Money Illusionists, Flushing Toilets & Austrians

Monetarists and Keynesians are less different than either imagine says this Austrian economist...

 

The GUILTY SECRET secret shared by many disciples of both monetarism and Keynesianism is that they are well aware that their schools are very much a busted flush, writes Sean Corrigan at the Cobden Centre in the third part of his series on the future of money.

 

This is made plain by the procession of very public breast-beatings and existential re-examinations which monetarists and Keynesians have conducted in the years of post-Lehman purgatory by way of atonement for their failures.

 

Indeed, one measure of the dissatisfaction felt at the failings of these Terrible Twins – the money illusionists and the flushing-toilet hydraulicists – lies in the attention now being focused on the work being done by my third opponent and his peers under the guise of the 'complex adaptive system' approach.

 

To an Austrian, in truth, there is much about this last that seems thoroughly unobjectionable, so much so that it is hard to resist an invocation of Gunnar Myrdal's trenchant dismissal of Keynes' for his linguistically-challenged commission of the sin of many a monoglottal, English-speaking economist – that of 'unnecessary originality'.

 

I say this because in many ways the Complexity guys are simply putting a computer-age spin on concepts we have been trying to articulate for the past three generations.

 

We, too, start from the bottom-up by focusing on the individual – or the 'agent' as he is now known. We, too, believe that order is emergent, knowledge is dispersed, network effects are key, and that the attainment of equilibrium is a mirage. 

 

Where I suspect we Austrians differ is that we are more radically subjectivist in a way that it cannot be possible to capture in a mathematized 'model'. One might also be dubious about the degree of 'scientism' involved – i.e., the extent to which there has been an invalid application of the precepts of physics to what is after all a social phenomenon. One might also be wary of the inherent dangers of being too prescriptive in laying out what the 'agents' may or may not do. 

 

Among the caveats is the fact that we Austrians hold that scales of preference and utility are ordinal, not cardinal, and so are not arithmetically tractable. Moreover, we cannot see it as a complete solution to go to the trouble of atomizing what was formerly a faceless, monolithic 'aggregate' only to have to deny the atoms their own individuality, however capricious their expression of this property may be. We must be wary therefore of driving out the ghost and leaving only the machinery behind.

 

Nor do we then want to thrust our poor little cellular automata into a Game of Life whose inevitably arbitrary choice of rules is predicated on the very same contradictory framework from which we are trying to free ourselves – namely, the one prescribed by the traditional schools of macromancy. Not only would we wish to avoid our agents' freedoms being prejudiced by the suppositions of the mainstream, we would also wish them to do more than play out a mere financial simulation, however rich it might be in revealing the structural flaws in our existing institutional architecture and in warning us of its proclivity to the negative feedbacks, price cascades, and other malign outcomes which have come to plague it.

 

For us, a better imagined microcosm would include scope for the real-world action of entrepreneurs, those principal vectors of eco-genetic adaptation and selection, those drivers of change and arbitrageurs of profitable possibilities, the men and women who are constantly seeking out new combinations of action and innovative mixes of things in order to deliver more value at lower cost to a wider range of customers. Any toy universe which leaves out a reasonable representation of entrepreneurial endeavour – and the fact that this quintessential force for betterment thrives best in conditions which lie outside the bounds of equilibrium, yet away from the ragged edge of chaos – is likely to produce a poor facsimile of the real economy. 

 

Our stipulation for an improved virtual landscape would also insist it addresses a major failing of mainstream macro, viz., its poor handling, if not outright neglect, of the role of capital – a critical construct which is neither a financial variable (despite the unfortunate overlap of terminology with the world of book-keeping) nor, strictly, a mere physical entity like a factory or a machine tool, but which is rather a hybrid which includes both the use of the Thing and the process by which it is employed such that 'capital' becomes as much a verb as a noun, if you will.

 

It may be that we do a disservice both to the judgement and the ingenuity of our Complex System friends, but it does seem questionable that the kind of 'experts' they are likely to have consulted would have advised them to incorporate such features when writing their programs just as it is beyond our ken as to exactly how they would go about doing so, even if asked.

 

If it really is the case that either they have not or they cannot, theirs must very much still be considered a work-in-progress and not yet a fully-formed tool of analysis.