Why NAIRU Is Nonsense

By George P. Brockway, originally published May 7, 1999

MANY YEARS AGO, when I was a college undergraduate, there was some talk on campus about The Fountainhead[1], a massive novel by Ayn Rand. I was aware of it because one of my close friends told me a bit about it, and the older brother of a classmate had edited it, but I never read the book nor did I see the movie. Perhaps it was too huge for me (I was reading Ernest Hemingway‘s stories and Gertrude Stein‘s scribblings). Perhaps I was sufficiently law-abiding to be put off by the novel’s intensely self-centered architect hero[2], whose action at the end was the principal topic of what I heard (he destroyed an allegedly supremely beautiful building he had built because the owner wanted some changes).

I never read Atlas Shrugged either, or any of the other works by Ayn Rand, and I was not aware that she was a self- invented economist until I became one myself. Even then I was-and still am-put off by the name she gave to her philosophy (“objectivism“). But despite my ignorance of what she has written, I am prepared to claim that she has had a great and salutary effect on the present and possible prosperity of the United States of America. Maybe of the world.

One of Ayn Rand’s disciples was Alan Greenspan, who grew up to be Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. So far as I know, Greenspan has never made a public reference to her, and so far as I am aware, only three of her doctrines may have slipped into the proceedings of the august body he heads. He has spoken some odd words on the movement of the price of gold as an indicator of the future course of the price level. His aversion to regulation of the rogue multitrillion-dollar derivatives market may be linked in his mind with the behavior of the hero of The Fountainhead. And almost alone among the public men of our time, he doesn’t believe in the barbarous theory of a natural rate of unemployment.

In any case, I suspect that her influence has been both more profound and more beneficial than her ideas. As a result of his association with her, Greenspan learned how to be at once the consummate insider and the consummate outsider.

Because he is a consummate insider, he got to where he is. Because he is a consummate outsider, he has not been overawed by the high-powered bankers and economists with whom he does business. Because he is not overawed by these worthies, we have not had a boost in the interest rate since March 1994, and in fact had three quarter-of-a -point cuts last summer and fall.

These 60-odd months without a rate increase constitute the longest, indeed the only, period of tranquility the Federal Reserve Board has allowed the American economy in the 30 years since the Reserve launched its all-out war against inflation-which propelled the Consumer Price Index from 36.7 in 1969 to 99.6 in 1984, a record-breaking and stupefying leap of 272 per cent in 14 years. It is for the present period of tranquility (and for its continuance, if he can bring it off) that Greenspan is renowned today and will be forever famous in the annals of economics and of political economy.

There is no doubt that if Greenspan had polled the economics profession and the banking profession he would have had them almost solidly against him. On July 19, 1995, Greenspan said in Congressional testimony, “I don’t believe that any particular unemployment rate-that 5 per cent or 5.5 per cent or whatever numbers we’re dealing with-is something desirable in and of itself. I don’t believe that.”

Neither the New York Times nor the Wall Street Journal reported this testimony (but THE NEW LEADER did, and I have the videotape). As I said at the time, this was earthshaking testimony. It directly contradicted what then was the first or second most sacred economic law, namely the natural rate of unemployment, a.k.a. the nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment, a.k.a. NAIRU. It is possible, but not certain, that the ancient “law” of supply and demand had a tighter grip than NAIRU on the hearts and minds of economists and those who pretended to an interest in economics. Yet Greenspan contradicted this barbarous doctrine, and got away with it.

As it happened, the economy jogged along pretty well. The stock market boomed, because the Baby Boomers were worried about saving for retirement and didn’t know where else to put their money. As the market soared, more and more of them made nice killings and began to spend some of their capital gains. Retail sales, especially of automobiles and other big-ticket items, picked up. Unemployment began to fall, and so, to almost everyone’s surprise, did inflation.

After a while the media began looking for someone to give the credit to. President Clinton was willing, but no matter what he claimed, and no matter what photo ops were arranged, people kept saying that he was too preoccupied with impeachment to run the country. Perhaps they were right, and, obviously the Republicans were too preoccupied, for the same reason.

Greenspan was available, and an interview with him was almost as good copy as the stories quoting Casey Stengel used to be. He talked about the free market, so he became the leader of the free world.

Of course, I wasn’t there, but I have a clear picture of what happened next. At meeting after meeting, the Federal Reserve Board staffers brought in sheaves of disturbing figures showing that Wendy’s in Sandusky was having trouble holding dishwashers and hiring cashiers; that Kmart in New Jersey had constant openings for stock clerks; that Boeing in Seattle was looking for riveters. Everywhere, in other words, the unemployment rate was falling-falling steadily below the rate at which all the bankers in the country knew, and all the mainline economists in the country absolutely knew, that inflation definitely had to break out again. The financial press talked nervously of the importance of being ahead of the curve, and Greenspan himself spoke of making a pre-emptive strike against inflation.

Nevertheless, Greenspan has not acted. He tried jawboning the stock market-and quickly learned that his reputation as economic wise man of the Western World was in jeopardy because practically no one was in favor of repeating the 1987 market crash.

Lately he has made a series of speeches suggesting that an increase in the productivity index explains our “miraculous” combination of falling unemployment and falling inflation. Since the productivity index is a fraction (output divided by hours worked), its value rises when the denominator falls. Greater productivity, therefore, is hardly an explanation of increasing employment.

WELL, maybe Greenspan can pull it off, but it would help if he could make clear why NAIRU has not performed as advertised. Since the business and financial press has not been able to do that either, the professional belief in NAIRU has been muted but not stilled. The true believers are prepared to stay the course, because they have been given no reason not to.

We shall continue to live in fear that our tranquil days of steadily expanding prosperity will soon be over unless somebody sets them straight. So, it might as well be me, here and now.

It isn’t enough to remind the believers that not so long ago they insisted the telltale rate of unemployment was 7.0 per cent, then 6.5 per cent, then 6.0 per cent, then 5.5 per cent, then 5.0 per cent, then 4.5 per cent, and now it must be 4.0 per cent or lower. They shrug off this embarrassment with the complaint that the available statistics are imperfect or that, as Humphrey Bogart said when told there were no waters in Casablanca, they were misinformed.

It also is not enough to show them that every one of the nine recessions since World War II has been preceded by boosts in the interest rate. The boosts were said to be necessary to nip inflation in the bud. But in fact inflation accelerated more rapidly after the boosts than before them. Another fact: In all the years since World War II, no matter what the Federal Reserve Board has tried, the price level has fallen only once, and in that year (1955) the interest rate fell too. Again, of course, the statistics are imperfect. And without a coherent theory everything is anecdotal, the diehards argue, as the doctors did when Linus Pauling tried to tell them about Vitamin C.

Yet the reason NAIRU is nonsense is not far to seek. To begin with, the interest rate and the unemployment rate are both percentages, just as apples and oranges are both fruits. Interest is a direct cost or an opportunity cost on both sides of every economic transaction. Labor costs are similarly universal. But interest costs are closely uniform for comparable risks throughout the economy; labor costs vary widely from industry to industry, job to job, locality to locality, and (shamefully) from ethnic group to ethnic group as well as from gender to gender.

The two percentages are so radically different in composition that NAIRU theorists themselves never had a theory of their interaction. All they had were some empirical observations that occasionally made pretty graphs, like the Phillips curve. As with all empirical observations, though, theirs were liable to falsification by events.

The serious recessions of 1974-75 and 1980-82 were certainly falsification enough. But those events were disregarded, perhaps because practitioners of this dismal science tend to believe that dismal outcomes must be true, while relatively happy outcomes (like the present situation) must nurture some occult seeds of their own distraction.

Moreover, a 1 point fall in the unemployment rate causes little more than a 1 point rise in the national wage bill (which itself is only three-fifths of the costs of production), whereas a 1 point rise in the basic interest rate (now 4.75 per cent) eventually results in a drop of about 20 per cent in the purchasing power of money (which is, of course, equivalent to a 20 per cent rise of the price level, or a pretty stiff dose of inflation).

Far more important, the interest hike would produce a 16.7 per cent decline in the borrowing power of money, resulting, as we shall see, in a 33 per cent drop in the value of investments that must be made to keep the capitalist system going. If the interest rate is 5 per cent, $500 will get you a year’s use of $10,000. You can invest that $10,000 in an enterprise of your choice, and, unless you are unwise or unlucky, you will earn back your $500 interest plus a profit to boot and be ready to do more of the same.

But if the rate rises to 6 per cent, you will be able to borrow only $8,333 with your $500. Worse yet, the purchasing power of the $8,333 you borrow will have been reduced 20 per cent; so in the end you will have only $6,667 worth of goods to invest in, compared with the $10,000 worth you would have had before the interest hike.

Any way you look at it, the “punishment” of a 1 per cent increase in the interest rate does not fit the “crime” of a 1 per cent decrease in the unemployment rate.

Federal Reserve Bulletin please copy.

The New Leader

[1] Ed: Not likely as an undergraduate.  The author graduated college in 1936.  The Fountainhead was published in 1943

[2] Ed: Howard Roark is no more self-centered, say, than Donald Trump…

The Love Song Of Homo Economicius

By George P. Brockway, originally published March 3, 1999

T.S. ELIOT sang of “Songs[1] that follow like a tedious argument! Of insidious intent! To lead you to an overwhelming question …. ” Economics

sometimes seems like that-tedious as well as dismal. Economics is also very like the next line of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?”’

For the characteristic economics essay or book lays out-“Like a patient etherized upon a table”-an account of the economy, or some part of it, demonstrating how it works, or doesn’t work. Often the putative truths contained therein are unpleasant, like the iron law of wages in the 19th century or the natural rate of unemployment in the 20th. Nonprofessionals are frequently prompted to ask, not “What is it?” but the truly overwhelming question, “What should we do about it?” Professional economists have tended to brush that question aside. They are, they say, scientists, not humanists; and science concerns what is, not what ought to be.

But there is another reason for the posture of most economists, and that is the problem posed by the first sentence of the last chapter of John Maynard Keynes‘ General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money: “The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and income.” One would have to be extraordinarily deficient in empathy for one’s fellow human beings not to recognize the justice and urgency of Keynes’ dictum. One would also have to be exceptionally ignorant of the ways of the world to imagine that the problem will simply solve itself. Indeed, anyone with empathy and knowledge must find it acutely uncomfortable to deny that confronting those “faults” is the special responsibility of economists.

Yet starting with Adam Smith in 1776, the history of modem economics has instead been the story of a search for an automatic polity, a mechanism that, whether it makes all well or not, at least makes everything inexorable. With Smith, of course, it was the invisible hand. With Jeremy Bentham it was the felicific calculus, supposed to operate like Newton’s laws of motion. With Jean-Baptiste Say it was production creating its own demand. With John Stuart Mill it was supply and demand. With Karl Marx it was dialectical materialism. With William S. Jevons, Leon Walras and Carl Menger it was marginal utility. Among our contemporaries, equilibrium is the chosen control-metaphorical with John Hicks, mathematical with Gerard Debreu and Paul Samuelson, quasi-psychological with Frank Hahn and Edmund S. Phelps.

All those I have named are honorable men, as I believe almost every economist to be. I am sure none would dispute the truth of Keynes’ pronouncement. Faced with the enormity of the problem, though, all, with the possible exception of Marx, have found in pseudoscience an excuse for denying the need or ability to do anything substantial, and hence for refusing their responsibility.

The first thing to note about the problem is that originally it was a double pronged affair, but by now the prongs have joined together. In the ancient world, the feudal world and the mercantilist world, you could have full employment along with unconscionable disparities of wealth and income. Perhaps even in Keynes’ day, over half a century ago, it was possible to consider the two great failures of the economy separately. Today, however, we shall not be able to solve unemployment without at the same time solving maldistribution.

An explanation for the intertwining of the two problems was suggested by Joseph A. Schumpeter in an observation of the sort he made so casually and so tellingly. “The capitalist achievement,” he wrote, “does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.” The modem economy, unfortunately, may not be quite so good to factory girls as Schumpeter suggests.

The reason lies with the opportunities the wealthy have to dispose of their income. In most cases, their money derives from mass production, but they do not spend much of it on the products of the assembly line. This is not merely a matter of taste. It would be flatly impossible to do so. You can buy a top-of-the-line Mercedes, the archetypal expensive, mass-produced commodity, for about $145,000. If you were a senior officer of a Fortune 500 corporation, or a partner in a major financial house, you could pay cash for a brand-new Mercedes the first of every month, junk it at the end of the month, and still have more money than you and your family could conveniently spend.

Traditionally the wealthy have invested their surplus, a practice generally considered to return it to the producing economy it came from. And, like Prufrock’s Yankee contemporary, Miniver Cheevy, they think they “have reasons” to believe they are doing something good. Theoretically, for example, their investment would make more silk stockings available at lower prices by increasing productivity. But in common with the romantic notions Cheevy holds so dear, the idea is largely spurious.

This is because, regardless of what distinguished economists say, the producing economy is, in general, overcapitalized. As things stand, it could very easily, without investment in another machine or machine tool, increase its output by 15 or 20 per cent. It has that capacity right now. More investment will not lead to greater productivity.

Increased demand would. But Chairman Greenspan still hopes to restrain the “exuberance” of the stock market-in which case its upper middle class “wealth effect” will disappear. And far from trying to stimulate consumption, credit card companies can’t wait to put fear of a new bankruptcy law into their lower-middleclass clients.

These actions reduce the nonwealthy to relying on what they earn by working, and what they earn necessarily falls short of being able to buy what industry produces: Schumpeter’s silk stockings (or their millennial equivalent) become less affordable. The shortfall is equal to the earnings and other withdrawals of the wealthy. Its correction must also come from that source.

LEFT TO THEIR own devices, how do the wealthy spend their money? After buying several Andy Warhols and subscribing to tables at a couple of dozen charity balls, it is all too easy to become frustrated by the attempt to consume one’s income and turn to speculation. So the money the wealthy take out of mass production industry stays out, and the money devoted to speculation becomes a flood.

A “moderate” session of the New York Stock Exchange today sees half again as many shares traded as were thrown on the market in the frenzy of the crash of October 1987. And still there is not enough to meet the demand. Besides the NASDAQ and the Amex and the mercantile exchanges and exchanges abroad (including way stations all over the new global village), there are $85 trillion worth of derivative “products” invented by clever bankers and brokers to facilitate betting on almost anything you can think of. In comparison, numbers running is child’s play.

Also in comparison, trying to make money by operating an enterprise that turns out actual goods and services is a mug’s game. As fortunes are made in speculation, the opportunity cost of productive enterprise rises. To keep those who have invested in industry from selling out, they have to be promised increased profits; and the fashionable way of doing that is for lean and mean companies to become leaner and meaner, thereby narrowing the already narrow market. Where once there was a spreading wage-price spiral, heading upward, the economy has slipped into a constricting lean-mean spiral, heading downward.

The wealthy are not the only ones contributing to this trend. The middle class is the beneficial owner, through what are called “institutions” (especially mutual funds and pension funds and insurance policies), of between one-third and one half of all the shares on the current exchanges. By being funded rather than treated as current expenses, these institutions soak up purchasing power and weaken aggregate demand. The funds’ speculating deprives the producing economy of efficient financing. The resulting shrinkage of the producing economy raises the rate of unemployment, accelerating the erosion of the middle class the institutions were created to protect, and exacerbating the polarization of society.

That is how we are approaching the turn of another century: The nonwealthy are unable to buy the products their industry can produce; industry consequently has fewer opportunities for expansion; the wealthy consequently have fewer opportunities for productive investment; the nonwealthy consequently have fewer job opportunities and more of them become unemployed (“naturally”).

It is easy to convince yourself that looking to the government to fix the situation is hopeless. President Franklin D. Roosevelt couldn’t get a cap on stay-at home incomes even in the midst of World War II, when millions of young men and women (and middle-aged ones, too) were risking their lives for their country. President Richard M. Nixon, despite being re-elected by the second largest percentage of the popular vote yet recorded, couldn’t enlist a Congressional majority for a negative income tax. The current tax law, whose top rate is less than half the top rate of 25 years ago, does not assess even the present top rate against capital gains. And who can imagine the Federal Reserve Board maintaining an interest rate that is either low or steady, let alone both?

Some (if not all) of these things should be done to mitigate the polarization of our society. If they can’t be done in the current political climate, what can economists be expected to do about it? Well, if economists can’t suggest answers, the least they can do is get out of the way. Certainly no solution will succeed if no one has the will to work for it, and certainly those most responsible are the people claiming professional status.

In the meantime, the outstanding “faults” of our economic society, albeit forged into one, are substantially identical with those of Keynes’ day. But the degradation, despair, and (in the words of the late Erik Erikson) negative identity are worse. Will human voices wake us before we drown?

 

The New Leader

[1] Ed. Well, I’ll be damned.  The author, uncharacteristically, has the quote wrong.  Eliot wrote of “streets”, not “songs” that follow like a tedious argument ….