Skousen The Big Three in Economics - Smith, Marx, Keynes (Sharpe, 2007)

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To generate interest in their theory and proposal, in 1927 they offered a prize of $5,000 to anyone who could refute them. They published the best essays a few months later, but the best critique was written by the AustrianeconomistFriedrichA.Hayekin1929.Hisessay,“The‘Paradox’ of Saving,” was translated and published in Economica in May 1931.

AccordingtoHayek,theFoster-and-Catchingsdilemmadependedon a single erroneous assumption. They assumed a “single-stage” model, so that investment depends entirely and immediately on consumer demand. Under such a restrictive assumption, “there would be no inducement [for consumers] . . . to save money . . . [or] . . . to invest their savings,” noted Hayek (1939 [1929], 224, 247). With a capital-using, time-orientedperiodofproduction,Hayekdemonstratedthatincreased savings lengthens the capitalistic process, increases productivity, and thereby enlarges profits, wages, and income sufficiently for consumers to buy the final product.10

Keynes Focuses on Spending as the Key Ingredient

In Keynes’s mind, saving is an unreliable form of spending. It is only “effective” if savings are invested by business. Thus, savings that are hoarded under a mattress or piled up in a bank vault are a drain on the economy and aggregate demand.

Only “effective demand”—a powerful new term introduced in chapter 3 of The GeneralTheory—counts.What consumers and businesses spend determines national output. Keynes defined effective demand as aggregate output (Y), which is the sum of consumption

(C) and investment (I). Hence,

Y = C + I

TodaywerefertoY,or“aggregateeffectivedemand,”asgrossdomestic product (GDP). GDP is defined as the value of final output of goods and servicesduringtheyear.SimonKuznets,aKeynesianstatistician,developednationalincomeaccounting in theearly1940sasaway to measure Keynes’s aggregate effective demand. Keynes effectively demonstrated

10. Foster and Catchings rejected all arguments and never paid the prize money.

KEYNES RESPONDS TO CAPITALISM’S GREATEST CHALLENGE 159

that if savings are not invested by business, GDP does not reach its potential; recession or depression indicates a lack of effective demand.

Demand Creates Its Own Supply

What was Keynes’s solution to recession? Increase effective demand! Ifdemandis stimulatedthroughadditionalspending,moregoodshave to be produced and the economy should recover. In this sense, Keynes turned Say’s law upside down. Demand creates supply, not the other way around.

To increase Y (national output), the choices are limited in a recession. During a downturn, the business community might be afraid to risk its capital on I (investment). Equally, consumers might be unwilling to increase consumption (C) due to the uncertainty of their incomes. Both investors and consumers are more likely to pull in their horns when left to their own devices.

Adding G to the Equation

There is only one way out, wrote Keynes. Get government to start spending. Keynes added G (government) to the national income equation, so that

Y = C + I + G

Keynes saw government (G) as an independent agent capable of stimulating the economy through the printing presses and public works. An expansionary government policy could raise “effective demand” if resources were underutilized, and it could do so without hurting consumption or investment. In fact, during a recession, a rise in G would encourage both C and I and thereby boost Y.

Digging Holes in the Ground: Keynes Endorses an Activist Fiscal Policy

Keynes overturned the classical solution to a slump, which had been to “tighten one’s belt” by cutting prices, wages, and wasteful spending while waiting out the slump. Instead, during a recession,

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he recommended deliberate deficit spending by the federal government to jump-start the economy. He endorsed an even more radical approach during a deep depression like that of the 1930s: government spending could be totally wasteful and it would still help. “Pyramid-building, earthquakes, even wars may serve to increase wealth,” he proclaimed (1973a [1936], 129). Of course, “It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like,” but productive building was not essential. According to Keynes, spending is spending, no matter what the objective, and it has the same beneficial effect—increasing aggregate demand.

Keynes Favors Public Works over Monetary Inflation

Keynes felt that tinkering with fiscal policy (changes in spending and taxes) was more effective than monetary policy (changes in the money supply and interest rates). He had lost faith in monetary policy and the Federal Reserve in the 1930s, when interest rates were so low that reducing them wouldn’t have made much difference (see Figure 5.2). Inducing the Federal Reserve to expand the money supply would not be very effective either, because banks refused to lend excess reserves anyway.Keynescalledthisa“liquiditytrap.”Thenewmoneywouldjust pile up unspent and uninvested because of “liquidity preference,” the desire to hold cash during a severe depression (1973a [1936], 207).

How the Multiplier Generates Full Employment

Public works would serve several benefits. First, public works are positive spending, putting people to work and money into business’s pockets. Moreover, they have a multiplier effect, based on the nation’s marginal propensity to consume.

Themultiplier,aconceptintroducedbyRichardKahn,wasapowerful newtoolintheKeynesiantoolbox,demonstratingthata“smallincrement ofinvestmentwillleadtofullemployment”(Keynes1973a[1936],118). Suppose in a recession that the government hires construction workers and suppliers to construct a new federal building costing $100 million. These previously unemployed workers are now getting paid. In the first round of spending, $100 million is added to the economy.

Now suppose that the public’s marginal propensity to consume is 90

KEYNES RESPONDS TO CAPITALISM’S GREATEST CHALLENGE 161

Figure 5.2 The General Theory Was Written When Interest Rates Were at

Their All-Time Lows

percent,thatis,theseworkersspend90centsofeverynewdollarearned. (Anotherwayofsayingit:theirmarginalpropensitytosaveis10percent.) In the second round of spending, $90 million is added to the economy.

Then there is a third round. After the workers spend their new money, that $90 million becomes the revenues of other businesses— shoppingmalls,gasstations,supermarkets,cardealerships,andmovie theaters. These business may in turn hire new workers to handle the new demand, paying them more wages, too, and these workers also spend 90 percent of that income. They receive an additional $81 million (90 percent of $90 million) of spending power. Ultimately, the public investment has a multiplier effect that generates round after round of gradually declining spending. By the time the new spending has run its course, the aggregate spending has increased tenfold. Keynes’s formula for the multiplier (k) is,

1

k = __________

1 – MPC

where MPC = marginal propensity to consume.

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Since MPC = .90 in the example above, k = 10. As Keynes stated, “the multiplier k is 10; and the total employment caused by . . .

increased public works will be ten times the primary employment provided by the public works themselves, assuming no reduction of investment in other directions” (1973a [1936], 116–17).

Keynes Makes a Mischievous Assumption

Note that in the Keynesian model, only consumption spending generates additional income and employment in the economy. Keynes assumes that saving is sterile, that it aborts into cash hoarding or excess bank reserves. Thus, the Keynesian model as originally proposed is considered a “depression” model.As we shall see in the next chapter, this was a crucial mistake that led to much mischief and misunderstanding in economics in the postwar era.

Keynes Offers a Drastic Measure to Stabilize Capitalism

The Cambridge leader was not satisfied with temporary measures such as public works and deficit spending to reestablish full employment. Once maximum output was reached, he reasoned, there is no reason to believe it will stay there. Investment is unpredictable and ephemeral, Keynes said. Long-term expectations, a stable business climate, and savings equal to investment could never be guaranteed as long as irra- tional“animalspirits”operatedinalaissez-fairefinancialmarketplace. What was Keynes’s solution? He favored a gradual but comprehensive “socialisation of investment” as the “only means of securing an approximation to full employment” (1973a, 378). This was by no means “statesocialism,”butitcouldmeangovernmentownershipoftheentire capital market. Keynes also sanctioned a small “transfer tax” on all securities sales as a way to dampen speculative fever.11

11. Nobel laureate James Tobin has entertained a similar measure, known as the Tobin tax on stock and foreign exchange transactions, a legal step that would surely reduce liquidity and enlarge the bid-ask spreads on stocks and foreign exchange.

6

A Turning Point in

Twentieth-Century Economics

Keynsesian economics is . . . the most serious blow that the authority of orthodox economics has yet suffered.

—W.H. Hutt (1979, 12)

Two factors created the right atmosphere for the Keynesian revolution to sweep the economics profession afterWorldWar II. First, the depth and length of the Great Depression seemed to justify the KeynesianMarxian view that market capitalism was inherently unstable and that the market could be stuck at unemployed equilibrium indefinitely.

Economichistoriansnotedthattheonlygovernmentsthatappearedto makeheadwayineliminatingunemploymentinthe1930sweretotalitarian regimes in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union. Curiously, Keynes himself acknowledged in the introduction to the German edition of The General Theory, that his theory “is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of the production and distributionofagivenoutputproducedunderconditionsoffreecompetition and a large measure of laissez-faire” (1973a [1936], xxvi).

Second,WorldWar II came along right after the publication of The GeneralTheory, giving strong empirical evidence of Keynes’s policy prescription. Government spending and deficit financing increased dramatically during World War II, unemployment disappeared, and economic output soared. War was “good” for the economy, just as Keynessuggested(1973a[1936],129).AshistorianRobertM.Collins wrote, “World War II set the stage for the triumph of Keynesianism by providing striking evidence of the effectiveness of government expenditures on a huge scale” (1981, 12). The following quote from a popular textbook repeated what other textbooks were saying in the postwar period: “Once the massive, war-geared expenditure of the 1940s began, income responded sharply and unemployment evapo-

163

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rated. Government expenditures on goods and services, which had been running at under 15 percent of GNP during the 1930s, jumped to 46 percent by 1944, while unemployment reached the incredible low of 1.2 percent of the civilian labor force” (Lipsey, Steiner, and Purvis 1987, 573).

Paul Samuelson Raises the Keynesian Cross

As noted earlier, Keynes died in 1946, right after the war. It would be left to his disciples to lead the charge and create a “new economics.” Fortunately for Keynes, a young wunderkind was ready to fill his shoes. His name was Paul Samuelson, and he would write a textbook that would dominate the profession for more than an entire generation.

The year was 1948, one of those watershed years that occasionally crops up in economics. Remember 1776, 1848, and 1871? In early 1948, the Austrian émigré Ludwig von Mises, secluded in his New York apartment, was typing a short article, “Stones into Bread, the Keynesian Miracle,” for a conservative publication, PlainTalk. “What is going on today in the United States,” he declared solemnly, “is the final failure of Keynesianism. There is no doubt that the American public is moving away from the Keynesian notions and slogans.Their prestige is dwindling” (Mises 1980 [1952], 62).

Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but Mises could not have misread the times more egregiously in 1948. It was in that very year that the neweconomicsofJohnMaynardKeyneswasbeinghailedbyKeynes’s rapidly growing number of disciples as the wave of the future and the savior of capitalism. Literally hundreds of articles and dozens of books had been published about Keynes and the new Keynesian model since Keynes wrote The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.

The Other Cambridge

The year 1948 was also when Seymour E. Harris, chairman of the economicsdepartmentatHarvard,producedaneditedvolumeentitled Saving American Capitalism. This was a sequel to his 1947 edited work, The New Economics. Both best-sellers were filled with lauda-

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tory articles by prominent economists preaching the new economics of Keynes.

Darwin had one bulldog to propagate his revolutionary theory, but Keynes had three in the United States—Seymour Harris, Alvin Hansen, and PaulA. Samuelson.They all came from the “other Cam- bridge”—Cambridge, Massachusetts. Both Harris and Hansen were conservative Harvard teachers who had converted to Keynesianism and devoted their energies to convincing students and colleagues of the efficacy of this strange new doctrine.

TheAmerican advancement of Keynesian economics represented a subtle but clear shift from Europe to the New World. Before the war, London and Cambridge in the United Kingdom shaped the economic world.After the war, the magnets for the best and the brightest graduate students were Boston, Chicago, and Berkeley. Students came from all over the world to do their work in the United States, and not just in economics.

The Year of the Textbook

Finally, 1948 was the year in which an exciting new breakthrough textbook came forth from Harvard’s neighboring university, the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology (MIT).Written by the “brash whippersnapper go-getter” Paul Samuelson (his own words!), Economics was destined to become the most successful textbook ever published in any field. Sixteen editions have sold more than 4 million copies and have been translated into over forty languages. No other textbook, includingthoseofJean-BaptisteSay,JohnStuartMill,andAlfredMar- shall,cancompare.Samuelson’sEconomicssurvivedahalf-centuryof dramaticchangesintheworldeconomyandtheeconomicsprofession: peace and war, boom and bust, inflation and deflation, Republicans and Democrats, and an array of new economic theories.

Samuelson’s textbook was popular not so much because it was well written, but because it elucidated and simplified the basics of Keynesian macroeconomics through the deft use of simple algebra and clear graphs. It took the profession by storm, selling hundreds of thousands of copies every year. Samuelson updated the textbook every three years or so, a practice that every textbook publisher now imitates. Economics sold over 440,000 copies at the height of its

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popularity in 1964. Even a conservative institution such as Brigham Young University, my alma mater, used the Samuelson textbook.

The Acme of Professional Success

Samuelson is known for more than just popularizing Keynesian economics. He is considered the father of modern macroeconomic theorizing. He has made innumerable contributions to pure mathematical economics,forwhichhehasbeenbothhonoredandblamed—honored for making economics a pure logical science, and blamed for carrying the Ricardian vice and Walrasian equilibrium analysis to an extreme, devoid of any empirical work. (See chapters 2 and 4.)

For his popular and scientific works, the academic community has awarded Samuelson virtually every honor it confers. He was the firstAmerican to win the Nobel Prize in economics, in 1970. He was awarded the first John Bates Clark Medal for the brightest economist under forty, and beyond economics, he received the Albert Einstein Medal in 1971. There’s even an annual award named after him, the PaulA. SamuelsonAward, given for published works in finance. His articles have appeared in all the major (and many minor) journals. He was elected president of theAmerican EconomicAssociation (AEA), has received innumerable honorary degrees from various universities, and has been the subject of many Festschrifts, gatherings at which scholars honor a fellow colleague with essays about his work.

“The Young, Brash Wunderkind”

PaulA. Samuelson was born in Gary, Indiana, in 1915 to Jewish parents, and moved to Chicago, where he received his B.A. in 1935—at the tender age of twenty—from the University of Chicago. Chicago in the 1930s, as it is today, was the citadel of laissez-faire economic thought. In those days, it was run by Frank Knight, Jacob Viner, and Henry Simons, among others. Paul’s first class in economics was taughtbyAaronDirector,whowasperhapsthemostlibertarianamong the faculty and who later became Milton Friedman’s brother-in-law. Both Friedman and George Stigler were graduate students at the time. Director’s laissez-faire philosophy failed to take in the youthful reformist Samuelson, who enjoyed being an intellectual heretic in a

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conservative institution and who was influenced by a father known as a “moderate socialist.” Moreover, during the depression, most of the leaders of the Chicago school advocated deficit spending and other government activist policies as temporary measures. Samuelson did inherit one concept from Chicago that he carried with him until he encountered Keynes—monetarism. He called himself a “jackass” for having been taken in (Samuelson 1968, 1).

Alvin Hansen Switches Sides to Become the “American Keynes”

After Chicago, Samuelson immediately went to Harvard, where he witnessed an amazing transition. His teacher, Alvin Hansen (1887– 1975), a long-standing classical economist, converted to Keynesianism. Most older economists at first rejected Keynes’s heretical ideas, including Hansen, who was at the University of Minnesota. Only Marriner Eccles, the exceptional Utah banker who became head of the Federal Reserve, and Lauchlin Currie, an economic aide to Roosevelt, were prominent Keynesian advocates.

Then, in the fall of 1937, Hansen transferred to Harvard and sud- denly—at the age of fifty—recognized the revolutionary nature of Keynes. He would become an outspoken exponent—the “American Keynes.” His fiscal policy seminar attracted many enthusiastic students, including Samuelson, and convinced many colleagues, includingSeymourHarris.KeyneshadtobetranslatedintoplainEnglishand easy-to-understand graphs and math, and Hansen was the principal interpreter, from Fiscal Policy and Business Cycles(1941) to A Guide to Keynes (1953). Hansen also campaigned for the Employment Act of 1946. According to Mark Blaug, “Alvin Hansen did more than any other economist to bring the Keynesian Revolution to America” (Blaug 1985, 79).

“Stagnation Thesis” Discredits Hansen and Almost

Destroys Samuelson’s Reputation

However, Hansen fell into a trap. He logically extended Keynes’s unemployment equilibrium theory into a “secular stagnation thesis.” (Keynes himself believed that conditions of the 1930s could persist