Putting a price on procrastination

Is there anything that economists cannot explain?

http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/12/30/procrastination.economics/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

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Charity

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Richard Wolff: Capitalism’s Crisis Through A Marxian Lens

Richard Wolff offers some comments on the crisis and urges us to look beyond capitalism.

The problem, to put it simply:

In Marxian terms, the current crisis emerged from the workings of the capitalist class structure.

[…]

To keep capitalism is to suffer its chronic instability. To deal effectively with capitalism’s recurring crises requires changing to a non-capitalist class structure

Some history:

Since the mid-1970s, workers’ average real wages stopped rising.

[…]

However, workers’ productivity kept rising (more machines, more pressure, and more skills). They produced ever more for their employers to sell, yet the employers paid them no more.

[…]

In effect, US capitalism thereby substituted rising loans for rising wages to workers.

Some questions:

Will responses to this latest capitalist crisis continue to ignore or deny the role of capitalism’s class structure? Will the crisis consequences of allowing capitalist boards of directors to appropriate and distribute surpluses go unrecognized?

A solution: New, non-capitalist class structures.  Wolff does not go into too much detail here.  If you are interested, try looking here or here or here.

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Hyman Minsky was Right

I enjoy reading about how non-mainstream economists were right about the financial system. After reading Minsky in political economy, it was hard for me to see how anyone could disagree with his financial instability hypothesis. Via Economist’s View, this post at CityEconomist offers a nice summary of Minsky’s work, and how his thought is now as influential as ever. One line sums Minsky up best:

If Hy had been listened to more than he was in a deregulatory environment, we would have seen less permissiveness – Ninja mortgages, lax SEC oversight, highly leveraged instruments and institutions, Treasury deficits – during the credit runup.

Yet another “if only” for the heterodoxically inclined to think about. Full text is below the fold.

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Capitalism in Crisis: John Bellamy Foster

Capitalism in Crisis: John Bellamy Foster on the Financial Crisis

…and The Onion article he cites.

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Economic Fragments 12/27

Nation’s Wealthy Cruelly Deprived of True Meaning of Christmas (The Onion)

I certainly hope poor people don’t take what they don’t have for granted…

War On Terror Nears $1 Trillion Mark

Even after adjusting for inflation, that’s four times more than America spent fighting World War I, and more than 10 times the cost of 1991’s Persian Gulf War (90% of which was paid for by U.S. allies). The war on terrorism looks set to surpass the costs the Korean and Vietnam wars combined, topped only by World War II’s price tag of $3.5 trillion.

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“Economists’ Pretensions About Science”

Saw this over at Economist’s View (great blog, btw), reposted from Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy. It speaks for itself, and also, it’s the Eve of Christmas so I don’t feel like adding a comment.

Massimo Pigliucci, professor in the departments of Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook, NY, contributes an important piece of work in the Blog,
Rationallyspeakingout.org (‘a site devoted to positive scepticism’) (HERE):

“Economics learns a thing or two from evolutionary biology”

“Economics is supposed to be a solid discipline, founded on complex mathematical models (and we all know math is really, really difficult). They even give Nobel prizes to economists, for crying out loud! And yet, economics has always had to fight off the same reputation of being a “soft” science that has plagued sociology, psychology, and to some extent even some of the biological sciences, like ecology and evolutionary biology. Indeed, like practitioners in those other fields of inquiry, some economists admit of being guilty of “physics envy,” that is, of using the physical sciences as the model for what their field ought to be like. Turns out even the assumption that a good science should be modeled on physics is “flawed,” to use Greenspan’s apt phrase.

“A recent article by Chelsea Wald in Science (12 December 2008) puts things in perspective by asking how it is possible that so many smart people in the financial sector made irrational decisions over a period of years, despite clear data showing there was a problem, and eventually leading to a worldwide economic crisis that is at the least poking at, if not shaking, the foundations of capitalism itself.

Part of the answer is to be found in the persistent idea in economics that “markets” work because people are rational agents who act in their own self-interest and have perfect, instantaneous access to relevant information about the businesses they are considering investing in. Economists are not stupid, and they know very well that perfect rationality, complete information and instant access are all light years away from the reality of how markets operate. And in fact recent models have relaxed these assumptions to some extent. But it is so much more tractable to model things that way! After all, physicists do it too: remember those problems in Physics 101 that started “consider a spherical cow…”?

“Perhaps not surprisingly, there is another science that has been inspiring economists for some time now: evolutionary biology. The old “efficient markets hypothesis” underlying classical models is being replaced by the “adaptive markets hypothesis,” where Adam Smith’s invisible hand becomes more directly analogous to natural selection.”

”As evolutionary biologists have found out, natural selection is not an optimizing process, but a satisficing one, meaning that it produces whatever outcome happened to be achievable at a particular historical moment and that works “well enough” for the problem at hand. Moreover, it does so while “wasting” a lot of resources and often marching straight into dead ends (just think that over 99% of the species that ever existed went extinct). The emerging picture is much more realistic than the rationalist paradigm, but it sure is a lot more messy too.”

“There is another lesson to be learned from evolutionary biology that will not make economists, or the public at large, particularly happy: when complex systems evolve over time the paths they take is contingent on historical accidents (as opposed to being deterministic, like the laws of macro-physics, outside quantum mechanics). Sociologists, psychologists, ecologists and evolutionary biologists will readily tell their economic colleagues that it is certainly possible to explain past events (the extinction of the dinosaurs, the dot-com bubble) by the use of sufficiently complex causal-historical models. What seems to be out of reach, however, is precisely what economists want most: predicting the future, the hallmark of “good” science.”

“The moral of the story is that all of the above is not a failure of economics, sociology, psychology, ecology or evolutionary biology. It is the predictable outcome of the fact that these sciences deal with complex, historical systems, unlike much (though not all) of physics. The real assumption we need to get rid of is the highly persistent and pernicious one that physics is the golden standard by which all other sciences ought to be measured. Now if we only could convince federal funding agencies of that…”

Comment
What a breath of fresh air from Professor Massimo Pigliucci! I wish (more in hope than expectation) that fellow economists will read all of his article. But because there are large dollops of research-grant money – and even bigger salaries from financial institutions (and government agencies) – available to smart-talking economists, who tell the grant agencies exactly what they want to hear, there is a steady demand for the services of ‘future predictors’ and no amount of their constant failures to do better than tossing a ten-pence coin could do, will curb the willingness to believe those in the prediction business.

It’s at least as bad as the historians of the immediate past, when they already know what has happened, who cannot agree on what caused, led to, or contributed to whatever is the latest ‘fine mess’ we’re in.

The historical precedents for this quite silly state of affairs goes back to classical times, and almost certainly farther back than that. Romans believed in ‘omens’ and fortune tellers, and even great generals, who pitted their lives against formidable foes, eagerly listened to what soothsayers and mystics had to say about the next few hours in decisive battles.

Among economists, we have bought the unscientific myth that if we spend a century creating beautiful mathematical models of an imaginary economy, without people in all their complexity and unpredictability, and our competence is judged by our understanding of the model, but not the reality of real economies!

We are a ‘hard’ science and much ‘superior’ to ‘wishy-washy sociology, psychology and history, even though it is well-known that humans are not ‘well behaved’ like physical objects. We are not like wooden pieces on a chess board, as Adam Smith put it.

It is worrying too that just as more economists begin to realise that “the old ‘efficient markets hypothesis’ underlying classical models is being replaced by the ‘adaptive markets hypothesis,’ into which realisation, the oldest nonsense in modern economics (invented as a mass myth from the 1950s), is being re-introduced into the latter, under the guise that the metaphor of “Adam Smith’s invisible hand”, such that it is to be regarded as “more directly analogous to natural selection.”

Please spare us from this spurious nonsense; it’s bad enough that the proponents of the so-called scientific basis of economics have got away with their claims that the mystical disembodied body part was the ‘most important idea’ of modern economics, which is something that they never got from the texts of Adam Smith (see my paper: ‘Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand: from metaphor to myth’, 2008 and downloadable from the homer page of Lost Legacy).

The myth of the invisible hand is a fabrication to support propaganda for corporate bodies to behave with all the monopolistic spirits and protectionism of the ‘merchants and manufacturers’ of his day, against whom Adam Smith railed in Wealth Of Nations because they persuaded legislators and those who influenced them (and they ‘bought’ not a few) to assist them in narrowing the competition and raising prices.

Follow the link to read Professor Massimo Pigliucci’s short article HERE

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Happy Holidays

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Economic Fragments 12/24

Outside Agitator: Naomi Klein

When she arrived back at university in 1996, she discovered that everything had changed. During her previous stint as an undergraduate, she had spent all her time protesting the underrepresentation of women and minorities in the curriculum and the media; campus politics in 1989 had mostly meant identity politics. But students in 1996 weren’t interested in identity; what they talked about was economics. At the time, corporations were starting to make inroads into schools: soft-drink companies were negotiating exclusive deals; advertisements were appearing in bathrooms. There was a feeling in the air that corporations were getting too powerful—more powerful than governments, but not accountable to anyone except their shareholders.

[…]

“The crash on Wall Street should be for Friedmanism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for authoritarian Communism, an indictment of an ideology”

Stocks Plummet, Shoplifting Takes-off

As the economy has weakened, shoplifting has increased, and retail security experts say the problem has grown worse this holiday season. Shoplifters are taking everything from compact discs and baby formula to gift cards and designer clothing.

Police departments across the country say that shoplifting arrests are 10 percent to 20 percent higher this year than last. The problem is probably even greater than arrest records indicate since shoplifters are often banned from stores rather than arrested.

Much of the increase has come from first-time offenders…making rash decisions in a pinch, the authorities say. But the ease with which stolen goods can be sold on the Internet has meant a bigger role for organized crime rings, which also engage in receipt fraud, fake price tagging and gift card schemes, the police and security experts say.

But At Least You Still Look Good: Botox Treatments On the Rise Despite Economic Downturn

Nearly three out of four plastic surgeons who responded to a survey this fall reported that demand has increased or held steady for minimally invasive procedures, including Allergan Inc.’s Botox antiwrinkle drug.

Increasingly, many aesthetic patients view their treatments as professional self-preservation rather than as a personal indulgence. Appearances make a difference, says Kathleen Hudson, a 57-year-old marketing consultant in Falls Church, Va. “If you’re in the business world and you want to be competitive with the younger people, you need to stay on top of your game,” she says.

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The Consumer’s Dilemma

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