Profits and Loss

by Daniel on June 7, 2007

I think I speak for every single reader and contributor to Crooked Timber when I say that we haven’t had nearly enough posts on the subject of heterodox economics recently …

A large part of my interest in heterodox economics derives from one major problem with neoclassical economics. In my opinion, it’s a big enough embarrassment to the profession that somebody ought to have done something about it, and the fact that more or less nobody is interested in even trying is bad enough that I am prepared to overlook an awful lot of misbehaviour on the part of heterodox economists, because at least they are, in general, trying. I’m even prepared to tentatively advance this “anomaly” in neoclassical economics as being constitutive of the difference between orthodox and heterodox economics, as currently practiced.

The anomaly I’m talking about is that neoclassical economics, in both macro and micro forms, nearly invariably works on the basis of models in which there are no profits.

Since in general, companies do earn profits, I think this is a pretty big problem.

Let me add a couple of caveats. Neoclassical economics does allow for “normal profits”, meaning a sufficient surplus of income over expense to repay the cost of financial capital[1]. But this isn’t really profit at all, and it doesn’t describe economic behaviour at all well – firms which are merely earning their cost of capital certainly don’t in general think that they’re doing as well as can be expected with no room for improvement.

Neoclassical economics also allows for monopoly profits to be earned in situations in which there are legal or practical barriers to entry into industries. In fact there’s practically a cottage industry within economics in making funky little models of information asymmetry in which monopoly rents of one sort or another arise. But these are in general toy models with an application to at most one industry; there’s another cottage industry in existence in quarantining any such conclusions from more general application in macro work.[2]

But this really doesn’t describe much of the economy either; there are actually very few genuinely monopolistic firms and even in completely commoditised industries, there are often significant profits made and significant variations in the profitability of companies within the same industry. In any case, if we were to assume that monopoly rents were the norm for the economy, then this would be curtains for a lot of the conclusions of orthodox economics – taxes, wage regulations and even tariffs could not be presumed to have the effects that they are normally assumed to have. And if the society-wide “normal” rate of profit was dependent on the specific competitive characteristics of individual industries, then it’s hard to see how any general tendency toward equilibrium could exist. It’s a common criticism of a lot of models of macroeconomics that they don’t have “microfoundations”, but it’s an equally serious problem with neoclassical theory of the firm that it isn’t allowed to have any macroimplications.

So that’s what I’d take to be definitive of heterodox economics today – it’s the branch of economics that starts from the assumption that the rate of profit for the economy as a whole is determined otherwise than by a natural tendency toward the factor price of capital. In other words, in the current state of play in economics, it is heterodox to take profits seriously.

[1] Of course, the cost of financial capital is a more or less completely mysterious quantity, subject to at least one major empirical problem (the equity risk premium) and at least one genuine theoretical antinomy (it is commonly thought to be determined by the marginal productivity of physical capital, but as proved by the Cambridge Capital Controversy, this simply can’t be true).

[2] I would compare this to “experimental economics”, in which all sorts of weird and wonderful departures from the straightforward maximising model are allowed to develop, as long as they can be safely contained within their little behavioural box (and allowed out into “behavioural finance” for an hour’s exercise every day).

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Economics and profits at Σπιτάκι
06.08.07 at 2:05 am

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1

abb1 06.07.07 at 8:37 pm

Isn’t there something called “market power” that allows larger firms to bump the clearing price and thus provide profits for everybody? I seem to remember that was one of the characteristics in the model I programmed years ago. Or maybe the spec I used wasn’t an orthodox model.

2

dsquared 06.07.07 at 8:40 pm

“Market power” as an unanalysed concept doesn’t really exist in NC econ. There are plenty of micro models in which positive rents exist in equilibrium, but very few in which this is something that matters in general equilibrium. So there’s plenty of profits in isolated analyses (anti-trust law models etc), but it’s IMO constitutive of orthodox economics that they don’t attempt to generalise this analysis to the economy as a whole.

3

SamChevre 06.07.07 at 8:56 pm

Aren’t what we call “profits” in an income statements just part of the “cost of capital”?

In other words, isn’t this just the equity risk premium puzzle, restated.

4

dsquared 06.07.07 at 8:57 pm

Not really – they go to the owners of capital, but I don’t think they can sensibly be modelled as a cost. The cost of capital doesn’t really join up to the actual profits earned in any particular way.

5

abb1 06.07.07 at 9:30 pm

I see. That was certainly a micro-model, but “market power” seems like a very simple concept, I think it was probably computed as simply market share by ownership. Then you can look at the distribution of this value and try to figure out whether an equilibrium is even possible. It seems that it shouldn’t be too difficult to calculate some sort of aggregate index of ‘market power’ on the macro level. Although I probably have no idea what I’m talking about.

6

dsquared 06.07.07 at 9:32 pm

yeah, you can measure concentration ratios across industries or even for the whole economy, but there really aren’t many macro models in which a number like that would be a useful input.

7

notsneaky 06.07.07 at 10:10 pm

When the heterodox manage to succesfully combine general equilibrium (i.e. macro) with market power, wake me up. For now, I’m gonna go take a nap.

8

dsquared 06.07.07 at 10:21 pm

Well, Rip van effing Winkle, since the successful combination of general equilibrium with anything is more or less ruled out by the fact that general equilibrium itself is a zombie research program, you’re going to be sleeping for a long time. The entire bloody point is that at least there are people working outside the GE cult who actually recognise that there is a problem there and that profits are like an unbelievably ubiquitous feature of the modern capitalist economy.

9

notsneaky 06.07.07 at 10:32 pm

Wha… they did it … no? Oh, well, the reasons that make it’s hard in GE are gonna pop up no matter how you approach it … GE cult? Are you sure you wanna start throwing the word “cult” around when discussing heterodoxy?

10

dsquared 06.07.07 at 10:56 pm

Well no. For careful and sensible consideration of the role of profit, market power and the corporation, in the context of the full economy, see the work of JK Galbraith.

Oh, by “successful” you meant “mathematically formalised as a dynamic programming problem”? Well why would you have meant a thing like that?

11

Eric 06.07.07 at 10:58 pm

In mainstream economics you can have models which give “excess profits” for some firms and models which give “excess profits” = 0 for everyone. That is, in the latter case only “normal profits” are earned.

It all depends on the assumptions made about the economy.

Whether any of these models, however, has anything to do with “the real world” ™ is a totally separate question that mainstream economists are not interested in asking. But, then, when there is publishing to be done and tenure to be awarded, who cares about such questions? ;>

12

Eric 06.07.07 at 11:05 pm

“When the heterodox manage to succesfully combine general equilibrium (i.e. macro) with market power, wake me up. For now, I’m gonna go take a nap.”
With all due regards, it looks like you’re already sleeping. ;>

First, you seem to imply that GE = “macro” which is a pretty odd thing to say.

Second, it is piece of cake to develop a macro model based on imperfect competition.

Third, why is it important to develop a GE or macro model like the mainstream? Perhaps those in the mainstream are dumb for seeking to do that and, if so, why should heterodox economists do the same dumb thing? “I crossed the busy freeway on foot with my eyes closed. Until you do the same thing I will consider you to be a bad thinker!” (Something wrong with that logic, no?)

13

notsneaky 06.07.07 at 11:07 pm

What does dynamic programming have to do with anything?
If you think that what happens in one market affects what happens in other markets, which affects still other markets, then you’re gonna have problems introducing market power into the picture. If you don’t ignore the problem.

Also you can go with monopolistic competition. Joan Robinson would be proud.

But you know I really really promised myself not to get in anymore discussion on this topic.

So I’ll just concede. Neoclassical economics bad.

14

Eric 06.07.07 at 11:10 pm

“If you think that what happens in one market affects what happens in other markets, which affects still other markets, then you’re gonna have problems introducing market power into the picture.”

hummmmmmm….

Waves can opener: “let their be barriers to entry!” And, then, barriers to entry existed and so too did market power. And the economists saw that this was good.

15

Eric Falkenstein 06.07.07 at 11:29 pm

I think this is a profound outstanding problem. Remember Marx (pre-marginalist revolution) thought profits in aggregate would decline over time, and that didn’t happen. Galbraith argued that market power came from size, and we see no correlation between size and profitability of capital. Austrian approaches like Oliver Williamson try to talk about profitability via a disequilibrium model, but disequilibrium is difficult to model! Leibenstein’s X-efficiency was a good stab, but I think this thread ran out of steam too.

If risk were related to return, we could see profits as just an increase in risk taking, but other than the fact that equities seem to return more than bonds (ignoring transaction costs, survivorship bias to equity indices, and asymmetric taxation of gains vs losses), and bond return more than bills, we rarely see a nice risk-return relationship anywhere (I argue here that in fact the risk-return relation is absent other than in the very short front end of the yield curve). That is, profits in theory are just risk-adjusted returns that accrue via firms with positive betas, but then, why does beta suck so bad empirically?

16

Rob 06.08.07 at 12:19 am

Yes the neoclasical way of dealing with it by assuming one good or at most infinite minor deviations of one good makes so much more sense! We get GE without having to actually think about what firms produce!

17

aaron 06.08.07 at 4:12 am

Given that profit is a major source of innovation in our economy, I’m fairly sure that NC econ has some way to factor it in. My own knowledge of economics is somewhat limited, but it seems to me that adding technological innovation and incorporating a few “irrational” preferences to consumers would be one way to go about this (even the most orthodox economists could justify this as the “added value” of a brand). This is where economics begins to fall short, because its tools for examining consumer preferences, technological change, or barriers to entry are extremely limited.

18

trialsanderrors 06.08.07 at 4:18 am

Huh? I’m absolutely baffled by this post. The standard undergrad textbook chapter on perfect competition characterizes the two conditions under which “normal (= zero excess) profits” are achieved by all firms in the market: 1. the competition is atomistic, i.e. no firm’s output decision will affect the market as a whole; and 2. the industry is in a long-run equilibrium state, i.e. all firms have optimized their input factors and entry or exit has occurred. These are clearly idealized conditions, and the implication is that they rarely, if ever, occur in the wild. Usually the very next chapter the undergrad textbook covers the primary exception to the normal profit condition, oligopolies. The other conditions are not all that well-explained, but it needs to be understood that the economic analysis of a competitive market starts from a technology (supply) or taste (demand) shock in t-zero and models the devolution towards the long-term equilibrium state in t-infinity. The corollary is that firms make profits (or losses) until they reach the long-term steady state, which can be quite a long time. So non-zero profits or losses are very much the “normal” state in the standard micro model.

19

John Quiggin 06.08.07 at 5:10 am

I share some of the puzzlement on a couple of points.

(1) Why the focus on dynamic programming? A common criticism of neoclassical GE models, even the intertemporal ones, is that they are effectively static. I suppose there is an implicit assumption that consumers are solving the DP problems they face – is this what you meant?

(2) If you define normal=average and economic profits as the difference between accounting profits and actual profits, it’s true by definition that aggregate economic profits are equal to zero. This seems to underlie some of the concerns that are being raised.

20

Eric 06.08.07 at 5:29 am

It certainly is the case that in standard mainstream models all firms earn normal profits or zero accounting profits. (That is, in GE models that reach equilibrium and have all those “nice” properties that give this result).

BUT: is the statement that all firms earn the same profit rate a PREDICTION? If so, the prediction is obviously false: firms in any real world economies do NOT equal the same profit rate.

So what are we to do with mainstream theory that likes to use models that lead to predictions that are obviously WRONG! Yet the use of such models to common and unquestioned by mainstream economists. Why? Because these folks are bred to accept these obviously false models as appropriate for analyzing the “real world.”

21

Eric 06.08.07 at 5:54 am

Here’s the thing: mainstream economists like to present themselves as doing something obviously important and meaningful. And, they justify what they do by some invoking of “science.”

But the core mainstream models:
(1) are based on assumptions that are obviously false (e.g., assume a very large if not infinite number of firms in every industry each of which has access to identical techology)
(2) give rise to predictions about the real world that are obviously false (all firms earn the same profit rate) and
(3) is associated with lots of empirical work b ut the underlying mainstream model is itself never presented in a way that permits it to be falsified.
(4) are never tested against other economic theories (that is, alternative to the mainstream theories).
and so on and so on.

The above should be potentially, for those who take thinking seriously, important flaws. But none of the above seems to lead to any concern within the mainstream of the economics profession.

22

dsquared 06.08.07 at 6:50 am

Why the focus on dynamic programming?

because it’s the mathematical guts of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium, which is utterly hegemonic in modern macroeconomics, and nearly all DSGE models have an implicit or explicit zero profit assumption in them.

The corollary is that firms make profits (or losses) until they reach the long-term steady state, which can be quite a long time. So non-zero profits or losses are very much the “normal” state in the standard micro model

well no, because the out-of-equilibrium states of the “standard micro model” are typically entirely unanalysed and certainly not generally considered for purposes of policy analysis.

If you define normal=average and economic profits as the difference between accounting profits and actual profits

I think that “normal=average” isn’t right – surely “normal profits” means “a rate of profit equal to the cost of capital”. And by economic profits I mean (and occasionally say) “economic rents” rather than an adjusted accounting profit concept, sorry.

23

Hidari 06.08.07 at 9:08 am

Eric’s comment is interesting. Are there any (Karl) Popperians still out there? If so, what do they think about the ‘core assumptions’ of neoclassical economics? Are they ‘falsifiable’ in Popper’s sense?

[And here’s another point that’s just occurred to me. Poppper loved Hayek’s theorising. But is it not the case that the inital assumptions of Austrian economics are also unfalsifiable?]

24

Andrew Edwards 06.08.07 at 11:01 am

RE: Eric and hidari

Before Galileo, “scientists” spent centuries modeling the earth as the center of the solar system. Over time, they actually got pretty good at it, throwing in fudge factors and interactive forces as needed.

When Galileo first published his theories, he suggested that the Earth orbited the sun in a circular motion.

Galileo’s theories were based on assumptions that weren’t far from the truth, whereas the astronomers’ assumptions were based on utterly false assumptions.

But because of Galileo’s miscalculation (really just because his theory was new and needed to be worked out a bit), the astronomers actualy had better predictive capability.

Is there some new economic model out there with worse predictive capability than heterodox economics, but more accurate underlying assumptions?

25

conchis 06.08.07 at 11:05 am

I realise this is a slightly different context, but don’t profits play a big part in the Schumpeterian-type growth models of Aghion and Howitt?

26

Z 06.08.07 at 11:46 am

Are they ‘falsifiable’ in Popper’s sense?

Well, sure. You can check easily that preferences aren’t strictly convex for instance.

Why the focus on dynamic programming?

A good reason from the theoretical point of view could be that equilibrium are in general unstable. The next step in a mathematical perspective would be to study the dynamic aspect of the system. The whole project looks rather misguided to me though.

27

Cure 06.08.07 at 1:50 pm

Concerning Popper:

There was an interesting debate in economics a few decades back about whether an economic model should a) try to use true assumptions and derive whatever results they may derive, or b) use approximations and simplifications of the real world, but keep the models that make good predictions about the nature of the economy. If I remember correctly, Friedman was well into the second camp.

That said, many of the heterodox types don’t like *either* of these methods; my feeling is that if you want to try to use true assumptions and derive true results, you’re going to be in for quite a Sisyphean challenge, and will end up with nothing more than some qualitative work (aka Galbraith) or no results of interest at all (aka many prominent heterodox economists).

28

Sock Puppet of the Great Satan 06.08.07 at 3:07 pm

“Neoclassical economics does allow for “normal profits”, meaning a sufficient surplus of income over expense to repay the cost of financial capital[1]. But this isn’t really profit at all, and it doesn’t describe economic behaviour at all well – firms which are merely earning their cost of capital certainly don’t in general think that they’re doing as well as can be expected with no room for improvement.”

Err, am I being completely cluelessly focused on the micro perspective here, but wouldn’t only the marginal firm being making “normal profits”, but those with a lower production cost being making a tidy little number, thank you?

29

dsquared 06.08.07 at 3:58 pm

this wouldn’t be an equilibrium though; such a firm would tend to expand production until its (nice, well behaved) cost function delivered only the normal rate of profit.

30

guest 06.08.07 at 4:02 pm

Firms with a lower production cost are said to earn “producers’ surplus”, not profit. This is the same as “classical factor rent”, e.g. Ricardian land rent – it flows through to input factor owners.

31

Sebastian holsclaw 06.08.07 at 4:44 pm

“this wouldn’t be an equilibrium though; such a firm would tend to expand production until its (nice, well behaved) cost function delivered only the normal rate of profit.”

Maybe I’m not understanding the question properly, but why is this an objection? Very few firms–even in relatively mature markets–are at equilibrium. It certainly doesn’t happen instantaneously. There is almost always someone on the way up and someone on the way down. I suspect this happens because very rarely does any one firm have the ideal management structure for their area PLUS the ideal production PLUS the ideal market development PLUS the ideal product improvement chain PLUS the ideal distribution chain PLUS all the stuff that I don’t have any idea about. Often some firms have better aspects in some areas and worse in others when you compare them to each other. They make improvements in their weak areas and gain a leg up. But it seems to me that only rarely does a market stay unchanging enough to reach a broad based equilibrium. And when it does, we don’t in fact see much profit (Think basic pencils or nails or something like that).

(And all this would be true in just the two identical competing firms case. Add two more and an additional one that competes with a distinguishable pseudo substitute–perhaps a bunch of tile guys and a slate-for-bathrooms manufacturer–and all worries about a stable equilibrium killing off profit go right out the window).

32

Eric 06.08.07 at 5:11 pm

If the real world economy is never in equilibrium and never can reach equilibrium, what is the relationship between models that assume equilibrium is achieved and the real world?

What is the status of the policy conclusions derived from equilibrium models and the real world (which never sees equilibrium).

Do we have a relationship, say, like that posited by Plato in his theory of forms? Or is the equilbrium model some sort of telos a la Aristotle? Or are we dealing with a type of utopia? Or, is there actually no obvious relationship at all?

But regardless of the above, what is the relationship between a model that makes tons of wild and crazy assumptions and the real world?

33

trialsanderrors 06.08.07 at 5:48 pm

well no, because the out-of-equilibrium states of the “standard micro model” are typically entirely unanalysed and certainly not generally considered for purposes of policy analysis.

Well this has nothing to do with your initial statement (“models in which there are no profits”). There is a difference between the impossibility of (non-monopoly) profits and vanishing profits. I don’t even see that the “heterodox” theories of the firm disagree with NC there that profits are vanishing. Whether the dynamic process of reaching the vanishing point is underanalyzed and underused is a different question, but I don’t see much benefit from a model that allows for positive profits in a stable, non-innovative, atomistic industry.

34

Michael Greinecker 06.08.07 at 6:06 pm

Aaaaaaaaaargh!

1. The Arrow-Debreu model allows for profits:

http://cowles.econ.yale.edu/P/cp/p00b/p0087.pdf

2. There are general equilibrium models with increasing returns to scale:

ftp://mse.univ-paris1.fr/pub/mse/cahiers2004/B04017.pdf

3. In general, we don’t know what profits are in a general equilibrium model with imperfect competition:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=179752

4. There are macroeconomic models with imperfect competition based on general equilibrium theory:

http://www.amazon.com/Macroeconomics-Imperfect-Competition-Economics-Mathematica/dp/3540660291/ref=sr_1_1/105-9026877-7434837?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1181325672&sr=8-1

In short, all these criticisms of mainstream economics are void.

35

Sebastian Holsclaw 06.08.07 at 6:40 pm

“But regardless of the above, what is the relationship between a model that makes tons of wild and crazy assumptions and the real world?”

But that isn’t the standard model doesn’t require steady state. Almost all modern economics I can think of readily acknowledges that innovation can create a state of flux. Who argues otherwise? Isn’t that a huge part of Schumpeter’s thesis? He died in 1950.

36

Sebastian Holsclaw 06.08.07 at 6:42 pm

Sorry I edited the first sentence but apparently not enough. It should read “But the orthodox models don’t require a steady state.”

37

Sebastian Holsclaw 06.08.07 at 6:57 pm

Apparently they are saying similar things at MarginalRevolutions only they note that Schumpeter might be considered a heterodox economist.

38

Eric 06.08.07 at 7:14 pm

“Aaaaaaaaaargh!”

Mainstream models of virtually any time imaginable do exist. The limit to what can be constructed using the mainstream tools is the imagination of the economist.

Yet this is exactly part of the problem.

Which is the “correct” model and how do we know what the “correct” model is? This is an important question as if you want the mainstream to be truly relevant you’d like them to say something about the real world.

But we have no idea which is the “correct” model. Indeed, they all seem to be based on many assumptions that are obviously false. SO maybe they are all wrong.

Further, the fact that you can develop a mainstream model for anything indicates that you perhaps can never “disprove” the basic mainstream assumptions (whatever the heck they are). The mainstream approach is unfalsifiable, has an unclear relationship to reality, and likely is based on models that are false.

But it generates lots of cool publications, so who cares, right?

39

Eric 06.08.07 at 7:29 pm

RE
“Is there some new economic model out there with worse predictive capability than heterodox economics, but more accurate underlying assumptions?”

One of the main issues is whether heterodox economics should be judged by how well it “predicts” the variables of interest to mainstream economics. It is not obvious that mainstream economics is even talking about the right things. If that is correct, then it seems odd to require that heterodox economics do a better job of predicting the wrong things.

Plus, it might be the case that the methods used by mainstream economists might not be the “right” methods. If so, then judging heterodox economics based on the fact that they don’t use the same tools in the same way as mainstream economists is again odd.

Perhaps, and I think this might be the case, mainstream economics talks about the wrong things using the wrong tools for the wrong reasons.

Other than that, its pretty cool.

40

Eric 06.08.07 at 7:33 pm

“…or no results of interest at all (aka many prominent heterodox economists).”

Of no interest to mainstream economists? By this approach you would then allow me to say that the mainstream produces nothing of interest at all (based on the standards of heterodox economics).

This is pretty basic stuff, folks: thinking about what standards you use to pass judgments on work “about the economy.” Mainstream folks, however, unthinkingly just assume that their agenda and their “standards” (sic) are obviously the correct ones to use because, well, it makes their stuff look good.

But this might merely be self-interest talking and not a true attempt to gain understanding of how best to improve life for people.

41

Michael Greinecker 06.08.07 at 7:40 pm

eric, that would mean that mainstream economics is already broad enough. So why should there be a need for heterodox approaches?

42

Eric 06.08.07 at 7:51 pm

“eric, that would mean that mainstream economics is already broad enough. So why should there be a need for heterodox approaches?”

“Broad” in the sense of empty of any interesting content as it can “explain” everything by the same small set of tools.

But being able to “provide an explanation” is different from providing, perhaps it can be said, “the right explanation.”

If you’re interested in a theory that explains everything perfectly, just use the God explanation: why did my car breakdown? Because God wanted it to. Why did someone die? Because God wanted him to.

So as you must admit, being able of “explain” everything is not necessarily a mark of a good theory.

Plus, if mainstream economics does, indeed, talk about the wrong things using the wrong tools for the wrong reasons, that looks like an opening for an alternative way to talk about “the economy.”

43

Chris Stiles 06.08.07 at 11:55 pm

44

J Thomas 06.09.07 at 1:56 pm

“But this might merely be self-interest talking and not a true attempt to gain understanding of how best to improve life for people.”

What a great goal! Improve life for people!

I think if I wanted to improve life with economics, I’d try to get the economy to be more productive. The more it produces things people want, the more there is to go around. (How we get money to citizens so they can share in the products of the economy is not particularly an economic question but a political question.)

My obvious candidate for making the economy more productive with economics, is to notice what information business managers need to look at. Right now a lot of businesses collect lots and lots of information that they don’t exactly know how to handle. So if you could tell for each business which data is important and why it’s important, and what they need to look for to decide that the situation has changed enough they need to look at something else, then those particular businesses can be managed more efficiently. You could run a consulting service to help them that way.

At some point your customers will have to predict how the rest of the world economy will go. They will consider choices that would be risky in bad times but very profitable in good times, etc. If you can tell them that the chance of a large rise in interest rates or a large decline in demand for their product etc within the next 2 years is 90% or 10% that’s real useful. If some years your prediction is 50% that isn’t as useful, but when you *can* say something useful it will help. Of course it would take time to get a track record about such things so your more hardheaded customers will believe you.

It isn’t necessarily true that your value to humanity can be measured by how much you get paid for your services. But if there’s a lot of money for you, it indicates that what you’re doing is known to be *needed* whether or not you do it well.

“You get for you pay for.”
“You may not get what you pay for, but you pay for what you get.”
“You pay for what you need, whether you get it or not.”

Dying people pay lots of money for medical procedures that may not improve their lives at all, but the alternative is to just die.

Refugees pay whatever they have to cross borders, and are often cheated, raped, etc. But what choice do they have but try?

Businesses that pay for economic advice at least have some idea what they need, whether or not the advice turns out good. But how do you persuade business managers to pay for your product, when it’s something new that has never been offered before? That is a marketing problem. Maybe you can get a marketing expert to help you with it….

45

tveb 06.09.07 at 2:13 pm

I don’t think we should be using falsifiability as a criterion to bash neo-classical economics with. It (falsifiability) went out of fashion a long time ago, at least among philosophers (to give you a flavor of the problems with this standard, try “falsifying” a singular probabilistic statement). No one talks about it much since Lakatos kinda scuppered it (he of course called it “naive falsifiability”, and suggested his own version of falsifiability that looked nothing like the falsifiability talked about here). However what is important are the empirical implications of any model. Actually neo-classical economics falls flat on its face even by this standard.

46

tveb 06.09.07 at 2:15 pm

The bold tags should have been around only “empirical implications”. Apologies

47

Eric 06.09.07 at 2:25 pm

“I think if I wanted to improve life with economics, I’d try to get the economy to be more productive. The more it produces things people want, the more there is to go around.”

I’d just observe that some have argued in the past that slave production was more productive than free worker production. (Whether this is true is a different question).

So …. using an unfair rhetorical move… you’re in favor of slavery?

(Perhaps unfair rhetorically, but it seems to be an issue that the more stuff is better crowd needs to address).

Or, is it possible that more is not always better (taking everything into account)? Is it possible that that notion that more is better is a culturally generated idea?

In any case, simplistic notions that all you need to know is that ‘more is better’ are debatable.

48

Eric 06.09.07 at 2:32 pm

” It (falsifiability) went out of fashion a long time ago, at least among philosophers”

Exactly. But it’s important to note that most, if not all, economists are still stuck back in the past with simplistic Popperism (along with being unaware of the relevant Duhem-Quine thesis). And they don’t even know exactly what old-fashioned falsification involves.

If you move up to the research program approach of Lakatos then you have to lose some of the pretense to “science” as economists would like to surround themselves with.

And, you have to ask whether progressive research programs (a la Lakatos) are in fact what people should obviously pursue.

I hold that mainstream economics has happened upon a massively “progressive” research program (= lots and lots of publications and new cool stuff to think about) but this is not necessarily adequate justification to do what they do (to the exclusion of everything else).

Lots of addition issues exist, but they are hard to raise here because most, if not all, economists are unfamiliar with anything relevant after Popper (and they misunderstand Popper).

49

Eric 06.09.07 at 2:37 pm

Finally note: why are mainstream economists ignorant about “theories of science” and related stuff? Because graduate programs have relentlessly removed any material from their curriculum that exposes economics graduate students to these ideas.

Very quickly the new faculty teaching the new graduate students are ignorant of important philosophical issues and so are unable to teach such material.

Implicitly, the notion seems to be that any real thinking about what they do will only hinder the newly minted economist from doing the important thing: generating more mainstream economics! Again, the goal seems to be to produce idiot savants through intellectual mistraining.

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J Thomas 06.09.07 at 3:52 pm

“I think if I wanted to improve life with economics, I’d try to get the economy to be more productive. The more it produces things people want, the more there is to go around.”

I’d just observe that some have argued in the past that slave production was more productive than free worker production. (Whether this is true is a different question).

I can see it might be more productive. If slaves receive the same rewards that nonslaves receive for similar work (like nonunion employees working beside union employees) then slavery translates to an effective no-compete contract. Employers could afford to invest in training when they could be sure their trained employees wouldn’t just jump ship for a pay raise.

I’d never really considered that before. Yes, slavery with modern working standards might indeed be more efficient and better all-around. Of course, slaves would have to be motivated with bonuses etc rather than whips, just as coal miners must be motivated by money etc rather than by Pinkerton goons.

So …. using an unfair rhetorical move… you’re in favor of slavery?

It would need a whole new name, since there are so many bad associations with the old one. Perhaps “long-term contract” or something like that. And of course the contract would have to be nontransferable. More like serfs than slaves who can be sold. We’re probably about ready for that, except that companies may prefer to start with, say, engineers who have paid for their own educations and who can be fired in 10-15 years when it becomes cheaper to replace them with new people fresh out of school.

(Perhaps unfair rhetorically, but it seems to be an issue that the more stuff is better crowd needs to address).

We’re facing a problem that employees with very little negotiating strength are finding themselves with essentially no job security. Government-regulated lifetime contracts might be just the solution for people who really want that security.

Or, is it possible that more is not always better (taking everything into account)? Is it possible that that notion that more is better is a culturally generated idea?

I expect I mis-stated that, or stayed too unclear. However much we choose to produce, it’s better not to waste limiting resources while we produce it.

This translates to minimising costs averaged over risks. If you had well-researched insurance for all risks, then it would translate to minimising costs.

I don’t accept social arguments here. If we could produce the same amount using fewer employee-hours then it’s better to use fewer hours working and distribute the extra wealth some other way than wages. While in theory if we have excess labor we might let supply-and-demand adjust the population downward until we reach equilibrium, in practice we need a noneconomic solution. And if we have a noneconomic solution then we don’t need the economy to somehow provide a living wage to all the people who happen to need one.

In any case, simplistic notions that all you need to know is that ‘more is better’ are debatable.

Yes. Regardless, businessmen must do economic planning. They win by cutting costs, by producing the right things at the right times, producing better products and persuading customers to buy them, arranging for business taxes to apply more to their competitors than to themselves, preparing well for what the rest of the economy does, creating entry costs, establishing brands, etc.

Economists who can give useful advice on those topics will be valuable if managers realise the need and believe the advice fills that need.

Economists who can make a good living supplying economic results to the wider community have at least as much claim to helping humanity as Coca-Cola bottlers and Philip Morris executives and, say, stockbrokers.

If your economic theory is vital to running a successful business, then it’s clearly useful. If it helps you get tenure in a university then it’s useful in a different way, and if it helps you win arguments on blogs that’s a third way.

Some of the things that businesses do to be successful are surely zero-sum or negative-sum games. A useful economic theory might predict which are like that, and look for ways to discourage those games while encouraging productive competition. Though in the short run you might do better to sell ideas about how to win at negative-sum competitions than to altrusticly try to eliminate them.

What other ways do you think economic theory can be useful to real people?

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Eric 06.09.07 at 4:34 pm

“Yes, slavery with modern working standards might indeed be more efficient and better all-around.”

How to respond? How to an argument that slavery (whatever it’s called in modern dress) might be a “better all-around”?

Of course, dozens of ways immediately come to mind.

But what’s important here is the ease with which a follower of mainstream economics considers instituting slavery for “efficiency” reasons. Some might say this is just “hard headed thinking”; others might way that it reveals an essential, and fundamental flaw, in the mainstream approach: a narrow-minded and simplistic notion that only consequences matter and the only consequence that matters is output per capita.

>”if it helps you win arguments on blogs that’s a third way.”

Well in that case it looks like mainstream economics falls short (except to someone who already believes in this particular theory).

I believe that economics needs to more clearly address the issue of “what is the good economy” and “how do we get there.”

(What now follows is a debate over normative vs. positive which will reveal that the mainstream economist had only a poorly understood notion of what these things mean and an inability to see how “normative” concepts are already embedded in mainstream economices. The debate will seemingly die out but then, after a pause, mainstream economists will start using math and drop big names and theories and this will drive out most who don’t understand these things. They will be driven out not because they are wrong but because they feel they no longer can compete with the math/names dropped. Soon the only one left standing in the mainstream economist who believes that he/she has won the debate while all they have done is successfully excluded those who they disagree with.)

(However, perhaps sadly, in this case someone who disagrees with the mainstream approach can actually match the mainstream economists in math/name dropping ability and can argue the case well that the math/names mainstream economists drop are not really responsive to the key issues.)

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abb1 06.09.07 at 5:01 pm

An economy based on slave labor is probably somewhat easier to model. Labor would be just another raw material, like oil or copper. So, from the point of view of a freako-economist it’s a no-brainer. A bunch of economists would be able to move to a more productive line of work.

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Walt 06.09.07 at 5:33 pm

eric: You are being trolled. The number of economists who would argue for instituting slavery on efficiency grounds is very, very small.

_And_ falsificationism is alive and well in physics, so maybe they’re shitty scientists too.

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notsneaky 06.09.07 at 5:40 pm

very, very small

Name one!

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Eric 06.09.07 at 6:08 pm

If slavery is more “efficient” (which is an open question by the way) why would mainstream economists be against slavery?

They overrule certain conclusions of their own theory based on non-theoretical notions.

Indeed, the fact that they do NOT advocate slavery suggests that they actually use some socially determined “normative” notions to limit what they find acceptable conclusions of their theory.

So, if they unthinkingly reject certain potential conclusions of their own theory in the case of slavery, is it not possible that they reject lots of other stuff simply based on their unexamed prior non-theoretical beliefs?

So we’re making some progress here: mainstream economists implicitly/explicitly accept that some conclusions of their own theory must be censored.

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Eric 06.09.07 at 6:11 pm

“And falsificationism is alive and well in physics, so maybe they’re shitty scientists too.”

Much of physics moves on ahead without any concern with simplistic falsification. And where falsification does occur in physics it’s the real thing and not the bogus falsification invoked in mainstream economics. Mainstream economics is not dedicated to falsifying their own theory they are dedicated to “fitting” a mainstream theory to whatever they observe. This is NOT falsification; it is merely a type of verificationism.

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Sebastian Holsclaw 06.09.07 at 6:46 pm

“I’d just observe that some have argued in the past that slave production was more productive than free worker production.”

Please name them, I’ve never heard the argument outside of drunken college-BS sessions.

“If slavery is more “efficient” (which is an open question by the way) why would mainstream economists be against slavery?”

That is a mighty big ‘IF’ for someone who is so interested in empiricism. I would think the argument against the efficiency of slavery would be rather obvious: the effort expended in keeping slaves is a huge drain on resources. I’m not aware of anyone who argues that the South was an economic powerhouse compared to the North.

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Sebastian Holsclaw 06.09.07 at 6:47 pm

“So, if they unthinkingly reject certain potential conclusions of their own theory in the case of slavery, is it not possible that they reject lots of other stuff simply based on their unexamed prior non-theoretical beliefs?”

You’re a LONG way from being able to justify this without showing that mainstream economics actually does or should justify slavery.

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Eric 06.09.07 at 7:02 pm

“Please name them, I’ve never heard the argument outside of drunken college-BS sessions.”

I have always agreed that Fogel and Engerman’s Time on the Cross was BS but now someone else has agreed! Thanks!

“That is a mighty big ‘IF’ for someone who is so interested in empiricism. I would think the argument against the efficiency of slavery …”

Lots has been written on the “efficiency” of slavery and the ante-bellum US southern economy versus the North. This includes both theoretical and empirical literature. You don’t need to make stuff up when a huge literature exists out there. Once you give it a read we can talk about it. ;>

But the point remains: if slavery IS efficient (once everything is taken into account) why would a mainstream economist be reluctant to promote slavery?

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dsquared 06.09.07 at 7:16 pm

Michael G:

1. The “profits” in Arrow and Debreu aren’t really “Profits” in the ordinary language sense of the word, not least because the firms in that model don’t really look like firms (how does Debreu buy an ice-cream? He first buys the entire output of a continuum of infinitesimally small ice-cream producers, then integrates).

2. I was talking about profits, not returns to scale. The fact that you treat them interchangeably (and thus presumably think it’s impossible to earn excess profits in a business which doesn’t have increasing returns to scale, at variance with normal experience) is kind of the problem here.

3. Neoclassical economics may not, but that doesn’t mean that nobody else does.

4. Again, I was talking about profits here, not any particular competitive structure. In the real world, all sorts of firms make profits.

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tveb 06.09.07 at 7:30 pm

“This is NOT falsification; it is merely a type of verificationism”.

What you described is not verificationism either.I don’t have the time to go over this here, but remember that verificationism failed not because it was “bad” or “cheating” (which is basically what you describe), but because there were logical problems with it. It was difficult to combine the method of verficationism at the level of methodology with the concept of universal laws at the ontological/metaphysical level.

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Eric 06.09.07 at 7:50 pm

“What you described is not verificationism”

I agree that what I’ve described is not how folks often define “verificationism” from the perspective of statments. That is why I called it a “type of varificationism” to differentiate what I was observing with what others often call varificationism.

To wit: The mainstream believes that as long as they can “fit” a mainstream theory to some observation, they have “varified” the mainstream theory. That is the (apparent) thinking going on in their head. They think that the ability to find varifiable statements (empirical predictions) they have shown they are going well.

But this is very far from “falsificationism” which the mainstream economists THINKS they are doing. But then never attempt to falsify their main theoretical notions and, indeed, it is not clear that their theory can ever be made to make a prediction that can be falsified. Therefore, using the rules of falsificationism (which the mainstream says they accept) the mainstream theory is not “science” because it is not falsifiable.

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Quo Vadis 06.09.07 at 8:45 pm

if slavery IS efficient (once everything is taken into account) why would a mainstream economist be reluctant to promote slavery?

Because the question is outside the scope of economics – by design. Economists don’t promote automation either, CFOs do.

Most of the discussion here is about the difference between pure science and applied science. You can argue that economics as a pure science is not useful to you as a policymaker for various reasons, but you cannot argue that those who take a scientific approach to economics doing it poorly simply because they are doing it.

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Walt 06.09.07 at 8:54 pm

Physicists are not simplistic falsificationists (since simplistic falsificationism exists only in the minds of philosophers of science), but they are falsificationists. In the long run, the coin of the realm is theories that can be refuted by experiment.

Economists would not advocate slavery because it’s, you know, immoral. I’m sure you think that scores some awesome point against economists, but damned if I can figure out your scoring system.

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Eric 06.09.07 at 9:21 pm

“Physicists are not simplistic falsificationists..”

Perhaps and perhaps not.

But for sure mainstream economists are NOT falsificationists. It is unclear if the mainstream approach can be falsified and it is clear that mainstream economists do not seek to falsify their own theory. But they claim they should be called “scientists” because they believe (but don’t implement!) falsification.

Now that is okay with me: I’m not sure that falsificationism is a reasonable approach. But I’m not the one saying I’m falsificationist: it’s the mainstream economists.

Saying the mainstream approach is a paradigm or research program is much more reasonable (and one which seeks to find evidence consistent with their approach). But once this move is made, mainstream economists lose what they desire: to present themselves as objective scientists. So the choice mainstream economists face is: (1) be truthful about what they do (paradigm/research program) and admit they don’t do science as this is typically defined or (2) be dishonest in what they really do and claim they are objective scientists.

“Economists would not advocate slavery because it’s, you know, immoral.”

Of course it is immoral.

But this is a case in which a “normative” agenda drives the mainstream theory. When it was first proposed that slavery might be “efficient” (see Fogel and Engerman) this set of a frenzy of mainstream research to show that slavey was NOT efficient. Lots of effort was made to prove this point and it required lots of hard thinking and work. That is, the normative goal of showing slavery was bad lead to the goal of showing that slavery was NOT efficient and this goal was apparently obtained (but not without a lot of work). The mainstream stuggled to find a way to label slavery as “inefficient” because they did not like slavery.

Moral of the story: mainstream economists are likely often driven by certain ideas (generated outside their theory) to “prove” certain things within their theory. Not exactly what they say they do.

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Quo Vadis 06.09.07 at 9:48 pm

It is unclear if the mainstream approach can be falsified and it is clear that mainstream economists do not seek to falsify their own theory. But they claim they should be called “scientists” because they believe (but don’t implement!) falsification.

You want to hold economics to a different standard than other sciences. When has a paradigm shift in any science NOT been met with widespread resistance by the mainstream in the discipline? This resistance to change is generally regarded as a good thing. New theories that stand up to the criticism by the mainstream are eventually incorporated into the mainstream.

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Eric 06.09.07 at 10:05 pm

“You want to hold economics to a different standard than other sciences. When has a paradigm shift in any science NOT been met with widespread resistance by the mainstream in the discipline? ”

Not at all. I want mainstream economists to drop this “science” stuff and admit that they are merely defending their own paradigm/research program. And that when they judge heterodox economics they, partly, are just using criteria generated within their paradigm/research program that is not “universal” but designed to justify what the mainstream does.

I also want the mainstream to drop the pretense that they do “positive” science and forsake “nomative” statements. (The positive vs. normative ideas is a bit out of date but it is one that is invoked constantly by the mainstream). Mainstream economics is infused from top to bottom with what can be called “value judgments.” This includes sneaking in the value judgment that “efficiency” is important and that by, more or less, saying that only efficient outcomes are valid to consider for an economy. Also, the mainstream theory is utilitarian from top to bottom and holding to utilitarianism is a major ethical claim. Yes the mainstream has dropped happiness as a concern but it still presumes that only consequences matter and only a limited number of consequences (related perhaps to output per person) are worthy of consideration.

This represents a HUGE ethical claim despite the fact that mainstream economists say the reject value judgments.

In addition, it is not clear that the mainstream vision of the economy itself (as a set of interlinked markets) is even helpful for revealing whether an economy is good or bad.

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Michael Greinecker 06.09.07 at 10:30 pm

“(how does Debreu buy an ice-cream? He first buys the entire output of a continuum of infinitesimally small ice-cream producers, then integrates).”

Actually, there´s a finite number of firms with positive size in the Arrow-Debreu model, not a continuum.

“The fact that you treat them interchangeably (and thus presumably think it’s impossible to earn excess profits in a business which doesn’t have increasing returns to scale, at variance with normal experience) is kind of the problem here.”

The absence of returns to scale was a criticism of GET made here. It´s wrong, that´s my point.

Nobody knows how to model profits in a system of interrelated markets. It´s your job to provide a counterexample.

One can of course get profits as quasi-rents in search models. But it´s hard to combine them with GET (Hosios tried something along these lines), nevertheless they are mainstream economics.

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J Thomas 06.10.07 at 12:00 am

How to respond? How to an argument that slavery (whatever it’s called in modern dress) might be a “better all-around”? [….]

But what’s important here is the ease with which a follower of mainstream economics considers instituting slavery for “efficiency” reasons. Some might say this is just “hard headed thinking”; others might way that it reveals an essential, and fundamental flaw, in the mainstream approach: a narrow-minded and simplistic notion that only consequences matter and the only consequence that matters is output per capita.

Perhaps I should admit here that I don’t know enough economics to be mainstream.

The argument that agricultural whip slavery was “efficient” is probably flawed, and in any case is specialised. It was surely much harder to sabotage a farm run entirely with hand tools, versus a factory. Similarly, to build canals and railroad tunnels etc you wouldn’t want slaves anywhere near dynamite or blasting powder. And in theory slaveowners were responsible for their slaves’ retirement; though to reduce that problem they could perhaps sell old slaves to someone who would work them to death. In a society that didn’t have adequate financial institutions, a farmer could trade his commodity crop for commodity slaves without money actually having to change hands. Later sharecropping provided the same advantage — the slave didn’t have to be paid money but could be paid in crops at harvest time. Of course, one-company mining towns could pay in scrip that could be redeemed at the company store — another solution to a similar problem.

Slavery let owners get jobs done fairly cheaply that could not be done at all at any reasonable price during a labor shortage. Could they have used slaves for higher-value work instead? Perhaps agricultural labor was particularly easy to train workers who didn’t know english.

People say that wage-slaves are better workers than whip-slaves. It makes sense. If you work hard and save your money then you can have something when you get old. And if there’s a labor surplus and you don’t work hard enough they can just throw you into the street and try somebody else. But if you’re a slave who works harder than the bottom 10% they won’t whip you, and there’s nothing you can do to keep them from selling you down the river when you get old. The arguments for lazy slaves are about the same as the arguments for lazy government workers and corporate bureaucrats. Wage-slaves are more scared than whip-slaves.

But there’s nothing to keep owners from motivating slaves with rewards more than punishments. One traditional reward for a job well done by plantation slaves, like Marines, was beer. There’s no limit to the rewards that can be offered to slaves, except that it shows on the bottom line. Romans commonly believed that slaves lived better (materially, at least) than most freemen. And it was true for many house slaves, though not at all for mine slaves.

Some years ago many people claimed that top japanese corporations did well because their employees were for life. Employees were naturally very loyal to their corporations, and they willingly taught OTJ because they weren’t threatened by younger people who could do their jobs — their pay increased by seniority and they would never be fired. They said that top US corporations ought to do it that way too. But then the japanese economy stagnated, and US corporations started doing big layoffs and scared their employees into working long hours for reduced pay, and the whole idea got dropped.

It’s traditional for network administrators to put time bombs into their networks — to give themselves job security. A network administrator with a lifetime contract wouldn’t need to do that. He could afford to be more efficient.

It might work. But then there are the problems that if the company gets into trouble it can’t fire its slaves and it can’t easily reduce their perks. The really good thing about wage slavery is that the company has no responsibility for its people, it can just dump them whenever it sees an advantage. So the inflexibility of lifetime contracts has some minuses.

I believe that economics needs to more clearly address the issue of “what is the good economy” and “how do we get there.”

Yes! That’s the whole point of economics, isn’t it? Apart from the pleasure of figuring things out, and the pleasure of making clever models that do clever things that might get applause from smart people.

There’s also the smaller issue of “what is the good corporation” and “how do we get there” which is likely to be more lucrative. Also, you can collect better data. Individual corporations fail faster, so to some extent you can see which approaches result in quicker bankruptcy. Particular answers to “how do we get there” can be falsified much quicker.

What now follows is a debate over normative vs. positive which will reveal that the mainstream economist had only a poorly understood notion of what these things mean and an inability to see how “normative” concepts are already embedded in mainstream economices.

Yes, when you try to decide what’s good, you need to notice what you’ve already assumed is good. And you have to decide where you draw the line between economics and everything else. The economics intertwines with the rest of society, and economic decisions affect social things, political choices affect the economy, etc. You have to put it together somehow.

You can’t get results without understanding *how* things work, and one of the main points of understanding it is so you can keep it working and make it work better, once you choose what better means.

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Eric 06.10.07 at 12:27 am

“…One can of course get profits as quasi-rents in search models…”

Yes, one can give a GE model almost any characteristics you desire (if you’re skilled enough with math and econ).

But…remind me…what exactly is the relationship between any given GE model and the “real world”? If I had a drawer that I put in a paper with the words “economics of scale” does that mean the drawer is now a good model for the real world?

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J Thomas 06.10.07 at 12:38 am

Mainstream economics is infused from top to bottom with what can be called “value judgments.” This includes sneaking in the value judgment that “efficiency” is important and that by, more or less, saying that only efficient outcomes are valid to consider for an economy. Also, the mainstream theory is utilitarian from top to bottom and holding to utilitarianism is a major ethical claim.

I am not a professional economist, and so most of what I hear is from other amateurs. I think we might wind up with similar arguments, just out of focus and dumbed down. I keep running into a sort of panglossian claim that whatever the economy does must be optimal, because it has feedback mechanisms to respond to suboptimality.

Sometimes I get that argument from electrical engineers who themselves work with control theory, who design control structures and who know how hard it can be to get a feedback system to respond appropriately.

And I hear the argument that free-market economies always tend toward full employment, that everybody who wants to work can get a living wage. When this is spelled out to a point, the argument invokes comparative advantage. Even if you aren’t very good at anything, there will always be jobs that the better-skilled people don’t have time to do because they’re doing something more valuable. Therefore an unregulated economy will always approach full employment.

It occurs to me that one of the major products of academic economics departments is undergraduates who are not economics majors but who have taken economics courses and who have opinions about political economy. If economists take responsibility for what laymen who’ve taken introductory economics classes believe, then they have a lot to answer for.

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notsneaky 06.10.07 at 3:36 am

“Profits” in the ordinary language sense of the word

Profits in the ordinary language sense of the word are accounting profits. There’s not a single neoclassical/mainstream/GE model that insists on accounting profits being zero. So …

what the hell are you talking about???

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abb1 06.10.07 at 6:41 am

J Thomas, sounds like you may want to read Going Postal by Mark Ames (Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine and Beyond); it has lots of stuff about socio-economics of slavery vs. ‘new deal’/’great society’ model vs. ‘Reagan revolution’/neoliberalism model. Excellent book.

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dsquared 06.10.07 at 11:24 am

No, radek, “profits” in the ordinary language sense of the term are cash that the owner can take out, over and above depreciation and the cost of capital. The accountant’s use of “profit” to mean accruals profit is another specialised one.

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Walt 06.10.07 at 2:25 pm

Why do you say that, notsneaky? Businesspeople and investors, for example, are well-aware that the accounting profits that appear in a balance sheet are only a proxy for the true profit number.

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notsneaky 06.10.07 at 6:05 pm

Then what are these “Profits in the ordinary language sense of the word” that mainstream economics refuses to consider? As has been pointed out mainstream economics allows for both accounting and economic profits.

Are they just “profits arising in a model/theory which is aesthetically pleasing to the whims and fancies of Daniel Davies”?

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Walt 06.10.07 at 11:30 pm

That’s the definition we all use in the real world, notsneaky. We’re very sensitive to the whims and fancies of Daniel Davies.

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elliottg 06.11.07 at 3:03 am

I’m confused. Everyone arguing for the idea that profits are a big problem. I can’t think of an industry where long term profits exist with the possible exception of oil and pharmaceuticals; certainly not airlines, automobiles, finanacial services, or computers.

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dsquared 06.11.07 at 6:25 am

Elliot, if you can’t think of profits in the financial services industry in the long term, you’re not imagining hard enough.

Radek: How jolly, jolly decent of mainstream economics to “allow for” accounting and economic profits! I don’t think I’d ever suggested that economists had banned them. However, “mainstream economics” does not, as I think you agreed not so long ago, work on the basis of models in which economic profits are systematically nonzero and positive.

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Gdr 06.11.07 at 3:43 pm

I know very little about economics, but it seems to me that something’s fishy when positive economic profits (surely a very common, even usual case) go by the names “supernormal profits” and “abnormal profits”.

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J Thomas 06.11.07 at 4:35 pm

Gdr, I don’t know much about economics either, but I know you can’t tell much at all about what jargon means from the way it sounds.

I have the strong impression that “mainstream economics” includes the idea that apart from monopolies etc all profit is just something that happens naturally for the good of the whole economy, and it also includes the idea that weird things can happen away from equilibrium but that things tend toward equilibrium where weird things stop happening and “profit” balances out with the cost for needed expansion and the cost of capital and so on.

I think “mainstream economics” includes a lot of variety, and for many ideas that get the label you can find some mainstream economists who disagree with them. But that variety still leaves a whole lot of room for heterodox economics which is labeled as not mainstream.

Sometimes the difference between mainstream and heterodox is just in who’s saying it. In genetics, at one point there was a “neoclassical synthesis” that put together most of the genetics known at that time into a coherent whole. You could mostly tell what was part of the neoclassical movement and what wasn’t, though there was some variety within it. I don’t think we have that in economics now.

However, there is a normative economic philosophy that is espoused by a lot of amatuer economists, that goes roughly: “Whatever happens in a free-market economy is good and is the best that could possibly happen, unless a government is involved.” This is similar to the oldstyle view in ecology that ecosystems are each optimised for something-or-other and are as good as they possibly could be so long as human beings aren’t involved. And these people believe that this simple wrong idea is derived from mainstream economics. I can’t prove that it isn’t.

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notsneaky 06.11.07 at 6:49 pm

daniel, aside from a critique of my choice of words, what is your point?

Over and over in this thread it’s been pointed out that there plenty of both micro and macro models with positive profits in them. Look through the past, I dunno, five issues of AER and count the # of models with zero profits. Even the infamous DSGE models often assume monopolistic competition.

The only thing I agreed to, I think – not sure what you’re referring to – is that it’s hard to have a GE model with a general theory of imperfect competition. While every competititve market is roughly the same, each imperfectly competititve market is special. Combining them and allowing for intereaction between them is just plain hard.

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Eric Nilsson 06.11.07 at 6:56 pm

In the math models of mainstream economists there is the variable called “profit.” In the real world there is also something called “profits.”

But just because the same word (“profits”) appears in the math model and in the real world, this does not mean they refer to the same thing.

Indeed, we have no reason to suppose that the “variable called profits” tells us anything about profits in the real world. If I renamed my cat Max, giving him the new name “Profits,” I have no reason to suppose that because Profits (aka, Max) sleeps alot that in the real world profits sleep alot.

Mainstream economists have yet to clearly indicate what the relationship is between their models and the “real world.” Just because the models and the real world utilize the same labels (for different things), this does not mean the math model “says” anything about the real world.

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dsquared 06.12.07 at 10:48 am

Combining them and allowing for intereaction between them is just plain hard

You keep saying this, but it’s not hard. It’s hard to do it in a closed-form mathematical model of the type that gets published in the AER, but that’s a bad thing about the AER and is kind of the point. “The New Industrial State” is a whole book about profit, planning and corporate power and its effects on the aggregate economy, and it’s not all that hard.

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Gdr 06.12.07 at 3:46 pm

#82: Misleading jargon tells us something about the beliefs and attitudes of the people who coined and popularized the jargon. For example, in mathematics the misleading terms “real number” and “imaginary number” tell us something about the attitudes of Descartes and his contemporaries.

Misleading jargon can also help perpetuate those beliefs: many people continue to wrongly believe that “real numbers” are more real than “imaginary numbers”; it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that the terminology has had something to do with this.

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SG 06.13.07 at 2:03 am

dsquared, can profits be modelled by taking into account the role of share holders? I know absolutely zero about economics, but since these mysterious people seem to be always the reason given for companies making stupendous profits, wouldn`t that be a good starting point? For example, they could be treated like a kind of bank, with infinite capital and a variable rate of repayment on their “loan”, which can be as low as zero but has to be repaid for an infinitely long period of time. Then any company which “floated” in your dynamic model would have to earn an amount above the equilibrium state forever in order to pay off this “bank”. Am I barking up the wrong tree? I find it really hard to believe that the supposed central motive of all of business is absent from the supposed central theory of all of business…

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