The limits and flaws in our economics

Summary: Economics is the social science with the greatest impact on public policy. At key points in our history, America’s fate is determined by the power of economic theory. Yet the news media make a hash of reporting it, and both political parties distort it for their own gain. Here is a great look at the problems and limits of today’s economic theory. How good is it?

“Against Economics” – Part 1 of 2.

By David Graeber in the New York Review of Books, 5 December 2019.
Reposted with their generous permission. Headings added.

Review of Money and Government: A Challenge to Mainstream Economics by Robert Skidelsky (2018).

The problem with economics.

There is a growing feeling, among those who have the responsibility of managing large economies, that the discipline of economics is no longer fit for purpose. It is beginning to look like a science designed to solve problems that no longer exist.

A good example is the obsession with inflation. Economists still teach their students that the primary economic role of government – many would insist, its only really proper economic role – is to guarantee price stability. We must be constantly vigilant over the dangers of inflation. For governments to simply print money is therefore inherently sinful. If, however, inflation is kept at bay through the coordinated action of government and central bankers, the market should find its “natural rate of unemployment,” and investors, taking advantage of clear price signals, should be able to ensure healthy growth.

These assumptions came with the monetarism of the 1980s, the idea that government should restrict itself to managing the money supply, and by the 1990s had come to be accepted as such elementary common sense that pretty much all political debate had to set out from a ritual acknowledgment of the perils of government spending.

This continues to be the case, despite the fact that, since the 2008 recession, central banks have been printing money frantically in an attempt to create inflation and compel the rich to do something useful with their money, and have been largely unsuccessful in both endeavors.

We now live in a different economic universe than we did before the crash. Falling unemployment no longer drives up wages. Printing money does not cause inflation. Yet the language of public debate, and the wisdom conveyed in economic textbooks, remain almost entirely unchanged.

One expects a certain institutional lag. Mainstream economists nowadays might not be particularly good at predicting financial crashes, facilitating general prosperity, or coming up with models for preventing climate change, but when it comes to establishing themselves in positions of intellectual authority, unaffected by such failings, their success is unparalleled. One would have to look at the history of religions to find anything like it. To this day, economics continues to be taught not as a story of arguments – not, like any other social science, as a welter of often warring theoretical perspectives – but rather as something more like physics, the gradual realization of universal, unimpeachable mathematical truths.

“Heterodox” theories of economics do, of course, exist (institutionalist, Marxist, feminist, “Austrian,” post-Keynesian…), but their exponents have been almost completely locked out of what are considered “serious” departments, and even outright rebellions by economics students (from the post-autistic economics movement in France to post-crash economics in Britain) have largely failed to force them into the core curriculum.

As a result, heterodox economists continue to be treated as just a step or two away from crackpots, despite the fact that they often have a much better record of predicting real-world economic events. What’s more, the basic psychological assumptions on which mainstream (neoclassical) economics is based – though they have long since been disproved by actual psychologists – have colonized the rest of the academy, and have had a profound impact on popular understandings of the world.

Nowhere is this divide between public debate and economic reality more dramatic than in Britain, which is perhaps why it appears to be the first country where something is beginning to crack. It was center-left New Labour that presided over the pre-crash bubble, and voters’ throw-the-bastards-out reaction brought a series of Conservative governments that soon discovered that a rhetoric of austerity – the Churchillian evocation of common sacrifice for the public good – played well with the British public, allowing them to win broad popular acceptance for policies designed to pare down what little remained of the British welfare state and redistribute resources upward, toward the rich.

“There is no magic money tree,” as Theresa May put it during the snap election of 2017 – virtually the only memorable line from one of the most lackluster campaigns in British history. The phrase has been repeated endlessly in the media, whenever someone asks why the UK is the only country in Western Europe that charges university tuition, or whether it is really necessary to have quite so many people sleeping on the streets.

Ignoring the magic of money.

The truly extraordinary thing about May’s phrase is that it isn’t true. There are plenty of magic money trees in Britain, as there are in any developed economy. They are called “banks.” Since modern money is simply credit, banks can and do create money literally out of nothing, simply by making loans. Almost all of the money circulating in Britain at the moment is bank-created in this way. Not only is the public largely unaware of this, but a recent survey by the British research group Positive Money discovered that an astounding 85 percent of members of Parliament had no idea where money really came from (most appeared to be under the impression that it was produced by the Royal Mint).

Economists, for obvious reasons, can’t be completely oblivious to the role of banks, but they have spent much of the twentieth century arguing about what actually happens when someone applies for a loan. One school insists that banks transfer existing funds from their reserves, another that they produce new money, but only on the basis of a multiplier effect (so that your car loan can still be seen as ultimately rooted in some retired grandmother’s pension fund).

Only a minority – mostly heterodox economists, post-Keynesians, and modern money theorists – uphold what is called the “credit creation theory of banking”: that bankers simply wave a magic wand and make the money appear, secure in the confidence that even if they hand a client a credit for $1 million, ultimately the recipient will put it back in the bank again, so that, across the system as a whole, credits and debts will cancel out. Rather than loans being based in deposits, in this view, deposits themselves were the result of loans.

The one thing it never seemed to occur to anyone to do was to get a job at a bank, and find out what actually happens when someone asks to borrow money. In 2014 a German economist named Richard Werner did exactly that, and discovered that, in fact, loan officers do not check their existing funds, reserves, or anything else. They simply create money out of thin air, or, as he preferred to put it, “fairy dust.”
That year also appears to have been when elements in Britain’s notoriously independent civil service decided that enough was enough. The question of money creation became a critical bone of contention. The overwhelming majority of even mainstream economists in the UK had long since rejected austerity as counterproductive (which, predictably, had almost no impact on public debate). But at a certain point, demanding that the technocrats charged with running the system base all policy decisions on false assumptions about something as elementary as the nature of money becomes a little like demanding that architects proceed on the understanding that the square root of 47 is actually π. Architects are aware that buildings would start falling down. People would die.

Before long, the Bank of England (the British equivalent of the Federal Reserve, whose economists are most free to speak their minds since they are not formally part of the government) rolled out an elaborate official report called “Money Creation in the Modern Economy,” replete with videos and animations, making the same point: existing economics textbooks, and particularly the reigning monetarist orthodoxy, are wrong.

The heterodox economists are right. Private banks create money. Central banks like the Bank of England create money as well, but monetarists are entirely wrong to insist that their proper function is to control the money supply. In fact, central banks do not in any sense control the money supply; their main function is to set the interest rate – to determine how much private banks can charge for the money they create. Almost all public debate on these subjects is therefore based on false premises. For example, if what the Bank of England was saying were true, government borrowing didn’t divert funds from the private sector; it created entirely new money that had not existed before.

One might have imagined that such an admission would create something of a splash, and in certain restricted circles, it did. Central banks in Norway, Switzerland, and Germany quickly put out similar papers. Back in the UK, the immediate media response was simply silence. The Bank of England report has never, to my knowledge, been so much as mentioned on the BBC or any other TV news outlet. Newspaper columnists continued to write as if monetarism was self-evidently correct. Politicians continued to be grilled about where they would find the cash for social programs. It was as if a kind of entente cordiale had been established, in which the technocrats would be allowed to live in one theoretical universe, while politicians and news commentators would continue to exist in an entirely different one.

Slowly responding to reality.

Still, there are signs that this arrangement is temporary. England – and the Bank of England in particular – prides itself on being a bellwether for global economic trends. Monetarism itself got its launch into intellectual respectability in the 1970s after having been embraced by Bank of England economists. From there it was ultimately adopted by the insurgent Thatcher regime, and only after that by Ronald Reagan in the United States, and it was subsequently exported almost everywhere else.

It is possible that a similar pattern is reproducing itself today. In 2015, a year after the appearance of the Bank of England report, the Labour Party for the first time allowed open elections for its leadership, and the left-wing of the party, under Jeremy Corbyn and now shadow chancellor of the exchequer John McDonnell, took hold of the reins of power. At the time, the Labour left were considered even more marginal extremists than was Thatcher’s wing of the Conservative Party in 1975; it is also (despite the media’s constant efforts to paint them as unreconstructed 1970s socialists) the only major political group in the UK that has been open to new economic ideas.

While pretty much the entire political establishment has been spending most of its time these last few years screaming at one another about Brexit, McDonnell’s office – and Labour youth support groups – have been holding workshops and floating policy initiatives on everything from a four-day workweek and universal basic income to a Green Industrial Revolution and “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” {see here and here}, and inviting heterodox economists to take part in popular education initiatives aimed at transforming conceptions of how the economy really works. Corbynism has faced near-histrionic opposition from virtually all sectors of the political establishment, but it would be unwise to ignore the possibility that something historic is afoot.

Money and Government.

One sign that something historically new has indeed appeared is if scholars begin reading the past in a new light. Accordingly, one of the most significant books to come out of the UK in recent years would have to be Robert Skidelsky’s Money and Government: A Challenge to Mainstream Economics. Ostensibly an attempt to answer the question of why mainstream economics rendered itself so useless in the years immediately before and after the crisis of 2008, it is really an attempt to retell the history of the economic discipline through a consideration of the two things – money and government – that most economists least like to talk about.

Skidelsky is well-positioned to tell this story. He embodies a uniquely English type: the gentle maverick, so firmly ensconced in the establishment that it never occurs to him that he might not be able to say exactly what he thinks, and whose views are tolerated by the rest of the establishment precisely for that reason.

Born in Manchuria, trained at Oxford, professor of political economy at Warwick, Skidelsky is best known as the author of the definitive, three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, and has for the last three decades sat in the House of Lords as Baron of Tilton, affiliated at different times with a variety of political parties, and sometimes none at all. During the early Blair years, he was a Conservative, and even served as opposition spokesman on economic matters in the upper chamber; currently he’s a cross-bench independent, broadly aligned with left Labour.

In other words, he follows his own flag. Usually, it’s an interesting flag. Over the last several years, Skidelsky has been taking advantage of his position in the world’s most elite legislative body to hold a series of high-level seminars on the reformation of the economic discipline; this book is, in a sense, the first major product of these endeavors.

What it reveals is an endless war between two broad theoretical perspectives in which the same side always seems to win – for reasons that rarely have anything to do with either theoretical sophistication or greater predictive power. The crux of the argument always seems to turn on the nature of money. Is money best conceived of as a physical commodity, a precious substance used to facilitate exchange, or is it better to see money primarily as a credit, a bookkeeping method or circulating IOU – in any case, a social arrangement?

What is money?

This is an argument that has been going on in some form for thousands of years. What we call “money” is always a mixture of both, and, as I myself noted in Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), the center of gravity between the two tends to shift back and forth over time. In the Middle Ages, everyday transactions across Eurasia were typically conducted by means of credit, and money was assumed to be an abstraction. It was the rise of global European empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the corresponding flood of gold and silver looted from the Americas, that really shifted perceptions. Historically, the feeling that bullion actually is money tends to mark periods of generalized violence, mass slavery, and predatory standing armies – which for most of the world was precisely how the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British empires were experienced.

One important theoretical innovation that these new bullion-based theories of money allowed was, as Skidelsky notes, what has come to be called the quantity theory of money (usually referred to in textbooks – since economists take endless delight in abbreviations – as QTM).

The QTM argument was first put forward by a French lawyer named Jean Bodin, during a debate over the cause of the sharp, destablizing price inflation that immediately followed the Iberian conquest of the Americas. Bodin argued that the inflation was a simple matter of supply and demand: the enormous influx of gold and silver from the Spanish colonies was cheapening the value of money in Europe. The basic principle would no doubt have seemed a matter of common sense to anyone with experience of commerce at the time, but it turns out to have been based on a series of false assumptions. For one thing, most of the gold and silver extracted from Mexico and Peru did not end up in Europe at all, and certainly wasn’t coined into money. Most of it was transported directly to China and India (to buy spices, silks, calicoes, and other “oriental luxuries”), and insofar as it had inflationary effects back home, it was on the basis of speculative bonds of one sort or another.

This almost always turns out to be true when QTM is applied: it seems self-evident, but only if you leave most of the critical factors out.

In the case of the sixteenth-century price inflation, for instance, once one takes account of credit, hoarding, and speculation – not to mention increased rates of economic activity, investment in new technology, and wage levels (which, in turn, have a lot to do with the relative power of workers and employers, creditors and debtors) – it becomes impossible to say for certain which is the deciding factor: whether the money supply drives prices, or prices drive the money supply.

Technically, this comes down to a choice between what are called exogenous and endogenous theories of money. Should money be treated as an outside factor, like all those Spanish dubloons supposedly sweeping into Antwerp, Dublin, and Genoa in the days of Philip II, or should it be imagined primarily as a product of economic activity itself, mined, minted, and put into circulation, or more often, created as credit instruments such as loans, in order to meet a demand – which would, of course, mean that the roots of inflation lie elsewhere?

To put it bluntly: QTM is obviously wrong. Doubling the amount of gold in a country will have no effect on the price of cheese if you give all the gold to rich people and they just bury it in their yards, or use it to make gold-plated submarines (this is, incidentally, why quantitative easing, the strategy of buying long-term government bonds to put money into circulation, did not work either). What actually matters is spending.

Nonetheless, from Bodin’s time to the present, almost every time there was a major policy debate, the QTM advocates won.

——- Tomorrow see part 2: why QTM is wrong but wins. ——-

About the author: David Graeber

David Graeber is a Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics. He studies Madagascar, Europe, North America, theories of value, money, debt, politics, manners, magic, class, social movements, and social theory. He is the author of many books, most recently …

• Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (2001).
• Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber (2011).
• The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (2013).
• The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy (2015).
• Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018) – well worth reading!

For More Information

Ideas! For shopping ideas, see my recommended books and films at Amazon. Also, see Chapter One of a story about our future: “Ultra Violence: Tales from Venus.”

If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about economic theory, about Keynesian economics, Austrian economics, faux economics, economic stimulus programs, and especially these …

1. About the state of economic science, and advice from a famous economist.
2. Keynes comments on our new-found love of austerity.
3. Ed Dolan talks to us about modern monetary theory. Can it save us?
4. Ed Dolan Asks: What Does it Mean for Fiscal Policy to be “Sustainable”? MMT and Other Perspectives.
5. Warnings from Keynes and Kipling about our mad empire.
6. Economists are wrong: America does not need more people to stay prosperous.
7. Listen to the minority of economists who say that Free trade is wrecking America.

Some good books about economics

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber (2011).

J is for Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception by Michael Hudson.

Turbo-Capitalism: Winners and Losers in the Global Economy by Edward N. Luttwak.