The Profit Doctrine

Economists of the Neoliberal Era

Robert Chernomas, Ian Hudson

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783719945
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Wirtschaftspolitik

The economics profession has a lot to answer for. After the late 1970s, the ideas of influential economists have justified policies that have made the world more prone to economic crisis, remarkably less equal, more polluted and less secure than it might be. How could ideas and policies that proved to be such an abject failure come to dominate the economic landscape? By critically examining the work of the most famous economists of the neoliberal period including Alan Greenspan, Milton Friedman, and Robert Lucas, the authors Robert Chernomas and Ian Hudson demonstrate that many of those who rose to prominence did so primarily because of their defence of, and contribution to, rising corporate profits and not their ability to predict or explain economic events. An important and controversial book, The Profit Doctrineexposes the uses and abuses of mainstream economic canons, identify those responsible and reaffirm the primacy of political economy.

1

Prophets and Profits

As an economist, I often find myself defending “bad guys”—companies outsourcing American jobs, gas stations gouging consumers with high prices, Wal-Mart undercutting small retailers with low prices, Mexican immigrants sneaking into our country, the Chinese fixing their exchange rate, American companies opening sweat shops abroad, foreign companies dumping cheap goods onto our markets, and pharmaceutical companies profiting off other people’s sickness and misfortune. Sometimes I feel like a defense attorney for economic criminals.

Unlike real defense attorneys, however, I get clients that are mostly innocent. The study of economics provides a cogent defense for these alleged evil doers.

Greg Mankiw (2006)

Despite the enormity of recent events, the principles of economics are largely unchanged. Students still need to learn about the gains from trade, supply and demand, the efficiency properties of market outcomes, and so on. These topics will remain the bread-and-butter of introductory courses.

Greg Mankiw (2009)

From 2003 to 2005, Gregory Mankiw was the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for President George W. Bush. In 2006, he became an economic adviser to Mitt Romney, a role he maintained during Romney’s 2012 presidential bid. He is a professor of economics at Harvard and was paid a $1.4m advance to write his best-selling textbook Principles of Economics. Economic giant Paul Samuelson once claimed, “Let those who will, write the nation’s laws if I can write its textbooks” (quoted in Chandra, 2009). Despite student protests at the narrowness of Mankiw’s teaching—in 2011, students walked out of his principles course in protest over his “limited view of economics” (Concerned Students of Economics 10, 2011)—it is this version of the discipline that has been largely taught in classrooms around the United States. As we will demonstrate throughout this book, Mankiw’s unshakeable belief in the efficiency of the market system reflected the dominant trend in the field of economics after the late 1970s.¹

A standard list of economic goals and priorities would include stable growth, price stability, full employment, and the efficient allocation of resources. Some might even add to this list an environmentally sustainable economy and a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth and income. But the evidence suggests that the post-1970s period in the United States can be characterized as one of instability and inequality relative to the “Golden Age” that preceded it. After the 2008 collapse, critics inside and outside economics accused those dominating the profession for the last three decades of behaving like an “ostrich with its head in the sand,” suffering from “groupthink,” and promoting “Zombie” economics. While there is some truth to each of these claims, we believe they all miss the central charge.

We will argue that the economists of this era who rose to prominence (like Mankiw) did so not because of their contributions to the standard list of economic goals, but primarily because of their contribution to corporate profits and the wealth of the business class. An efficient, healthy economy shared by all was never a likely outcome of the policies advocated by those who had the power to assert their own interests. And those possessing that power got their way with the help of the economics profession. This period in American history, including the post-2008 years, has been an unqualified success for the American business class. While economics is ostensibly guided by commitments to scientific rigor and objectivity, this boon to business was the predictable result of the specific policy recommendations of those that came to dominate the profession.

How Do “Bad” Economic Ideas Develop?

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas … soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

John Maynard Keynes (1936, p. 383)

Keynes’s eloquent account of the importance of economic ideas has been widely used by economists across the ideological spectrum to explain the influence that the profession wields. He suggests that it is the “gradual encroachment of ideas” that influences policy. Keynes also seems to be suggesting that “wrong” or even “evil” ideas of an “academic scribbler” can come to dominate the profession and influence “madmen in authority.” Indeed, after the economics profession appeared to fail so miserably during the economic crisis that started in 2008, critics from inside and outside the discipline queued up to point out how wrong (or even evil) economics had become.

If outsiders think the economics profession is a homogeneous discipline where consensus is easily achieved and genuine debate an infrequent visitor, there has been strong criticism of the profession from within, especially since the 2008 economic meltdown. Jeffrey Sachs has been a professor at Columbia and Harvard. He is a special adviser to the UN on its Millennium Development Goals. He has been very critical of recent trends in economics: “What I know about our training, since the early 1980s, the way we train people to think has left them, in mainstream economics and, I would say in mainstream politics, has left them almost unable anymore to distinguish the surface from the underlying reality” (Sachs, 2008). People who would view themselves as slightly further on the fringes of mainstream economics have been even more critical (for a more complete look at economists’ opinions on their colleagues’ work, see Box 1.1). An important theme of this book is that these internal criticisms were seldom heard, and even more rarely paid attention to, between the late 1970s and the 2008 crisis. Further, there were important limitations to the criticisms of those economists, like Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, who did manage to make their objections heard.

Academic observers from outside the field of economics have been even more scathing. Akeel Bilgrami, a philosophy professor at Columbia University claimed that

… economics is perhaps about the worst offender among disciplines in inuring itself in alternative frameworks of thought and analysis. In fact, I would venture to say that I have never come across a discipline which combines as much extraordinary sophistication and high-powered intelligence with as much drivel. (Bilgrami, 2008)

In the wake of the 2008 economic collapse, even the popular media vilified the profession. Headlines in the New York Times argued that academic economists were not sufficiently repentant for their role in creating the economic crash, with headlines like “Ivory Tower Unswayed by Crashing Economy,” and “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?” Other publications were in a more punitive mood. The Financial Times wanted to “Sweep Economists Off Their Throne,” and The Atlantic opted for the corporal “Will Economists Escape a Whipping?” Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail weighed in with “Economics Has Met the Enemy, and it is Economics.” The fact that it is almost impossible to imagine another area of academics being the subject of such irate headlines underscores both the level of genuine anger at the failings of the profession, but also the fact that Keynes was right in claiming that it had so much influence.

Box 1.1 Economists on economics

The 2008 crisis has resulted in some serious soul-searching within economics. Much of the self-criticism revolved around the very narrow nature of what it means to study economics after 1980.

Perry Mehrling, a professor of economics at New York’s Columbia University says his graduate students are growing increasingly frustrated by the tendency to “define the discipline by its tools instead of its subject matter … they find little relationship between the mathematical models in class and the world outside the door” (quoted in Basen, 2011).

Robert J. Shiller, an economist at Yale, claimed that the reason the profession failed to foresee the financial collapse was “groupthink”: “Wander too far and you find yourself on the fringe. The pattern is self-replicating. Graduate students who stray too far from the dominant theory and methods seriously reduce their chances of getting an academic job” (quoted in Cohen, 2009).

Willem Buiter, a London School of Economics professor and a former member of the Bank of England monetary policy committee was especially scathing: “The typical graduate macroeconomics and monetary economics training received at Anglo-American universities during the past 30 years or so may have set back by decades serious investigations of aggregate economic behavior and economic policy-relevant understanding. It was a privately and socially costly waste of time and other resources. Most mainstream macroeconomic theoretical innovations since the 1970s … have turned out to be self-referential, inward-looking distractions at best. Research tended to be motivated by the internal logic, intellectual sunk capital and aesthetic puzzles of established research programs, rather than by a powerful desire to understand how the economy works—let alone how the economy works during times of stress and financial instability. So the economics profession was caught unprepared when the crisis struck” (Buiter, 2009).

James K. Galbraith, an economist at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, and long-time critic of orthodox, mainstream economics, was not optimistic about these criticisms leading to any real change in the discipline: “I don’t detect any change at all.” Academic economists are “like an ostrich with its head in the sand.” “It’s business as usual,” he said “I’m not conscious that there is a fundamental re-examination going on in journals” (quoted in Cohen, 2009).

The most systematic and, perhaps, damning indictment of the state of modern economics can be found in Australian economist James Quiggan’s book, Zombie Economics (2010). Like Galbraith, he is pessimistic that the flaws in economics that were revealed by the 2008 crisis will lead to any real change in the discipline: “Economists who based their analysis on these ideas contributed to the mistakes that caused the crisis, failed to predict it or even recognize it when it was happening, and had nothing useful to offer as a policy response.

Three years later, however, the … reanimation process has taken place in the realm of ideas. Theories, factual claims, and policy proposals that seemed dead and buried in the wake of the crisis are now clawing their way through the soft earth, ready to wreak havoc once again” (Quiggan, 2010a).

The focus of all these critics is that those dominating the profession won the war of ideas to the detriment of society. How could ideas and policies that proved to be such an abject failure come to dominate the economic landscape? Surely, some “academic scribbler” influencing “Madmen in authority” is not an acceptable explanation of the evolution of ideas or policy. Keynes mystified the origin of these ideas and, more importantly, trivialized the means by which they rise to the top. His implication that there is an evolutionary and progressive character to the development of ideas obscures the existing power structure in society. Marx’s reflection on an earlier era is a better place to begin if one is looking for a conceptual framework to understand how ideas take hold in society. Marx argued that once the economic system of capitalism became dominant in the nineteenth century, economic debate was

… no longer a question, [of] whether this theorem or that was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harmful, expedient or inexpedient, politically dangerous or not. In place of disinterested inquirers, there were hired prize fighters; in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and the evil intent of apologetic. (Marx, 1873, p. 25)

This is not to suggest that Marx’s “prize fighters” of intellectual ideas are being dishonest with themselves or the public. Rather, their ideas, in which they no doubt genuinely believe, are promoted, popularized and enacted into policy by those who stand to benefit from them.

Unlike Keynes, who insists that the contest for intellectual dominance is a contest of ideas, Marx argues that it is a contest of power. Economic ideas, and the policies that arise from them, have profoundly different impacts on different groups in society. It is, therefore, in any group’s interest to promote those ideas from which it will benefit, while discrediting those that are harmful. The question then becomes, what is the capacity for different groups to promote certain ideas and dismiss others? This depends, most obviously, on the financial, political and institutional resources that they can bring to bear but also on their coherence as a group and their ability to act in concert.

As Marx also suggests, ideas are not formed, disseminated and popularized in a context-free intellectual vacuum. Instead, the ideas that come forward, the extent to which they are believed, and whether they will be adopted as policy are influenced by the social and economic contexts in which they emerge. This could be seen in the fallout from the 2008 crisis. After the economic collapse, there was much more opportunity for critics of the prevailing economic wisdom than was the case prior to the crisis. The ideas of the critics had not changed. Economists like Shiller and Galbraith had been railing against some of the more conservative of the dominant economic ideas, and the policies that stemmed from them, for years without being given a great deal of credence until the crisis. Yet, the lack of real change within economics departments, or in public policy, also demonstrates that it is not only economic conditions that influence ideas. As Quiggan suggested, economic policy that was thoroughly discredited in the eyes of many by the economic crisis still appears to rule the day. This demonstrates that it is not simply economic conditions, broadly speaking, that influence economic ideas, but the way in which those economic conditions affect the material interests of those groups in society that have the capacity to influence the intellectual climate.

The economics profession has a lot to answer for. After the late 1970s, the ideas of influential economists have justified policies that have made the world more prone to economic crisis, remarkably less equal, more polluted and less safe than it might be. We seek to explain why a particular type of economist became so influential, especially from the late 1970s, and demonstrate the damage that their policies have wrought.

Since the 1970s, a dominant group of famous economists have swayed the direction of the discipline, and the policy that it influences, with easily identified distributional consequences. Starting with Milton Friedman, we trace the intellectual history of a common core of economic assumptions and beliefs about using the autonomous individual as the centerpiece for economic analysis, a commitment to formalized modeling, faith in market forces and the failure to recognize power relationships in society. We trace the rise of this dominant trend in the discipline by examining the works of its most famous adherents to demonstrate the limits of the mainstream economists’ models and show how implementation of these ideas created the economic context for many of the economic difficulties that we face today. While these economists have helped create an economic policy environment that has proved catastrophic for many, it has also proved remarkably beneficial for the privileged minority, which partly explains why their ideas were greeted with such enthusiasm.

The Book in Brief

Chapter 2 examines how certain ideas came to dominate the discipline itself and the broader policy debate in society. Why do some ideas become accepted, institutionalized and popularized while others are ignored? We argue that economic knowledge is not a Darwinian process where superior ideas overcome their inferior predecessors. Rather, the ideas that dominated the discipline were shaped by a correlated combination of commitments to idealized techniques, methodological individualism and the market. Further, the adoption of certain economic ideas over others has been more a result of the imperatives of the economic environment of the time, and the institutional clout mustered by those who benefit from economic policy, than a battle of academic ideas taking place in a context-free vacuum of abstract intellectual debate. As a result, for over three decades, income, status and Nobel prizes have been the reward for those who created and justified economic policy that has had debilitating effects on the majority of citizens while benefitting a privileged minority.

Chapter 3 provides a concise review of the current economic state of affairs in the United States. This chapter lays out the economic trends that are the result of enacting the economic ideas documented in the rest of the book. The last 35 years have featured stagnating incomes for most Americans alongside large income gains for the rich, creating growing inequality. For the privilege of modest income gain...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Boxes, Figures and Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Prophets and Profits
• 2 The Contest of Economic Ideas: Survival of the Richest
• 3 The Consequences of Economic Ideas
• 4 Milton Friedman: The Godfather of the Age of Instability and Inequality
• 5 The Deregulationists: Public Choice and Private Gain
• 6 The Great Vacation: Rational Expectations and Real Business Cycles
• 7 Bursting Bubbles: Finance, Crisis and the Efficient Market Hypothesis
• 8 Economists Go to Washington: Ideas in Action
• 9 Conclusion: Dissenters and Victors
• Bibliography
• Index