The political right’s dangerous support for economic quackery

You may remember Niall Ferguson’s disastrous attempt to claim that George Osborne’s imagined success proved Keynesians and Keynes were wrong. That kind of nonsense makes it into a serious paper like the Financial Times because it is written by a famous history professor, or maybe on other occasions by a senior policy maker. But for those who only read this serious press, it is in fact one example of many. There is a little cottage industry out there of so called journalists and think tanks who peddle economic quackery to support right wing policies.

Take, for example, this recent piece by James Bartholomew in the Spectator. Deficit spending by the government never works, he claims. Presumably the opposite also holds, which is that fiscal consolidation (aka austerity) never hurt anyone. Mainstream economics has it all wrong. One of the skills writers like this have is to make very little evidence seem like a lot. Mr. Bartholomew has two bits of evidence.

1. Papers by Alesina et al. He is quite right they briefly gained a lot of influence in Europe in particular, among policy makers who wanted to cut deficits and liked to argue this would not reduce output. What Bartholomew does not tell you is that following this policy of cutting deficits, we had a second Eurozone recession. Nor does he tell you that subsequent analysis by the IMF and others explained why these authors got the results they did, because of countervailing influences that did not apply in the Eurozone in the years following 2010. Nor does he mention the huge number of past and recent studies that confirm fiscal policy does what Keynesians say it does. The only other authority he quotes is Tim Congdon.
   
   
2. Lots of historical examples where fiscal action did not, supposedly, have the expected impact. The thing is, anyone can write this kind of stuff about anything in macroeconomics, because in the economy there are lots of things going on. I’m sure I could come up with an equally impressive list to show you that monetary policy has no effect. Just look at 2009 and 2010: interest rates on the floor and the economy still crashed. That is why economists do econometric studies, the overwhelming (like 95%) majority of which show fiscal policy drives the economy in the expected direction.

To his credit Bartholomew does admit that logically Keynesian policies should work. But there is an awful lot he does not tell you. He does not tell you that the reason it should work is that additional private sector demand does increase output (except perhaps in booms), and that this, rather than fiscal stimulus, was the key insight that Keynes had. It is the insight that every central bank uses to guide monetary policy, using Keynesian models. Models that all say that without countervailing factors fiscal stimulus increases output and fiscal consolidation reduces it. There is no way that his article is a measured piece of journalism. It is designed to discredit the economics that is taught to every student the world over.

There is plenty of this on the left too: people who want to tell you mainstream economics is all wrong. Yet until very recently at least, the influence of this group on politicians on the mainstream left had been minimal, and this group has a far smaller public presence than their equivalent on the right. On the right they are ubiquitous.

Policy makers on the right might tell you that of course they are not influenced by this group, but instead consult serious economic analysis that you can find in mainstream universities. But how can we tell if they are telling the truth. When campaigning senior politicians on the right seem quite happy to talk about the government maxing out its credit card, the classic first year undergraduate ‘schoolboy’ error of treating the government like a household. In the UK, while the fiscal strategy of the Labour government was written up in Treasury documents that referenced the academic literature, there is nothing equivalent from the current government. Even the most technical of Osborne’s speeches just seemed horribly out of date in terms of its macroeconomics.

This is dangerous for two reasons. The first is that it can lead to major macroeconomic policy errors: in the UK think money supply targets, entering the ERM at an overvalued rate, and 2010 fiscal consolidation, in the Eurozone think of the Stability and Growth Pact and the 2011-13 recession. The second is that it encourages a lazy anti-science attitude, all too evident in climate change denial. If the political right in the UK and Europe want to see where this could lead, look across the Atlantic. With the left in disarray and flirting with non-mainstream economics, the right has an excellent opportunity (when a new Chancellor takes over in the UK, for example) to re-engage with mainstream economics, and cast off the quackery of the Ferguson and Bartholomew ilk.

Ferguson tries again

Perhaps stung by the widespread criticism of the way he treated data in his original FT op-ed piece, Professor Niall Ferguson has had another go. This new piece is distinctly better than the original. For example, he now acknowledges that “From 2010 to 2015, average inflation-adjusted weekly earnings fell more than under any postwar government.” Let me focus here on his central claim, which is that the economy did far better than Keynesians had predicted, and that Keynesians have refused to acknowledge this. (There are some other problematic points in the piece, but they are largely distractions from the main idea.)

Rather than get into the pointless business of comparing quotes, let us do this the academic way, which is to see what the Keynesian model says. Recall this is the model that pretty well all central banks use to regulate the economy. Everyone agrees that UK austerity was at its most intense in the first two years of Osborne’s Chancellorship. The UK Office of Budget Responsibility, which does the number crunching for Osborne, calculates using standard (although conservative in the current context) Keynesian multipliers that austerity in those first two years reduced GDP growth by 1% in each year. That is the basis for my calculation that austerity cost the average UK household at least the equivalent of £4,000. The OBR also calculate that overall UK austerity had no significant impact on growth in subsequent years.

Does the data show that Keynesian assessment is clearly wrong? Ferguson includes an IMF chart in his article, and I commend the fact that it uses GDP per head. Unfortunately it also includes a forecast, which is as reliable as most macro forecasts, so just focus on the part that is data. In 2011 and 2012 the UK flat lined, and only started recovering when the drag imposed by austerity came to an end. This is entirely consistent with my and the OBR’s analysis. (For the record, I also said three years ago that we would see a recovery in subsequent years.) Anti-Keynesians like to point to UK growth from 2013 onwards being healthy compared to other countries, but this is also entirely consistent with Keynesian analysis, because if you look at underlying primary balances UK fiscal austerity was much weaker in those years than in the US or the Eurozone.

General government underlying primary balances: source OECD Economic Outlook

In a way Ferguson acknowledges all this, because he lists other potential reasons why UK growth might have been weak in those early years. Fair enough, except that his central claim is that the numbers show the Keynesian analysis of austerity is wrong. But his chart shows that the numbers are in fact completely consistent with the Keynesian story. That does not prove the Keynesian story is right, but it sure does not show it is wrong!

Macroeconomics is a messy subject, because there are always so many things going on. For this reason the impact of policy is often not immediately apparent in the data, and some econometrics is required to sort things out. The unusual feature of the last few years across the UK and Eurozone is that events have largely followed the Keynesian script - no econometrics required. An election result does not change this fact.

Blaming Keynes

A few people have asked me to respond to this FT piece from Niall Ferguson. I was reluctant to, because it is really just a bit of triumphalist Tory tosh. That such things get published in the Financial Times is unfortunate but I’m afraid not surprising in this case. However I want to write later about something else that made reference to it, so saying a few things here first might be useful.

The most important point concerns style. This is not the kind of thing an academic should want to write. It makes no attempt to be true to evidence, and just cherry picks numbers to support its argument. I know a small number of academics think they can drop their normal standards when it comes to writing political propaganda, but I think they are wrong to do so. Take this paragraph, designed to show how good UK macro performance has been compared to the dire warnings of those Keynesians.

“The UK had the best performing of the G7 economies last year, with a real gross domestic product growth rate of 2.6 per cent. In 2009, the last full year of Labour government, the figure was minus 4.3 per cent. Moreover, far from being in depression, the UK economy has generated more than 1.9m jobs since May 2010. UK unemployment is now 5.6 per cent, roughly half the rates in Italy and France. Weekly earnings are up by more than 8 per cent; in the private sector, the figure is above 10 per cent. Inflation is below 2 per cent and falling.”

The first sentence is correct. But why compare that to 2009, which apart from being the ‘last full year of Labour government’ also happened to be the year of the recession that followed the global financial crisis. As I have mentioned before, growth in GDP per head under Labour averaged 1.5% even though it included this recession, but average growth from 2010 to 2014 was only 1% when we should have been seeing a rapid recovery. The jobs figures are mentioned, but the awful productivity performance that they imply is not. Earnings growth over the whole period is quoted (but without saying it is nominal growth), but only inflation over the last year! Presumably this is done to create the impression of real wage growth, when in reality this period has seen unprecedented falls in real wages.

A paragraph like that might earn Ferguson a job as a speechwriter for a Conservative politician, but if a first year undergraduate wrote it as part of an essay it would have red ink scrawled all over it, no matter whether the marker was an economist or historian. As for the general idea that the election result represented a disaster for the Keynesian model, I wonder whether Ferguson realises that most/all central banks base monetary policy on Keynesian economics? If the idea is that taking an anti-austerity line is a vote loser, why not note that the Scottish National Party adopted a clear anti-austerity rhetoric? (This letter in response to Ferguson’s article from Sam Wills makes much more sense on the election result. My own take is here.)

It is possible for someone to try and make a serious academic case in defence of the coalition government’s macroeconomic record, but this is not it. This kind of nonsense polemic is of course not just the preserve of the anti-Keynesian right. But what this kind of thing does illustrate is how problematic public debate on macroeconomic policy is. It is difficult to think about many other academic subjects where people who seem to have little idea of what they are talking about can write such obvious rubbish in a quality newspaper.