Real Business Cycle

An unusual recession, a rapid recovery

PNRJ current events, macroeconomics, market failure, public policy , , , , , , , ,

Jul 11 JDN 2459407

It seems like an egregious understatement to say that the last couple of years have been unusual. The COVID-19 pandemic was historic, comparable in threat—though not in outcome—to the 1918 influenza pandemic.

At this point it looks like we may not be able to fully eradicate COVID. And there are still many places around the world where variants of the virus continue to spread. I personally am a bit worried about the recent surge in the UK; it might add some obstacles (as if I needed any more) to my move to Edinburgh. Yet even in hard-hit places like India and Brazil things are starting to get better. Overall, it seems like the worst is over.

This pandemic disrupted our society in so many ways, great and small, and we are still figuring out what the long-term consequences will be.

But as an economist, one of the things I found most unusual is that this recession fit Real Business Cycle theory.

Real Business Cycle theory (henceforth RBC) posits that recessions are caused by negative technology shocks which result in a sudden drop in labor supply, reducing employment and output. This is generally combined with sophisticated mathematical modeling (DSGE or GTFO), and it typically leads to the conclusion that the recession is optimal and we should do nothing to correct it (which was after all the original motivation of the entire theory—they didn’t like the interventionist policy conclusions of Keynesian models). Alternatively it could suggest that, if we can, we should try to intervene to produce a positive technology shock (but nobody’s really sure how to do that).

For a typical recession, this is utter nonsense. It is obvious to anyone who cares to look that major recessions like the Great Depression and the Great Recession were caused by a lack of labor demand, not supply. There is no apparent technology shock to cause either recession. Instead, they seem to be preciptiated by a financial crisis, which then causes a crisis of liquidity which leads to a downward spiral of layoffs reducing spending and causing more layoffs. Millions of people lose their jobs and become desperate to find new ones, with hundreds of people applying to each opening. RBC predicts a shortage of labor where there is instead a glut. RBC predicts that wages should go up in recessions—but they almost always go down.

But for the COVID-19 recession, RBC actually had some truth to it. We had something very much like a negative technology shock—namely the pandemic. COVID-19 greatly increased the cost of working and the cost of shopping. This led to a reduction in labor demand as usual, but also a reduction in labor supply for once. And while we did go through a phase in which hundreds of people applied to each new opening, we then followed it up with a labor shortage and rising wages. A fall in labor supply should create inflation, and we now have the highest inflation we’ve had in decades—but there’s good reason to think it’s just a transitory spike that will soon settle back to normal.

The recovery from this recession was also much more rapid: Once vaccines started rolling out, the economy began to recover almost immediately. We recovered most of the employment losses in just the first six months, and we’re on track to recover completely in half the time it took after the Great Recession.

This makes it the exception that proves the rule: Now that you’ve seen a recession that actually resembles RBC, you can see just how radically different it was from a typical recession.

Moreover, even in this weird recession the usual policy conclusions from RBC are off-base. It would have been disastrous to withhold the economic relief payments—which I’m happy to say even most Republicans realized. The one thing that RBC got right as far as policy is that a positive technology shock was our salvation—vaccines.

Indeed, while the cause of this recession was very strange and not what Keynesian models were designed to handle, our government largely followed Keynesian policy advice—and it worked. We ran massive government deficits—over $3 trillion in 2020—and the result was rapid recovery in consumer spending and then employment. I honestly wouldn’t have thought our government had the political will to run a deficit like that, even when the economic models told them they should; but I’m very glad to be wrong. We ran the huge deficit just as the models said we should—and it worked. I wonder how the 2010s might have gone differently had we done the same after 2008.

Perhaps we’ve learned from some of our mistakes.

Revealed preference: Does the fact that I did it mean I preferred it?

PNRJ critique of neoclassical economics, heuristics and biases , , , , , , ,

Post 312 Oct 27 JDN 2458784

One of the most basic axioms of neoclassical economics is revealed preference: Because we cannot observe preferences directly, we infer them from actions. Whatever you chose must be what you preferred.

Stated so badly, this is obviously not true: We often make decisions that we later come to regret. We may choose under duress, or confusion; we may lack necessary information. We change our minds.

And there really do seem to be economists who use it in this bald way: From the fact that a particular outcome occurred in a free market, they will infer that it must be optimally efficient. (“Freshwater” economists who are dubious of any intervention into markets seem to be most guilty of this.) In the most extreme form, this account would have us believe that people who trip and fall do so on purpose.

I doubt anyone believes that particular version—but there do seem to be people who believe that unemployment is the result of people voluntarily choosing not to work, and revealed preference has also led economists down some strange paths when trying to explain what sure looks like irrational behavior—such as “rational addiction” theory, positing that someone can absolutely become addicted to alcohol or heroin and end up ruining their life all based on completely rational, forward-thinking decision planning.

The theory can be adapted to deal with these issues, by specifying that it’s only choices made with full information and all of our faculties intact that count as revealing our preferences.

But when are we ever in such circumstances? When do we ever really have all the information we need in order to make a rational decision? Just what constitutes intact faculties? No one is perfectly rational—so how rational must we be in order for our decisions to count as revealing our preferences?

Revealed preference theory also quickly becomes tautologous: Why do we choose to do things? Because we prefer them. What do we prefer? What we choose to do. Without some independent account of what our preferences are, we can’t really predict behavior this way.

A standard counter-argument to this is that revealed preference theory imposes certain constraints of consistency and transitivity, so it is not utterly vacuous. The problem with this answer is that human beings don’t obey those constraints. The Allais Paradox, the Ellsberg Paradox, the sunk cost fallacy. It’s even possible to use these inconsistencies to create “money pumps” that will cause people to systematically give you money; this has been done in experiments. While real-world violations seem to be small, they’re definitely present. So insofar as your theory is testable, it’s false.

The good news is that we really don’t need revealed preference theory. We already have ways of telling what human beings prefer that are considerably richer than simply observing what they choose in various scenarios. One very simple but surprisingly powerful method is to ask. In general, if you ask people what they want and they have no reason to distrust you, they will in fact tell you what they want.

We also have our own introspection, as well as our knowledge about millions of years of evolutionary history that shaped our brains. We don’t expect a lot of people to prefer suffering, for instance (even masochists, who might be said to ‘prefer pain’, seem to be experiencing that pain rather differently than the rest of us would). We generally expect that people will prefer to stay alive rather than die. Some may prefer chocolate, others vanilla; but few prefer motor oil. Our preferences may vary, but they do follow consistent patterns; they are not utterly arbitrary and inscrutable.

There is a deeper problem that any account of human desires must face, however: Sometimes we are actually wrong about our own desires. Affective forecasting, the prediction of our own future mental states, is astonishingly unreliable. People often wildly overestimate the emotional effects of both positive and negative outcomes. (Interestingly, people with depression tend not to do this—those with severe depression often underestimate the emotional effects of positive outcomes, while those with mild depression seem to be some of the most accurate forecasters, an example of the depressive realism effect.)

There may be no simple solution to this problem. Human existence is complicated; we spend large portions of our lives trying to figure out what it is we really want.
This means that we should not simply trust that whatever it is happens is what everyone—or even necessarily anyone—wants to happen. People make mistakes, even large, systematic, repeated mistakes. Sometimes what happens is just bad, and we should be trying to change it. Indeed, sometimes people need to be protected from their own bad decisions.

Unsolved problems

PNRJ core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, macroeconomics, public policy, science and academia , , , , , ,

Oct 20 JDN 2458777

The beauty and clearness of the dynamical theory, which asserts heat and light to be modes of motion, is at present obscured by two clouds. The first came into existence with the undulatory theory of light, and was dealt with by Fresnel and Dr. Thomas Young; it involved the question, how could the earth move through an elastic solid, such as essentially is the luminiferous ether? The second is the Maxwell-Boltzmann doctrine regarding the partition of energy.


~ Lord Kelvin, April 27, 1900

The above quote is part of a speech where Kelvin basically says that physics is a completed field, with just these two little problems to clear up, “two clouds” in a vast clear horizon. Those “two clouds” Kelvin talked about, regarding the ‘luminiferous ether’ and the ‘partition of energy’? They are, respectively, relativity and quantum mechanics. Almost 120 years later we still haven’t managed to really solve them, at least not in a way that works consistently as part of one broader theory.

But I’ll give Kelvin this: He knew where the problems were. He vastly underestimated how complex and difficult those problems would be, but he knew where they were.

I’m not sure I can say the same about economists. We don’t seem to have even reached the point where we agree where the problems are. Consider another quotation:

For a long while after the explosion of macroeconomics in the 1970s, the field looked like a battlefield. Over time however, largely because facts do not go away, a largely shared vision both of fluctuations and of methodology has emerged. Not everything is fine. Like all revolutions, this one has come with the destruction of some knowledge, and suffers from extremism and herding. None of this deadly however. The state of macro is good.


~ Oliver Blanchard, 2008

The timing of Blanchard’s remark is particularly ominous: It is much like the turkey who declares, the day before Thanksgiving, that his life is better than ever.

But the content is also important: Blanchard didn’t say that microeconomics is in good shape (which I think one could make a better case for). He didn’t even say that economics, in general, is in good shape. He specifically said, right before the greatest economic collapse since the Great Depression, that macroeconomics was in good shape. He didn’t merely underestimate the difficulty of the problem; he didn’t even see where the problem was.

If you search the Web, you can find a few lists of unsolved problems in economics. Wikipedia has such a list that I find particularly bad; Mike Moffatt offers a better list that still has significant blind spots.

Wikipedia’s list is full of esoteric problems that require deeply faulty assumptions to even exist, like the ‘American option problem’ which assumes that the Black-Scholes model is even remotely an accurate description of how option prices work, or the ‘tatonnement problem’ which ignores the fact that there may be many equilibria and we might never reach one at all, or the problem they list under ‘revealed preferences’ which doesn’t address any of the fundamental reasons why the entire concept of revealed preferences may fail once we apply a realistic account of cognitive science. (I could go pretty far afield with that last one—and perhaps I will in a later post—but for now, suffice it to say that human beings often freely choose to do things that we later go on to regret.) I think the only one that Wikipedia’s list really gets right is ‘Unified models of human biases’. The ‘home bias in trade’ and ‘Feldstein-Horioka Puzzle’ problems are sort of edging toward genuine problems, but they’re bound up in too many false assumptions to really get at the right question, which is actually something like “How do we deal with nationalism?” Referring to the ‘Feldstein-Horioka Puzzle’ misses the forest for the trees. Likewise, the ‘PPP Puzzle’ and the ‘Exchange rate disconnect puzzle’ (and to some extent the ‘equity premium puzzle’ as well) are really side effects of a much deeper problem, which is that financial markets in general are ludicrously volatile and inefficient and we have no idea why.

And Wikipedia’s list doesn’t have some of the largest, most important problems in economics. Moffatt’s list does better, including good choices like “What Caused the Industrial Revolution?”, “What Is the Proper Size and Scope of Government?”, and “What Truly Caused the Great Depression?”, but it also includes some of the more esoteric problems like the ‘equity premium puzzle’ and the ‘endogeneity of money’. The way he states the problem “What Causes the Variation of Income Among Ethnic Groups?” suggests that he doesn’t quite understand what’s going on there either. More importantly, Moffatt still leaves out very obviously important questions like “How do we achieve economic development in poor countries?” (Or as I sometimes put it, “What did South Korea do from 1950 to 2000, and how can we do it again?”), “How do we fix shortages of housing and other necessities?”, “What is causing the global rise of income and wealth inequality?”, “How altruistic are human beings, to whom, and under what conditions?” and “What makes financial markets so unstable?” Ironically, ‘Unified models of human biases’, the one problem that Wikipedia got right, is missing from Moffatt’s list.

And I’m also humble enough to realize that some of the deepest problems in economics may be ones that we don’t even quite know how to formulate yet. We like to pretend that economics is a mature science, almost on the coattails of physics; but it’s really a very young science, more like psychology. We go through these ‘cargo cult science‘ rituals of p-values and econometric hypothesis tests, but there are deep, basic forces we don’t understand. We have precisely prepared all the apparatus for the detection of the phlogiston, and by God, we’ll get that 0.05 however we have to. (Think I’m being too harsh? “Real Business Cycle” theory essentially posits that the Great Depression was caused by everyone deciding that they weren’t going to work for a few years, and as whole countries fell into the abyss from failing financial markets, most economists still clung to the Efficient Market Hypothesis.) Our whole discipline requires major injections of intellectual humility: We not only don’t have all the answers; we’re not even sure we have all the questions.

I think the esoteric nature of questions like ‘the equity premium puzzle’ and the ‘tatonnement problem‘ is precisely the source of their appeal: It’s the sort of thing you can say you’re working on and sound very smart, because the person you’re talking to likely has no idea what you’re talking about. (Or else they are a fellow economist, and thus in on the con.) If you said that you’re trying to explain why poor countries are poor and why rich countries are rich—and if economics isn’t doing that, then what in the world are we doing?—you’d have to admit that we honestly have only the faintest idea, and that millions of people have suffered from bad advice economists gave their governments based on ideas that turned out to be wrong.

It’s really quite problematic how closely economists are tied to policymaking (except when we do really know what we’re talking about?). We’re trying to do engineering without even knowing physics. Maybe there’s no way around it: We have to make some sort of economic policy, and it makes more sense to do it based on half-proven ideas than on completely unfounded ideas. (Engineering without physics worked pretty well for the Romans, after all.) But it seems to me that we could be relying more, at least for the time being, on the experiences and intuitions of the people who have worked on the ground, rather than on sophisticated theoretical models that often turn out to be utterly false. We could eschew ‘shock therapy‘ approaches that try to make large interventions in an economy all at once, in favor of smaller, subtler adjustments whose consequences are more predictable. We could endeavor to focus on the cases where we do have relatively clear knowledge (like rent control) and avoid those where the uncertainty is greatest (like economic development).

At the very least, we could admit what we don’t know, and admit that there is probably a great deal we don’t know that we don’t know.