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Mankiw’s Principles of Economics Part 2: The Cost of Something Is What You Give Up To Get It

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The introduction to this series is here.
Part 1 is here.

Mankiw’s second principle is The Cost of Something Is What You Give Up To Get It. Mankiw explains that you have to include opportunity costs in your calculations. His example is college: the actual cost of going to college includes tuition, but not necessarily all of the costs of room and board, because you need food and a place to sleep whether or not you go to college. It also includes the money you didn’t earn by going to work instead of going to college.

Before I read Mankiw’s explanation, I thought we were going to get a discussion of the way an economist might calculate costs. That was not to be. Maybe I have to buy his Principles of Microeconomics. In the express language Mankiw chooses, you are the sole standard for calculating costs. That kind of calculation fits perfectly with the neoliberal canon of Philip Mirowski. It’s part of Number 6: Thou Shalt Become The Manager Of Thyself for sure, and it complements Number 3: Thou Shalt Worship “Spontaneous Order”, meaning the market.

Again, non-specialist students will likely remember the principle, and will repeat it mindlessly when talking about value and cost, even though this discussion doesn’t include value or even price. This is a license to ignore all the costs that are not visited upon the neoliberal You. Smoking may not make you sick, but smoking makes some people sick directly and others indirectly. The neoliberal You hopefully doesn’t pay those costs, so they aren’t included in the calculations of the neoliberal You. Computers have a number of components that are dangerous to the health of people. Those costs aren’t paid by the neoliberal You, so they aren’t included in the calculation of costs. Coal burning is a major contributor to climate change, but maybe those costs won’t be paid by the neoliberal You, so they don’t count.

Well, perhaps that wasn’t Mankiw’s intent. He does discuss externalities as something government can correct maybe, sometimes, after a fashion, and at a cost to efficiency. The notion of opportunity costs arises directly from Principle 1: People Face Trade-offs. Most likely the only point of the second principle is to make sure there a nice round ten.

Mankiw’s Ten Principles of Economics 1: People Face Trade-offs

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The introduction to this series is here.

The first of the Ten Principles of Economics laid down by N. Gregory Mankiw is “People Face Trade-Offs”. Principles of Macroeconomics, 6th Ed. 2012, p. 4. In language more suited to a high school textbook than a best-selling college textbook, he provides several examples. If you study economics for five hours, then you can’t spend that time studying something useful, like welding or English Literature. If parents have a certain amount of money, every dollar they spend on rent can’t be saved, or used to buy food. Then, as if society were a person, and faced trade-offs in exactly the same way (government is just like a household) he gives two macro examples. First:

The more a society spends on national defense (guns) to protect its shores from foreign aggressors, the less it can spend on consumer goods (butter) to raise the standard of living at home.

There is also a trade-off between a clean environment and a high level of income. If companies have to pay for environmental contamination, they make smaller profits, pay lower wages, or raise prices or some combination. This is the last example:

Another trade-off society faces is between efficiency and equality. Efficiency means that society is getting the maximum benefits from its scarce resources. Equality means that those benefits are distributed uniformly among society’s members. Emphasis in original.

Mankiw explains this by saying that government policies that help those in need, like unemployment insurance or welfare reduce efficiency, because, and I quote because otherwise you’ll think I’m being snarky:

When the government redistributes income from the rich to the poor, it reduces the reward for working hard; as a result, people work less and produce fewer goods and services. In other words, when the government tries to cut the economic pie into more equal slices, the pie gets smaller.

The statement that individuals face trade-offs in consumption of goods and services as well as every other human activity is vacuously true. We get one life, and at any point in time can only do one thing. If we do one thing we cannot do another. So what’s the point of this principle? I think it’s not the principle itself, but the examples. Each supports the principles of neoliberalism, as described by Philip Mirowski in this article.

Mankiw’s first two examples are folksy and disarming. Let’s try a similar version:

Angela has a problem: should she summer with her mom on Martha’s Vineyard, or should she summer with her dad on their ranch in Montana? Jane has a problem: should she pay her utility bill, or should she buy the drugs she needs to control her Parkinson’s Disease? Since these are two individuals, you can see that the problems they face are identical. Both will suffer if they make the wrong decision, and both will suffer anyway because of the knowledge they could have chosen otherwise. The rich and the poor are just the same: people struggling with trade-offs. Or, from Mirowski on neoliberalism: [9] Thou Shalt Know That Inequality Is Natural.

Things get more complicated at the macro level. The third example, guns or butter, is as abstract as the first two are concrete. Mankiw makes it seem that “defense” is a consumer good, like Hummel Figurines or orange marmalade. The government just goes down to the defense store and buys as much as it wants. He doesn’t talk about how those decisions get made at the social level, and doesn’t talk about who gets the benefits of those guns and who pays the costs of the foregone butter, or whether there are better ways to keep aggressors away than bombing their countries. He turns the example into a concrete fact, with no context. The choices made in the US and other countries about how much “defense” to “buy” would make a really interesting case study in macroeconomic behavior, and just defining terms would be really helpful to public discourse. That’s certainly not the point of the Mankiw textbook.

One of the goals of neoliberalism, Mirowski’s Number 5, is to change the idea of democracy from one of participation by citizens in determination of social policy to one of consuming state services, like defense. Guns v. butter shows how that notion gets into people’s heads. Given the level of corruption in the system, in the broad sense of Zephyr Teachout in her excellent book, Corruption in America, it’s also an example of crony capitalism, part of Number 8. There’s a lot more to unpack in the guns and butter example, but let’s move on.

The environmental example is fascinating. From the very beginning of this country, companies polluted lakes, rivers and the air, to keep costs low and prices down. No one did anything. Then when citizens started complaining about their ability to breathe the air and drink the water, and the rich people and their corporations act all outraged, like they have a right to pollute. Mankiw ignores this history, and ignores the obvious fact that dumping pollutants everywhere hurts everyone in general, and some people dramatically; and profits only a few. Again, the entire issue of pollution and environmental destruction would make fascinating case studies in economics. Mankiw’s discussion supports Mirowski number 10: Thou Shalt Not Blame Monopolies and Corporations.

Finally, there is the trade-off between equality and efficiency. Mankiw’s explanation about the negative effects of a progressive income tax on economic efficiency is flatly wrong. For my explanation, see this and this and this. For a short view, does Mankiw think the economy in the 50s was less efficient strictly because of high income and estate taxes on the rich? I’d love to see a paper showing how that happened. Piketty and Saez suggest a top tax rate of 80%. Here’s a short article explaining their thinking, and here’s an impenetrable paper that lies below it.

I assume Mankiw was referencing Arthur Okun’s 1975 book Equality and Efficiency: The Big Trade-Off. Okun postulated that there was a trade-off between equality and economic efficiency from his armchair, and he discusses the implications for policy in this excellent piece. By 1995, it was clear that the facts did not support his speculation. This paper is a review of literature and discussion of exactly how wrong Okun was: Lars Osburg, The Equity/Efficiency Trade-off in Retrospect. Subsequent work has made this even more clear. Mankiw ignores all the evidence and new theory to the contrary, choosing to continue to support an unmeasured armchair theory Mirowski number 9: Thou Shalt know that Inequality is Natural.

The point of this discussion is that textbooks have an outsized influence on people, particularly on non-specialists. They may not recall the argument, but they will recall the examples and the general approach, especially when those are common in discourse, and not contravened by other authorities. I know this from my own college education. It has taken years for me to shed the parts that don’t conform to the reality of life as I have lived it and seen it.

A Possible Paradigm of Neoliberal Economics

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In this post I ask what the paradigm of economics might be, and if there is one. I did not address the question of the exact nature of the paradigm as discussed by Kuhn, leaving it at the broadest possible level: the theories, instruments, methods, prejudices and so on common to a community of scholars working in a fairly specific area of human knowledge. The general question of the nature of the paradigm is the subject of a number of papers, most concluding that the concept is too unclear to support careful analysis. That’s the position taken by George Stigler in a remarkable paper, Does Economics Have a Useful Past? 1 Hist. of Pol. Econ. 225 (1969). Stigler dismisses Kuhn because he can’t find an example of a paradigm that completely defeats a prior paradigm.

To be concrete, the marginal utility revolution of the 1870s replaced the individual economic agent as a sociological or historical datum by the utility-maximizing individual. The essential elements of the classical theory were affected in no respect. (A possible, but uncertain, aftereffect in twenty years was the development of the marginal productivity theory.) Until Kuhn gives us criteria of a revolution (or a paradigm) which have direct empirical content, it will not be possible to submit his fascinating hypotheses to test.

I assume Stigler means that Kuhn’s ideas aren’t applicable to economics. Certainly the book is full of examples from physics and chemistry of theories that completely replace older theories, leaving the old to as nothing more than objects of interest. Let me propose one such idea for economics. It is a certainty of economics that taxes exist for the purpose of raising revenue for the government. That was probably true before the advent of fiat money. When nations left the gold standard, it became untrue, as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Beardsley Ruml, wrote in 1946 in a paper titled Taxes For Revenue Are Obsolete. This idea is as revolutionary as the Copernican Revolution. It forms the basis of Modern Money Theory, and both the idea and the elaboration into a coherent theory are fiercely ignored or fiercely fought by the dominant economists. As it happens, this idea is leaking into public discussion despite their best efforts.

I have little else to add to this discussion about the nature of paradigms. I’ll follow Stigler in accepting that there are communities of scholars engaged in the same general areas of study, and in these communities, there is a mutual agreement on theories, instruments, methods, measurements, and even prejudices, and these guide the thinkers in their day to day efforts. Stigler considers this a good picture of economics, and for my purposes, it serves to connect Kuhn’s ideas to economics.

The neoclassical school dominates economic discourse and is widely taught as authoritative at every level in the US. N. Gregory Mankiw, Harvard professor and author of the leading economics textbook, wrote this in a New York Times column in May 2009:

Despite the enormity of recent events [meaning the Great Crash], the principles of economics are largely unchanged. Students still need to learn about the gains from trade, supply and demand, the efficiency properties of market outcomes, and so on. These topics will remain the bread-and-butter of introductory courses.

Let’s try to tease out the paradigmatic points of the neoliberal school. Mankiw’s best-selling economics textbook contains these 10 principles of economics:

  1. People face tradeoffs
  2. The cost of something is what you give up to get it
  3. Rational people think at the margin
  4. People respond to incentives
  5. Trade can make everyone better off
  6. Markets are usually a good way to organize economic activity
  7. Governments can sometimes improve market outcomes
  8. A country’s standard of living depends on its ability to produce goods and services
  9. Prices rise when the government prints too much money
  10. Society faces a short-run tradeoff between Inflation and unemployment

The primary method of this school is mathematical modeling, which adds at least two covert assumptions, that collective and individual human behavior is continuous enough so that it’s reasonable to use college calculus, and that aggregate behavior is nothing but the sum of individual behaviors which exist independently of each other at all times. The theory is premised on the idea that the motivation of all people is efficiency, and that economic efficiency is the most prized value in a society, with all other goals held as secondary. The models are used to give normative policy advice.

This school of thought, to follow Stigler, replaced Keynesianism. P. 228. Why? Stigler suggests that a school of thought cannot survive the life of its leader. That seems very odd, because many of the ideas of the neoliberals are taken from the past. As Stigler says:

The young theorist, working with an increasingly formal, abstract, and systematic corpus of knowledge, will seldom find it necessary to consult even a late-nineteenth-century economist. He will assume, just as the mathematician or chemist assumes, that all that is useful and valid in earlier work is present — in purer and more elegant form — in the modern theory. P. 217-8

I won’t belabor the obvious point that every element of the neoliberal school is contested. Instead, I continue to focus on this question. The canonical explanation of the rise of neoliberalism is that Keynesianism failed in the 1970s, and was replaced by neoliberal economics which offered a better solution to the problem that Keynesianism stumbled over. That explanation leaves a bunch of questions. Not the least is exactly why the events of the 1970s were somehow a failure of economic theory. The solution offered by neoliberalism was the traditional conservative solution: hammer the workers and coddle the capitalists. Why is that a better solution? Remember, Keynes believed that the goal of economic recovery was to give people useful work to do [see paragraph 5], not to help the rich. And why isn’t neoliberalism facing extinction in the wake of its disastrous failure? Both Kuhn and Keynes have something to offer on this question, and I’ll take that up next.