James Galbraith 主流中世纪通胀医学

https://larspsyll.wordpress.com/2024/01/10/mainstream-medieval-inflation-medicine/

2024 年 1 月 10 日 15:46 | 发表于经济学 | 关闭主流中世纪通胀医学的评论

通胀在 2022 年 6 月达到顶峰，距离美联储开始加息仅三个月。当时，美联储的政策利率仅上升了 75 个基点，没有人知道它可能会上升多少。事实上，我们没有证据表明货币政策对价格走势有任何重大影响——在 2022 年 6 月的转折点之前肯定没有，此后也没有。

中世纪医学：占星术“蝙蝠书”告诉医生何时治疗患者在现代医学中，特定的诊断通常会导致特定的治疗。但在现代经济学中并非如此。相反，最近发生的事件缺乏有序的顺序，这让人想起中世纪的医学方法，根据这种方法，所有疾病都源于四种身体“体液”的失衡。而且，就像前现代医学一样，无论体液失衡的性质如何，治疗方法总是相同的。中世纪的医生抽血；现代央行行长提高利率。两者的对应关系是完全一样的，因为思维方式没有改变。

詹姆斯·K·加尔布雷斯

资本与增长

https://larspsyll.wordpress.com/category/economics/

2024 年 7 月 29 日 12:15 | 发表于经济学 | 6 条评论

我们从不同时间和地点获得大量证据表明，产出相对于资本的弹性确实很小。罗伯特·索洛（Robert Solow）在其著名的论文中开创了这种思考经济增长的方法，他估计（pdf）1900 年至 1949 年间，美国工人人均 GDP 增长中只有八分之一是由于资本存量的增加。他说，其余部分是由于技术进步。在《完全成长》（Fully Grown）一书中，迪特里希·沃尔拉斯（Dietrich Vollrath）估计，从 1950 年到 2000 年，美国人均物质资本存量的增加仅占人均实际 GDP 每年 2.2% 增长的 0.64 个百分点。 Nick Crafts 估计 (pdf)，1913 年至 1973 年间，发达经济体中不到三分之一的增长是由于资本存量增加。而 Gavan Conlon 及其同事估计 (pdf)，资本增长下降只占 2001-07 年至 2014-19 年间英国每小时生产率增长放缓的一半以下。

现在，我们不应该纠结于精确的数字。总生产函数和资本存量及折旧的衡量指标在理论和实践上都存在巨大问题：索洛本人曾说，这些指标“真的会让纯粹主义者发疯”。但这里的图景很清楚：需要大量资本支出才能实现适度的 GDP 增长。

Chris Dillow

亚当·斯密曾经写道，一个真正好的解释是“几乎天衣无缝的”。

在社会科学最重要的领域之一——经济增长中，是否存在这样的理论？

保罗·罗默在《内生技术变革》（1990 年）中提出的理论——知识是增长的最重要驱动力——可能是我们能找到的最接近的理论。

根据罗默的说法，知识——或思想——是增长的火车头。但正如艾琳·杨、皮耶罗·斯拉法等人早在 20 世纪 20 年代就表明的那样，知识也与规模收益递增有关，因此与强调规模收益递减的主流经济学并不真正相容。

主流经济学试图通过或多或少用人力资本取代知识/思想来拯救自己。但罗默的开创性思想不应与人力资本相混淆。尽管有些人对现代内生增长理论中创意和人力资本的区别存疑，但罗默的文章《新卡尔多事实：创意、制度、人口和人力资本》中的这段话简洁易懂地解释了两者的区别：

竞争性商品和非竞争性商品之间的区别在总体层面上很容易被模糊，但在任何微观经济环境中都不可避免。例如，想象一栋正在建造的房子。它所在的土地、卷尺形式的资本和木匠的人力资本都是竞争性商品。它们可以用来建造这所房子，但不能同时用于建造其他房子。与此形成对比的是勾股定理，木匠通过构造一个边长比例为 3、4 和 5 的三角形来隐式地使用勾股定理。这个想法是非竞争性的。世界上的每个木匠都可以同时使用它来创建一个直角。

当然，人力资本和创意在生产和使用上紧密相连。正如资本产生产出，放弃的产出可用于生产资本一样，人力资本产生创意，而创意在教育过程中用于产生人力资本。然而，创意和人力资本本质上是不同的。在微观层面，我们三角形示例中的人力资本实际上是由木匠头脑中神经元之间的新连接组成的，这是一种竞争性商品。3-4-5 三角形是非竞争性创意。在宏观层面，如果不区分创意和人力资本，就无法断言偏向技能的技术变革正在增加对教育的需求。

垄断竞争、产品差异化和收益递增（例如由创意之间的非竞争性产生）与纯粹的竞争和简单的“看不见的手”教条根本不相容。主流经济学教科书作者假装收益递增可以无缝地融入既定范式，从而扭曲了事实。

Mainstream medieval inflation medicine

https://larspsyll.wordpress.com/2024/01/10/mainstream-medieval-inflation-medicine/

10 Jan, 2024 at 15:46 | Posted in Economics | Comments Offon Mainstream medieval inflation medicine

Inflation peaked back in June 2022, only three months after the Fed started hiking interest rates. At that time, the Fed’s policy rate had risen just 75 basis points, and no one knew how much higher it might go. In fact, we have no evidence that monetary policy had any significant effect on the course taken by prices – certainly not before the June 2022 turning point, and not thereafter, either.

Medieval medicine: astrological 'bat books' that told doctors when to treat  patientsIn modern medicine, a specific diagnosis normally leads to a specific treatment. But that is not the case in modern economics. Instead, the absence of an orderly sequence in the recent episode recalls the medieval approach to medicine, according to which all disease stemmed from an imbalance of the four bodily “humors.” And, as in pre-modern medicine, the treatment is always the same, regardless of the nature of the humoral imbalance. Medieval doctors drew blood; modern central bankers raise interest rates. The parallel is exact, because the thinking hasn’t change.

James K. Galbraith

Capital and growth

https://larspsyll.wordpress.com/category/economics/

29 Jul, 2024 at 12:15 | Posted in Economics | 6 Comments

We've lots of evidence from different times and places that the elasticity of output with respect to capital is indeed small. In his famous paper which kickstarted this approach to thinking about economic growth, Robert Solow estimated (pdf) that only one-eighth of the increase in US GDP per worker between 1900 and 1949 was due to increases in the capital stock. The rest, he said, was due to technical progress. In Fully Grown, Dietrich Vollrath estimated that from 1950 to 2000 a rise in the US’s physical capital stock per person accounted for only 0.64 percentage points of the 2.2 per cent annual rise in real GDP per capita. Nick Crafts has estimated (pdf) that less than one-third of growth in advanced economies between 1913 and 1973 was due to a bigger capital stock. And Gavan Conlon and colleagues have estimated (pdf) that a fall in capital growth accounted for less than half of the slowdown in the UK’s hourly productivity growth between 2001-07 and 2014-19.

Now, we shouldn’t be fixated on precise numbers here. Aggregate production functions and measures of both the capital stock and depreciation have massive theoretical and practical problems: Solow himself said that such measures “will really drive a purist mad.” But the picture here is clear: it takes a lot of capital spending to deliver only moderate increases in GDP.

Chris Dillow

Adam Smith once wrote that a really good explanation is “practically seamless.”

Is there any such theory within one of the most important fields of social sciences — economic growth?

Paul Romer’s theory presented in Endogenous Technological Change (1990) — where knowledge is made the most important driving force of growth — is probably as close as we get.

Knowledge — or ideas — are according to Romer the locomotive of growth. But as Allyn Young, Piero Sraffa and others had shown already in the 1920s, knowledge is also something that has to do with increasing returns to scale and therefore not really compatible with mainstream economics with its emphasis on decreasing returns to scale.

Mainstream economics has tried to save itself by more or less substituting human capital for knowledge/ideas. But Romer’s pathbreaking ideas should not be confused with human capital. Although some have problems with the distinction between ideas and human capital in modern endogenous growth theory, this passage from Romer’s article The New Kaldor Facts: Ideas, Institutions, Population, and Human Capital gives a succinct and accessible account of the difference:

The distinction between rival and nonrival goods is easy to blur at the aggregate level but inescapable in any microeconomic setting. Picture, for example, a house that is under construction. The land on which it sits, capital in the form of a measuring tape, and the human capital of the carpenter are all rival goods. They can be used to build this house but not simultaneously any other. Contrast this with the Pythagorean Theorem, which the carpenter uses implicitly by constructing a triangle with sides in the proportions of 3, 4 and 5. This idea is nonrival. Every carpenter in the world can use it at the same time to create a right angle.

Of course, human capital and ideas are tightly linked in production and use. Just as capital produces output and forgone output can be used to produce capital, human capital produces ideas and ideas are used in the educational process to produce human capital. Yet ideas and human capital are fundamentally distinct. At the micro level, human capital in our triangle example literally consists of new connections between neurons in a carpenter’s head, a rival good. The 3-4-5 triangle is the nonrival idea. At the macro level, one cannot state the assertion that skill-biased technical change is increasing the demand for education without distinguishing between ideas and human capital.

Monopolistic competition, product differentiation and increasing returns — generated by e. g. nonrivalry between ideas — are simply not compatible with pure competition and the simplistic invisible hand dogma. Pretending that increasing returns are possible to seamlessly incorporate into the received paradigm, mainstream economics textbook writers transmogrify truth.