The dangers of pluralism in economics: the case of MMT

MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) is a ‘school of thought’ in economics, by which I mean that it deliberately sets itself apart from the mainstream. I like a lot about MMT as a set of ideas. On the key issue of whether monetary or fiscal policy should be used as the main stabilising tool, although I go with the mainstream in looking to monetary policy outwith the lower bound, I think that issue should always be kept open, and too many mainstream economists just presume that monetary policy must be better. I am also attracted to the idea of some version of a Job Guarantee type scheme, and the mainstream has often failed to recognise the amount of autonomy the banking system has to create demand. I could go on but you get the idea. As I result, I have tried probably more than most mainstream economists to engage with MMT ideas.

As far as I can see there is nothing in MMT that cannot be presented using standard mainstream tools. But I also know that the microfoundations hegemony in mainstream macro excludes many, like MMT economists, who would prefer to do macro in different ways. I dislike the microfoundations hegemony for reasons I have set out elsewhere. For that reason I cannot argue that MMT, or any other school of thought, should be part of the mainstream, because right now it would be impossible because of the microfoundations hegemony. [1]

Having said all that, I think MMT sometimes demonstrates many of the dangers of a school of thought. It tends to be antagonistic to the mainstream, and some (not all) of its leading lights give their followers the idea that the only truth is to be found within MMT, and everything the mainstream says has to be wrong. That proposition is so absurd but I can understand why it can be believed. It was a long time ago, but I was told as a student that neoclassical economics was fundamentally flawed, and would soon be replaced in some kind of Kuhnian revolution. I know how easy it is to follow your political instincts and thereby miss out on so much important and useful knowledge.

It is very difficult not to come across MMT followers (MMTers) if you write a blog on macroeconomics. Most recently this happened when I wrote this on Trump’s tax cuts. Now unusually this post examined how to discuss these tax cuts split into two parts: one which followed the mainstream view where monetary policy controlled inflation, and another that described an MMT view where fiscal policy controls inflation.

My post was criticised by some MMTers on twitter. Not because I had got the MMT part wrong, but because I had argued in the mainstream part that a deficit generated by a tax cut could alter the intergenerational distribution of income. Now this idea is standard, but it can confuse, because you cannot transfer real resources (output) through time in a closed economy. I show how it can be done in an overlapping generations framework here. It is much easier to see how it can happen in an individual open economy, because a generation can consume overseas goods as well as domestically produced goods.

If that all seems a bit abstract, it is also important. I have argued in the past that one of Margaret Thatcher’s failures was to give taxes from the North Sea back to consumers (who spent rather than saved them) instead of following Norway in creating a sovereign wealth fund. Subsequent generations have therefore been deprived of the benefits of North Sea oil. By giving tax cuts funded by borrowing, governments can do the opposite of creating a sovereign wealth fund: future generations inherit more government debt which they have to service.

Those MMTers criticising my blog said such intergenerational transfer was impossible. I tried the best I could to explain why it was possible, but the responses I got ranged from intelligent denialism to simple insults along the lines that I was neoliberal, I didn’t care about the working class and so on.

I’m used to that kind of interchange as a result of Brexit. But there was an important difference here. I was not attacking MMT, but outlining how things work in a mainstream view. So I was not attacking their school or their politics. They had no reason to be defensive. But it was clear to some that I was the enemy simply because I was not an MMTer. This very tribal attitude reflects one of the dangers of plurality in economics. Another is language. MMTers have their own way of describing things, so if you say something like a ‘tax financed increase in government spending’ you are jumped on: according to MMT tax never finances spending, but follows it, or something like that. I don’t mean to make fun, and I can see what they are trying to do, but talking separate languages is a key problem when you have different schools of thought, particularly if you insist that only your language is the right language.

Another problem is that schools of thought also tend to be political. As a result, to use Paul Romer’s phrase, all too often scientific discourse is replaced by political discourse. To some of these MMTers because I was a mainstream economist I had to be neoliberal, as if those two things had to go together. The idea that deficits could redistribute income between generations moved from being an economic statement to a political one. Presenting models that showed how it could happen meant those models had to be unrealistic, without specifying why that lack of realism mattered to the issue in hand.

It is a shame, because these MMTers are clearly interested in economics because of their political interest, so I would love them to be discussing both mainstream as well as MMT ideas. I probably spent too much time on twitter with them as a result. Those that tell them the mainstream is neoliberal and a waste of time are in my view almost criminal because that attitude leads to such a waste of enthusiasm and interest.

It does not have to be like this. I have had plenty of good discussions with MMT academics and some supporters which I have found interesting. They have been courteous and not aggressive. But not all the leading lights in MMT encourage these things. Such as those who write

“Wren-Lewis just should stick to Twitter. He seems to like that. It would save us the time reading the other stuff.”

He wrote that, and worse still which I will not repeat, because he is angry that Labour have adopted a fiscal rule based on my own work with Jonathan Portes rather than MMT’s ideas. Actually I didn’t enjoy the conversations he is referring to at all, and I should have stopped much earlier because it was a waste of time, but as I said above it is a shame to see people who have closed themselves off to so much interesting and, for them, politically useful knowledge.

As I said, I do not blame anyone being in a macroeconomic school of thought because the current mainstream is exclusionary. Many MMTers are open and my discussions with them have been interesting for me at least. But unfortunately some in MMT appear to want to make it a kind of cult, where only MMT sees the truth and everything in the mainstream is neoliberal and wrong. They attract followers because of their politics, but then they turn their followers into converts with closed minds. Which I think is a real shame and completely unnecessary, because MMT is strong enough to stand on its own feet and encourage open minded thinking, not dogma.

[1] I do not think that is the only aspect of the mainstream that excludes other schools. There is too little room in mainstream journals to discuss policy or history in a discursive, holistic way. I happen to like the way most mainstream economists use models to discuss issues, but sometimes it is useful to make sure we are not abstracting from what is really important.

Was the UK government’s use of North Sea Oil a scandal?

Aditya Chakrabortty of the Guardian thinks so, as do many on the left. The evidence appears at first sight quite strong, if we compare the UK to Norway. The Norwegian government invested the proceeds from its share of North Sea oil in a sovereign wealth fund, and as a result each Norwegian citizen is currently about $150,000 richer. The fund holds on average 1% of the world's shares. In contrast, there is no equivalent UK sovereign wealth fund, but just a lot of UK government debt. QED?

Not so fast. The opposing argument can also be stated in an equally compelling way. Why should the government decide on what to do with the oil revenue? The democratic thing to do with the money is to give it to the people, and they can decide what to do with it. To the extent that they choose to invest it, so the argument goes, individuals are much better at making good investment decisions with their own money than the government is. Seen this way, the complaints from the left are just another example of the paternalistic belief that the state knows better what is good for people than people themselves. What Mrs Thatcher’s government did was allow individuals to create their own wealth from North Sea Oil revenues, if they so wished.

There are essentially two issues here: one involving distribution between generations, and the other distribution between individuals. Few would argue that the generation who paid taxes in the 1980s deserved exclusive rights to the benefits of North Sea Oil: most would agree that this resource should also benefit future UK generations. Now the current generation could look after future generations by investing rather than consuming a large part of the revenues. The standard macroeconomic model assumes this happens to some extent (agents care about their children etc), although in a way that heavily discounts the welfare of future generations. Did they do this?

It is difficult to know for sure, but when I looked at the evidence from current accounts and net national wealth here, it was hard to believe that most of the UK’s North Sea Oil money was invested. So on this occasion at least, the Norwegian government appears to have looked after the interests of future generations rather better than the average 1980s UK taxpayer did. Whether that is because these taxpayers were selfish or badly informed I have no idea. (For a fascinating account of how a sovereign wealth fund might be useful in a world with selfish agents and animal spirits, see these papers (pdf, pdf, pdf) by Roger Farmer.)

The other problem with the defence of the UK government’s approach is more straightforward. If North Sea Oil revenue was used to reduce taxes, this means that the revenue was distributed unequally rather than democratically. Those who didn’t pay any taxes at the time received nothing. Those that paid the most taxes, which of course means those with the highest incomes, received most. An alternative would have been to distribute equal oil ‘dividends’ to each citizen, for example as the US state of Alaska has done. (For more general discussion of how best to handle resource discoveries, see some of the papers produced by OxCarre.)

So was the UK government’s policy a scandal? One definition of scandal is “an action or event regarded as morally or legally wrong and causing general public outrage”. Well, general public outrage it did not cause: giving the majority of people at least some money rarely does, and that those who were better off got most was a feature of the decade. On the other hand the fact that so little of the wealth was left for future generations, in contrast to the ‘statist’ Norwegian alternative, does seem to pose serious problems for neoliberalism, as well as the core intertemporal macroeconomic model.

 

Safe Assets and Sovereign Wealth Funds: Norway, the UK and Oil

Miles Kimball was ahead of me in thinking about the safe asset problem. It was interesting that we seem to have reached similar conclusions thinking about very different things. He focused here on the immediate problem of what the Fed was buying as part of QE, whereas I was in a fictional (and perhaps utopian) world centuries ahead when the government owned net assets rather than net debt. A sovereign wealth fund can be helpful in both cases: the monetary authority can ask the fund to make the decisions about what assets to buy, and the fund can provide the assets to either match against government debt or help reduce the need to raise taxes to pay for government spending. A short list of his posts on this issue can be found here. They are especially relevant for the UK if you are worried that all the Bank has been doing with QE is buying Gilts.

The discovery of a finite natural resource is an ideal experiment in teaching macro. It uses the intertemporal consumption model to illustrate why current account deficits (pre-extraction phase) and surpluses (extraction phase) can be optimal things for economies to have. I’m afraid I use the discovery of North Sea oil as my example, and luckily there is still enough there that no student will ever say to me ‘so there was once oil under the North Sea?’ [1] But my excuse for showing my age is that it also allows a very nice contrast between what happened in Norway and what happened in the UK, and a nice way to throw Ricardian Equivalence into the teaching mix.

For anyone who does not know, Norway invested (and continues to invest) most of its tax receipts from North Sea Oil into a Sovereign Wealth Fund (which used to be called the Petroleum Fund, but is now rather misleadingly called the Government Pension Fund.) It was not a token exercise - its assets are around $654 billion, which is larger than Norway’s GDP. The UK, mostly under the Thatcher government, decided instead that it was better to give this money to the people, so it cut taxes using its receipts from North Sea Oil. Under Ricardian Equivalence, where agents who care about their children as themselves also internalise the government’s accounts (which include any oil fund), what the UK and Norway did will have identical effects.

They will have identical effects, because those receiving the tax cuts will invest much of the proceeds so that when the oil runs out, they (or their children) will be able to carry on as if nothing had happened because they can consume the returns from those assets instead of revenues from the oil. It is a classic example of consumption smoothing: saving or borrowing to smooth out the impact of variations in income. We know people do sometimes try and consumption smooth, because most save for their retirement. Yet did UK consumers save the proceeds from oil to create their own personal equivalents of Norway’s oil fund?

The data is not very promising. While the UK ran some current account surpluses in the early 1980s, there were also deficits, and by the late 1980s there were only (large) deficits. We almost got back to current account balance in the late 1990s, but have had large deficits ever since. No obvious sign of saving the revenues from oil there. Looking at our net foreign asset position is initially a little more hopeful, as it’s positive value increased in the first half of the 1980s, but that disappeared for good by 1990, and the UK is now a net debtor. Perhaps a more detailed study might come to different conclusions, but I do not know of any that does.

Nor did the government set a very good example. It should at least have been running down its net debt position while North Sea oil revenues were at their peak, so that it could reduce the need to raise distortionary taxes once the money ran out. Net government debt did fall in the second half of the 1980s, but it went straight back up again in the early 1990s, suggesting this was just a cyclical effect.

What has this got to do with safe assets? Only this. One of the arguments against establishing a Sovereign Wealth Fund is that, even if the fund is nominally independent, governments cannot be trusted not to interfere, and so it is better to give the money to the people. Miles Kimball discusses this ‘libertarian’ view here, and I alluded to the ‘communism by the back door’ idea at the end of my earlier post. That, presumably, was part of the justification for not establishing an oil fund in the UK in the 1980s. I suspect if you asked most people who were born in the UK in the decade after North Sea oil started flowing whether the UK or Norway made the better decision, they would say Norway. In Norway, I suspect they would say Norway too.[2] The evidence seems to suggest they would be right. So in this case at least, not setting up a Sovereign Wealth Fund for ideological reasons was a mistake.

[1] How to use resource revenue is a critical issue for many developing countries, and is discussed in many places by my colleagues at the end of my corridor, including here.

[2] Of course many would not have a view, but I cannot help feeling that strengthens the case for a Fund. Interestingly it seems that it is the right in Norway that want to spend more of the Fund today, and the left that (financial crisis aside) want to stick to their 4% rule.