Wednesday, December 25, 2019

Uninstalling Hayek and Friedman


I recently re-read Corey Robin's contribution to a forum on Economics After Neoliberalism that proposed a project to "uninstall" Hayek:
Hayek translated moral and political problems into an economic idiom. What we need now, I would argue, is a way to uninstall or reverse that translation. ... Hayek persuaded generations of elites that it is only the individual in the market who can engage in such a process. In a modern society, the combination of informational challenges, on the one hand, and the intractability of moral conflict, on the other, was seen as too great to make decisions about economic life through public deliberation.
I think this is a good frame in which to read A Random Physicist — the main thesis is that making assumptions about how individuals in the market operate or deriving conclusions from them is fraught with problems, that the insights we think we gleaned do not depend on economic agents, and that we should plead ignorance about what individuals think. It builds to the deconstruction of Hayek's price mechanism (summarized in my Evonomics article).

While I agree that Hayek's firmware has been installed in the minds of most economists, I don't think his insights were the most corrupting — or even have that much influence at all today in the real world of everyday people. For that, we have to turn to Hayek popularizer Milton Friedman.

Ironically, the place where (as Keynes would put it) defunct economist Friedman still seems to hold the most sway is on the left/center left. Even the MMT [1] so popular among democratic socialists is best seen as a find-and-replace on our modern status quo with money switched for debt (as the driver of economic activity) and interest rates switched for the salaries of guaranteed jobs (as the mechanism for controlling inflation). On the right, no one really cares about economic theory unless it can be used as a post hoc rationalization. We can see evidence of that in how quickly they've abandoned Friedman.

A Workers' History is about uninstalling Friedman. It points out that the narrative we've been told about the post-war economic history of the United States is empirically unsupported, and in fact often gets causality backwards with effects preceding purported causes. It turns out social changes are a better explanatory framework for the post-war economy — not Friedman's monetarism. And since monetary and fiscal policy [2] do not seem to have much of an effect on macroeconomic metrics like GDP, we should make decisions about our lives based on public deliberation of moral choices. The only way to do that in a world with no single moral authority is through robust and egalitarian democracy [3].

I once heard that a good definition of the inherently slippery term "neoliberal" was the codification of ameliorating social problems as improving economic efficiency — we provide unemployment insurance not because it's morally right but because it's Keynesian stimulus that improves growth; we try to mitigate inequality not because it's corrupting of society but because it's a drag on economic growth [4]. A Workers' History is a direct argument against that view, and argues that policies that attempt to treat symptoms (e.g. inequality) but do not address their underlying social causes (e.g. racism) will create bigger problems (e.g. the housing crisis).

A Random Physicist — uninstalling Hayek and the individual economic agent.

A Workers' History — uninstalling Friedman and monetarism.

...

Footnotes:


[2] Fiscal policies do seem to have tiny effects (mostly due to the fact that G is part of Y = C + I + G − NX), and are at their best when they directly employ people. However, nothing like the WPA has been attempted in a long time.

[3] That's why some of the conclusions of A Workers' History are about addressing the poor decisions of a democratic minority (particularly the "rural white working class") — to be best solved with democratic reforms.

[4] Even lefty heterodox econ seems to take inequality being a cause rather than an effect as dogma.

Sunday, December 22, 2019

Working title ...


I've written a bit about the Industrial Revolution and long term growth on the blog:


But coming across this data set made me fear for the future — what if growth as we know it is over for an extended period? That's going to be my driving question for my next book. The implications will be hard to understand if only because our current institutions rely on economic growth in order to function.


No idea when it'll come out — it might be a couple of years.

Monday, June 24, 2019

A Workers' History of the United States 1948-2020





#1 New Release in Macroeconomics
After seven years of economic research and developing forecasting models that have outperformed the experts, author, blogger, and physicist Dr. Jason Smith offers his controversial insights about the major driving factors behind the economy derived from the data and it's not economics — it's social changes. These social changes are behind the questions of who gets to work, how those workers organize, and how workers identify politically — and it is through labor markets that these social changes manifest in economic effects. What would otherwise be a disjoint and nonsensical postwar economic history of the United States is made into a cohesive workers' history driven by women entering the workforce and the backlash to the Civil Rights movement — plainly: sexism and racism. This new understanding of historical economic data offers lessons for understanding the political economy of today and insights for policies that might actually work.
Dr. Smith is a physicist who began with quarks and nuclei before moving into research and development in signal processing and machine learning in the aerospace industry. During a government fellowship from 2011 to 2012 — and in the aftermath of the global financial crisis — he learned about the potential use of prediction markets in the intelligence community and began to assess their validity using information theoretic approaches. From this spark, Dr. Smith developed the more general information equilibrium approach to economics which has shown to have broader applications to neuroscience and online search trends. He wrote A Random Physicist Takes on Economics in 2017 documenting this intellectual journey and the change in perspective towards economic theory and macroeconomics that comes with this framework. This change in perspective to economic theory came with new interpretations of economic data over time that finally came together in this book.
The book I've been working on for the past year and a half is now available on Amazon as a Kindle e-book or a paperback (link here until they get them together on the same page)**. Get your copy today! Or pick up a copy of A Random Physicist Takes on Economics if you haven't yet ...




And once you've had a chance to read it, stick around and leave your first impressions, comments, criticisms in the open thread below ...

**Paperback should be available soon. Update: Now Available. As of 6:50am PDT 24 June 2019, KDP still says "publishing". Also, as of 2pm PDT the Kindle edition still says it's the #1 New Release in Macroeconomics on Amazon, so I replaced the cover graphic (show below).


Tuesday, April 9, 2019

A Workers' History blurb


Here's my draft book blurb (these things are weirdly the hardest things to write):
After seven years of economic research and developing forecasting models that have outperformed the experts, author, blogger, and physicist Dr. Jason Smith offers his insights about the major driving factors behind the economy derived from the data and it's not economics — it's social changes. These social changes are behind the questions of who gets to work, how those workers organize, and how workers identify politically — and it is through labor markets that these social changes manifest in economic effects. What would otherwise be a disjoint and nonsensical postwar economic history of the United States is made into a cohesive workers' history driven by women entering the workforce and the backlash to the Civil Rights movement — plainly: sexism and racism. This new understanding of historical economic data offers lessons for understanding the political economy of today and insights for policies that might actually work.
Feel free to let me know what you think in comments ...

Friday, February 1, 2019

A Workers' History update: February 2019

Updated 7 Feb 2019. I'm now finished with the first draft — I was out with a cold all week and 2" of snow in Seattle brought the city to a halt (ha!) so I had tons of time. It has been an interesting journey of discovery — I've had to revise some of the models (like this improved explanation of the housing crisis where there's no housing bubble), and found a lot more connections between the various streams of data. That first one required me to re-make the cover ... what will probably be its final version:


I explained my thinking in response to a comment on my other blog that I should get someone else to design it:
The cover design I'm working on now is in reference to Piet Modrian's abstract Paris work from the inter-war period, using a font (Futura) from the same time period. But it's also of the economic seismogram from the Great Recession. This (roughly) bookends the same time period I am writing about in the book. Additionally, the blue color is borrowed from my previous cover (the red is its RGB transpose) which was based on the blueberry analogies in the book but also a reference to the Velvet Underground's first album (and Andy Warhol cover).
Updated 7 Feb 2019. Here are the table of contents and the opening paragraphs of the first draft (click to enlarge):


I'm also recommending two books that I'm using to help understand the the subject of the second chapter on the decline of manufacturing:

    

I've added them to my side bar.