Keynes’s General Theory Contains Oddly Few Mentions of “Fiscal Policy”

Posted on by Brad DeLong
File WhiteandKeynes jpg Wikipedia

Something that has puzzled me for quite a while: Keynes’s General Theory contains remarkably few references to fiscal policy in any form:

  • “Government spending”: no matches…

  • “Government purchases”: no matches…

  • “Fiscal policy”: 6 matches:

    • Four in one paragraph about how fiscal policy is the fifth in an enumerated list of factors affecting the marginal propensity to consume…
    • One about how an estate tax changes the marginal propensity to consume…
    • One about how fiscal policy in ordinary times is “not likely to be important”…
  • “Public works”: 10 matches:
    • Three in a paragraph about how the multiplier amplifies the employment effect from public works…
    • Two in a paragraph warning that multiplier calculations are overoptimistic because of import, interest rate, and confidence crowding-out…
    • Four on how public works have a much bigger effect when unemployment is high and “public works even of doubtful utility may pay for themselves…”
    • One a criticism of Pigou’s logic…

And yet it also contains this one paragraph:

In some other respects the foregoing theory is moderately conservative in its implications. For whilst it indicates the vital importance of establishing certain central controls in matters which are now left in the main to individual initiative, there are wide fields of activity which are unaffected. The State will have to exercise a guiding influence on the propensity to consume partly through its scheme of taxation, partly by fixing the rate of interest, and partly, perhaps, in other ways. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that the influence of banking policy on the rate of interest will be sufficient by itself to determine an optimum rate of investment. I conceive, therefore, that a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment will prove the only means of securing an approximation to full employment; though this need not exclude all manner of compromises and of devices by which public authority will co-operate with private initiative…

Chasing back this “banking policy” that is the alternative to the “somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment”, there are three cites to “banking policy”: this paragraph is one, and the others are:

  • “to every banking policy there corresponds a different long-period level of employment…”
  • and the “it is, I think, arguable that a more advantageous average state of expectation might result from a banking policy which always nipped in the bud an incipient boom by a rate of interest high enough to deter even the most misguided optimists. The disappointment of expectation, characteristic of the slump, may lead to so much loss and waste that the average level of useful investment might be higher if a deterrent is applied…. [But] the austere view, which would employ a high rate of interest to check at once any tendency in the level of employment to rise appreciably above the average of; say, the previous decade, is, however, more usually supported by arguments which have no foundation at all apart from confusion of mind…”

The question of why “it seems unlikely that the influence of banking policy on the rate of interest will be sufficient by itself… a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment will prove the only means of securing an approximation to full employment…” is left hanging. And how “a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment” is to be implemented are left hanging as well.

So will somebody please explain to me why “fiscal policy” plays such a small part in the General Theory and yet such a large part in mindshare perceptions of “Keynesianism”?

Economic Methodology: Thinking Math Can Substitute for Economics Turns Economists Into Real Morons Department

Posted on by Brad DeLong
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The highly estimable Tim Taylor wrote:

Tim Taylor: Some Thoughts About Economic Exposition in Math and Words: “[Paul Romer’s] notion that math is ‘both more precise and more opaque’ than words is an insight worth keeping…”

And he recommends Alfred Marshall’s workflow checklist:

  1. Use mathematics as a shorthand language; rather than as an engine of inquiry.
  2. Keep to them till you have done.
  3. Translate into English.
  4. Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life.
  5. Burn the mathematics.
  6. If you can’t succeed in 4, burn 3.

This is sage advice.

And to underscore the importance of this advice, I think it is time to hoist the best example I have seen in a while of people with no knowledge of the economics and no control over their models using—simple—math to be idiots: Per Krusell and Tony Smith trying and failing to criticize Thomas Piketty.

(2015) The Theory of Growth and Inequality: Piketty, Zucman, Krusell, Smith, and “Mathiness”: It is Krusell and Smith (2014) that suffers from “mathiness”–people not in control of their models deploying algebra untethered to the real world in a manner that approaches gibberish.

I wrote about this last summer, several times:

  • Department of “Huh?!”–I Don’t Understand More and More of Piketty’s Critics: Per Krusell and Tony Smith
  • The Daily Piketty: Ryan Avent on Housing in the Twenty-First Century: Wednesday Focus for June 18, 2014
  • In Which I Continue to Fail to Understand Why Critics of Piketty Say What They Say: (Late) Friday Focus for June 6, 2014
  • Depreciation Rates on Wealth in Thomas Piketty’s Database

This time, [it was a] reply… to Paul Romer… with a Tweetstorm. Here it is, collected, with paragraphs added and redundancy deleted:

My objection to Krusell and Smith (2014) was that it seemed to me to suffer much more from what you call “mathiness” than does Piketty or Piketty and Zucman. Recall that Krusell and Smith began by saying that they:

do not quite recognize… k/y=s/g…

But k/y=s/g is Harrod (1939) and Domar (1946). How can they fail to recognize it? And then their calibration–n+g=.02, δ=.10–not only fails to acknowledge Piketty’s estimates of economy-wide depreciation rate as between .01 and .02, but leads to absolutely absurd results:

  • For a country with a K/Y=4, δ=.10 -> depreciation is 40% of gross output.
  • For a country like Belle Époque France with a K/Y=7, δ=.10 -> depreciation is 70% of gross output….

Krusell and Smith had no control whatsoever over the calibration of their model at all. Note that I am working from notes here, because http://aida.wss.yale.edu/smith/piketty1.pdf no longer points to Krusell and Smith (2014). It points, instead, to Krusell and Smith (2015), a revised version. In the revised version, the calibration differs. It differs in:

  • raising (n+g) from .02 to .03,
  • lowering δ from .10 or .05 (still more than twice Piketty’s historical estimates), and
  • changing the claim that as n+g->0 K/Y increases “only very marginally” to the claim that it increases “only modestly”. The right thing to do, of course, would be to take economy-wide δ=.02 and say that k/y increases “substantially”.)

If Krusell and Smith (2015) offer any reference to Piketty’s historical depreciation estimates, I missed it. If it offers any explanation of why they decided to raise their calibration of n+g when they lowered their δ, I missed that too.

Piketty has flaws, but it does not seem to me that working in a net rather than a gross production function framework is one of them.

And Krusell and Smith’s continued attempts to demonstrate otherwise seem to me to suffer from “mathiness” to a high degree.

Here are the earlier pieces:

DEPARTMENT OF “HUH?!”–I DON’T UNDERSTAND MORE AND MORE OF PIKETTY’S CRITICS: PER KRUSELL AND TONY SMITH: As time passes, it seems to me that a larger and larger fraction of Piketty’s critics are making arguments that really make no sense at all–that I really do not understand how people can believe them, or why anybody would think that anybody else would believe them. Today we have Per Krusell and Tony Smith assuming that the economy-wide capital depreciation rate δ is not 0.03 or 0.05 but 0.1–and it does make a huge difference…

Per Krusell and Tony Smith: Piketty’s ‘Second Law of Capitalism’ vs. standard macro theory: “Piketty’s forecast does not rest primarily on an extrapolation of recent trends…

…[which] is what one might have expected, given that so much of the book is devoted to digging up and displaying reliable time series…. Piketty’s forecast rests primarily on economic theory. We take issue…. Two ‘fundamental laws’, as Piketty dubs them… asserts that K/Y will, in the long run, equal s[net]/g…. Piketty… argues… s[net]/g… will rise rapidly in the future…. Neither the textbook Solow model nor a ‘microfounded’ model of growth predicts anything like the drama implied by Piketty’s theory…. Theory suggests that the wealth–income ratio would increase only modestly as growth falls…

And if we go looking for why they believe that “theory suggests that the wealth–income ratio would increase only modestly as growth falls”, we find:

Per Krusell and Tony Smith: Is Piketty’s “Second Law of Capitalism” Fundamental? : “In the textbook model…

…the capital- to-income ratio is not s[net]/g but rather s[gross]/(g+δ), where δ is the rate at which capital depreciates. With the textbook formula, growth approaching zero would increase the capital-output ratio but only very marginally; when growth falls all the way to zero, the denominator would not go to zero but instead would go from, say 0.12–with g around 0.02 and δ=0.1 as reasonable estimates–to 0.1.

But with an economy-wide capital output ratio of 4-6 and a depreciation rate of 0.1, total depreciation–the gap between NDP and GDP–is not its actual 15% of GDP, but rather 40%-60% of GDP. If the actual depreciation rate were what Krussall and Smith say it is, fully half of our economy would be focused on replacing worn-out capital.

It isn’t:

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That makes no sense at all.

For the entire economy, one picks a depreciation rate of 0.02 or 0.03 or 0.05, rather than 0.10.

I cannot understand how anybody who has ever looked at the NIPA, or thought about what our capital stock is made of, would ever get the idea that the economy-wide depreciation rate δ=0.1.

And if you did think that for an instant, you would then recognize that you have just committed yourself to the belief that NDP is only half of GDP, and nobody thinks that–except Krusall and Smith. Why do they think that? Where did their δ=0.1 estimate come from? Why didn’t they immediately recognize that that deprecation estimate was in error, and correct it?

Why would anyone imagine that any growth model should ever be calibrated to such an extraordinarily high depreciation rate?

And why, when Krusell and Smith snark:

we do not quite recognize [Piketty’s] second law K/Y = s/g. Did we miss something quite fundamental[?]… The capital-income ratio is not s/g but rather s/(g+δ) no reference to Piketty’s own explication of s/(n+δ), where δ is the rate at which capital depreciates…

do they imply that this is a point that Piketty has missed, rather than a point that Piketty explicitly discusses at Kindle location 10674?

?One can also write the law β=s/g with s standing for the total [gross] rather than the net rate of saving. In that case the law becomes β=s/(g+δ) (where δ now stands for the rate of depreciation of capital expressed as a percentage of the capital stock)…

I mean, when the thing you are snarking at Piketty for missing is in the book, shouldn’t you tell your readers that it is explicitly in the book rather than allowing them to believe that it is not?

I really do not understand what is going on here at all…

In Which I Continue to Fail to Understand Why Critics of Piketty Say What They Say: “Per Krusell II: So I wrote this on Friday, and put it aside because I feared that it might be intemperate, and I do not want to post intemperate things in this space.

Today, Sunday, I cannot see a thing I want to change–save that I am, once again, disappointed by the quality of critics of Piketty: please step up your game, people!

In response to my Department of “Huh?!”–I Don’t Understand More and More of Piketty’s Critics: Per Krusell and Tony Smith, Per Krusell unfortunately writes:

Brad DeLong has written an aggressive answer to our short note…. Worry about increasing inequality… is no excuse for [Thomas Piketty’s] using inadequate methodology or misleading arguments…. We provided an example calculation where we assigned values to parameters—among them the rate of depreciation. DeLong’s main point is that the [10%] rate we are using is too high…. Our main quantitative points are robust to rates that are considerably lower…. DeLong’s main point is a detail in an example aimed mainly, it seems, at discrediting us by making us look like incompetent macroeconomists. He does not even comment on our main point; maybe he hopes that his point about the depreciation rate will draw attention away from the main point. Too bad if that happens, but what can we do…

Let me assure one and all that I focused–and focus–on the depreciation assumption because it is an important and central assumption. It plays a very large role in whether reductions in trend real GDP growth rates (and shifts in the incentive to save driven by shifts in tax regimes, revolutionary confiscation probabilities, and war) can plausibly drive large shifts in wealth-to-annual-income ratios. The intention is not to distract with inessentials. The attention is to focus attention on what is a key factor, as is well-understood by anyone who has control over their use of the Solow growth model.

Consider the Solow growth model Krusell and Smith deploy, calibrated to what Piketty thinks of as typical values for the 1914-80 Social Democratic Era: a population trend growth rate n=1%/yr, a labor-productivity trend growth rate g=2%/yr, W/Y=3.

Adding in the totally ludicrous Krusell-Smith depreciation assumption of 10%/yr means (always assuming I have not made any arithmetic errors) that a fall in n+g from 3%/yr to 1%/yr, holding the gross savings rate constant, generates a rise in the steady-state wealth-to-annual-net-income ratio from 3 to 3.75–not a very big jump for a very large shift in economic growth: the total rate of growth n+g has fallen by 2/3, but W/Y has only jumped by a quarter.

Adopting a less ludicrously-awry “Piketty” depreciation assumption of 3%/yr generates quantitatively (and qualitatively!) different results: a rise in the steady-state wealth-to-annual-net-income ratio from 3 to 4.708–the channel is more than twice has powerful.

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We have a very large drop in Piketty’s calculations of northwest European economy-wide wealth-to-annual-net-income ratios from the Belle Époque Era that ended in 1914 to the Social Democratic Era of 1914-1980 to account for. How would we account for this other than by (a) reduced incentives for wealthholders to save and reinvest and (b) shifts in trend rates of population and labor-productivity growth? We are now in a new era, with rising wealth-to-annual-net-income ratios. We would like to be able to forecast how far W/Y will rise given the expected evolution of demography and technology and given expectations about incentives for wealthholders to save and reinvest.

How do Krusell and Smith aid us in our quest to do that?

Depreciation Rates on Wealth in Thomas Piketty’s Database:: Thomas Piketty emails:

We do provide long run series on capital depreciation in the “Capital Is Back” paper with Gabriel [Zucman] (see http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/capitalisback, appendix country tables US.8, JP.8, etc.). The series are imperfect and incomplete, but they show that in pretty much every country capital depreciation has risen from 5-8% of GDP in the 19th century and early 20th century to 10-13% of GDP in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, i.e. from about 1%[/year] of capital stock to about 2%[/year].

Of course there are huge variations across industries and across assets, and depreciation rates could be a lot higher in some sectors. Same thing for capital intensity.

The problem with taking away the housing sector (a particularly capital-intensive sector) from the aggregate capital stock is that once you start to do that it’s not clear where to stop (e.g., energy is another capital intensive sector). So we prefer to start from an aggregate macro perspective (including housing). Here it is clear that 10% or 5% depreciation rates do not make sense.

No, James Hamilton, it is not the case that the fact that “rates of 10-20%[/year] are quite common for most forms of producers’ machinery and equipment” means that 10%/year is a reasonable depreciation rate for the economy as a whole–and especially not for Piketty’s concept of wealth, which is much broader than simply produced means of production.

No, Pers Krusell and Anthony Smith, the fact that:

[you] conducted a quick survey among macroeconomists at the London School of Economics, where Tony and I happen to be right now, and the average answer was 7%[/year…

for “the” depreciation rate does not mean that you have any business using a 10%/year economy-wide depreciation rate in trying to assess how the net savings share would respond to increases in Piketty’s wealth-to-annual-net-income ratio.

Who are these London School of Economics economists who think that 7%/year is a reasonable depreciation rate for a wealth concept that attains a pre-World War I level of 7 times a year’s net national income? I cannot imagine any of the LSE economists signing on to the claim that back before WWI capital consumption in northwest European economies was equal to 50% of net income–that depreciation was a third of gross economic product.

One more remark: if more than half LSE macroeconomists really do believe that net domestic product is 28% lower than gross domestic product—for that is what a depreciation rate of 7% per year gets you with an aggregate capital-output ratio of 4—then more than half of LSE macroeconomists need to be in a different profession. I don’t believe Krusell and Smith’s survey. I don’t believe their LSE colleagues told them what they claimed they had…

Should-Read: Tim Taylor: Some Thoughts About Economic Exposition in Math and Words

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Should-Read: Very smart pickup about teaching—and doing—economics from Paul Romer and Alfred Marshall by the highly estimable Tim Taylor: Tim Taylor: Some Thoughts About Economic Exposition in Math and Words: “[Paul Romer’s] notion that math is ‘both more precise and more opaque’ than words is an insight worth keeping…

…It reminded me of an earlier set of rules from the great economist Alfred Marshall, who… wrote in 1906 letter to Alfred Bowley (reprinted in A.C. Pigou (ed.), Memorials of Alfred Marshall, 1925 edition, quotation on p. 427): 

But I know I had a growing feeling in the later years of my work at the subject that a good mathematical theorem dealing with economic hypotheses was very unlikely to be good economics; and I went more and more on the rules:

  1. Use mathematics as a shorthand language; rather than as an engine of inquiry.

  2. Keep to them till you have done.

  3. Translate into English.

  4. Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life.

  5. Burn the mathematics.

  6. If you can’t succeed in 4, burn 3.

This last I did often…. Mathematics used in a Fellowship thesis by a man who is not a mathematician by nature—and I have come across a good deal of that—seems to me an unmixed evil. And I think you should do all you can to prevent people from using Mathematics in cases in which the English language is as short as the Mathematical…

Should-Read: Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, and Jakob Egholt Søgaard: Children and Gender Inequality: Evidence from Denmark

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Should-Read: Saying that gender inequality in Denmark is one third wage and salary rates, one third hours conditional on participation in the paid labor force, and one third labor force participation simply does not do it for me. Informed people make choices in environments. Discrimination and unfreedom is found not in outcome measures but in choice sets—plus the knotty question of how and what people are taught they should prefer, and how such preferences are then enforced: Hate the game, not the players. And does the departure of children from the household then close the gap? The authors take a stab at this with their analyses of the intergenerational transmission of lowered female earnings upon child arrival through the female line. But I want MOAR!: Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, and Jakob Egholt Søgaard: CHILDREN AND GENDER INEQUALITY: EVIDENCE FROM DENMARK: “Despite considerable gender convergence over time, substantial gender inequality persists in all countries…

…Using Danish administrative data from 1980-2013 and an event study approach, we show that most of the remaining gender inequality in earnings is due to children. The arrival of children creates a gender gap in earnings of around 20% in the long run, driven in roughly equal proportions by labor force participation, hours of work, and wage rates. Underlying these “child penalties”, we find clear dynamic impacts on occupation, promotion to manager, sector, and the family friendliness of the firm for women relative to men. Based on a dynamic decomposition framework, we show that the fraction of gender inequality caused by child penalties has increased dramatically over time, from about 40% in 1980 to about 80% in 2013. As a possible explanation for the persistence of child penalties, we show that they are transmitted through generations, from parents to daughters (but not sons), consistent with an influence of childhood environment in the formation of women’s preferences over family and career…

Paul Krugman Looks Back at the Last Twenty Years of the Macroeconomic Policy Debate

Posted on by Brad DeLong
Preview of Paul Krugman Looks Back at the Last Twenty Years of the Macroeconomic Policy Debate

Everybody interested in macroeconomics or macroeconomic policy should know this topic backwards and forwards by heart. My problem is that I do not see how I can add value to it. The only thing I can think of to do is to propose two rules:

  1. Paul Krugman is right.
  2. If you think Paul Krugman is wrong, refer to rule #1.

I do wish that those who were not bad actors who made mistakes would ‘fess up to them. Those who don’t will get moved to the “bad actor” category: and, yes, I am looking at you, Marvin Goodfriend.

The only remaining question, I think, is whether these should all be read in chronological or reverse chronological order. I find myself torn, with arguments on both sides having force:

Ben Bernanke (1999): Japanese Monetary Policy: A Case of Self-Induced Paralysis? https://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/bernanke_paralysis.pdf

Must-Read: Paul Krugman: It’s Baaack, Twenty Years Later

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Very few people have properly read Paul Krugman’s “It’s Back”. As I understand the paper, one of its key messages is this: When the economy is in a liquidity trap—at the zero lower bound—it wants inflation. Inflation is the way a flex-price economy would keep the zero lower bound from causing a deep, persistent depression. A competent central bank that wants to mimic a flex-price economy as closely as possible in a sticky-price world—a competent central bank that wants to make Say’s Law true in practice even though it is not true in theory—will therefore strain every nerve to generate that inflation. Its leader will not say, as Fed Chair Ben Bernanke said repeatedly, that he does not want higher inflation. He will say that he does. But Bernanke never understood that. And few of those advising him understood that. They had not, I believe, understood Krugman: Paul Krugman: It’s Baaack, Twenty Years Later: “In early 1998 I set out to reassure myself… to show that if Japan was having troubles, it was simply because the Bank of Japan wasn’t trying hard enough…

…But as sometimes happens when you try to model your intuitions explicitly (and is one of the main reasons for doing formal analysis), the model ended up telling me something quite different–namely, that when short-term interest rates are near zero it is not, in fact, easy for the central bank to reflate the economy. In fact, even very large increases in the monetary base will have essentially no effect unless the private sector is convinced that there has been a permanent shift in the central bank’s objectives, a new willingness to accept and even promote inflation. As I put it, the central bank needed to “credibly promise to be irresponsible.”…

Ten years later my fears came true…. With the coming of the global financial crisis the whole advanced world basically turned Japanese, experiencing a protracted era of near-zero interest rates. The United States has emerged from that era, barely; Europe and Japan itself have not. What I want to ask in this paper is how good the analytical approach of 1998 looks in the light of subsequent experience. Were its basic predictions correct? Where did it fall down? What new issues have arisen? And how does its policy prescription look after all these years?…

Should-Read: Adrien Auclert and Matthew Rognlie: Inequality and aggregate demand

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Should-Read: A very interesting exploration of how inequality that is or is perceived as risk by the relatively young potentially destroys entrepreneurship and growth. I am going to have to think about this some more. But it is very plain to me that rising inequality is not best thought of as “rising dispersion in individual fixed effects”, but rather as individuals—in their teens, in their twenties, in their thirties—finding themselves in the right (or the wrong) place at the right (or the wrong) time: Adrien Auclert and Matthew Rognlie: Inequality and aggregate demand: “We explore the transmission mechanism of income inequality to output…

…In the short run, higher inequality reduces output because marginal propensities to consume are negatively correlated with incomes, but this effect is quantitatively small in the data and in our model. In the long run, the output effects of income inequality are small if inequality is caused by rising dispersion in individual fixed effects, but can be large if it is the manifestation of higher individual income risk. We formalize the connection between partial and general equilibrium effects, and show that the two are closely related under standard assumptions about the behavior of monetary policy. Our economy features a depressed long-run real interest rate, allowing us to quantify the potential contribution of income inequality to secular stagnation…

Weekend reading: “diminishing demand” edition

Posted on by Nick Bunker

This is a weekly post we publish on Fridays with links to articles that touch on economic inequality and growth. The first section is a round-up of what Equitable Growth published this week and the second is the work we’re highlighting from elsewhere. We won’t be the first to share these articles, but we hope by taking a look back at the whole week, we can put them in context.

Equitable Growth round-up

The latest release in the Equitable Growth Working Paper series looks at how high levels of income inequality might affect aggregate demand. Adrien Auclert of Stanford University and Matthew Rognlie of Northwestern University summarize their research while another post digs into what their findings might mean for the future of interest rates.

The U.S. Supreme Court next week will hear oral arguments in Ohio v. American Express, a case you likely haven’t heard of. But as Michael Kades argues, how the court rules on the case could have a major impact on the future of antitrust policy.

Check out the slides from a presentation Greg Leiserson gave this week on the recently passed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Links from around the web

The Family and Medical Leave Act was signed into law 25 years ago, notes former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, but “while the FMLA was a landmark achievement, it doesn’t go far enough. American workers and businesses need a universal paid leave program.” [wapo]

Leah Fessler interviews Harvard University economist Claudia Goldin about Goldin’s research into the origins of the gender pay gap and her own career. [quartz]

Marcus Casey and Bradley Hardy—fellows at The Brookings Institution—point out that while the black unemployment rate is having its time in the national spotlight as it hit historical lows recently, the economic well-being of any community can’t be determined by just the unemployment rate. [brookings]

Should employers in the United States be able to ask a prospective hire about her previous salaries? Several states and cities have passed laws recently banning the practice. Noam Scheiber looks into how such policies might affect hiring. [nyt]

The rate at which U.S. workers participated in the labor force at one time far outstretched the participation rate of workers in the United Kingdom. But since the late 1990s, the participation rate in the United States has dropped sharply while and the U.K. rate has risen. What happened? Ernie Tedeschi dives into the data. [medium]

Friday figure

Figure is from “How income inequality may affect U.S. interest rates,” by Nick Bunker

Should-Read: Bishnupriya Gupta: Falling Behind and Catching up: India’s Transition from a Colonial Economy

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Should-Read: Colonial régimes were unwilling to make the “normal” investments in education and infrastructure that even a subnormal autonomous régime would have made. And without those investments colonies could not take full advantage of comparative advantage opportunities opened up by globalization. Full Stop. Thus colonization meant social dislocation and the enrichment of a “comprador” stratum little tied to the broader underlying economy. Is this the story that economic history is telling us these days about the British, French, Portuguese, Italian empires?: Bishnupriya Gupta: Falling Behind and Catching up: India’s Transition from a Colonial Economy: “India fell behind during colonial rule…

…The absolute and relative decline of Indian GDP per capita with respect to Britain began before colonization and coincided with the rising textile trade with Europe in the 18th century. The decline of traditional industries was not the main driver of Indian decline and stagnation. Inadequate investment in agriculture and consequent decline in yield per acre stalled economic growth. Modern industries emerged and grew relatively fast.

The falling behind was reversed after independence. Policies of industrialization and a green revolution in agriculture increased productivity growth in agriculture and industry, but Indian growth has been led by services. A strong focus on higher education under colonial policy had created an advantage for the service sector, which today has a high concentration of human capital. However, the slow expansion in primary education was a disadvantage in comparison with the high growth East Asian economies…

Should-Read: Johannes A. Schwarzer: Cost-Push and Demand-Pull Inflation: Milton Friedman and the “Cruel Dilemma”

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Should-Read: Johannes A. Schwarzer: Cost-Push and Demand-Pull Inflation: Milton Friedman and the “Cruel Dilemma”: “In the 1950s and 1960s… many economists… emphasized the issue of a seemingly unavoidable inflationary pressure at or even below full employment…

…In contrast, Milton Friedman was convinced that full employment and price stability are not conflicting policy objectives. This dividing line between the two camps ultimately rested on fundamentally different views about the inflationary process: For economists of the 1950s and 1960s cost-push forces are responsible for the apparent conflict between price stability and full employment. On the other hand, Friedman, who regarded inflation to be an exclusively monetary phenomenon, rejected the notion of ongoing inflationary cost-push pressures at full employment. Besides his emphasis on the full adjustment of inflation expectations, this rejection of cost-push theories of inflation, which implied a decoupling of the two previously perceived incompatible policy objectives, was the other important element in Friedman’s attack on the Phillips curve tradeoff in his 1967 presidential address to the American Economic Association…