Saturday, December 4, 2010

Empirical Austrian Economics, Part 4

Another good example of how to approach it from Matt Yglesias - and he calls it "Austrian" which is very good. (I previously blogged on empirical Austrian economics here, here, here and I'm sure some other places).

One thing I've harped on is that you can't just point out what everybody knows - that investment spending and prices are more cyclical than consumption spending and prices - and call that "empirical evidence for the Austrian school". Why? Because any business cycle theory worth its salt predicts this or can accomodate this.

To offer empirical evidence for Austrian business cycle theory what you really need to do is break out the structure of production by its time structure, demonstrate that investment and employment over that time structure is sensitive to the interest rate, and demonstrate that unsustainable roundabout investments are a result of money creation and drive the bust. Showing that "cheap money causes asset bubbles" doesn't cut it. That's just common sense and its really not the central point of ABCT as Hayek or Garrison espouse it anyway.

Yglesias offers a start, simply by breaking employment losses out by industry (well, he shares a guy at NPR that did this). He is by no means the first to do this and this is by no means sufficient but it seems to me to be a hell of a lot better than a lot of what's out there. It's an industry-based approach at least, which is bizarrely rare in the empirical Austrian literature. Here is his chart:


What is wrong with approach this as Austrian? Well, first and foremost I would have liked to see job loss rates rather than total job losses. The point of ABCT is that more roundabout processes have to contract to a greater extent, not that the total number of people employed in more roundabout processes has to be the highest. To call this "Austrian" I would also like to actually identify a time structure to the production process. Retail seems to be very close to the consumer. Finance seems much farther away except for consumer finance. Leisure and hospitality are very close to the consumer, but a lot of professional services are much farther away (although some, like legal services, may be closer). Transportation and administration are interspersed all throughout the time structure of production. Yglesias titles this "Austrian", and people see construction and manufacturing way over on the left hand side, and I think that gives the illusion that we have something like a time structure of production here. We don't.

I also think we oughta take into account secular trends in these industries. Health care is indeed close to the consumer, and manufacturing is indeed farther from the consumer on the Hayekian triangle. But health care has been growing before, during, and after the downturn, and manufacturing has been shrinking (in employment at least) before, during, and after the downturn. We need to differentiate secular from cyclical trends here and not attribute this to the business cycle.

This may seem like much ado about nothing from me. But I think it's very significant and extremely encouraging that a liberal blogger like Matt Yglesias even knows enough about "the Austrian School" to connect sectoral trends with this "Austrain School", and map it out in an effort to roughly empirically verify the theoretical insights. The Austrian school is on the upswing, guys. This is good. But it has to withstand scrutiny and empirical verification. I have taken great personal interest in seeing that that gets done right. I think if you want this upswing to last and not just be a footnote to the Tea Party fad, one important shift is going to have to occur: you are going to have to abandon knee jerk praxeology that rejects empiricism and the scientific method or you are going to stay wallowed in heterodox irrelevancy. Keep your affiliated praxeologists and rebrand them as "social epistemologists" or something. Let them make their case if they can on their own. But for God's sake don't tie the millstone of praxeology or libertarian politics around the neck of a quite interesting, quite plausible business cycle theory that is just starting to pierce through to the mainstream.

UPDATE: The comment section on that Yglesias post is utterly pointless. Nobody is taking a cue from the title or talking about ABCT. There was very little of it in Yglesias's post to discuss, granted. But nobody took the bait from the title. Still got a lot of work to do on ABCT education.

18 comments:

  1. Hayek told us that changes in the money stream are responsible for the phenomena he describes in Prices and Production. So were there any increases in the money stream before or during the housing bubble? Perhaps a little, but the charts I have looked at show remarkably little change. If monetary policy contributed to the bubble, then it cannot have been a significant factor. The Fed's greatest sin was not creating an excess supply of money, but not correcting the excess demand for money.

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  2. Lee,

    Hayek does not represent the complete "Austrian" explanation for the bust. Specifically, he lacks a coherent incorporation of monetary and interest theories. His focus is on the time structure of production.

    It will not be until 1949 when Mises publishes Human Action that you will see the "Austrian" take on the boom/bust. If I recall correctly, Mises corrects Hayek on a few parts.

    Daniel,

    one important shift is going to have to occur: you are going to have to abandon knee jerk praxeology that rejects empiricism and the scientific method or you are going to stay wallowed in heterodox irrelevancy.

    Let me make the point that the Austrian school cannot do without praxeology. It's not like a shackle on our feet; it's an absolutely necessary process without which we would never have ABCT.

    Now, if you want to conduct empirical research on the validity of ABCT - that's fine, but we cannot "do without" praxeology for the erudition of theory because theory demands deductive logic, or else you only have correlation.

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  3. I wouldn't want to purge deductive logic from theory building, Mattheus. Allow me to clarify - Austrians need to purge a praxeological epistemology that thinks the action axiom is sufficient for economic theorizing and that rejects empiricism.

    A sweet spot for a priorism isn't a problem for me.

    I do think, though, ABCT does fine without praxeology or a priorism - but we've been over this ground.

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  4. Daniel,-

    =Austrians need to purge a praxeological epistemology that thinks the action axiom is sufficient for economic theorizing and that rejects empiricism.=

    I highly recommend you to read this paper by Jorg Guido Hulsmann.

    http://mises.org/journals/jls/17_1/17_1_3.pdf

    In it he shows how praxeology is superior to other approaches to studying economic phenomena in that it allows us to start from saying that there are certain apriori true statements about the world.

    When you know and accept that there are such statements you may try to think what is next; e.g. whether is it possible to deduce ABCT from such statements.

    To this end you may try to set out all the starting conditions from which an Austrian cycle follows, including those implicit in the traditional ccounts of ABCT. Then you may look at whether all those conditions are apriori true. If they are, then the Austrian cycle necessarily follows from the initial conditions.

    If some of those conditions are actually of probabilistic nature, then empirical analysis might help finding out whether such conditions were present at the start of a given cycle.

    But empirical analysis plays only secondary role here.

    The key difference of the Austrian economic analysis from the mainstream approach is that Austrians do not model anything. They do not simplify reality. They look at one aspect of it - at what happens in the minds of individual economic agents who share the same way they frame the world - logic. Because most of what is relevant to economics happens in human minds, the study of pure logic of action should be the most important part of economics.

    BTW my reading of Keynes is that compared to the modern mainstream economist he was also an apriorist. The problem with him is that his deductive logical analysis is wrong.

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  5. Did you ever read my post on ABCT on ET? Not that it takes one type of epistemology over another, I'm just curious.

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  6. I'm not sure exactly which one you're refering to, but I pretty much read everything you guys post.

    I might not have had time to comment or even really digest - let me know which one you're refering to and I'll read it again.

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  7. Daniel,-

    I highly recommend you to read this paper by Jorg Guido Hulsmann.

    http://mises.org/journals/jls/17_1/17_1_3.pdf

    In it he shows how praxeology is superior to other approaches to studying economic phenomena in that it allows us to start from saying that there are certain apriori true statements about the world.

    When you know and accept that there are such statements you may try to think what is next; e.g. whether is it possible to deduce ABCT from such statements.

    To this end you may try to set out all the starting conditions from which an Austrian cycle follows, including those implicit in the traditional ccounts of ABCT. Then you may look at whether all those conditions are apriori true. If they are, then the Austrian cycle necessarily follows from the initial conditions.

    If some of those conditions are actually of probabilistic nature, then empirical analysis might help finding out whether such conditions were present at the start of a given cycle.

    But empirical analysis plays only secondary role here.

    The key difference of the Austrian economic analysis from the mainstream approach is that Austrians do not model anything. They do not simplify reality. They look at one aspect of it - at what happens in the minds of individual economic agents who share the same way they frame the world - logic. Because most of what is relevant to economics happens in human minds, the study of pure logic of action should be the most important part of economics.

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  8. http://www.economicthought.net/2010/11/layman-abct/

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  9. "The key difference of the Austrian economic analysis from the mainstream approach is that Austrians do not model anything."

    The ERE tells otherwise.

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  10. I think that ERE is one of Mises's least good ideas.

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  11. Daniil - thanks. I am not that familiar with Hulsmann so this will be interesting.

    I want to clarify - I see nothing wrong with a priorism itself. My critique is that it is insufficient to adequately theorize I complex system when we really don't know all the relevant axioms.

    Think about why math is a prioristic but not biology. Why do you think that is?

    Anyway - I have more detailed thoughts on this that I've been thinking about since this past week - specifically why a priorism works in math, and what the conditions are for it working in math that don't apply to economics. I'll try to write something this week on it, although I'll be out of town a lot.

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  12. I think that ERE is one of Mises's least good ideas.

    You're joking, right? The ERE is what allows us to differentiate the catallactic concepts of interest and entrepreneurial profit. It's an invaluable tool.

    Furthermore, the ERE is not a "model" of anything we find in reality. It is not a model in the sense that Friedman tried to argue we should use models. It is a purposeful abstraction; not an approximation of reality.

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  13. Mattheus, I've no time to respond right now. Will do it a bit later.

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  14. Daniel,-

    In the article, Hulsman answers exactly this question: why apriorism IS suitable for studying human behavior more than other approaches.

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  15. Once again, I stress the importance of Human Action (which is many times better than Hulsmann's paper)... even if only the first 71 pages of Human Action. Mises explains the differences in epistemology between economics and the natural sciences.

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  16. Mises attempt to "explain" the difference in epistemology between economics and the natural sciences is a mark against Mises, in my opinion.

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  17. Lee, Mises is fundamentally right.

    Most of the thing that are relevant to economics happen in human midns. You can't productively study what is happening in human minds by studying the external human behavior.

    If you accept this point then everything that remains, is studying of what is common in the thought processes of all human beings and secondary things.

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  18. Mattheus,-

    =You're joking, right? The ERE is what allows us to differentiate the catallactic concepts of interest and entrepreneurial profit. It's an invaluable tool.=

    I don't really think that we need ERE to explain entrepreneural profit. Why not use Kirznerian explanation of profit instead?

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