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Economists in reflective mood

admin / November 17, 2012 / Bristol, Economics / Permalink

Next weekend Bristol will host the Festival of Economics, organised under the auspices of the Festival of Ideas. The programme for the Festival of Economics has been assembled by Diane Coyle of Enlightenment Economics. It brings together economic journalists, applied academic economists, and economists in the think tank world who seek to talk directly to policy makers. Some are relatively mainstream in their orientation. Some are decidedly more heterodox.

The arrival of the festival coincides with my finally getting the chance to finish Diane’s recent edited collection What’s the use of economics? Teaching the dismal science after the crisis (WTUOE). The book arises out of a seminar held back at the beginning of the year, which I would dearly have loved to have attended. Unfortunately it clashed with teaching my economics of public policy unit. The book comprises 22 brief chapters giving a range of perspectives on how economists should respond to the deficiencies exposed by the 2007-2008 financial crisis.

At least some parts of the economics community are in reflective mood. Continue Reading →

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The Queen’s Relaunch. The Coalition’s Speech … Oh look, Tractors …

admin / May 10, 2012 / Economics, Politics / Permalink

There was a bit of social media sniping yesterday that, despite David Cameron’s protestations to the contrary, the Queen’s Speech didn’t contain much of any substance to help the ailing UK economy.

That doesn’t seem to me to be entirely fair, for two reasons. First, there were some useful measures in the Speech – on banking or energy market reform, for example – that have the potential to make a difference to the performance of the economy. Second, it’s not obvious that the Queen’s Speech is the place you’d expect to find a menu of measures designed to stimulate the economy. If the Government wanted to get serious with the economy then much that it might consider doing can be achieved without the aid of new primary legislation.

So maybe we need to look back to the Cameron-Clegg relaunch event on Tuesday to get a better idea of policy action on the economy. After all:

The primary task of the Government remains ensuring that we deal with the deficit, and stretch every sinew to return growth to the economy – providing jobs and opportunities to hard-working people across Britain who want to get on. Continue Reading →

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The developing case for capital controls

admin / January 9, 2012 / Economics / Permalink

The desirability of free capital movement is an article of faith for the international organisations that seek to govern the global economy. The perspective is shared by the governments of most developed countries. Liberalisation of capital markets is typically part of the medicine prescribed to ailing countries. A weakened country might consider imposing capital controls in a bid to gain some relief from a battering in the global financial markets, but international treaties can stand in its way. This is part of the challenge currently facing Hungary, as discussed by Frances Coppola here.

A month ago I blogged On the wisdom of free capital markets, in which I drew on James K Galbraith and Keynes to argue that an overwhelming emphasis upon retaining the free movement of capital is mistaken. This becomes even clearer when one looks at the issue from a development perspective. Successful development has not been founded upon free capital markets. Free capital markets have led, historically, in a different direction.

Given this starting point, my eye was drawn to an article by Heather Stewart in yesterday’s Observer entitled Financial crisis could turn the tide against unrestricted capital flows. Continue Reading →

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Keen insight into the monetary economy

admin / November 15, 2011 / Economics, Politics / Permalink

Lucas Papademos, former vice-president of the European Central Bank, has now been installed as the new Prime Minster of Greece. The imminent arrival of former European Commissioner Mario Monti as Prime Minister of Italy will get the post-Berlusconi era properly under way. This is to be an era of technocratic policy-making by market-approved placemen.

Defenders of democracy are deeply concerned about the way in which this process has evolved. It is not so much that crisis has precipitated change at the top of national governments. Nor even that these countries find themselves governed by interim governments that are appointed rather than elected. More concerning is the apparent erosion of sovereignty through the overt intervention of foreign governments in domestic affairs, and the apparent concentration of European power in the hands of the eight members of the Frankfurt Group, only two of whom are democratically elected politicians.

But this is not simply a crisis of politics and the economy. It is also a crisis of economic epistemology. Of economic knowledge. Paul Mason, BBC Newsnight’s Economics Editor, observed on Friday’s programme that “The economic orthodoxy of an entire generation of politicians seems to be failing. And they don’t know what to do.” Continue Reading →

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Liberal Democrat economics

shodanalexm / November 7, 2011 / Economics, Politics / Permalink

In a post at Liberal England yesterday entitled Clegg tells Lib Dems to come out from behind the sofa Jonathan Calder responds to a brief piece in the Independent on Sunday. The Indie reports that Lib Dem ministers have been instructed to be a bit less reticent in speaking about the distinctively Lib Dem successes in government. The party is suffering in the polls in a way that the Tories are not. Some better PR would help.

Calder offers two reasons why the Lib Dems were behind the sofa in the first place. First, the party is not used to being unpopular. “When you are the third party, being ignored is a far more familiar experience”. Second, “we are not really sure what Liberal Democrat economics look like”.

I’m not convinced the second of these reasons put the Lib Dems behind the sofa. But I am certain it is an issue. We really aren’t sure. Continue Reading →

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On knowing what’s going on

shodanalexm / November 5, 2011 / Economics / Permalink

Leading active members of today’s economics profession … have formed themselves into a kind of Politburo for correct economic thinking. As a general rule—as one might generally expect from a gentleman’s club—this has placed them on the wrong side of every important policy issue, and not just recently but for decades. They predict disaster where none occurs. They deny the possibility of events that then happen. … They oppose the most basic, decent and sensible reforms, while offering placebos instead.

James K Galbraith

Last weekend in a brief post over at Pop Theory Clive poses one of the key social scientific questions of our time – What do economists know? Of course, the answer depends on which economists one is talking about. As the epigraph above notes, the mainstream of macroeconomics largely misses the point. It didn’t see the current economic turmoil coming and has little to offer by way of solutions. One striking thing about Galbraith’s comment is that it was written in 2000. Not a great deal has changed since then. These deficiencies with mainstream approaches have been recognised by some high profile mainstream practitioners, as I noted last month in the aftermath of this year’s Nobel prize in economics.

Yet, it is not as if economics has nothing sensible to say on the matter. Continue Reading →

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On economic amnesia

shodanalexm / October 12, 2011 / Economics / Permalink

Economists, one might assume, have something useful to say about the current problems afflicting the world economy. Yet, since the crash of 2008 there has been a considerable amount of reflection in parts of the discipline about its failure to anticipate the crash and its failure to offer effective prescriptions for getting the economy out of the hole it’s in. Of course, elsewhere in the discipline it is business as usual – with a range of prescriptions for privatisation and deregulation at the microlevel and fiscal restraint at the macrolevel.

This week’s Nobel announcements are salutary in that respect. Olaf Storbeck described them as a prize for the Ancien Régime. He was criticised for doing so, but his intervention might be better seen as simply the most recent in a chorus of disapproval directed at an approach to macroeconomics that came to dominate the field. Thomas Sargent, who shared this year’s prize, did as much as anyone to propel rational expectations and new classical macroeconomic models to the forefront of the field, and his macroeconometric work has been hugely influential. That is why he was awarded the Nobel prize. But that can be separated from the question of whether, looked at from a broader perspective, such models actually shed much light on the way the economy operates.

Some see the solution to the problems afflicting macroeconomics as the need to search for new ideas. Paul Krugman has recently argued, on the contrary, that the problem is that the discipline has amnesia. Continue Reading →

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The riots and the return to the big picture

shodanalexm / August 17, 2011 / Economics, Politics / Permalink

Last week’s riots were shocking. The effect upon the many communities, families and individuals affected was undoubtedly profound. They have prompted plenty of soul searching and a wide range of diagnoses. If we are optimistic we should hope that they act as a catalyst for addressing problems of urban Britain that have been developing over many years.

The riots have not shown the political classes in a great light. There was the slow response from the Government – was this really a situation sufficiently serious to justify curtailing our vacations? There was the muddle over who has shaped policing strategy, leading to a potentially damaging war of words between the Government and senior police officers. And there is the extraordinary range of illiberal and disproportionate measures that David Cameron has seen fit to propose in response to the crisis. He seemed intent on manufacturing a full blown moral panic in order to take a worryingly authoritarian turn. Liberal Democrat MPs are clearly very uneasy at the way in which Mr Cameron has changed his tune from those far off days of compassionate Conservatism.

The riots have pushed just about everything else to the back of the news agenda for the last week. That is deeply unfortunate for at least two reasons associated with this period of momentous – indeed unprecedented – economic turmoil. Continue Reading →

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Steve Hilton, blues skies thinking and the resurgent deregulatory impulse

shodanalexm / July 30, 2011 / Economics, Politics / Permalink

Steve Hilton has attracted flak across the old and new media following the FT’s revelations about his suggestions for stimulating economic growth. The proposals that hit the headlines included the abolition of maternity leave, labour market policies that contravened European law and the suspension of all consumer rights. Many have criticised the proposals for a range of offences including apparently overlooking the rule of law. Others have defended the utility of blue skies thinking when seeking ways to deal with the challenges that face us.

Personally I’m not averse to blue skies thinking. But the idea that off the wall thinking is central to the role of a strategy director is curious. One would have thought strategy should entail something rather more concrete and grounded, at some point in the process at least. And as someone more disposed to bottom up decision making and a Parliamentary party that is charged with representing the collective will of its members, I’m not so keen on the idea that one unelected, unaccountable and largely anonymous individual should have such influence over policy in the first place.

But the main thing that strikes me about these revelations is that they are not very “Blue Skies” at all. Continue Reading →

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Osbornomics – the path to enlightenment

shodanalexm / May 30, 2011 / Economics, Politics / Permalink

Is a major change in policy thinking imminent? Will Hutton’s piece in Sunday’s Observer focused on the question of quite what the Labour party stands for. It is relatively clear what it is against, but its positive project is rather less obvious. And it needs such a project if it is going to counteract Conservative economic strategy. In the course of his discussion, Hutton argues that we can expect a change in the Coalition’s approach to deficit reduction some time soon and the recent less than congratulatory OECD report on UK policy is evidence in support of the case: Continue Reading →

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