Showing posts with label assumption. Show all posts
Showing posts with label assumption. Show all posts
Thursday 5 October 2023
Thursday 20 July 2023
A Level Economics 36: The Assumptions of Perfect Competition
Perfect competition is a theoretical market structure characterized by several key features and assumptions. In a perfectly competitive market, there are many buyers and sellers dealing with identical or homogenous products. Each firm is a price taker, meaning it has no influence over the market price, and there are no barriers to entry or exit for new firms. Additionally, perfect information is assumed, implying that buyers and sellers have access to all relevant market information.
Underpinning Assumptions of Perfect Competition:
Many Buyers and Sellers:
- Assumption: There are numerous buyers and sellers in the market, and no single buyer or seller can significantly influence the market price.
- Importance: The presence of many buyers and sellers ensures that no individual firm has market power to manipulate prices. This fosters intense competition, benefitting consumers with lower prices and greater product availability.
Homogeneous Products:
- Assumption: All firms in a perfectly competitive market produce identical products, making them perfect substitutes for buyers.
- Importance: Homogeneity eliminates product differentiation and branding competition. Consumers make decisions solely based on price, leading to price-based competition that benefits consumers.
Price Takers:
- Assumption: Each firm is a price taker, meaning it must accept the market-determined price for its output and cannot influence the price through its individual actions.
- Importance: Being a price taker eliminates pricing power and ensures that all firms face the same market price. This promotes efficient allocation of resources and prevents price manipulation.
Free Entry and Exit:
- Assumption: There are no barriers to entry or exit for new firms to enter or leave the market.
- Importance: Free entry and exit enable new firms to enter the market if there are profits to be made or exit if there are losses. This ensures that profits are driven down to normal levels in the long run, benefiting consumers with competitive prices.
Perfect Information:
- Assumption: Buyers and sellers have access to complete and accurate information about product quality, prices, and market conditions.
- Importance: Perfect information ensures that buyers can make informed decisions and choose the best products and prices available. Likewise, sellers can efficiently allocate resources based on market demand and conditions.
Perfect Factor Mobility:
- Assumption: Factors of production, such as labor and capital, can move freely between industries without any restrictions or costs.
- Importance: Perfect factor mobility ensures that resources can be allocated efficiently to their most productive uses, resulting in optimal output and minimizing waste of resources.
Zero Transport Costs:
- Assumption: There are no transportation costs involved in moving goods and services between locations.
- Importance: Zero transport costs enable the efficient movement of products and resources, leading to uniform prices across the market and avoiding regional price disparities.
Rational Actor:
- Assumption: All economic agents, including consumers and firms, are rational and act in their self-interest to maximize their utility or profits.
- Importance: Assuming rational actors allows economists to analyze how individuals and firms make decisions based on cost-benefit analysis and react to changes in market conditions.
Example: Agricultural Commodities Market
Agricultural commodities like wheat, corn, or soybeans often exemplify perfect competition. In these markets, there are many farmers (sellers) and buyers, and each farmer produces the same commodity. Buyers, such as food processing companies or exporters, have access to perfect information about market prices and product quality. Individual farmers cannot influence market prices and must accept the prevailing price for their crops. Moreover, factors of production like labor and machinery can move freely between farms without any constraints, and there are no transport costs involved in moving agricultural products to the market.
The assumptions of perfect competition are vital because they create an ideal benchmark for understanding how competitive markets function. While perfect competition may not fully exist in the real world, understanding its underpinning assumptions helps economists analyze market dynamics and assess the impacts of market imperfections, such as monopolies or oligopolies. Moreover, perfect competition serves as a standard to measure the efficiency of other market structures and helps identify areas where regulatory intervention may be necessary to enhance consumer welfare and overall market efficiency.
Friday 23 June 2023
Fallacies of Capitalism 15: The Voluntary Transactions of Actors in an Economy
A voluntary transaction refers to an economic exchange between two or more parties where each party willingly participates without coercion or external pressure. In a voluntary transaction, individuals are assumed to engage in the exchange because they perceive it to be mutually beneficial, based on their own preferences and subjective judgements of value.
However, the "voluntary transactions" fallacy arises when this concept is applied without considering the power imbalances and information asymmetries that can exist in real-world market transactions. While voluntary transactions are a foundational concept in market economics, it is important to recognise that not all transactions occur under ideal conditions of equal power and perfect information. Here are some additional points to consider:
Power imbalances: In many transactions, there can be significant disparities in bargaining power between the parties involved. For example, in labour markets, workers may face limited employment options and economic pressures, while employers may have more leverage in determining wages and working conditions. These power imbalances can influence the outcomes of the transaction, potentially leading to exploitation or unfair terms.
Information asymmetry: In voluntary transactions, it is assumed that both parties have access to complete and accurate information about the goods, services, or conditions involved. However, in reality, information can be unevenly distributed between buyers and sellers. Sellers may possess superior knowledge about the product, its quality, or potential risks, while buyers may lack access to the same information. This information asymmetry can undermine the notion of fully informed and voluntary choices.
Coercive pressures: While voluntary transactions should be free from coercion, individuals can face external pressures that limit their choices and compromise their ability to make truly voluntary decisions. These pressures can include economic necessity, social or cultural expectations, or systemic inequalities. For example, individuals may accept low-paying jobs or unfavourable contracts due to limited alternatives or the need to meet basic needs.
Market failures: The assumption of voluntary transactions fails to account for market failures, such as externalities or the undersupply of public goods. Externalities occur when the actions of one party impose costs or benefits on others who are not involved in the transaction. Market failures can result in suboptimal outcomes, where voluntary transactions do not account for the broader social or environmental impacts.
By considering these factors, it becomes clear that the "voluntary transactions" fallacy oversimplifies the complexities of real-world market interactions. Recognising the existence of power imbalances, information asymmetries, and other limitations is crucial for understanding the potential consequences of market transactions and designing policies that promote fair and equitable outcomes.
Economics Explained: Assumptions and Economic Models
An assumption, in the context of economic models, refers to a simplifying belief or proposition about the behaviour of individuals, firms, or the overall economic system. These assumptions are necessary because economic models attempt to capture the complexity of real-world phenomena and make them more understandable and analysable.
Assumptions serve as building blocks for economic models, providing a foundation upon which the analysis can be conducted. They help economists create a framework that abstracts away unnecessary details and focuses on key variables and relationships of interest. By making assumptions, economists can isolate specific factors and explore their impact on economic outcomes.
For example, when constructing a model to analyse consumer behaviour, economists may assume that individuals are rational decision-makers who seek to maximise their personal satisfaction or utility. While this assumption may not accurately capture every aspect of real-world consumer behaviour, it simplifies the decision-making process and allows economists to predict how individuals might respond to changes in prices, incomes, or other factors.
Similarly, in the study of market dynamics, economists often assume perfect competition, which assumes a large number of buyers and sellers, identical products, and perfect information. Although perfect competition is rarely found in reality, this assumption enables economists to study market equilibrium, price determination, and the effects of various policy interventions in a more manageable way.
Assumptions in economic models also often employ the ceteris paribus principle, which means "all else equal." This principle assumes that while analysing the relationship between two variables, all other factors remain constant. This allows economists to focus on the specific relationship of interest without getting entangled in the complexities of simultaneous changes in multiple factors.
It is important to note that assumptions are simplifications and abstractions, and they may not always perfectly reflect reality. However, they serve a crucial role in economic modelling by making the analysis feasible, highlighting key relationships, and providing initial insights into economic behaviour and outcomes. While assumptions are necessary, it is also important for economists to continuously test and refine them based on empirical evidence to improve the accuracy and reliability of economic models.
Assumptions and simplifications in mathematical economic models can introduce potential biases and limitations in several ways:
Inaccurate representation of reality: Economic models are abstractions that aim to simplify the complex real world. However, by making assumptions and simplifications, models may fail to capture the full complexity and nuances of economic phenomena. These simplifications can lead to a mismatch between the model's assumptions and the actual behaviour of individuals, firms, or markets, potentially introducing biases in the model's predictions.
Omission of relevant variables: Economic models often involve simplifications that exclude certain variables or factors that may be important in real-world situations. This exclusion can limit the model's ability to provide a comprehensive understanding of the economic system under study. The omission of relevant variables can result in biased or incomplete analysis, as important drivers of economic behaviour or outcomes may be neglected.
Assumptions about individual behaviour: Many economic models rely on assumptions about the behaviour of individuals, such as the assumption of rationality or self-interest. However, these assumptions may not always hold true in reality. Individuals may exhibit bounded rationality, have imperfect information, or behave altruistically, which can deviate from the assumptions made in economic models. Such deviations can lead to biased predictions or inaccurate representations of real-world phenomena.
Simplified market structures: Economic models often assume simplified market structures, such as perfect competition, monopoly, or oligopoly. While these assumptions provide a useful framework for analysis, they may not reflect the complexities of actual markets. Real-world markets can exhibit various degrees of competition, market power, and imperfect information, which can introduce biases when using simplified market structures in economic models.
Linear relationships: Many economic models assume linear relationships between variables for simplicity and tractability. However, in reality, relationships between variables may be nonlinear or exhibit diminishing returns. Assuming linearity can introduce biases in predictions or policy recommendations, as it may not accurately capture the actual dynamics and interactions among variables.
Limited scope of analysis: Economic models often focus on specific aspects or sectors of the economy, neglecting interdependencies and feedback effects. This limited scope can introduce biases by overlooking broader systemic effects or failing to capture the full consequences of policy interventions. It is important to recognise that economic systems are complex and interconnected, and simplifications in models can restrict the understanding of these interconnections.
To mitigate these limitations and biases, economists employ various techniques, such as sensitivity analysis, robustness checks, and empirical validation, to test the assumptions and evaluate the robustness of model predictions. Additionally, economists strive to develop more realistic and nuanced models by incorporating more accurate assumptions, relaxing unrealistic assumptions, or adopting alternative modelling approaches to address the limitations and biases introduced by simplifications.
Principles of Economics Translated by Yoram Bauman
Monday 12 March 2018
Accounting watchdogs find ‘serious problems’ at 40% of audits
Madison Marriage in The Financial Times
Global accounting watchdogs identified serious problems at 40 per cent of the audits they inspected last year, raising fresh concerns about the quality of work being carried out by the world’s largest accounting firms.
Global accounting watchdogs identified serious problems at 40 per cent of the audits they inspected last year, raising fresh concerns about the quality of work being carried out by the world’s largest accounting firms.
According to the International Forum of Independent Audit Regulators, accounting lapses were identified at two-fifths of the 918 audits of listed public interest entities they inspected last year.
The audit inspections focused on organisations in riskier or complex situations such as mergers or acquisitions, according to the IFIAR, whose members include 52 audit regulators around the world.
The most common issue identified by these regulators was a failure among auditors to “assess the reasonableness of assumptions”.
The second biggest problem was a failure among auditors to “sufficiently test the accuracy and completeness of data or reports produced by management”.
The findings have intensified concerns about weaknesses in the auditing process, an issue that has been thrust into the spotlight over the past 12 months following a string of high profile accounting failures.
These include the collapse of BHS and Carillion in the UK, a corruption scandal involving oil company Petrobras in Brazil, and the share price collapse of South Africa’s Steinhoff after the retail conglomerate admitted to a series of accounting irregularities last year.
Prem Sikka, an accounting expert and emeritus professor at Essex University, said the frequency of problems identified by the IFIAR was “terrible”.
“There are a whole range of issues and there is no simple fix. There is a huge knowledge failure in the audit industry which is not being looked at. The whole industry is ripe for reform. The question is where is the political will for this?”
The accounting industry has faced significant reputational problems in the UK in particular. KPMG came under heavy criticism from politicians last year for giving HBOS a clean bill of health shortly before the UK bank collapsed during the financial crisis. KPMG has also been criticised for declaring Carillion a going concern last March, 10 months before the construction company went into liquidation.
The report showed that 41 per cent of the problems identified by audit regulators last year related to independence and ethics. These included accounting firms failing to maintain their independence due to financial relationships with clients, and failing to evaluate the extent of non-audit and audit services provided to clients.
Many firms also failed “to implement a reliable system for tracking business relationships, audit firm financial interests, and corporate family trees”, the IFIAR said. Its research was based on feedback from 33 audit regulators who inspected the work done by 120 audit firms.
Karthik Ramanna, a professor at Oxford university’s Blavatnik School of Government, said the number of firms with issues around independence and ethics was “absurdly high”. He added that the research would reinforce concerns about a lack of competition in the audit market, which is widely viewed as being dominated by the ‘Big Four’: EY, Deloitte, KPMG and PwC.
“The auditing industry is so concentrated, once the largest firms set the standard for poor conduct, the whole industry is dragged down,” he said.
Brian Hunt, chairman of the IFIAR, told the FT: “We would like the firms to focus on getting better. We need them to think about how they come at this a bit differently. The firms are making progress — we would like to see it happen a bit faster.”
Deloitte said: “We remain focused on continually improving the quality of services we provide to our clients. We look forward to continuing our constructive engagement with our audit regulators.”
Tuesday 11 July 2017
How economics became a religion
John Rapley in The Guardian
Although Britain has an established church, few of us today pay it much mind. We follow an even more powerful religion, around which we have oriented our lives: economics. Think about it. Economics offers a comprehensive doctrine with a moral code promising adherents salvation in this world; an ideology so compelling that the faithful remake whole societies to conform to its demands. It has its gnostics, mystics and magicians who conjure money out of thin air, using spells such as “derivative” or “structured investment vehicle”. And, like the old religions it has displaced, it has its prophets, reformists, moralists and above all, its high priests who uphold orthodoxy in the face of heresy.
Although Britain has an established church, few of us today pay it much mind. We follow an even more powerful religion, around which we have oriented our lives: economics. Think about it. Economics offers a comprehensive doctrine with a moral code promising adherents salvation in this world; an ideology so compelling that the faithful remake whole societies to conform to its demands. It has its gnostics, mystics and magicians who conjure money out of thin air, using spells such as “derivative” or “structured investment vehicle”. And, like the old religions it has displaced, it has its prophets, reformists, moralists and above all, its high priests who uphold orthodoxy in the face of heresy.
Over time, successive economists slid into the role we had removed from the churchmen: giving us guidance on how to reach a promised land of material abundance and endless contentment. For a long time, they seemed to deliver on that promise, succeeding in a way few other religions had ever done, our incomes rising thousands of times over and delivering a cornucopia bursting with new inventions, cures and delights.
This was our heaven, and richly did we reward the economic priesthood, with status, wealth and power to shape our societies according to their vision. At the end of the 20th century, amid an economic boom that saw the western economies become richer than humanity had ever known, economics seemed to have conquered the globe. With nearly every country on the planet adhering to the same free-market playbook, and with university students flocking to do degrees in the subject, economics seemed to be attaining the goal that had eluded every other religious doctrine in history: converting the entire planet to its creed.
Yet if history teaches anything, it’s that whenever economists feel certain that they have found the holy grail of endless peace and prosperity, the end of the present regime is nigh. On the eve of the 1929 Wall Street crash, the American economist Irving Fisher advised people to go out and buy shares; in the 1960s, Keynesian economists said there would never be another recession because they had perfected the tools of demand management.
The 2008 crash was no different. Five years earlier, on 4 January 2003, the Nobel laureate Robert Lucas had delivered a triumphal presidential address to the American Economics Association. Reminding his colleagues that macroeconomics had been born in the depression precisely to try to prevent another such disaster ever recurring, he declared that he and his colleagues had reached their own end of history: “Macroeconomics in this original sense has succeeded,” he instructed the conclave. “Its central problem of depression prevention has been solved.”
No sooner do we persuade ourselves that the economic priesthood has finally broken the old curse than it comes back to haunt us all: pride always goes before a fall. Since the crash of 2008, most of us have watched our living standards decline. Meanwhile, the priesthood seemed to withdraw to the cloisters, bickering over who got it wrong. Not surprisingly, our faith in the “experts” has dissipated.
Hubris, never a particularly good thing, can be especially dangerous in economics, because its scholars don’t just observe the laws of nature; they help make them. If the government, guided by its priesthood, changes the incentive-structure of society to align with the assumption that people behave selfishly, for instance, then lo and behold, people will start to do just that. They are rewarded for doing so and penalised for doing otherwise. If you are educated to believe greed is good, then you will be more likely to live accordingly.
The hubris in economics came not from a moral failing among economists, but from a false conviction: the belief that theirs was a science. It neither is nor can be one, and has always operated more like a church. You just have to look at its history to realise that.
The American Economic Association, to which Robert Lucas gave his address, was created in 1885, just when economics was starting to define itself as a distinct discipline. At its first meeting, the association’s founders proposed a platform that declared: “The conflict of labour and capital has brought to the front a vast number of social problems whose solution is impossible without the united efforts of church, state and science.” It would be a long path from that beginning to the market evangelism of recent decades.
Yet even at that time, such social activism provoked controversy. One of the AEA’s founders, Henry Carter Adams, subsequently delivered an address at Cornell University in which he defended free speech for radicals and accused industrialists of stoking xenophobia to distract workers from their mistreatment. Unknown to him, the New York lumber king and Cornell benefactor Henry Sage was in the audience. As soon as the lecture was done, Sage stormed into the university president’s office and insisted: “This man must go; he is sapping the foundations of our society.” When Adams’s tenure was subsequently blocked, he agreed to moderate his views. Accordingly, the final draft of the AEA platform expunged the reference to laissez-faire economics as being “unsafe in politics and unsound in morals”.
This was our heaven, and richly did we reward the economic priesthood, with status, wealth and power to shape our societies according to their vision. At the end of the 20th century, amid an economic boom that saw the western economies become richer than humanity had ever known, economics seemed to have conquered the globe. With nearly every country on the planet adhering to the same free-market playbook, and with university students flocking to do degrees in the subject, economics seemed to be attaining the goal that had eluded every other religious doctrine in history: converting the entire planet to its creed.
Yet if history teaches anything, it’s that whenever economists feel certain that they have found the holy grail of endless peace and prosperity, the end of the present regime is nigh. On the eve of the 1929 Wall Street crash, the American economist Irving Fisher advised people to go out and buy shares; in the 1960s, Keynesian economists said there would never be another recession because they had perfected the tools of demand management.
The 2008 crash was no different. Five years earlier, on 4 January 2003, the Nobel laureate Robert Lucas had delivered a triumphal presidential address to the American Economics Association. Reminding his colleagues that macroeconomics had been born in the depression precisely to try to prevent another such disaster ever recurring, he declared that he and his colleagues had reached their own end of history: “Macroeconomics in this original sense has succeeded,” he instructed the conclave. “Its central problem of depression prevention has been solved.”
No sooner do we persuade ourselves that the economic priesthood has finally broken the old curse than it comes back to haunt us all: pride always goes before a fall. Since the crash of 2008, most of us have watched our living standards decline. Meanwhile, the priesthood seemed to withdraw to the cloisters, bickering over who got it wrong. Not surprisingly, our faith in the “experts” has dissipated.
Hubris, never a particularly good thing, can be especially dangerous in economics, because its scholars don’t just observe the laws of nature; they help make them. If the government, guided by its priesthood, changes the incentive-structure of society to align with the assumption that people behave selfishly, for instance, then lo and behold, people will start to do just that. They are rewarded for doing so and penalised for doing otherwise. If you are educated to believe greed is good, then you will be more likely to live accordingly.
The hubris in economics came not from a moral failing among economists, but from a false conviction: the belief that theirs was a science. It neither is nor can be one, and has always operated more like a church. You just have to look at its history to realise that.
The American Economic Association, to which Robert Lucas gave his address, was created in 1885, just when economics was starting to define itself as a distinct discipline. At its first meeting, the association’s founders proposed a platform that declared: “The conflict of labour and capital has brought to the front a vast number of social problems whose solution is impossible without the united efforts of church, state and science.” It would be a long path from that beginning to the market evangelism of recent decades.
Yet even at that time, such social activism provoked controversy. One of the AEA’s founders, Henry Carter Adams, subsequently delivered an address at Cornell University in which he defended free speech for radicals and accused industrialists of stoking xenophobia to distract workers from their mistreatment. Unknown to him, the New York lumber king and Cornell benefactor Henry Sage was in the audience. As soon as the lecture was done, Sage stormed into the university president’s office and insisted: “This man must go; he is sapping the foundations of our society.” When Adams’s tenure was subsequently blocked, he agreed to moderate his views. Accordingly, the final draft of the AEA platform expunged the reference to laissez-faire economics as being “unsafe in politics and unsound in morals”.
‘Economics has always operated more like a church’ … Trinity Church seen from Wall Street. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
So was set a pattern that has persisted to this day. Powerful political interests – which historically have included not only rich industrialists, but electorates as well – helped to shape the canon of economics, which was then enforced by its scholarly community.
Once a principle is established as orthodox, its observance is enforced in much the same way that a religious doctrine maintains its integrity: by repressing or simply eschewing heresies. In Purity and Danger, the anthropologist Mary Douglas observed the way taboos functioned to help humans impose order on a seemingly disordered, chaotic world. The premises of conventional economics haven’t functioned all that differently. Robert Lucas once noted approvingly that by the late 20th century, economics had so effectively purged itself of Keynesianism that “the audience start(ed) to whisper and giggle to one another” when anyone expressed a Keynesian idea at a seminar. Such responses served to remind practitioners of the taboos of economics: a gentle nudge to a young academic that such shibboleths might not sound so good before a tenure committee. This preoccupation with order and coherence may be less a function of the method than of its practitioners. Studies of personality traits common to various disciplines have discovered that economics, like engineering, tends to attract people with an unusually strong preference for order, and a distaste for ambiguity.
The irony is that, in its determination to make itself a science that can reach hard and fast conclusions, economics has had to dispense with scientific method at times. For starters, it rests on a set of premises about the world not as it is, but as economists would like it to be. Just as any religious service includes a profession of faith, membership in the priesthood of economics entails certain core convictions about human nature. Among other things, most economists believe that we humans are self-interested, rational, essentially individualistic, and prefer more money to less. These articles of faith are taken as self-evident. Back in the 1930s, the great economist Lionel Robbins described his profession in a way that has stood ever since as a cardinal rule for millions of economists. The field’s basic premises came from “deduction from simple assumptions reflecting very elementary facts of general experience” and as such were “as universal as the laws of mathematics or mechanics, and as little capable of ‘suspension’”.
Deducing laws from premises deemed eternal and beyond question is a time-honoured method. For thousands of years, monks in medieval monasteries built a vast corpus of scholarship doing just that, using a method perfected by Thomas Aquinas known as scholasticism. However, this is not the method used by scientists, who tend to require assumptions to be tested empirically before a theory can be built out of them.
But, economists will maintain, this is precisely what they themselves do – what sets them apart from the monks is that they must still test their hypotheses against the evidence. Well, yes, but this statement is actually more problematic than many mainstream economists may realise. Physicists resolve their debates by looking at the data, upon which they by and large agree. The data used by economists, however, is much more disputed. When, for example, Robert Lucas insisted that Eugene Fama’s efficient-markets hypothesis – which maintains that since a free market collates all available information to traders, the prices it yields can never be wrong – held true despite “a flood of criticism”, he did so with as much conviction and supporting evidence as his fellow economist Robert Shiller had mustered in rejecting the hypothesis. When the Swedish central bank had to decide who would win the 2013 Nobel prize in economics, it was torn between Shiller’s claim that markets frequently got the price wrong and Fama’s insistence that markets always got the price right. Thus it opted to split the difference and gave both men the medal – a bit of Solomonic wisdom that would have elicited howls of laughter had it been a science prize. In economic theory, very often, you believe what you want to believe – and as with any act of faith, your choice of heads or tails will as likely reflect sentimental predisposition as scientific assessment.
It’s no mystery why the data used by economists and other social scientists so rarely throws up incontestable answers: it is human data. Unlike people, subatomic particles don’t lie on opinion surveys or change their minds about things. Mindful of that difference, at his own presidential address to the American Economic Association nearly a half-century ago, another Nobel laureate, Wassily Leontief, struck a modest tone. He reminded his audience that the data used by economists differed greatly from that used by physicists or biologists. For the latter, he cautioned, “the magnitude of most parameters is practically constant”, whereas the observations in economics were constantly changing. Data sets had to be regularly updated to remain useful. Some data was just simply bad. Collecting and analysing the data requires civil servants with a high degree of skill and a good deal of time, which less economically developed countries may not have in abundance. So, for example, in 2010 alone, Ghana’s government – which probably has one of the better data-gathering capacities in Africa – recalculated its economic output by 60%. Testing your hypothesis before and after that kind of revision would lead to entirely different results.
Once a principle is established as orthodox, its observance is enforced in much the same way that a religious doctrine maintains its integrity: by repressing or simply eschewing heresies. In Purity and Danger, the anthropologist Mary Douglas observed the way taboos functioned to help humans impose order on a seemingly disordered, chaotic world. The premises of conventional economics haven’t functioned all that differently. Robert Lucas once noted approvingly that by the late 20th century, economics had so effectively purged itself of Keynesianism that “the audience start(ed) to whisper and giggle to one another” when anyone expressed a Keynesian idea at a seminar. Such responses served to remind practitioners of the taboos of economics: a gentle nudge to a young academic that such shibboleths might not sound so good before a tenure committee. This preoccupation with order and coherence may be less a function of the method than of its practitioners. Studies of personality traits common to various disciplines have discovered that economics, like engineering, tends to attract people with an unusually strong preference for order, and a distaste for ambiguity.
The irony is that, in its determination to make itself a science that can reach hard and fast conclusions, economics has had to dispense with scientific method at times. For starters, it rests on a set of premises about the world not as it is, but as economists would like it to be. Just as any religious service includes a profession of faith, membership in the priesthood of economics entails certain core convictions about human nature. Among other things, most economists believe that we humans are self-interested, rational, essentially individualistic, and prefer more money to less. These articles of faith are taken as self-evident. Back in the 1930s, the great economist Lionel Robbins described his profession in a way that has stood ever since as a cardinal rule for millions of economists. The field’s basic premises came from “deduction from simple assumptions reflecting very elementary facts of general experience” and as such were “as universal as the laws of mathematics or mechanics, and as little capable of ‘suspension’”.
Deducing laws from premises deemed eternal and beyond question is a time-honoured method. For thousands of years, monks in medieval monasteries built a vast corpus of scholarship doing just that, using a method perfected by Thomas Aquinas known as scholasticism. However, this is not the method used by scientists, who tend to require assumptions to be tested empirically before a theory can be built out of them.
But, economists will maintain, this is precisely what they themselves do – what sets them apart from the monks is that they must still test their hypotheses against the evidence. Well, yes, but this statement is actually more problematic than many mainstream economists may realise. Physicists resolve their debates by looking at the data, upon which they by and large agree. The data used by economists, however, is much more disputed. When, for example, Robert Lucas insisted that Eugene Fama’s efficient-markets hypothesis – which maintains that since a free market collates all available information to traders, the prices it yields can never be wrong – held true despite “a flood of criticism”, he did so with as much conviction and supporting evidence as his fellow economist Robert Shiller had mustered in rejecting the hypothesis. When the Swedish central bank had to decide who would win the 2013 Nobel prize in economics, it was torn between Shiller’s claim that markets frequently got the price wrong and Fama’s insistence that markets always got the price right. Thus it opted to split the difference and gave both men the medal – a bit of Solomonic wisdom that would have elicited howls of laughter had it been a science prize. In economic theory, very often, you believe what you want to believe – and as with any act of faith, your choice of heads or tails will as likely reflect sentimental predisposition as scientific assessment.
It’s no mystery why the data used by economists and other social scientists so rarely throws up incontestable answers: it is human data. Unlike people, subatomic particles don’t lie on opinion surveys or change their minds about things. Mindful of that difference, at his own presidential address to the American Economic Association nearly a half-century ago, another Nobel laureate, Wassily Leontief, struck a modest tone. He reminded his audience that the data used by economists differed greatly from that used by physicists or biologists. For the latter, he cautioned, “the magnitude of most parameters is practically constant”, whereas the observations in economics were constantly changing. Data sets had to be regularly updated to remain useful. Some data was just simply bad. Collecting and analysing the data requires civil servants with a high degree of skill and a good deal of time, which less economically developed countries may not have in abundance. So, for example, in 2010 alone, Ghana’s government – which probably has one of the better data-gathering capacities in Africa – recalculated its economic output by 60%. Testing your hypothesis before and after that kind of revision would lead to entirely different results.
‘The data used by economists rarely throws up incontestable answers’ … traders at the New York Stock Exchange in October 2008. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Leontief wanted economists to spend more time getting to know their data, and less time in mathematical modelling. However, as he ruefully admitted, the trend was already going in the opposite direction. Today, the economist who wanders into a village to get a deeper sense of what the data reveals is a rare creature. Once an economic model is ready to be tested, number-crunching ends up being done largely at computers plugged into large databases. It’s not a method that fully satisfies a sceptic. For, just as you can find a quotation in the Bible that will justify almost any behaviour, you can find human data to support almost any statement you want to make about the way the world works.
That’s why ideas in economics can go in and out of fashion. The progress of science is generally linear. As new research confirms or replaces existing theories, one generation builds upon the next. Economics, however, moves in cycles. A given doctrine can rise, fall and then later rise again. That’s because economists don’t confirm their theories in quite the same way physicists do, by just looking at the evidence. Instead, much as happens with preachers who gather a congregation, a school rises by building a following – among both politicians and the wider public.
For example, Milton Friedman was one of the most influential economists of the late 20th century. But he had been around for decades before he got much of a hearing. He might well have remained a marginal figure had it not been that politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were sold on his belief in the virtue of a free market. They sold that idea to the public, got elected, then remade society according to those designs. An economist who gets a following gets a pulpit. Although scientists, in contrast, might appeal to public opinion to boost their careers or attract research funds, outside of pseudo-sciences, they don’t win support for their theories in this way.
However, if you think describing economics as a religion debunks it, you’re wrong. We need economics. It can be – it has been – a force for tremendous good. But only if we keep its purpose in mind, and always remember what it can and can’t do.
The Irish have been known to describe their notionally Catholic land as one where a thin Christian veneer was painted over an ancient paganism. The same might be said of our own adherence to today’s neoliberal orthodoxy, which stresses individual liberty, limited government and the free market. Despite outward observance of a well-entrenched doctrine, we haven’t fully transformed into the economic animals we are meant to be. Like the Christian who attends church but doesn’t always keep the commandments, we behave as economic theory predicts only when it suits us. Contrary to the tenets of orthodox economists, contemporary research suggests that, rather than seeking always to maximise our personal gain, humans still remain reasonably altruistic and selfless. Nor is it clear that the endless accumulation of wealth always makes us happier. And when we do make decisions, especially those to do with matters of principle, we seem not to engage in the sort of rational “utility-maximizing” calculus that orthodox economic models take as a given. The truth is, in much of our daily life we don’t fit the model all that well.
Economists work best when they take the stories we have given them, and advise us on how we can help them to come true
For decades, neoliberal evangelists replied to such objections by saying it was incumbent on us all to adapt to the model, which was held to be immutable – one recalls Bill Clinton’s depiction of neoliberal globalisation, for instance, as a “force of nature”. And yet, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the consequent recession, there has been a turn against globalisation across much of the west. More broadly, there has been a wide repudiation of the “experts”, most notably in the 2016 US election and Brexit referendum.
It would be tempting for anyone who belongs to the “expert” class, and to the priesthood of economics, to dismiss such behaviour as a clash between faith and facts, in which the facts are bound to win in the end. In truth, the clash was between two rival faiths – in effect, two distinct moral tales. So enamoured had the so-called experts become with their scientific authority that they blinded themselves to the fact that their own narrative of scientific progress was embedded in a moral tale. It happened to be a narrative that had a happy ending for those who told it, for it perpetuated the story of their own relatively comfortable position as the reward of life in a meritocratic society that blessed people for their skills and flexibility. That narrative made no room for the losers of this order, whose resentments were derided as being a reflection of their boorish and retrograde character – which is to say, their fundamental vice. The best this moral tale could offer everyone else was incremental adaptation to an order whose caste system had become calcified. For an audience yearning for a happy ending, this was bound to be a tale of woe.
The failure of this grand narrative is not, however, a reason for students of economics to dispense with narratives altogether. Narratives will remain an inescapable part of the human sciences for the simple reason that they are inescapable for humans. It’s funny that so few economists get this, because businesses do. As the Nobel laureates George Akerlof and Robert Shiller write in their recent book, Phishing for Phools, marketers use them all the time, weaving stories in the hopes that we will place ourselves in them and be persuaded to buy what they are selling. Akerlof and Shiller contend that the idea that free markets work perfectly, and the idea that big government is the cause of so many of our problems, are part of a story that is actually misleading people into adjusting their behaviour in order to fit the plot. They thus believe storytelling is a “new variable” for economics, since “the mental frames that underlie people’s decisions” are shaped by the stories they tell themselves.
Economists arguably do their best work when they take the stories we have given them, and advise us on how we can help them to come true. Such agnosticism demands a humility that was lacking in economic orthodoxy in recent years. Nevertheless, economists don’t have to abandon their traditions if they are to overcome the failings of a narrative that has been rejected. Rather they can look within their own history to find a method that avoids the evangelical certainty of orthodoxy.
In his 1971 presidential address to the American Economic Association, Wassily Leontief counselled against the dangers of self-satisfaction. He noted that although economics was starting to ride “the crest of intellectual respectability … an uneasy feeling about the present state of our discipline has been growing in some of us who have watched its unprecedented development over the last three decades”.
That’s why ideas in economics can go in and out of fashion. The progress of science is generally linear. As new research confirms or replaces existing theories, one generation builds upon the next. Economics, however, moves in cycles. A given doctrine can rise, fall and then later rise again. That’s because economists don’t confirm their theories in quite the same way physicists do, by just looking at the evidence. Instead, much as happens with preachers who gather a congregation, a school rises by building a following – among both politicians and the wider public.
For example, Milton Friedman was one of the most influential economists of the late 20th century. But he had been around for decades before he got much of a hearing. He might well have remained a marginal figure had it not been that politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were sold on his belief in the virtue of a free market. They sold that idea to the public, got elected, then remade society according to those designs. An economist who gets a following gets a pulpit. Although scientists, in contrast, might appeal to public opinion to boost their careers or attract research funds, outside of pseudo-sciences, they don’t win support for their theories in this way.
However, if you think describing economics as a religion debunks it, you’re wrong. We need economics. It can be – it has been – a force for tremendous good. But only if we keep its purpose in mind, and always remember what it can and can’t do.
The Irish have been known to describe their notionally Catholic land as one where a thin Christian veneer was painted over an ancient paganism. The same might be said of our own adherence to today’s neoliberal orthodoxy, which stresses individual liberty, limited government and the free market. Despite outward observance of a well-entrenched doctrine, we haven’t fully transformed into the economic animals we are meant to be. Like the Christian who attends church but doesn’t always keep the commandments, we behave as economic theory predicts only when it suits us. Contrary to the tenets of orthodox economists, contemporary research suggests that, rather than seeking always to maximise our personal gain, humans still remain reasonably altruistic and selfless. Nor is it clear that the endless accumulation of wealth always makes us happier. And when we do make decisions, especially those to do with matters of principle, we seem not to engage in the sort of rational “utility-maximizing” calculus that orthodox economic models take as a given. The truth is, in much of our daily life we don’t fit the model all that well.
Economists work best when they take the stories we have given them, and advise us on how we can help them to come true
For decades, neoliberal evangelists replied to such objections by saying it was incumbent on us all to adapt to the model, which was held to be immutable – one recalls Bill Clinton’s depiction of neoliberal globalisation, for instance, as a “force of nature”. And yet, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the consequent recession, there has been a turn against globalisation across much of the west. More broadly, there has been a wide repudiation of the “experts”, most notably in the 2016 US election and Brexit referendum.
It would be tempting for anyone who belongs to the “expert” class, and to the priesthood of economics, to dismiss such behaviour as a clash between faith and facts, in which the facts are bound to win in the end. In truth, the clash was between two rival faiths – in effect, two distinct moral tales. So enamoured had the so-called experts become with their scientific authority that they blinded themselves to the fact that their own narrative of scientific progress was embedded in a moral tale. It happened to be a narrative that had a happy ending for those who told it, for it perpetuated the story of their own relatively comfortable position as the reward of life in a meritocratic society that blessed people for their skills and flexibility. That narrative made no room for the losers of this order, whose resentments were derided as being a reflection of their boorish and retrograde character – which is to say, their fundamental vice. The best this moral tale could offer everyone else was incremental adaptation to an order whose caste system had become calcified. For an audience yearning for a happy ending, this was bound to be a tale of woe.
The failure of this grand narrative is not, however, a reason for students of economics to dispense with narratives altogether. Narratives will remain an inescapable part of the human sciences for the simple reason that they are inescapable for humans. It’s funny that so few economists get this, because businesses do. As the Nobel laureates George Akerlof and Robert Shiller write in their recent book, Phishing for Phools, marketers use them all the time, weaving stories in the hopes that we will place ourselves in them and be persuaded to buy what they are selling. Akerlof and Shiller contend that the idea that free markets work perfectly, and the idea that big government is the cause of so many of our problems, are part of a story that is actually misleading people into adjusting their behaviour in order to fit the plot. They thus believe storytelling is a “new variable” for economics, since “the mental frames that underlie people’s decisions” are shaped by the stories they tell themselves.
Economists arguably do their best work when they take the stories we have given them, and advise us on how we can help them to come true. Such agnosticism demands a humility that was lacking in economic orthodoxy in recent years. Nevertheless, economists don’t have to abandon their traditions if they are to overcome the failings of a narrative that has been rejected. Rather they can look within their own history to find a method that avoids the evangelical certainty of orthodoxy.
In his 1971 presidential address to the American Economic Association, Wassily Leontief counselled against the dangers of self-satisfaction. He noted that although economics was starting to ride “the crest of intellectual respectability … an uneasy feeling about the present state of our discipline has been growing in some of us who have watched its unprecedented development over the last three decades”.
Noting that pure theory was making economics more remote from day-to-day reality, he said the problem lay in “the palpable inadequacy of the scientific means” of using mathematical approaches to address mundane concerns. So much time went into model-construction that the assumptions on which the models were based became an afterthought. “But,” he warned – a warning that the sub-prime boom’s fascination with mathematical models, and the bust’s subsequent revelation of their flaws, now reveals to have been prophetic – “it is precisely the empirical validity of these assumptions on which the usefulness of the entire exercise depends.”
Leontief thought that economics departments were increasingly hiring and promoting young economists who wanted to build pure models with little empirical relevance. Even when they did empirical analysis, Leontief said economists seldom took any interest in the meaning or value of their data. He thus called for economists to explore their assumptions and data by conducting social, demographic and anthropological work, and said economics needed to work more closely with other disciplines.
Leontief’s call for humility some 40 years ago stands as a reminder that the same religions that can speak up for human freedom and dignity when in opposition, can become obsessed with their rightness and the need to purge others of their wickedness once they attain power. When the church retains its distance from power, and a modest expectation about what it can achieve, it can stir our minds to envision new possibilities and even new worlds. Once economists apply this kind of sceptical scientific method to a human realm in which ultimate reality may never be fully discernible, they will probably find themselves retreating from dogmatism in their claims.
Paradoxically, therefore, as economics becomes more truly scientific, it will become less of a science. Acknowledging these limitations will free it to serve us once more.
Leontief thought that economics departments were increasingly hiring and promoting young economists who wanted to build pure models with little empirical relevance. Even when they did empirical analysis, Leontief said economists seldom took any interest in the meaning or value of their data. He thus called for economists to explore their assumptions and data by conducting social, demographic and anthropological work, and said economics needed to work more closely with other disciplines.
Leontief’s call for humility some 40 years ago stands as a reminder that the same religions that can speak up for human freedom and dignity when in opposition, can become obsessed with their rightness and the need to purge others of their wickedness once they attain power. When the church retains its distance from power, and a modest expectation about what it can achieve, it can stir our minds to envision new possibilities and even new worlds. Once economists apply this kind of sceptical scientific method to a human realm in which ultimate reality may never be fully discernible, they will probably find themselves retreating from dogmatism in their claims.
Paradoxically, therefore, as economics becomes more truly scientific, it will become less of a science. Acknowledging these limitations will free it to serve us once more.
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