Secular stagnation and failed interpretations​ of Keynes

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Lars Pålsson Syll
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from Lars Syll

Commenting on the Stiglitz-Summers debate on secular stagnation, Roger Farmer writes:

We cannot continue to make unfounded assertions about economic policy using the failed interpretation of the General Theory that evolved from John Hicks’ attempt to reconcile Keynes with the classics. The current manifestation of that approach is so-called New Keynesian Economics, which Summers himself has rightly rejected because it is inconsistent with secular stagnation. But it is not enough to assert that secular stagnation is possible. It is time to confront alternative theories of secular stagnation with empirical evidence, as I have done. The assertion that money wages are downwardly rigid is not, in my view, a credible explanation of persistent unemployment. Nor was it a credible explanation for Keynes, who asserted that his theory did not rely on the assumption of rigid wages …

In my work, expectations – or so-called animal spirits – are a new and independent fundamental that determines the steady-state unemployment rate. When we feel rich, we are rich. And if animal spirits are indeed fundamental, it becomes important to understand the factors that determine swings in confidence.

If a large dose of expansionary fiscal policy is not the answer, what is? My response is that the right way to respond to financial crises is with policies that restore the value of private assets. And the right way to prevent financial crises in the first place is to intervene in the financial markets to moderate swings in asset values and to head off recessions before they happen.

Maintaining that economics is a science in the ‘true knowledge’ business, I cannot but concur with Farmer. We have to remain skeptical of the pretences and aspirations of ‘New Keynesian’ macroeconomics. So far, I cannot really see that it has yielded very much in terms of realist and relevant economic knowledge. And there’s nothing new or Keynesian about it. 

‘New Keynesianism’ doesn’t have its roots in Keynes. It has its intellectual roots in Paul Samuelson’s — partly following in John Hicks’ footsteps — ill-founded ‘neoclassical synthesis’ project, whereby he thought he could save the ‘classical’ view of the market economy as a (long run) self-regulating market clearing equilibrium mechanism, by adding some (short run) frictions and rigidities in the form of sticky wages and prices.

But — putting a sticky-price lipstick on the ‘classical’ pig sure won’t do. The ‘New Keynesian’ pig is still neither Keynesian nor new.

The rather one-sided emphasis of usefulness and its concomitant instrumentalist justification cannot hide that ‘New Keynesians’ cannot give supportive evidence for their considering it fruitful to analyze macroeconomic structures and events as the aggregated result of optimizing representative actors. After having analyzed some of its ontological and epistemological foundations, yours truly cannot but conclude that ‘New Keynesian’ macroeconomics, on the whole,​ has not delivered anything else than ‘as if’ unreal and irrelevant models.

The purported strength of New Classical and ‘New Keynesian’ macroeconomics is that they have a firm anchorage in preference-based microeconomics, and especially the decisions taken by inter-temporal utility maximizing ‘forward-looking’ individuals.

To some of us, however, this has come at too high a price. The almost quasi-religious insistence that macroeconomics has to have microfoundations – without ever presenting neither ontological nor epistemological justifications for this claim – has put a blind eye to the weakness of the whole enterprise of trying to depict a complex economy based on an all-embracing representative actor equipped with superhuman knowledge, forecasting abilities and forward-looking rational expectations.

And then, of course, there is that weird view on unemployment that makes you wonder on which planet those ‘New Keynesians’ live …