Globalized Inequality

 

Posted on April 9, 2015 by Diane Coyle/Enlightenment Economics/Blog Ref http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics

 

Francois Bourguignon’s The Globalization of Inequality is an interesting companion to Tony Atkinson’s Inequality, which I reviewed here recently. It’s a different kind of book, a relatively short argument about why and how to make the globalization process fairer, as contrasted with Atkinson’s longer and detailed description and analysis of inequality in the UK with a substantial list of policy recommendations. It’s useful to have the global picture alongside the national one, however, because the story globally is of much increased incomes in the middle of the distribution in a few countries – largely China – as well as gains among the richest groups.
In the first chapter and its data annexe Bourguignon sets out the figures in careful detail, distinguishing between increases in inequality within countries and changes between countries. “Inequality in the standard of living between countries has started to decline … On the other hand, inequality within many countries has increased.” The book’s central question is then whether these two phenomena are related, linked by the process of globalization, of trade and investment flows between high and low (average) income countries. This is addressed in the second and third chapters of the book. He answers broadly yes, through the far greater intensity of competitive forces operating on industries in the rich economies that couldn’t cope – although he also attributes a significant part of the explanation to the politics of deregulation and tax cuts, and the expanding role of finance.
The final part of the book turns to whether anything ought to be done about inequality in this global context, and if so what can be done. Bourguignon argues that it is worth trying to get the best of both worlds and combine the trend towards less inequality between countries while tackling greater inequality within countries. He rejects the idea of a sharp trade-off between equity and economic efficiency on the grounds that inequality of the degree seen now in the US and UK is politically and institutionally destabilising. Indeed, he says, many aspects of inequality inhibit the efficient operation of markets.
The final chapter turns to policies, and it is the least satisfactory. This is in large part because in a short book like this, there is little room for the persuasive detail. However, I don’t think the policies he favours – more development aid for the poorer economies, taxes and transfers within the rich economies – would be particularly effective. I’m far more in sympathy with Atkinson’s emphasis on market incomes, and the need to address the structures of markets that are the root causes of the increase in inequality.
Having grumbled about that, it is certainly important to keep the biggest of big pictures in mind when thinking about inequality, even at the national level. The fact that the economy is globalized is an important factor in any assessment of the causes of inequality and therefore what it might be practical to do about it.

Cybernetic dreams

 

Posted on October 31, 2014 by Diane Coyle /Enlightenment Economics/ Blogger Ref Link http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics

 

I read Eden Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile because I spotted the fuss on Twitter about Evgeny Morozov’s New Yorker piece, The Planning Machine: Project Cybersyn and the Origins of the Big Data Nation. I’m not all that interested in the fuss but was very intrigued by what people were saying about the book.

It is indeed a completely fascinating history and reflection on the interaction between technology and politics, and I highly recommend it. The cover photograph gives a good flavour of the weirdness of this episode. It is the control room built in Santiago in late 1972 under the guidance of British cybernetician Stafford Beer. The control room, that is, for the economy, linking a network of telex machines in factories around the country to a mainframe computer in the capital.

 

While not a fully planned economy, the Allende government had nationalised substantial sections of industry and, as time went on and the American-led sanctions began to bite, planned to control key prices. It also had to contend with a nationwide strike led by businesses opposed to the leftist government. The aim with Project Cybersyn, as the cybernetic plan was labelled, was to deliver to the central authorities ample real-time information on production while allowing individual factories the freedom to make their own decisions. Government policy could be adapted quickly in response to the trends identified. In other words, it was meant to avoid the pitfalls of central planning while enabling the co-ordination benefits. As Medina puts it: “Connecting the State Development Corporation to the factory floor would … allow the government to quickly address emergencies such as shortages of raw materials and adapt its policies quickly. Up-to-date production data would also allow Chile’s more experienced managers to … identify problems in factories and change production activities in the enterprise when necessary to meet national goals.”
Apart from the obvious practical difficulties (eg only one mainframe and very few programmers), one challenge was actually modelling the economy. It is unclear what kind of relationships were written in to the code, but they must have been something similar to those embodied in the simple linear model of the Phillips Machine. For all that it was a project about managing the economy, there was just one economist on the team, according to the book. However, Medina emphasises the intended flexibility of Project Cybersyn: “The model would not function as a predictive black box that gave definitive answers about future economic behaviour. Rather, it offered a medium in which economists, policy makers and model makers could experiment and, through this act of play, expand their intuition about [the economy].” The structure embodied the cybernetic emphasis on responding to the information contained in feedback. I must say I didn’t understand Beer’s cybernetic models at all, as the language and concepts are so different from anything I’m familiar with – but then cybernetics itself comes across as rather futuristic-retro.
Beer also hoped to have a method of getting real-time feedback from the people to the government by installing ‘algedonic meters’, or dials indicating their happiness or dissatisfaction, that would be installed in community centres or public places. This part of his plan was never taken up. However, he was keen on getting public engagement with the project and even persuaded Chile’s most famous folk singer Angel Parra to write a Project Cybersyn song.
One of the divisions within the project, well-described in the book, was between the technocrats who saw it as a tool for managing the economy more effectively, and those who saw it as a means of reverse engineering politics and society on the ground. The latter group hoped workers in the factories would develop their own sense of autonomy through inputting information into the telex, and understanding in this way the part they played in the whole. “[Beer] believed that engineering a technology also provided opportunities to engineer the social and organizational relationships that surrounded it.” The technocrats tended to dominate, though, largely because of the growing difficulty Allende’s government had in sustaining its coalition. Politics didn’t co-operate with the technology.
One of the interesting aspects of Project Cybersyn is that the technologies it used were not the most advanced. The US blockade largely prevented Chile from importing more computers or sophisticated equipment. Aside from the one mainframe and the telexes, the futuristic control room used slide projectors and hand drawn slides. The fibreglass control chairs, based on Italian designs, were one of the most cutting-edge aspects of the control room. And yet the project was the most ambitious cybernetics project ever (partially) implemented.

The project Cybersyn control room

It’s hard to decide whether the people behind Project Cybersyn were crazy dreamers or just 50 years ahead of their time – what would they have made of the possibilities of the web and ‘big data’? The basic cybernetic question the project poses remains valid: can policymakers do a better job with rapid real-time feedback on economic indicators – or is the economy as a dynamic, complex system simply beyond the kind of mapping implicit in any such project? Can what is measured about the economy reshape the economy or underlying social order in turn – and what does that imply for the indicators one might try to include in a Project Cybersyn 3.0?
Fascinating questions, and a fascinating book.
PS After finishing the book, I read the Morozov column. It is a precis of the story told in Medina’s book, with a handful of extra paragraphs woven in that give his own reflections on the issues raised – including, for example, exactly the obvious ‘what could we do in the era of the internet of things’ question. If the column had actually been billed as a review of Cybernetic Revolutionaries, I don’t think there would have been any fuss. While not plagiarism, as the book is the only source mentioned, for Morozov to have given it just one passing mention in the ‘Critic at Large’ section seems ungenerous.

The crisis of inaction

Posted on September 19, 2014 by Diane Coyle /Source Ref Enlightenment Economics

Blogger Ref http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics

 

  

The Status Quo Crisis: Global Governance After the 2008 Meltdown, by Eric Helleiner.

A guest review by Bill Allen

 The crisis in Eric Helleiner’s title is not something that has happened, but something that hasn’t happened. The aftermath of a real crisis – something that has happened - can provide the opportunity for institutional change. Helleiner’s choice of title reflects his observation that there has been very little effective change in the panoply of international financial institutions since the financial crisis of 2007 – 08. Specifically, he claims that the G20 has achieved very little, that financial regulation has remained undesirably ‘market-friendly’, and that no effective international organisation for financial regulation has been set up.
 Helleiner is quite right about the G20, whose main boast – agreement on a doubling of IMF quotas – has not been ratified by the United States Congress. He could have gone a lot further. International institutions generally were not much use in the crisis. The IMF lent very little in 2008. The Chiang Mai Initiative, which had been set up in the late 1990s as a source of mutual liquidity support in East Asia, was not used at all in 2007 – 08. There is a reason for this. International financial institutions, despite having extremely talented staff and managers, are inherently slow in reacting to fast-moving situations and lack the ability to improvise. This reflects their governance structures, and the caution that democratically-accountable governments display when faced with any new invitation to put up money. Fear of moral hazard always trumps recognition of a new urgent need. There is no getting over this problem, and it will be a considerable surprise if the recently-announced BRICS financing facility turns out not to be purely ornamental.
Just as well, then, that the Federal Reserve was unilaterally ready, able and willing to provide emergency dollar liquidity in short order and in massive amounts when it was most needed in the autumn of 2008. Chairman Bernanke received democracy’s traditional reward for doing the right thing when he was attacked for lending money to foreigners by Congressmen who either could not or would not understand that the Fed’s actions were in the interests of the United States as well as those of other countries, and that the Fed had prevented what is now known as the Great Recession from turning into a repetition of the Great Depression.
Where does this leave the international monetary system? Helleiner notes that China is in favour of a system based more heavily on Special Drawing Rights, and bemoans the failure to create more SDRs. But getting agreement to increase the SDR issue is always going to be slow and difficult, no matter how urgent the need. And in any case, an SDR is merely a right bestowed on an IMF member country to get some real money (dollars, probably, or possibly euros) from another member country which is willing to take SDRs in exchange. As Richhild Moessner and I have shown, the expansion of the SDR issue runs the risk of undermining the liquidity of the IMF itself. The key issue is what counts as real money and who controls the supply of it.
Past experience shows that it is desirable for the international monetary system to be capable of expanding international liquidity quickly in a crisis. That means that international reserve currencies have to be managed by single countries, which are sufficiently enlightened to understand that what is in the global interest may also be in their national interest. On this criterion, the dollar is the only plausible reserve currency at present and in the foreseeable future. The euro and its managers have structural problems - no single government,constipated decision making, and a penchant for looking inwards rather than outwards: the European Central Bank was dangerously slow in extending swap lines when they were needed in 2008 – 09, and bizarrely confined its swap lines to EU member countries. The renminbi, often suggested as a possible challenger to the dollar, has the crippling handicap that there is no separation in China between the government and the judiciary. No responsible reserve manager could rely on the RMB as a large-scale repository of liquid assets. Helleiner also claims that Russia was ‘strongly committed to goal of ruble internationalization’ after the crisis (p 85), but if so, Russia did nothing about it, and incomprehensibly passed up the opportunity to win influence among former Soviet Union countries by offering dollar swaps from its large reserves during the crisis.
Unfortunately the outlook for the dollar as a reserve currency is not assured, despite the Fed’s masterly crisis management of 2008. There is the perennial problem of the budget deficit, and the new threat that the Congress will force the U.S. Treasury to default by refusing to increase the Federal debt limit. Without the dollar, the international monetary system would be thrown into chaos, and an undesired return to gold would be on the cards.
What of financial regulation? Helleiner wishes that financial regulation had become less ‘market-friendly’, but he seriously underestimates the amount of new bank regulation that has been introduced and does not seem to understand its effects. For one thing, he says virtually nothing about liquidity regulation, which has been introduced into the Basel regulatory apparatus. In practice, in the UK at least, liquidity regulation has forced banks to buyenormous amounts of government securities, and to curtail lending to private borrowers. It has subsidised government borrowing and taxed private borrowing, and arguably prolonged the recession unnecessarily.
More generally, Helleiner misses what I think is the key issue in bank regulation, namely theproblem of banks that are too big to fail. They were too big to fail in 2008 and they are still too big to fail. This fact has profound implications. Too-big-to-fail imposes contingent liabilities on governments. Naturally the governments want to minimise the liability; hence official regulation of finance. As Helleiner points out, regulators cannot always be expected to co-operate with their foreign counterparts. All of them are servants of their own states, and are obliged to act in the interests of their own state and in accordance with its laws. If those interests and laws don’t conflict with those of other states, then fine; if not, not. So governments want to ensure that their contingent risk is monitored by people they control: international co-operation is limited in scope. All this explains increased capital requirements, the introduction of maximum bank leverage ratios, and the new-found aversion to foreign bank branches and pressure for subsidiarisation of international banks, country by country.
If it could be arranged that financial companies were not too big to fail, then most official financial regulation would be unnecessary; private incentives would be better aligned with social welfare and corporate governance, lamentably feeble in many cases before the recent crisis, could be expected to be more effective. It is impossible to contemplate all parts of the financial landscape being arranged in such a way: for example, the clearing houses through which financial companies are now required to settle derivative and other transactions are inevitably going to be too big to fail. But is possible to contemplate a less concentrated banking and securities-dealing industry, both in the retail and wholesale fields. Paradoxically, heavier and more intrusive regulation protects big companies, because potential competitors cannot bear the heavy fixed costs that it imposes. We have got stuck in a concentratedfinancial system/heavy regulation world, but a dispersed financial system/lighter regulation world would be much better.
 Helleiner is concerned that the banking industry has too much lobbying power, and asserts that reforms have been watered down in consequence. He provides no evidence, merely referring to similar claims by others. He complains that ‘the G20 made little effort to develop international standards that might tackle the issue of the potential “capture” of regulatory process by private financial actors’ (p 126). The United States addressed this issue in 1991when ‘Prompt Corrective Action’ was enacted, removing regulators’ discretion in managing failing banks, but that did not prevent the recent crisis. How serious is the issue of regulatory capture now? In the years before the crisis, bankers, regulators and governments shared many of the same illusions about the durability of the boom. Bankers were respected, consulted, and knighted. Financial companies had a lot of lobbying power, since they paid a disproportionately large share of taxes, in Britain at least – tax receipts that were sorely missed when the financial companies stopped making profits. But now, in many countries, the main issue between banks and governments is the ‘deadly embrace’ in which governments depend on banks to finance their deficits while banks depend on governments to guarantee their deposits. The situation in those countries is a lot more complicated than Helleiner suggests. And, as already noted, some of the post-crisis regulation that has been imposed has, predictably, had unintended bad consequences; perhaps it would have been wise to pay a little more attention to the lobbying of the banking industry.
Helleiner laments the ‘soft law’ character of international regulatory institutions like the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and the Financial Stability Board. He would prefer them to have powers like those of the World Trade Organisation, which has rules and settlesdisputes between its member countries. But such an arrangement in the field of financial regulation might not be conducive to financial stability. There are signs that these bodies have become fora in which the main issue at stake is not financial stability but the financial and political interests of national governments. How else can the absurdly generous treatment of government securities for both capital and liquidity purposes be explained, and the extremely lenient treatment of mortgages for the purpose of the Net Stable Funding Ratio? Arguably, the world would be a better place if Basel 1, 2 and 3 had never been invented, because it would have been clear to bankers that it was their responsibility to judge the adequacy of their capital, and not something that could be assessed formulaically by reference to a set of complicated rules arrived at as a compromise among national negotiators in Switzerland. The truth is that nobody has yet worked out how to do bank regulation properly, and it would not be a good idea to entrench present-day customs and practices in an international treaty.
‘More regulation’ may be a good slogan but there isn’t much substance behind it. Helleiner denies this, claiming that there are a lot of new ideas in ‘the new macroprudential regulatory philosophy’, which, he says, provide a ‘broad intellectual justification for many…regulatory initiatives…such as counter-cyclical buffers, tighter controls on liquidity and SIFIs, the extension of public oversight to new sectors, transaction taxes, and support for capital controls’ (p 127). Broad, indeed. By these standards, ‘the new macroprudential regulatory philosophy’ could provide intellectual justification for just about anything. Regulation of this kind would be like doing brain surgery with a penknife.
Many of the issues arising from the crisis are unresolved and contentious. Helleiner addresses a great many of them. He has a point of view, with which readers may agree or disagree, but he is well informed and his book is a serious contribution to the continuing discussion. It is well worth reading.
 Bill Allen is a former Bank of England director and is on the sdvisory board of the Cass Business School

Taking information seriously in economic policy

Posted on June 22, 2014 by Diane Coyle

Blogger Ref http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics

 

Earlier this month I wrote about Joe Stiglitz’s Jean-Jacques Laffont speech at the Tiger Forum, which was based on his new book with Bruce Greenwald, Creating A Learning Society: a new approach to growth, development and social progress.

Stiglitz won his Nobel Prize for his massively important work on asymmetric and missing information – how this shapes institutional structures, including markets. His Nobel Lecture is well worth the read.
This book builds on the information-based approach, and links it to other work on endogenous growth theory, which sees the process of growth as a cumulative process in which knowledge builds on earlier knowledge. This makes ideas (including those formalized as ‘intellectual property’) and people (to whom ideas are attached) the key to economic development. Stiglitz and Greenwald introduce industrial policy to endogenous growth models. They cover, among other areas, trade policy, intellectual property regimes, industrial strategy, and competition policy. It’s a somewhat technical book – there are quite a few equations and models at I would say advanced undergraduate level -  although one could skip those bits and still follow the argument.
I agree with the authors’ motivation for this book. They write: “Everyone today speaks of the innovation economy or the knowledge economy, and there have been important advances in the analysis of, say, patents and patent races, and network externalities, to take but two examples. But the full implications …. for the neoclassical model have still not been taken on board. And the implications for policy have been even less absorbed into mainstream thinking.” They go on to point out that it is 40 years since Stiglitz’s work on information questioned fundamentally standard economics results such as the existence of equilibrium, or the uniqueness of equlibrium, but little has changed in the standard approach. I doubt that any ‘mainstream’ economist would challenge the importance of the results on asymmetric information, non-linearities in growth and so on, so it is a puzzle that so few have taken the implications seriously. No doubt the answer lies in the sociology of the profession and academic incentive structures. My sense is that this is now changing.
This book takes the implications of information externalities forward into specific policy areas. It argues that not only can we not presume that a market economy is efficient, but also that industrial and trade policies can demonstrably increase social welfare. “Learning externalities are pervasive and it is a mistake not to take them into account.”
While not agreeing with every specific policy prescription they make, information, knowledge, learning – whatever you want to call it – definitely does change the prism for assessing structural economic policies. Maybe Prof Stiglitz will next write the popular book that makes this shift in perspective accessible to the policy world.

Prof Stiglitz and me at the TSE TIGER Forum

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Cautious giant leaps

Posted on June 26, 2014 by Diane Coyle

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The argument of Why Government Fails So Often and How It Can Do Better by Peter Schuck is set out wonderfully succinctly in the title, and the book does an excellent job of telling half of the story about the role of governments and markets in delivering economic outcomes.

The chapters cover a range of reasons for ‘government failure’. To list them, they are: incentives not aligned with the policy’s aims; non-rational choice; lack of information; lack of flexibility in delivering outcomes when circumstances change or things don’t work out; lack of government credibility so essential co-operation is not forthcoming; mismanagement including fraud and abuse. Schuck argues that these barriers to policy success have a “deep, structural, endemic nature.”
The book has many examples of policy failure – it’s an American and to be honest far less amusing version of The Blunders of Our Governments by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe. It’s hard to argue with the examples. This book cites also Clifford Winston’s Government Failure versus Market Failure, which has many more. indeed, there have been loads of policy failures, in all kinds of places and contexts.
An aspect of the argument here that I strongly agree with is the failure of policy analysts to build themselves into their ‘impact analysis’ or whatever framework they use for assessing the likely success of the initiative. In other words, the incentives the policy will create for the people affected to change their behaviour are hardly ever incorporated. Economists often think of themselves as being ‘outside’ the society, in a benign deus ex machina role.Yet all policies alter people’s behaviour and have many side-effects.
Schuck’s book does end with a chapter on policy successes – in fact it finds nine, including Airline Deregulation in 1978, the 1975 Earned Income Tax Credit, the food stamp program, the interstate highway system and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. However, it concludes: “It is hard to know for sure why these (and other) policies have succeeded when so many others have failed. Low costs, simple implementation, strong public good characteristics, and replacing far worse policies are all given as potential explanations. However, Schuck also concludes: “To succeed, the programs needed to engage the actors’ self-interest; they did not need to create new values or transform behaviors.” But he believes that the ‘low hanging fruit’ has gone.
Hence his main recommendation – be cautious. “Realistic meliorism” – make things a little bit better but keep your ambitions modest. The policy ‘doing better’ bit of the book’s title is doing far less.
I’m all for realism. There’s a missing half of the story here, though, which is how government actions unavoidably shape markets, so that to argue ‘don’t do much and just leave it to the market’ is in itself a policy. Collective choices are inevitable and government is how we make those choices. Why Government Fails So Often should be read alongside Colander and Kuper’s  recent book Complexity and the Art of Public Policy, which is about policy as determining the structure of a complex, and uncontrollable (in the old-fashioned policy sense) economy and society.
That approach is hard to get right too, but as it’s impossible not to have a structure within which markets operate, because here we are at a point in history where we have actually existing markets, it surely makes sense for governments to think about that structure. And while caution, in the face of the record of policies ranging from the inept to the horribly counter-productive, is surely sensible, thinking about structure does not automatically point to incrementalism.  Sometimes a cautious giant leap might be just the thing.












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Economists and humanity

Blogger Ref  http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Transfinancial_Economics Posted on June 29, 2014 by Diane Coyle

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Peter Smith sent me his new book The Reform of Economics: How the complex systems approach is building a realistic and humane alternative to laissez-faire. In a letter accompanying it, he said he has two motivations. One is to get economics out of the trap of over-simplifying so that models can use linear algebra and thus be made ‘tractable’. This is one of the things that makes complexity economics and agent-based modelling appealing; virtual economies run on a computer do not need to be solved algebraically.

The other aim is to make economic methodology something more like normal scientific methodology. Economic method consists of choosing some basic postulates and making deductions from them. The deductions can then be tested against data. Normal science involves both induction and deduction. Careful empirical observation will shape theory.
The book dates the choice of the purely deductive path to Lionel Robbins and his 1935 essay The Nature and Significance of Economic Science. He defined economics as the science of constrained choice, which, “Not only excludes uncertainty, but it also excludes from the scope of economics both institutions and the medium-term evolution of economic systems.” This isolates economics from the institutional framework of the economy, and hence from what determines the availability of resources over time – it makes economics an inherently static subject.
Natural scientists do regard economics as bizarrely non-empirical – I’ve been in multi-disciplinary conferences about both macroeconomics and behavioural choice at which biologists exclaim about how rarely economists discuss data, for all that they might go away and test hypotheses. One of the joys of being on the Competition Commission for eight years was how profoundly evidence-based the process is, and hence a real insight for an economist used to generalising about how companies behave. There aren’t many business people who think about marginal cost curves and production functions.
The Reform of Economics is a game of two parts (not halves). It is mostly a critique of economic methodology but also has a useful introduction to agent based modelling. It ends on an upbeat note I very much like:
“Economics is becoming a much more interesting area in which to work and learn; and we have every hope that a more realistic and effective reformed science of economics will also be a more humane one. For, ultimately, economics is about the well-being of humanity.”




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