those suspicious economists

Profit maximization

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I read today David Colander’s article How to Market the Market: The Trouble with Profit Maximization and Aswath Damodaran‘s response in the most recent issue of the Eastern Economic Journal. By coincidence we’re also talking producer theory in my economics 101 class right now, so the timing is good. I favor Colander.

As the 101 story goes, profit maximization plus the assumptions of the perfectly competitive model generate maximal efficiency in the hypothetical economy. The Colander article establishes the historical context, entwined with the formal mathematical turn in economic theory and the methodological-ideological mashup of “free market” economics circa Friedman.

My feelings on the use and abuse of “efficiency” as a concept are well established. On top of this we have the evidence that learning about profit maximization induces students of economics and business to answer moral dilemmas involving hypothetical businesses differently than other people.

Something that bugs me is that I feel like “business” gets a pass on things that would never fly in other walks of life. I mean, sure United Airlines gets a justified backlash when a passenger is violently concussed on one of their flights, but the subtext is “well, yeah, they’re trying to make money.” Albert Burnenko was on to this at Deadspin after the United incident. The motives of the corporation are taken for granted to be inhuman.

In politics, behavior that would sink a typical politician a hundred times over rolls off the back of an “outsider” candidate from “the world of business”.

I struggle to think of examples from books, movies, or television in which firms, business, corporations—whatever you want to call them—are the good guys. Instead if you’re consuming the culture you’re getting a creeping collective paranoia about the callousness of the profit motive. This is what Angela Allan is getting at in this Atlantic article that I continue to assign regularly. I realize that the people who create art may have a particular perspective distinct from the average businessperson or person-on-the-street, but if culture creates and reflects itself then corporations are not the heroes of this story.

Damodaran concludes his response like so:

Implicit in that statement is the presumption that talking about private businesses making profits makes people feel queasy, a presumption which may be justified in the rarefied air of some parts of Vermont but it is not true in the rest of the world!

I don’t agree with this at all. Every semester I try to have my students think about what connotations they and their peers are carrying about “business”, “corporations”, “profit”. The connotations of “big business” are not positive. Economics is infected by association, and I know what the average person thinks of economists.

Or, more nuanced, the idea that a corporation is a callous automaton that is supposed to do whatever it can get away with to make as much profit as possible is so baked in that it doesn’t even seem like a bad thing anymore.”Of course” businesses are supposed to try to make as much money as possible, right?

On the other hand, Damodaran is quite right that there is nothing new in human suspicion of the pursuit of wealth just because economists came to adopt profit maximization into the canonical texts. It’s just another one of those aspects of our methodology that gives us a pedagogical PR problem.

I find profit maximization a lot riskier and more nefarious in econ 101 than utility maximization. It’s too real. It’s tricky enough to tease out the technical meaning of rational choice and preferences to sell utility maximization properly, but this ultimately lets profit maximization off very lightly since it doesn’t require the same technical ramping up. It just feels too obvious, and so I find myself having to work twice as hard to give it the interrogation it deserves. There’s no getting around either of them if you want to teach general equilibrium and the welfare theorems, and of course we do. I worry about the proportionality.

I also find it interesting the advent of behavioral economics has mobilized so much energy beating up on utility maximization, and the 20th century debates on profit maximization that Colander describes have given way to consensus. I think this is way out of proportion with the funkiness of the concepts. Utility maximization is abstract and flexible in way that profit maximization just is not. Profit is a real thing in the real world, very close to the model version of profit in its definition and spirit. Utility is not. Maybe we could pick the straw man of homo economicus up from under the bus, since I for one am much more relaxed about selling rationality than I am about selling profit maximization.

Leech the economy

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Anatole Kaletsky’s evisceration of “old economics” in the London Times may be consistent with the general backlash during the current recession, but it’s half-baked.


Today’s academic approach prevented economists from thinking about a world that is, by its very nature, unpredictable and inconsistent… others may revive the literary and anecdotal traditions of the great economists of the past… Smith and Hayek produced no real mathematical models. Their eloquent writing lacked the “analytical rigour” demanded by modern economics. And none of them ever produced an econometric forecast.

To wish simultaneously for a return to an “anecdotal tradition” and for theories to be “tested against reality” is perverse. The economy is indeed a complex system, and to draw correct conclusions on the relationships in a complex system requires more than anecdote. As epidemiology is to medicine, so econometrics is to economics; a
patient’s recovery after leeching does not prove leeching effective, and folk inference in economics would be just as counterproductive, in its own way. The “analytical rigour” so disdained by Mr. Kaletsky represents the struggle to understand and draw inference from the very real complexity that to rely on anecdote risks ignoring.

The first idea, known as “rational expectations”, maintained that capitalist economies with competitive labour markets do not need stabilising by governments.

The second idea — “efficient markets” — asserted that competitive finance always allocates resources in the most efficient way, reflecting all the best available information and forecasts about the future.

The specific “theories” attacked by Mr. Kaletsky are also grossly misrepresented. Hell, the concept of a theory is being misrepresented. An economic theory is an if-then statement, and this is not a matter of mathematics, which is after all just a language like any other. No theory, no matter how it is expressed, can ever do more than suggest the outcome that would pertain under a given set of conditions. No theory, then, can “[maintain] that capitalist economies… do not need stabilizing by governments”, or “[assert] that competitive finance always allocates resources in the most efficient way”. To attack the assumptions underlying these theories is good and rigorous; to either attack the value of their existence is to distort the purpose of academic inquiry. It is precisely because
theories are if-then that any single conclusion can be given an ‘if’ and be co-opted and championed by the politically powerful of the moment, but the “assertions” come always from the interpreter, not from the theorem.

Literary and cross-disciplinary approaches to economics can have great value in conveying economic ideas and in complementing other forms of research. What would be unacceptable, however, would be the abandonment of valuable tools to help us to understand the way things are. Perhaps attacking economists makes us feel better, but this is like blaming the shipbuilder, engineer or mathematician for a drunk captain’s crash.

And finally, because that felt a bit too serious, I must mention these:

Today’s academic economics reverses this process: if models disagree with reality, it is reality that economists want to change.

Policymakers who turned to academic economists for guidance in last year’s crisis were told in effect: “The situation you are dealing with is impossible: our theories prove that it simply cannot exist.”

This is garbage.

It’s called "the ivory tower"

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Here’s a thoughtful antidote to “boo economists!” by Barry Eichengreen at The National Interest. Perhaps the most forceful point is this:

What got us into this mess, in other words, were not the limits of scholarly imagination. It was not the failure or inability of economists to model conflicts of interest, incentives to take excessive risk and information problems that can give rise to bubbles, panics and crises. It was not that economists failed to recognize the role of social and psychological factors in decision making or that they lacked the tools needed to draw out the implications. In fact, these observations and others had been imaginatively elaborated by contributors to the literatures on agency theory, information economics and behavioral finance. Rather, the problem was a partial and blinkered reading of that literature. The consumers of economic theory, not surprisingly, tended to pick and choose those elements of that rich literature that best supported their self-serving actions. Equally reprehensibly, the producers of that theory, benefiting in ways both pecuniary and psychic, showed disturbingly little tendency to object. It is in this light that we must understand how it was that the vast majority of the economics profession remained so blissfully silent and indeed unaware of the risk of financial disaster.

Eichengreen notes that business schools, for example, are part of the production line of financial labor and ideas and so have no inventive to rock the boat; however, he also directs a lot of fire at academic economists for being part of the stitch-up. I accept that the author surely knows better than me the “pecuniary and psychic” benefits to academics from the use of their work, but a counter-hypothesis would be ignorance rather than malice, a sin of omission, not commission. How many in economics departments know what’s going on in industry – or even business schools? Is it enough to claim a quorum of the profession?
There’s probably analog to the hard sciences here. Newspaper science (cf. Bad Science, for example) is to natural science research as financial industry models are to economics research, or something like that. Imagine a house full of economists (reality show idea?) – every so often one wanders out to hand some obscure technical document to someone from the outside world, and something inevitably gets lost in translation. 

Measurement again

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From the New York Times:

During the boom years of the Bush presidency — remember them? — economic growth was an especially unreliable indicator of how most Americans were doing.

Our problem, again, is that semantically dead word ‘economics’. ‘Economic growth’ is an especially fun one, not least because it actually refers to growth in GDP, which is something that’s kind of confusing anyway. Look at this catalog of misery:
The numbers were impressive, but the gains were lopsided, benefiting executives and investors far more than hourly workers and salaried employees. Because the growth was fueled by reckless lending and borrowing, it created an illusion of wealth even as many Americans lost ground…

The government reported that the economy grew at a surprising 3.3 percent in the second quarter, while productivity (the measure of how much workers accomplish per hour) soared. Unfortunately, those bounces did not mean a rebound in the lives of most Americans.

Growth rose, but so did unemployment. Productivity surged, but wages fell. Fixing that disconnect is the central economic challenge for the next president.

Increased exports were responsible for last spring’s strong economic growth numbers. But selling more abroad has not led to more manufacturing jobs or working-class pay raises at home.

Oh my. One point is that the popular metrics – like ‘growth’ – clearly aren’t capturing everything that’s relevant, but we knew that. Another would be that it’s therefore pretty odd that we continue to use the word economics when, lo, it’s actually two degrees away from making sense: first, it usually means something like GDP or unemployment or productivity or something, and second, even that wouldn’t actually tell a proper story. 
Yet a third point is that the title of the article is “Real Life Economy”: seems like there’s a bit of a trust issue developing with the metrics the media reports when they talk about ‘the economy’. Economists look silly again, but was it their fault? And are we surprised?