Pareto, Inequality and Government Debt

Or is economics inherently right wing?

I noted in passing in an earlier post that Pareto efficiency was obviously not a value free criteria. So those who argue that economists should only look for Pareto improvements – changes where no one is made worse off – are making a value judgement. One, and only one, of its implicit normative assumptions is that inequality does not matter. For others see, for example, Elizabeth Anderson (pdf, HT Anon). Now you could argue that an assumption that inequality does not matter intrinsically is at least internally consistent with the conventional assumption that personal utility depends only on personal variables. However as that assumption is clearly incorrect, this is a rather weak defence.

(You could also reasonably argue that Pareto improving increases in inequality could have a negative impact on the personal variables of others that conventional economic analysis ignores. So, for example, rising incomes of the 1% - even if this initially comes from just increasing the size of the pie - allows that 1% greater political power, which they will subsequently use to redistribute income away from the 99%.)

This is hardly a new point. For just two recent examples of other posts saying the same thing: Richard Serlin here, and Ingrid Robeyns here. It only has to keep being said because too many students are taught that economists like the Pareto criteria because it is value free. One of the comments to that second post says that the task should not be to “import liberal or left-wing moral philosophy into economics. It’s to scrub right-wing, libertarian moral philosophy out of it.” Well, in my usual moderate manner, I’d say we should at least expose it.

A more sophisticated defence of Pareto optimality is the second welfare theorem, which says that we can separate issues of distribution from issues of allocative efficiency. So, if some Pareto improving measure only makes the 1% better off, we can go ahead with it and deal with any reduction in social welfare generated by additional inequality using lump sum transfers. One obvious problem with this idea is that there are no lump sum transfers. Another is that we do not as a society decide at some date every year what the optimal distribution of income to implement is. In practice the only chance of reversing any inequality created by a Pareto improving measure is to use compensation alongside that measure, but then agents will recognise this connection which in turn will influence incentives.

The only possibly original point I wanted to make here is that the absurdity of restricting policies to Pareto improvements becomes immediately apparent if we think about government debt. Measures to reduce currently high levels of debt will almost certainly make current generations worse off, because they will have to pay the taxes (or whatever) to get debt down. Yet I do not often hear people arguing that we have to let debt stay high because the government can only implement Pareto improvements. If you think about it for a second, restricting government debt policy to Pareto improvements would be a sure fire recipe for deficit bias.

While this may be obvious, textbooks still make a big deal of dynamic inefficiency. This is the idea that the amount of productive capital in society can be too high, so that too much output is going to preserving that level of capital (replacement investment to offset depreciation etc), and not enough to consumption. If that is true, then if the current generation saves less, everyone can be made better off. Government intervention to discouraging saving would be a Pareto improvement: the current generation consumes more because they save less, but future generations consume more because less output needs to go to replacement investment.

The symmetrical case is where there is too little capital, which also reduces long run consumption compared to what could be achieved. Yet the implication in many textbooks is that this case is not one we should worry about, because to change it (by raising saving) would make the current generation worse off and is therefore not a Pareto improvement. The discussion in Romer, for example, is all about whether economies are dynamically inefficient rather than sub-optimally small. We don’t think this way about government debt, so why should we when it comes to productive capital?

Why is there this emphasis on only looking at Pareto improvements? I think you would have to work quite hard to argue that it was intrinsic to economic theory - it would be, and is, quite possible to do economics without it. (Many economists use social welfare functions.) But one thing that is intrinsic to economic theory is the diminishing marginal utility of consumption. Couple that with the idea of representative agents that macro uses all the time (who share the same preferences), and you have a natural bias towards equality. Focusing just on Pareto improvements neutralises that possibility. Now I mention this not to imply that the emphasis put on Pareto improvements in textbooks and elsewhere is a right wing plot - I do not know enough to argue that. But it should make those (mainstream or heterodox) who believe that economics is inherently conservative pause for thought.    

The Eurozone: out of the ashes?

I was at a gathering a year or so back in which sensible economists were thinking about the transition path for the Eurozone to full fiscal (and banking) union. They viewed recent events as confirming that monetary union alone was not tenable, and that fiscal union was the way forward. Many share that view. I remember asking whether there was any likelihood that the treaty changes required for fiscal union would find democratic support, given recent events. To say that this interjection was regarded as unwelcome was an understatement.

In one sense this reaction was understandable. Democracy within the Eurozone is a strange thing. On occasions it has been of the ‘last time you voted you got the answer wrong, but don’t worry, we are going to give you a second chance by having another vote’ variety. On others it has been ‘if you vote the wrong way you will have to leave’ type. In these circumstances worrying about democratic opinion and fiscal union may seem beside the point.

But in a way, that is the point. My interjection at that meeting could have been far blunter. How can you be planning to move towards fiscal union when the governance structures of the Eurozone have clearly failed with a more limited set of tasks? That would be a classic economist’s mistake: of designing a set-up which works well in the hands of a benevolent social planner, but falls apart when run by actual politicians.

Take, for example, the ECB. Compared to the US Fed or the UK Bank of England, it comes a poor third. It actually raised interest rates in 2011, making its own contribution to the subsequent recession. It has consistently gone well beyond its remit in promoting certain fiscal policies or structural reforms. It took two years before coming up with OMT, giving us two years of continual crisis. It is only now thinking about QE. A basic problem is that it is not accountable for its actions, which is a serious deficiency for an unelected institution with such power.

The other reason for the 2012 recession was fiscal contraction. If you regard some fiscal contraction in the periphery countries as necessary to correct a lack of competitiveness, then the problem has been the lack of offsetting fiscal expansion elsewhere (not just Germany, but countries like the Netherlands). This has not happened in Germany in part because there is no compelling need within Germany for fiscal expansion: it has been benefiting from the lack of competitiveness of other countries, as its current account surplus shows.

In a fiscal union, fiscal policy is decided at the centre, so these national obstacles to fiscal expansion could be brushed aside. (This, of course, is one good reason why Germans might be rather reluctant to vote for such a union.) But in practice what would aggregate fiscal policy determined in Brussels look like? All the indications are that it would look much like the fiscal policy we currently have: obsessed with debt, and completely ignorant of any significant multiplier effects. The fundamental misunderstandings about fiscal policy that are embedded in German thinking are now deeply ingrained elsewhere.  

To make the more general point, if a core problem is with the governance structures of the Eurozone, then handing those structures more power through fiscal union could be a huge mistake. But this realisation seems to leave us in a horrible position: we do not like the place we are in, we cannot and/or should not ‘go forward’ to fiscal union, yet ‘going back’ by leaving the Euro seems too traumatic. (See, for example, Kevin O’Rourke.)

Yet this may be a too limited, one dimensional point of view. As I have argued before, the 2010-12 crisis and the subsequent recession demonstrated the failure of one version of monetary union, but there are other possible versions. As studies before the formation of the Euro showed, monetary union needs countercyclical fiscal policy. The Eurozone ignored this point, partly because it worried that fiscal policy in the Eurozone would no longer be ‘disciplined by the market’. Until 2010 this fear was understandable, but after Greek default the opposite is true. So the need for central control on that account has disappeared.

The current Eurozone fiscal architecture is chaotic, but within it there are now two mechanisms to discipline national governments. The first and currently dominant is central control from Brussels. The second is national control through a combination of fiscal rules decided at the national level and independent national fiscal councils. Having two systems in place can be a nightmare, but the optimistic view would be that this presents the opportunity for evolutionary change. The central control mechanism could be gradually phased out, but held in reserve for when the national system broke down.

Many years ago I suggested that Eurozone countries could be allowed to opt out from the Stability and Growth Pact if they established their own sound fiscal rules and institutions. There are now enough fiscal councils around that it would be easy to get advice on whether countries had established these sound fiscal rules and institutions. A great advantage of this form of fiscal control is that there are established channels of accountability at the national level. Memories of the 2010-12 crisis, and market discipline, should ensure that a combination of fiscal rules and fiscal councils prevent deficit bias, yet leave scope for countercyclical action when required.

Commission based monitoring would be still needed in the background for two reasons. First, if a government persistently ignored the advice of the fiscal council, or compromised its independence, control at the Eurozone level could be re-established. Second, there may be occasions (like now) when coordination of national fiscal decisions is required, and here a Commission role would be essential.

I am not optimistic that this evolutionary change is going to happen anytime soon. Like any bureaucracy, the Commission will resist a reduction in its power. Germany’s own regional fiscal setup involves strong central control, so it will resist a change like this. Arguably this unholy alliance has helped create the dysfunctional system we now have. However, perhaps at some point countries like France will become galvanised by harmful pressure from the Commission to argue for some kind of alternative. That alternative does not have to be fiscal union, and in some countries a good part of an alternative institutional structure is already in place.

Looking for the flimflam

According to Thomas Palley, Paul Krugman and my defence of mainstream economics is “pure flimflam”. The definition of flimflam is ‘nonsensical or insincere talk’ or ‘a confidence trick’. Nonsensical I guess is possible, but insincere or a confidence trick it most definitely is not. But I guess this no worse than ‘pure drivel’, which is how Lars Syll once described one of my posts.

Despite all this, I would like to have a debate about macroeconomics with heterodox economists, and have tried to initiate one in the past. A debate that gets beyond generalities (and name calling), and talks about actual macroeconomic mechanisms and what policy makers should do. This is because I’m genuinely puzzled about what I am doing that heterodox economists find so wrong.

According to Thomas Palley, New Keynesian economics “retained the nonsense of marginal productivity distribution theory while discarding the foundations of Keynesian economics”. We “use price and nominal wage rigidity to explain cyclical unemployment”. Now I admit to not being terribly concerned about what Keynes really meant, but I’m at a loss to see marginal productivity distribution theory at the centre of New Keynesian theory. What New Keynesian theory does need is that falls in real interest rates stimulate aggregate demand (i.e. some form of IS curve), and in the basic model this comes from changing the intertemporal pattern of consumption. Is that wrong? What explains cyclical unemployment is real interest rates being at the wrong level. Movements in wages and prices get us out of a recession because they lead the central bank to reduce real interest rates. At the zero bound they cannot do that, and in those circumstances wage and price flexibility could make things worse. Is that wrong?

Now it is true that the standard New Keynesian model assumes a labour market that clears, but a model that replaces this with labour market imperfect competition would not behave very differently. That is what I actually teach. Equally the basic New Keynesian model assumes rational expectations, but if we want to change this to a case where agents make predictable errors that is easy enough to do. I also teach this to undergraduates. (For a pretty good guide to what I teach, see this paper by Carlin and Soskice. I use their textbook.)

Which brings us back to teaching. As I said in my original post, I would like to make students aware of heterodox critiques, but I want to point out where in my mainstream account that critique would enter. (I think what I teach is pretty close to how many central bankers think, if not the rest of 'my tribe'!)  I believe I can do that for what I call anti-Keynesians (freshwater or whatever), although I remain at a loss as to how flexible prices can get us out of a liquidity trap when central banks target inflation (see here and here). So where (in terms of macroeconomic mechanisms) do I locate the heterodox (post-Keynesian or whatever) critique of New Keynesian analysis? This is not an insincere or trick (flimflam) question.   

Recovery rhetoric and reality

What does the now sustained recovery in the UK and the still tentative signs of recovery in the Eurozone tell us? According to some on the right, it says all is good in the world, austerity has been successful and we need to stay the course. According to some on the left, the recovery is not real, and anyway it is all because there are more people, or because of a house price bubble.

First austerity. As I have said many times, the current recovery tells us nothing about austerity. In the UK austerity helped delay the recovery by three years. We can argue about how much of the stagnation of 2011 and 2012 was due to UK austerity and how much to the Eurozone (austerity somewhere else), but no serious economist would argue with the statement that both played a significant part in delaying the recovery. That is why I wrote this over a year ago.

In the Eurozone austerity helped create a second recession. Here we can argue about the relative contributions of fiscal policy and inept monetary policy, but again no serious economist would disagree that austerity played a major role. Model based estimates suggest Eurozone GDP was around 4% lower in 2013 as a result of fiscal consolidation, and this restrictive fiscal policy was not confined to the periphery.

In the UK austerity was put on hold in 2012 and 2013, which helped allow the recovery in 2013 (see my April Fools day post or this from Jonathan Portes). However suspending austerity did not create the recovery, which was mainly down to lower consumer saving. This reduction in saving may have happened anyway, but both Funding for Lending and Help to Buy will have lent a helping hand. In the Eurozone austerity has continued. That will be a drag on growth, but it alone is not enough to prevent a recovery as consumers rebalance and monetary conditions in periphery countries ease a little.

Underlying Primary Balances according to OECD Economic Outlook Nov 2013

What about the counter argument that the recovery is not real, or not sustainable. In some ways this rhetoric is worse than the ‘austerity works’ line: it is also wrong, but it is much less likely to succeed as rhetoric. The fact that growth in output per person (GDP per capita) is less impressive that GDP growth alone does not detract from the recovery because, in a demand led recession, population growth does not automatically cause GDP growth. Recoveries are often led by consumers, but as long as investment follows on and average incomes begin to rise then a recovery will become sustainable. The rhetoric will not work because, despite the unequal and uneven nature of the recovery, many people do feel more optimistic now than two years ago. It is much better for critics of the government to focus on the ‘wasted years’ of 2010-2012, and on the fall in median incomes (pdf) over the last five years. If they want economic issues for today and tomorrow, focus on inequality.

Does this mean that the macroeconomic debate (as opposed to the political debate) over fiscal policy is over? Here we should go back to basics. Tightening fiscal policy reduces output, and fiscal stimulus increases output, when interest rates are at their zero lower bound. So until interest rates start rising, austerity will still be a drag on growth. The macroeconomics says recovery could be quicker without austerity. But from a practical policy point of view, the influence of this basic logic on what politicians do seems as remote as ever.

So for me the interesting question on austerity has changed. Although it is occasionally necessary to go over the macroeconomic logic yet again to counter the rhetoric I discuss above, what I find more interesting is why policymakers did the wrong thing from 2010 onwards, and what lessons for the future that implies. Was it all an unfortunate consequence of Greek profligacy? Is it down to the influence of the financial sector, and is this a result of mistaken beliefs or vested interests? How do we avoid this happening again? One obvious answer is that we must start the next liquidity trap recession with lower levels of public debt. But even if we did, is that going to stop those ‘close to the markets’ insisting on the dangers of the large deficits and rising debt that are the inevitable result of a recession, and then go on to insist that we need fiscal contraction to avoid a funding crisis? If the answer is no, how can we immunise politicians from such calls?

Of course, just because the recovery and its development tells us little useful about austerity does not mean it is uninteresting - at least for a macroeconomist. For me a really big question for the next year or two is what will happen to inflation, particularly in the US and UK. This has not always been the case. From the start of the recession until recently consumer price inflation has been a misleading distraction. One of the clear lessons from recent history is that a focus on consumer price inflation when there are various temporary supply side shocks is dangerous. It led the ECB to raise rates just before a recession, and it almost led to higher rates in the UK. Monetary policy makers really should reflect on why they were distracted in this way.

In the absence of similar distractions in the future, inflation should become a better indicator of just how fast the recovery could potentially be - of how much spare capacity there is available. Yet the exact relationship between this spare capacity and inflation remains mysterious. Most theories say that inflation should remain below target if the economy is below trend, but should inflation be rising or falling? There are some (old and new) theories that suggest that inflation could become disinflation even though the economy is growing reasonably well. Given this uncertainty, for a macroeconomist what happens to inflation over the next year or two will be really interesting.

To sum up, the recovery is welcome: it is not an illusion, but neither does it atone for the sins of the past. Above all else, it must not lead to complacency. We have still a long way to go to repair all the damage caused by the recession. Even when that has been done, the problems that led to the financial crisis have not been fixed. With inflation targets still at 2%, and perverse fiscal responses, we remain dangerously vulnerable to any future large negative demand shock. 

Retiring macroeconomic theory

Dear Professor Diamond

Thank you for sending your paper ‘National Debt in a Neoclassical Growth Model’ to the American Economic Review. The paper has now been read by two referees, and I’m afraid the news is not good.

Referee A raises a fundamental objection. Your model has a two period structure, where agents work in the first period but do not work in the second. This assumption is simply stated in one paragraph on your page 2, but is not justified in any way. In that sense it appears entirely ad hoc. Furthermore, as referee A stresses, it appears to contradict (is internally inconsistent with) another fundamental part of you model, which is that agents attempt to smooth consumption over time. The referee is quite happy with that assumption, as it clearly comes from standard postulates about the utility of the consumption of goods. Yet why should these postulates not also apply to the consumption of leisure? As the referee points out, if agents tried to smooth leisure in the same way as they smoothed consumption, there would not be any ‘retirement’. As this concern strikes at the heart of your model, it is troubling.

Referee B raised rather different issues. They pointed out that the model implies a constant interest rate that is only a function of the population growth rate. The model therefore makes a clear prediction, but as the referee points out interest rates have fallen in this country over the last two decades, without any matching declines in the population growth rate. So the model has been clearly falsified by events, and therefore cannot be the basis of any meaningful discussion of the impact of national debt. The referee is also concerned that you failed to locate your analysis within an ontological discussion of the open rather than closed nature of the social realm, which makes your deductivist and formalist reasoning about socially constructed variables problematic, to say the least.

I am therefore very sorry to inform you that we will be unable to publish your paper. Referee A did make a number of helpful suggestions about how ‘retirement’ could be microfounded, and I am sure you will find the extensive reading list referee B provided on economic methodology helpful in any future work. 

My apologies to Nick Rowe, whose post gave me the idea. I actually think asking the question why we have retirement is revealing, but writing the above was easier than attempting an answer. (And I also think economic methodology is important!)  

When economics students rebel

I read the Manchester Post-Crash Economics Society’s (PCES) critique of economics education in the UK with a bewildering mixture of emotions. (Claire Jones has a short FT summary here.) It is eloquently and intelligently written, but I believe in some respects fundamentally misguided. It is indicative of a failure of mainstream economics education, but not (as it thinks) a failure of mainstream economics. Yet even after all these years, it is a position I can empathise with.

At its heart the critique is an appeal for plurality in economics. Rather than pretend that there is one right way to do economics (what the critique calls neoclassical), the critique says we should recognise that there are many alternative perspectives which have significant worth (and which therefore undergraduates should have significant exposure to). These alternative perspectives have become marginalised within economics over the last few decades, and the critique suggests that the financial crisis is evidence that this process should be reversed. This is not an unusual complaint, and I hear it frequently from those working in other social sciences.

Let me first say what I agree with here. Students should certainly be shown something of heterodox (non-mainstream) thought. I’d like to think that if we taught economics to undergraduates as a more problem solving discipline, with less emphasis on its axiomatic/deductive structure, that would become easier. We should certainly get more economic history in there, and again that would be easier with a problem solving approach.

What I disagree with strongly is that the current dominance of mainstream economics should be reversed, and that we should go back to ‘schools of thought’ economics. There are three reasons for this.

●     Of course mainstream theory can be conservative. It has been used by some to support a particular ideology. I complain a lot about both. But the most important reason mainstream economics has become dominant is not because of these things, but because it has proved far more useful than all of its heterodox alternatives put together. I agree with Roger Farmer here: economics is a science. Its response to data and events may be slow compared to the normal sciences, for obvious reasons, but it is progressive. I cannot see any fundamental barriers to its continuing development.

●     This is because mainstream economics can be remarkably flexible. One of the sad things about the way economics is often taught is that students do not see much of the interesting stuff that is going on in both micro and macro, and instead just learn what the discipline looked like 50 years ago.

Let me give one example. Students get taught that under perfect competition the wage is equal to the marginal product of labour. If that was all there was to say, then you might indeed believe that economics was just a means of excusing current levels of executive pay or arguing against the minimum wage. But instead it is just the start of what economics has to say. Read Alan Manning, who argues that because firms generally set wages and changing jobs is costly, monopsony is the more relevant default model. Read the Piketty et al paper I referenced here which talks about rent seeking by executives, and how cutting top rates of tax encouraged this rent seeking. These are powerful and effective critiques of marginal productivity theory.

●     At first reading, heterodox writers can seem like a breath of fresh air, because they are more holistic and often less formalist. But while many complain, with some justice, that mainstream economics can be resistant of radical ideas, I have personally found at least as much intolerance on the other side. Some heterodox economists appear to reject almost everything that is mainstream, which is frankly just silly. 

I think there may be a particular problem for students who are exercised by what they see as economic injustices around them. Economics in its studied neutrality can appear indifferent to that. It is natural for those who take an anti-establishment, left wing view to react to this perceived indifference by asking for revolution rather than evolution, by looking for a new paradigm. Perhaps those on the right, who may be happier with the status quo, find it easier to work within the mainstream, and use it to their own advantage. Yet any discipline where a utilitarian view is routine, and where diminishing marginal utility is standard, can hardly be described as inherently biased towards the status quo.

I think it is true that economics as a discipline has tried too hard to emphasise that it is an objective, politically neutral discipline, thereby underplaying value judgements when it makes them. Worse still, sometimes heavily value laden ideas like the importance of Pareto optimality are portrayed as being value neutral, which is clearly nonsense (see above). Yet the idea that it should be possible to build a science of human behaviour which is independent of ideology or politics is a noble ideal, and one which has been partly achieved. We may need (and are getting) more political economy, in the sense of recognising that economics works alongside and interacts with social and political forces, but I do not think we need more partisan economics. 

Let me get personal. Over the last few years, I have been in charge of a macroeconomics course at Oxford. For better or worse, if past evidence is anything to go by, one or two of those taking this course will end up helping run the economy. There is so much important mainstream theory that needs to be covered in that course, because it is theory that is essential to trying to understand what is currently going on in the world. At its core is Keynesian theory, which has proved its worth since the recession. (Interest rates didn’t rise because of all that government debt, inflation didn’t take off because of all the money that has been created, and austerity did delay the recovery.) It would be a great step backwards if I had to stop teaching part of that, and instead teach Austrian or Marxian views about the macroeconomy, or still worse spend time worrying about what Keynes really meant. I would much rather a future Chancellor, Prime Minister, or advisor to either, remembered from their undergraduate degree that mainstream theory said austerity was contractionary, rather than ‘well it all depends on whether you are a Keynesian or an Austrian’.

None of this implies that there are not large gaps in the discipline, large elements that will not stand the test of time, and that there is much still to be done. But I agree with Diane Coyle (about economics, if not DSGE) that “the Naked Emperor needs to be reclothed rather than dethroned”. New ideas could perhaps come from heterodox thought, although I suspect that they are more likely to come from other social science disciplines. But they will be developed within the mainstream, leading to the evolution of mainstream thought. If students want to change the world, I think they are much more likely to do this by working within mainstream economics than heterodox thought.

Targeting wage inflation

I was pleased to see that David Blanchflower and Adam Posen have advocated using wage inflation as an intermediate target in their analysis of labour market slack in the US. Specifically they say

“Our results also point towards using wage inflation as an additional intermediate target for monetary policy by the FOMC, paralleling on the real activity side the de facto inflation targets on the price stability side.”

I have periodically argued for wage inflation targets in the case of the UK, but both their and my arguments are universal.

My own argument for targeting wage inflation has been a combination of theory and practicality. As I have often pointed out, there are good theoretical arguments for targeting alternative measures of inflation besides consumer prices. The way macroeconomists usually measure the cost of inflation nowadays is to score the distortion to relative prices created by the combination of general inflation and the fact that different prices are set at different times. The ‘ideal’ price index to target would be one that gave a higher weight to prices that changed infrequently, and a low weight to those that were changed often. Wages are just another price in this context, and they are changed infrequently.

The practical argument is that if we had been targeting wage inflation over the last few years, monetary policy would have worried less about the temporary inflation induced by shocks such as commodity price increases or sales taxes. Here is a chart of recent and expected wage inflation (compensation per employee) from the OECD. 

In normal times we would expect 2% price inflation to be associated with something like 4% wage inflation because of productivity growth. Wage inflation has not come close to that number in recent years in the UK, US or the Eurozone. It is difficult to see how the ECB could have raised interest rates in 2011 - as they did - if they had had wage inflation as an intermediate target.

The argument put forward by Blanchflower and Posen is rather different, because they associate wage inflation with the real side of the dual mandate in the US. To quote:

“wage inflation should be considered as the primary target of FOMC policy with respect to the employment stabilization side of the Fed’s dual mandate, at least for now. Unlike unemployment, the rate of wage inflation requires less judgment and is subject to less distortion by such factors as inactivity. At least four of the labor markets measures that Yellen cites as worth monitoring- unemployment, under-employment of part-timers, long-term unemployment, and participation rate- reveal their non-structural component by their influence on wage growth. And that is what the Fed should be trying to stabilize along with prices.”

To paraphrase, unemployment (or anything similar) can become distorted as a measure of labour market slack, but wage inflation is a good indicator of the true state of the labour market.

I would add one final point. The spectre that seems to haunt central bankers is the inflation of the 1970s. That has to be avoided at all costs. Yet the 1970s was associated with what was called a wage-price spiral: both price inflation and wage inflation rising rapidly, and a feeling that this was a contest between workers and firms that neither could win, but where society was a loser. If we want to avoid a wage-price spiral happening again, it is only logical that we look at wages as well as prices.