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Re: From an Economist -- How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 7 Sep 2009 13:03:13 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: Dave Wilson <dave () wilson net> Date: September 7, 2009 12:20:17 PM EDT To: dave () farber net Cc: ip <ip () v2 listbox com>Subject: Re: [IP] From an Economist -- How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?
For a very different take on this issue (one that supports Krugman's position) I recommend a recent book, "The Myth of the Rational Market" by Justin Fox (Time magazine), which details the decades-long flight from economic theory based on observable fact toward economic theory based on behavioral modeling. If you're wondering how it is that banks had no trouble giving million dollar mortgages to people who likely would not earn that much over the course of their lifetimes, it's because the models said it was perfectly safe. On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 9:53 AM, David Farber<dave () farber net> wrote:
Begin forwarded message: From: "Faulhaber, Gerald" <faulhabe () wharton upenn edu> Date: September 7, 2009 9:10:37 AM EDT To: David Farber <dave () farber net> Subject: RE: [Dewayne-Net] How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? Dave [for IP if you wish]I'm an admirer of Krugman; he's a great economist. However, as a columnist,he gets a bit fevered at times, and this is one of those times. The breast-beating and mea culpa in this article has a long history ineconomics; we are always baring our soul about how imperfect we are, morethan any other discipline. But let me add a little balance here.First, economics is not good at predicting dynamics; we are pretty good at discerning when things are out of whack ("out of equilibrium" as we say) but we don't have good predictive models that tell us exactly what will happen and when if we are out of equilibrium. Now in fact economists have known for at least a decade that we were in bubbles: the stock boom of the mid-90s (remember Alan Greenspan's "irrational exuberance"?), the Internet/ telecom boom, and the housing bubble. If you didn't hear the warnings, you were not listening, because many, many economists and even analysts were warning of it. But no one can predict when the s--t will hit the fan; that is not within our technology to do this. Don't like this? Well, you can always find someone, maybe an economist, who will supply a prediction if you demandone...for a price. Now you know what it's worth. But don't tell meeconomists didn't know we were in a housing bubble. Did we know how bad it would be when it burst? No. Largely because the data on systemic risk inbanking was simply not available. 'Nother story.Second, economists are not really very smug about what we can do. We are of the view that we are much better than other social sciences, because our results are all empirically based and quite rigorous, for what they do. While sometimes we get complacent (witness Krugman's quotes), most of usare aware that a "black swan" event will take us far from where we canconfidently say we know what's going on. We do study carefully the GreatDepression black swan, but it's only one data point.Krugman's notion that economists fell in love with beautiful mathematical models is simply nonsense. Economists, including macroeconomists, have been strongly empirically based for decades and have been prepared to jettison theories that the data rejects. Rational expectations models, associated with the Chicago School, may still have some adherents on the shores of Lake Michigan, but they have generally been rejected by the data. We must alsounderstand that empirically based analyses are always based on what we observe, and what we have been observing over the past five decades isNot-Depression. So when a Depression-sized events occur, we are forecasting outside the sample, which means we are forecasting into ignorance. All good economists know this: we are in uncharted waters which our previous data(except 1930-1940) doesn't cover at all. The notion that the government plays an absolutely crucial role in theeconomy is almost unquestioned by modern economists (except for the Ayn Rand aficionados). The interesting and difficult question is what role (s) shouldit play? Topic for another day; class dismissed. Professor Emeritus Gerald Faulhaber Business and Public Policy Dept. Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104 Professor Emeritus of Law University of Pennsylvania -----Original Message----- From: David Farber [mailto:dave () farber net] Sent: Saturday, September 05, 2009 3:16 PM To: Faulhaber, Gerald Subject: Fwd: [Dewayne-Net] How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? Begin forwarded message: From: dewayne () warpspeed com (Dewayne Hendricks) Date: September 5, 2009 1:19:13 AM EDT To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <xyzzy () warpspeed com> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? September 6, 2009 How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? By PAUL KRUGMAN <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=allI. MISTAKING BEAUTY FOR TRUTH It's hard to believe now, but not long ago economists were congratulating themselves over the success of their field. Those successes - or so they believed - were both theoretical and practical, leading to a golden era for the profession. On the theoretical side, they thought that they had resolved their internal disputes. Thus, in a 2008 paper titled "The State of Macro" (that is, macroeconomics, the study of big-picture issues like recessions), Olivier Blanchard ofM.I.T., now the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, declared that "the state of macro is good." The battles of yesteryear, he said, were over, and there had been a "broad convergence of vision." And in the real world, economists believed they had things under control: the "central problem of depression-prevention has been solved," declared Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago in his 2003 presidential address to the American Economic Association. In 2004, Ben Bernanke, a former Princeton professor who is now the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, celebrated the Great Moderation in economic performance over the previous two decades, which he attributed in part to improved economic policy making. Last year, everything came apart. Few economists saw our current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the field's problems. More important was the profession's blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy. During the golden years, financial economists came to believe that markets were inherently stable - indeed, that stocks and other assets were always priced just right. There was nothing in the prevailing models suggesting the possibility of the kind of collapse that happened last year. Meanwhile, macroeconomists were divided in their views. But the main division was between those who insisted that free-market economies never go astray and those who believed that economies may stray now and then but that any major deviations from the path of prosperity could and would be corrected by the all-powerful Fed. Neither side was prepared to copewith an economy that went off the rails despite the Fed's best efforts.And in the wake of the crisis, the fault lines in the economics profession have yawned wider than ever. Lucas says the Obama administration's stimulus plans are "schlock economics," and his Chicago colleague John Cochrane says they're based on discredited "fairy tales." In response, Brad DeLong of theUniversity of California, Berkeley, writes of the "intellectual collapse" of the Chicago School, and I myself have written that comments from Chicago economists are the product of a Dark Age of macroeconomics in which hard-won knowledge has been forgotten. What happened to the economics profession? And where does it go from here? As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Untilthe Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn't sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized market was, to be sure, partly a response to shifting political winds, partly a response to financial incentives. But while sabbaticals at the Hoover Institution and job opportunities on Wall Street are nothing to sneeze at, the central cause of the profession's failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess. Unfortunately, this romanticized and sanitized vision of the economy led most economists to ignore all the things that can go wrong. They turned a blind eye to the limitations of human rationality that often lead to bubbles and busts; to the problems of institutions that run amok; to the imperfections of markets - especially financial markets - that can cause the economy's operating system to undergo sudden, unpredictable crashes; and to the dangers created when regulators don't believe in regulation. It's much harder to say where the economics profession goes from here. But what's almost certain is that economists will have to learn to live with messiness. That is, they will have to acknowledge the importance of irrational and often unpredictable behavior, face up to the often idiosyncratic imperfections of markets and accept that an elegant economic "theory of everything" is a long way off. In practical terms, this will translate into more cautious policy advice - and a reduced willingness to dismantle economic safeguards in the faith that markets will solve all problems. II. FROM SMITH TO KEYNES AND BACK The birth of economics as a discipline is usually credited to Adam Smith, who published "The Wealth of Nations" in 1776. Over the next 160 years an extensive body of economic theory was developed, whose central message was: Trust the market. Yes, economists admitted that there were cases in which markets might fail, of which the most important was the case of "externalities" - costs that people impose on others without paying the price, like traffic congestion or pollution. But the basic presumption of "neoclassical" economics (named after the late-19th-century theorists who elaborated on the concepts of their "classical" predecessors) was that we should have faith in the market system. This faith was, however, shattered by the Great Depression. Actually, even in the face of total collapse some economists insisted that whatever happens in a market economy must be right: "Depressions are not simply evils," declared Joseph Schumpeter in 1934 - 1934! They are, he added, "forms of something which has to be done." But many, and eventually most, economists turned to the insights of John Maynard Keynes for both an explanation of what had happened and a solution to future depressions. Keynes did not, despite what you may have heard, want the government to run the economy. He described his analysis in his 1936 masterwork, "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money," as "moderately conservative in its implications." He wanted to fix capitalism, not replace it. But he did challenge the notion that free-market economies can function without a minder, expressing particular contempt for financial markets, which he viewed as being dominated by short-term speculation with little regard for fundamentals. And he called for active government intervention - printing more money and, if necessary, spending heavily on public works - to fight unemployment during slumps. 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