Category: Philoeconomica

Categories
Antitrust Monopolization Philoeconomica

The Twice-Anti Monopoly Progressive

Keynes was no antimonopolist.

One of the most interesting and unnoticed developments of recent decades has been the tendency of big enterprise to socialise itself. A point arrives in the growth of a big institution – particularly a big railway or big public utility enterprise, but also a big bank or a big insurance company – at which the owners of the capital, i.e. its shareholders, are almost entirely dissociated from the management, with the result that the direct personal interest of the latter in the making of great profit becomes quite secondary. When this stage is reached, the general stability and reputation of the institution are the more considered by the management than the maximum of profit for the shareholders. The shareholders must be satisfied by conventionally adequate dividends; but once this is secured, the direct interest of the management often consists in avoiding criticism from the public and from the customers of the concern. This is particularly the case if their great size or semi-monopolistic position renders them conspicuous in the public eye and vulnerable to public attack. The extreme instance, perhaps, of this tendency in the case of an institution, theoretically the unrestricted property of private persons, is the Bank of England. It is almost true to say that there is no class of persons in the kingdom of whom the Governor of the Bank of England thinks less when he decides on his policy than of his shareholders. Their rights, in excess of their conventional dividend, have already sunk to the neighbourhood of zero. But the same thing is partly true of many other big institutions. They are, as time goes on, socialising themselves.

John Maynard Keynes, The end of laissez-faire (1926).

In Robert Skidelsky’s great three-volume intellectual biography of Keynes, there is but a single reference to antitrust—an entreaty by Felix Frankfurter that Keynes should lend some support to the antitrust project.

Keynes opposed the early New Deal’s state-sponsored cartels because they restricted output when the economy required more investment. But, like many in the early 20th century, Keynes viewed monopoly as an inevitable and possibly salutary adjunct to industrial progress.

Indeed, Skidelsky suggests that Keynes found debates over market structure—including self-righteous antimonopolism—dumb.

Writes Skidelsky:

Keynes used to come away from Manchester with feelings of ‘intense pessimism’, provoked by the short-sighted individualism of the Capulets and Montagues, . . . the sermonising of those who wanted to put the industry through the wringer, the ingrained dislike of any suggestion of monopoly.

Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour, 1920-1937 262-63 (1995).

(This post originally appeared as a Twitter thread.)

Categories
Miscellany Philoeconomica

An Economics of False Advertising

The first fundamental theorem of welfare economics states conditions under which any price equilibrium with transfers, and in particular any Walrasian equilibrium, is a Pareto optimum. For competitive market economies, it provides a formal and very general confirmation of Adam Smith’s asserted “invisible hand” property of the market. A single, very weak assumption, the local nonsatiation of preferences . . . , is all that is required for the result. Notably, we need not appeal to any convexity assumption whatsoever.

Andreu Mas-Colell et al., Microeconomic Theory 549 (1995).

Wow. So there is a mathematical proof that a “competitive market economy” is always efficient? And all that is required is “[a] single, very weak assumption, the local nonsatiation of preferences,” which translates into the reasonable assumption that people always tend to want more?

If only.

Page forward 70 pages and you encounter the following proviso:

We have, so far, carried out an extensive analysis of equilibrium equations. A characteristic feature that distinguishes economics from other scientific fields is that, for us, the equations of equilibrium constitute the center of our discipline. Other sciences, such as physics or even ecology, put comparatively more emphasis on the determination of dynamic laws of change. In contrast, we have hardly mentioned dynamics. The reason, informally speaking, is that economists are good (or so we hope) at recognizing a state of equilibrium but are poor at predicting precisely how an economy in disequilibrium will evolve. Certainly, there are intuitive dynamic principles: if demand is larger than supply then the price will increase, if price is larger than marginal cost then production will expand, if industry profits are positive and there are no barriers to entry, then new firm will enter, and so on. The difficulty is in translating these informal principles into precise dynamic laws.

Andreu Mas-Colell et al., Microeconomic Theory 620 (1995).

So, that great proof of the efficiency of competitive markets applies only to an economy in “equilibrium,” but economics has no idea how any economy would actually get into equilibrium?

Yes, that is exactly right.

Economics has shown that if buyers and sellers happen to trade at competitive prices in all markets, then the invisible hand will work great. But economics has never been able to show that buyers and sellers will actually bargain their way to competitive prices, even in “competitive market economies,” and even if they are rational profit-maximizers and all that.

Actually, even this proviso is false advertising. Because economics has actually gone and nearly proved the opposite of the proposition that buyers and sellers will always bargain their way to competitive prices: that buyers and sellers in competitive market economies can bargain their way to almost any set of prices—not just competitive prices—and, moreover, that they can bargain prices in circles forever, never achieving any equilibrium set of prices at all, much less the efficient competitive equilibrium set.

The entire project of free market economic theory is, in other words, a failure, and has been since these results appeared in the 1970s.

But you wouldn’t know it from reading the canonical graduate textbook in economics.

Categories
Philoeconomica Regulation World

Magic Markets: Looking Down on China for the Wrong Reasons Edition

Foreign Policy’s normally pretty good China Brief has this bit of magical thinking about markets today:

But clashing economic and governmental incentives, not generator capacity, are causing the problems [with China’s electricity supply]. Fifty-six percent of China’s power comes from coal, and thermal coal prices have more than doubled around the world after the initial shock of the pandemic. . . . In most countries, these prices would be passed on to consumers, but Beijing tightly limits the maximum price of electricity—causing generators to reduce their supply or shut down rather than lose money.

Palmer J., China Faces an Electricity Crisis. Foreign Policy. September 30, 2021.

Um, if there’s not enough low-cost electricity capacity in China then there’s not enough low-cost electricity capacity in China. Raising prices won’t make the blackouts stop, unless you happen to consider “blackout” too ugly a term to use for having your electricity cut off because you missed your payment. All raising prices will do is ensure that the rich get more of a limited electricity supply, and the poor less. But you don’t need to take my word for it. Just ask Texas.

It’s hard to believe that in 2021 Foreign Policy is still trying to teach China lessons about the virtues of unregulated markets. I mean, this is a country that went from nothing in 1980 to having an economy that’s 20% larger than ours today by purchasing power parity, nationwide blackouts due to the country’s resource poverty notwithstanding. It might be time for us to learn a thing or two from China about how to handle resource constraints equitably.

Or at least to put down our market fetish and actually study a bit of basic economics.

Categories
Inframarginalism Miscellany Monopolization Philoeconomica

Was Personalized Pricing the Epstein Grift?

The Times reports that pedophile Jeffrey Epstein earned more than $100 million from private equity magnate Leon Black in exchange for providing some “idea-generator”-type tax advice on a handful of Black’s family trusts, advice that Black still had to pay his own tax lawyers to implement.

Does that mean that Epstein, who was a college dropout, was a self-taught tax genius? Not likely.

But it does suggest that Epstein knew the value of personalized pricing. Here’s the key passage from the article:

Jack Blum, a Washington lawyer who has led corruption investigations for several Senate committees, said he was surprised by the size of the fees Mr. Epstein’s work commanded. “You could be the best lawyer in Manhattan working on the most complicated trusts and estates and it would never come anywhere close to that kind of money,” he said.

Matthew Goldstein & Steve Eder, What Jeffrey Epstein Did to Earn $158 Million From Leon Black, N.Y. Times (Jan. 26, 2021).

So what gives?

The answer is that tax lawyers price for the marginal consumer: the marginal client using their services. They not only serve magnates like Leon Black, but also the merely rich, like an executive mentioned in the Times article whom Epstein initially refused to take on as a client for being insufficiently wealthy.

The merely rich can’t afford $100 million, so, to get their business, tax lawyers must charge them lower fees. When the truly rich, like Leon Black, go looking for tax advice, they knock on these lawyers’ doors, and the lawyers charge them about the same price they charge everyone else.

They don’t try to charge higher fees to their wealthiest clients because tax law is a reasonably competitive industry. You need to be smart to work at the high end of the field, but tax is not a field in which “the best are easily ten times better than the average.”

And for the many who do have what it takes, the cost of entry into the market is relative low; all you need is a JD and an LLM, which cost a few hundred thousand dollars to obtain, about the amount needed to open a cleaners or a pizzeria (okay, there’s also the opportunity cost of time spent in school, but we are still probably only talking about the high six figures).

So if you start raising your fees above what the marginal client is willing to pay, your super-rich inframarginal clients will take their business to another tax lawyer who is still pricing for the marginal client. So you, too, continue to price for the marginal client.

But what if you could find a way to charge your richest clients prices personalized to them, and not have them jump ship to your competitor?

It looks like Epstein’s grift was figuring out how to do that.

The answer, as in so many other lines of business, was to make tax advice into a luxury product: to make the product exclusive.

The Times tells us that Epstein sold himself to clients as a genius who would only give tax advice to the richest of the rich. He cultivated the image of being, not some pathetic, overworked, upwardly-mobile professional, but one of them, a fellow member of the super-rich who was willing to cut other members in on secrets that only they could access because of who they were.

Exclusivity creates brand loyalty, and brand loyalty means that you stop shopping around; you are willing to pay a price determined by what you can afford, rather then what competitors are offering. You are willing to pay, in other words, a personalized price.

Graphically, the tax market may have looked like this:

Gerrit De Geest observes in Rents: How Marketing Causes Inequality, that in today’s economy, it’s not those who make who earn all the profits, or those who distribute who earn all the profits; it’s those who do the marketing. That’s where all the rents live. Competition drives profits to zero for all save those who beguile.

It seems somehow fitting that this economy would spawn a figure like Epstein, who sold tax advice but didn’t even bother to do his legal work in house. He didn’t really sell tax advice; he marketed it.

As the Times recounts, Epstein referred one acquaintance to outside tax lawyers, whom the acquaintance then paid for tax advice, and then Epstein, having never mentioned a fee to this acquaintance, sent him a bill for 10% of the purported tax savings that the lawyers, and not Epstein, had created.

That 10% was the price of enchantment, nothing more.

But you still have to wonder how a private equity guy like Black, whose business revolves around deals hammered out by armies of lawyers and shaped by tax considerations, could have thought he was getting something special from Epstein.

Did he really think tax was like music, and it was worth paying his Mozart to dream up a tune, even if Black still had to pay someone else to write all the notes down for him?

Maybe he didn’t, and there’s more left to tell in this story.

Or maybe we need a new razor: Never attribute to conspiracy what can otherwise be attributed to marketing.

Categories
Antitrust Meta Philoeconomica

Liu et al. and the Good and Bad in Economics

Liu et al.’s paper trying to connect market concentration to low interest rates reflects everything that’s good and bad about economics.

The Good Is the Story

The good is that the paper tells a plausible story about why the current era’s low interest rates might actually be the cause of the low productivity growth and increasing markups we are observing, as well as the increasing market concentration we might also be observing.

The story is that low interest rates encourage investment in innovation, but investment in innovation paradoxically discourages competition against dominant firms, because low rates allow dominant firms to invest more heavily in innovation in order to defend their dominant positions.

The result is fewer challenges to market dominance and therefore less investment in innovation and consequently lower productivity growth, increasing markups, and increasing market concentration.

Plausible does not mean believable, however.

The notion that corporate boards across America are deciding not to invest in innovation because they think dominant firms’ easy access to capital will allow them to win any innovation war is farfetched, to say the least.

“Gosh, it’s too bad rates are so low, otherwise we might have a chance to beat the iPhone,” said one Google Pixel executive to another never.

And it’s a bit too convenient that this monopoly-power-based explanation for two of the major stylized facts of the age–low interest rates and low productivity growth–would come along at just the moment when the news media is splashing antitrust across everyone’s screens for its own private purposes.

But plausibility is at least helpful to the understanding (as I will explain more below), and the gap between it and believability is not the bad part of economics on display in Liu et al.

The Bad Is the General Equilibrium

The bad part is the the authors’ general equilibrium model.

They think they need the model to show that the discouragement competitors feel at the thought of dominant firms making large investments in innovation to thwart them outweighs the incentive that lower interests rates give competitors, along with dominant firms, to invest in innovation.

If not, then competitors might put aside their fears and invest anyway, and productivity growth would then increase anyway, and concentration would fall.

Trouble is, no general equilibrium model can answer this question, because general equilibrium models are not themselves even approximately plausible models of the real world, and economists have known this since the early 1970s.

Intellectually Bankrupt for a While Now

Once upon a time economists thought they could write down a model of the economy entire. The model they came up with was built around the concept of equilibrium, which basically meant that economists would hypothesize the kind of bargains that economic agents would be willing to strike with each other–most famously, that buyers and sellers will trade at a price at which supply equals demand–and then show how resources would be allocated were everyone in the economy in fact to trade according to the hypothesized bargaining principles.

As Frank Ackerman recounts in his aptly-titled assessment of general equilibrium, “Still Dead After All These Years: Interpreting the Failure of General Equilibrium Theory,” trouble came in the form of a 1972 proof, now known as the Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu Theorem, that there is never any guarantee that actual economic agents will bargain their way to the bargaining outcomes–the equilibria–that form the foundation of the model.

In order for buyers and sellers of a good to trade at a price the equalizes supply and demand, the quantity of the good bid by buyers must equal the quantity supplied at the bid price. If the price doesn’t start at the level that equalizes supply and demand–and there’s not reason to suppose it should–then the price must move up or down to get to equilibrium.

But every time price moves, it affects the budgets of buyers and sellers, who much then adjust their bids across all the other markets in which they participate, in order to rebalance their budgets. But that in turn means prices in the other markets must change to rebalance supply and demand in those markets.

The proof showed that there is no guarantee that the adjustments won’t just cause prices to move in infinite circles, an increase here triggering a reduction there that triggers another reduction here that triggers an increase back there, and so on, forever.

Thus there is no reason to suppose that prices will ever get to the places that general equilibrium assumes that they will always reach, and so general equilibrium models describe economies that don’t exist.

Liu et al.’s model describes an economy with concentrated markets, so it doesn’t just rely on the supply-equals-demand definition of equilibrium targeted by the Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu Theorem, a definition of equilibrium that seeks to model trade in competitive markets. But the flaw in general equilibrium models is actually even greater when the models make assumptions about bargaining in concentrated markets.

We can kind-of see why, in competitive markets, an economic agent would be happy to trade at a price that equalizes supply and demand, because if the agent holds out for a higher price, some other agent waiting in the wings will jump into the market and do the deal at the prevailing price.

But in concentrated markets, in which the number of firms is few, and there is no competitor waiting in the wings to do a deal that an economic agent rejects, holding out for a better price is always a realistic option. And so there’s never even the semblance of a guarantee that whatever price the particular equilibrium definition suggests should be the one at which trade takes place in the model would actually be the price upon which real world parties would agree. Buyer or seller might hold out for a better deal at a different price.

Indeed, in such game theoretic worlds, there is not even a guarantee that any deal at all will be done, much less a deal at the particular price dictated by the particular bargaining model arbitrarily favored by the model’s authors. Bob Cooter called this possibility the Hobbes Theorem–that in a world in which every agent holds out for the best possible deal, one that extracts the most value from others, no deals will ever get done and the economy will be laid to waste.

The bottom line is that all general equilibrium models, including Liu et al.’s, make unjustified assumptions about the prices at which goods trade, not to mention whether trade will take place at all.

But are they at least good as approximations of reality? The answer is no. There’s no reason to suppose that they get prices only a little wrong.

That makes Liu et al.’s attempt to use general equilibrium to prove things about the economy something of a farce. And their attempt to “calibrate” the model by plugging actual numbers from the economy into it in order to have it spit out numbers quantifying the effect of low interest rates on productivity, absurd.

If general equilibrium models are not accurate depictions of the economy, then using them to try to quantify actual economic effects is meaningless. And a reader who doesn’t know better might might well come away from the paper with a false impression of the precision with which Liu et al. are able to make their economic arguments about the real world.

So Why Is It Still Used?

But if general equilibrium is a bad description of reality, why do economists still use it?

It Creates a Clear Pecking Order

Partly because solving general equilibrium models is hard, and success is clearly observable, so keeping general equilibrium models in the economic toolkit provides a way of deciding which economists should get ahead and be famous: namely, those who can work the models.

By contrast, lots of economists can tell plausible, even believable, stories about the world, and it can take decides to learn which was actually right, making promotion and tenure decisions based on economic stories a more fraught, and necessarily political, undertaking.

Indeed, it is not without a certain amount of pride that Liu et al. write in their introduction that

[w]e bring a new methodology to this literature by analytically solving for the recursive value functions when the discount rate is small. This new technique enables us to provide sharp, analytical characterizations of the asymptotic equilibrium as discounting tends to zero, even as the ergodic state space becomes infinitely large. The technique should be applicable to other stochastic games of strategic interactions with a large state space and low discounting.

Ernest Liu et al., Low Interest Rates, Market Power, and Productivity Growth 63 (NBER Working Paper, Aug. 2020).

Part of the appeal of the paper to the authors is that they found a new way to solve the particular category of models they employ. The irony is that technical advances of this kind in general equilibrium economics are like the invention of the coaxial escapement for mechanical watches in 1976: a brilliant advance on a useless technology.

It’s an Article of Faith

But there’s another reason why use of general equilibrium persists: wishful thinking. I suspect that somewhere deep down economists who devote their lives to these models believe that an edifice so complex and all-encompassing must be useful, particularly since there are no other totalizing approaches to mathematically modeling the economy on offer.

Surely, think Liu et al., the fact that they can prove that in a general equilibrium model low interest rates drive up concentration and drive down productivity growth must at least marginally increase the likelihood that the same is actually true in the real world.

The sad truth is that, after Sonnenschein-Mantel-Debreu, they simply have no basis for believing that. It is purely a matter of faith.

Numeracy Is Charismatic

Finally, general equilibrium persists because working really complicated models makes economics into a priesthood. The effect is exactly the same as the effect that writing had on an ancient world in which literacy was rare.

In the ancient world, reading and writing were hard and mysterious things that most people couldn’t do, and so they commanded respect. (It’s not an accident that after the invention of writing each world religion chose to idolize a book.) Similarly, economics–and general equilibrium in particular–is something really hard that most literate people, indeed, even most highly-educated people and even most social scientists, cannot do.

And so it commands respect.

I have long savored the way the mathematical economist gives the literary humanist a dose of his own medicine. The readers and writers lorded it over the illiterate for so long, making the common man shut up because he couldn’t read the signs. It seems fitting that the mathematical economists should now lord their numeracy over the merely literate, telling the literate that they now should shut up, because they cannot read the signs.

It is no accident, I think, that one often hears economists go on about the importance of “numeracy,” as if to turn the knife a bit in the poet’s side. Numeracy is, in the end, the literacy of the literate. But schadenfreude shouldn’t stop us from recognizing that general equilibrium has no more purchase on reality than the Bhagavad Gita.

To be sure, economists’ own love affair with general equilibirium is somewhat reduced since the Great Recession, which seems to have accelerated a move from theoretical work in economics (of which general equilibrium modeling is an important part) to empirical work.

But it’s important to note here that economists have in many ways been reconstituting the priesthood in their empirical work.

For economists do not conduct empirics the way you might expect them to, by going out and talking to people and learning about how businesses function. Instead, they prefer to analyze data sets for patterns, a mathematically-intensive task that is conveniently conducive to the sort of technical arms race that economists also pursue in general equilibrium theory.

If once the standard for admission to the cloister was fluency in the latest general equilibrium techniques, now it is fluency in the latest econometric techniques. These too overawe non-economists, leaving them to feel that they have nothing to contribute because they do not speak the language.

Back to the Good

But general equilibrium’s intellectual bankruptcy is not economics’ intellectual bankruptcy, and does not even mean that Liu et al.’s paper is without value.

For economic thinking can be an aid to thought when used properly. That value appears clearly in Liu et al.’s basic and plausible argument that low interest rates can lead to higher concentration and lower productivity growth. Few antitrust scholars have considered the connection between interest rates and market concentration, and the basic story Liu et al. tell give antitrusters something to think about.

What makes Liu et al.’s story helpful, in contrast to the general equilibrium model they pursue later in the paper, is that it is about tendencies alone, rather than about attempting to reconcile all possible tendencies and fully characterize their net product, as general equilibrium tries to do.

All other branches of knowledge undertake such simple story telling, and indeed limit themselves to it, and so one might say that economics is at its best when it is no more ambitious in its claims than any other part of knowledge.

When a medical doctor advises you to reduce the amount of trace arsenic in your diet, he makes a claim about tendencies, all else held equal. He does not claim to account for the possibility that reducing your arsenic intake will reduce your tolerance for arsenic and therefore leave you unprotected against an intentional poisoning attempt by a colleague.

If the doctor were to try to take all possible effects of a reduction in arsenic intake into account, he would fail to provide you with any useful knowledge, but he would succeed at mimicking a general equilibrium economist.

When Liu et al. move from the story they tell in their introduction to their general equilibrium model, they try to pin down the overall effect of interest rates on the economy, accounting for how every resulting price change in one market influences prices in all other markets. That is, they try in a sense to simulate an economy in a highly stylized way, like a doctor trying to balance the probability that trace arsenic intake will give you cancer against the probability that it will save you from a poisoning attempt. Of course they must fail.

When they are not deriding it as mere “intuition,” economists call the good economics to which I refer “partial equilibrium” economics, because it doesn’t seek to characterize equilibria in all markets, but instead focuses on tendencies. It is the kind of economics that serves as a staple for antitrust analysis.

What will a monopolist’s increase in price do to output? If demand is falling in price–people buy less as price rises–then obviously output will go down. And what will that mean for the value that consumers get from the product? It must fall, because they are paying more, so we can say that consumer welfare falls.

Of course, the higher prices might cause consumers to purchase more of another product, and economies of scale in production of that other product might actually cause its price to fall, and the result might then be that consumer welfare is not reduced after all.

But trying to incorporate such knock-on effects abstractly into our thought only serves to reduce our understanding, burying it under a pile of what-ifs, just as concerns about poisoning attempts make it impossible to think clearly about the health effects of drinking contaminated water.

If the knock-on effects predominate, then we must learn that the hard way, by acting first on our analysis of tendencies. And even if we do learn that the knock-on effects are important, we will not respond by trying to take all effects into account general-equilibrium style–for that would gain us nothing but difficulty–but instead we will respond by flipping our emphasis, and taking the knock-on effects to be the principal effects. We will assume that the point of ingesting arsenic is to deter poisoning, and forget about the original set of tendencies that once concerned us, namely, the health benefits of avoiding arsenic.

Our human understanding can do no more. But faith is not really about understanding.

(Could it be that general equilibrium models are themselves just about identifying tendencies, showing, perhaps, that a particular set of tendencies persists even when a whole bunch of counter-effects are thrown at it? In principle, yes. Which is why very small general equilibrium models, like the two-good exchange model known as the Edgeworth Box, can be useful aids to thought. But the more goods you add in, and the closer the model comes to an attempt at simulating an economy–the more powerfully it seduces scholars into “calibrating” it with data and trying to measure the model as if it were the economy–the less likely it is that the model is aiding thought as opposed to substituting for it.)

Categories
Philoeconomica

Economics as Cultural Tell

Why do economic explanations feel so much more insightful than humanistic explanations? The answer may be that economists take social types as their axioms, the unsplittable atoms of the economic universe, whereas humanists take mental states to be their atoms. And we have lost the capacity to believe–really, truly believe–in the inner life.

Consider economist A.O. Hirschman’s argument that monopoly may be better for consumers than the sluggish competition of highly concentrated markets if “exit is ineffective as a recuperation mechanism, but does succeed in draining from the firm or organization its more quality-conscious, alert, and potentially activist customer or members.”

One immediately has the experience of insight here. Yes! If the competitors are already so large that most customers can’t abandon an underperforming firm, but there remain enough options that activist consumers can still bail on underperforming behemoths and buy from some scrappy startup on the competitive fringe, then the behemoths won’t be subject to voice–to the pressure campaigns that only activists are likely to bring–and so the big firms may well perform worse than if there were a single monopoly and the activists were to have nowhere to go but into the streets, onto the message boards, and to Congress to compel change.

What’s driving this experience of insight? The answer is the division of the consumer group into types. Hirschman posits the existence of an activist type, and a sleeper type who does not complain about poor quality. This typology does all of the work in his argument, as the sleepers bail out of underperforming firms when competition persists, depriving all consumers of the massive positive externality that is their activism applied to big firms.

Now consider a humanistic explanation of the same phenomenon. The sociologist, for example, might argue that competition is sometimes worse for consumers than monopoly because the absence of alternatives to a monopoly focuses consumers’ minds on using complaints and activism to induce the monopoly to reform. Whereas the existence of competition leads to apathy, because consumers know that they have the option to buy elsewhere in response to bad behavior, even if they do not exercise that option.

This humanistic explanation does not produce the same experience of insight as Hirschman’s account, at least for me. And yet it is saying exactly the same thing.

Hirschman doesn’t actually know that there are activist types, human beings who have fixed personalities that make them prone to activism in ways not true of other people. But Hirschman does know that there is a human tendency toward activism that is expressed more under some conditions than under others. The mechanism of expression is simply unclear to him and to us all. It could be that there are fixed activist types, as Hirschman suggests, but it could also be that people do change, there are no types, and activism is really a contingent mental state, called forth by monopoly buying, as the humanist suggests. Both Hirschman and the humanist are describing the exact same phenomenon, but imposing upon it different preconceptions regarding the causes of social behavior.

The humanist ties the explanation to an intellectual worldview in which mental states are the axioms, the first principles that produce the experience of insight when applied to observed phenomena. Whereas Hirschman ties the explanation to an intellectual worldview in which personality types are first principles.

But why is Hirschman’s type-casting move so intellectually irresistible?

The reason may just be that we feel more comfortable on an intuitive level dealing in human types than in mental states. If Hirschman had said that monopoly makes us complain, or makes us angry, we would have dismissed him as fishing in the soup of introspection, conjuring up emotions to suit his explanatory tastes. We would not hear “the feeling of being trapped” and say: yes! That’s why consumers discipline monopolies!

But when we hear that activist types can’t bail on monopolies, we feel a veil pulling from our eyes because we already think in terms of types informally. We all already know that there are activist types out there in the world. We have seen them with our own eyes marching in the streets. Economics is satisfying because we intuitively accept its axioms.

In other words, our love of economics should teach us that we do not really, truly, fully believe in the inner life. We feel more comfortable, as a cultural matter, with the immutable personality type than with the notion that the human is a vessel the contents of which are constantly changing as circumstances change, as new thoughts and emotions pour in and old ones pour out. Feelings are, to us, arbitrary, untrustworthy, a kind of magic trick or supernatural spirit conjured up by lazy thinkers to gloss a reality that lies elsewhere. We don’t actually believe in feelings despite all the lip service we like to pay to them.

Somehow I’m reminded of an experience watching a couple of movies with foreign friends in graduate school. One of the films was an American romcom. The other was a film by Almodovar: Women on the Edge of A Nervous Breakdown. I’d seen the romcom before and it was one of my favorites; I’d felt that it was all about the human condition, feelings, and so on.

But watching it with this crowd, and back to back with the Almodovar, was, well, embarrassing. I realized that the entire romcom was a vehicle for the expression of a single emotion at one discrete moment in the film, a kind of exhausting, Herculean effort to get in touch with feelings by a culture for which feelings remain distinctly unnatural to this day. My friends were bored out of their minds.

By contrast, the Almodovar, which for me was dizzying and inscrutable in the way that its characters seemed constantly buffeted by unseen forces, was engrossing and deeply insightful for my friends. I realized that unlike my romcom, the Almodovar film didn’t struggle to present a feeling so much as it took feelings for granted, making of them a vast ensemble of principal players in a drama that unfolded almost entirely on the plane of the inner life. With respect to that plane, that film was like the Mona Lisa standing next to the stick figure of my romcom.

All of economics is a tell regarding this type-casting value system of ours. The economist’s basic model of human behavior is the immutable preference function. When economists model individual behavior, they write down a single function, the utility function, which defines the consumer’s preferences, and then they model the consumer as acting always in a manner consistent with those immutable preferences. Thus for economists, people are always just types. The rise of so-called behavioral economics has not changed this one bit; it has just changed the menu of types.

The economist has no defense for the type-casting approach, anymore than Hirschman could possibly have been prepared to defend his attribution of activism to types as opposed to the changing mental states of consumers. It is simply in the nature of economics to approach the world in this way. You are asked to take it or leave it. And we take it, and have taken it, to a far greater extent than we have embraced any other field of social science, because economics creates for us a more visceral experience of insight.

That tells us something ultimately about ourselves.

Categories
Antitrust Monopolization Philoeconomica

Economic Plotting

The assumption that people behave rationally does a lot of work in economics, but perhaps its most important function is to allow economists to assume that mutually beneficial deals always get done. If a seller places a value of a $5 on a good, and a buyer a value of $10, the assumption goes, the seller and buyer will agree on a price somewhere between $5 and $10, and trade will take place, simply because the exchange is mutually beneficial.

Economists and their detractors have spent at least half a century tearing apart the assumption that good deals always get done, first through the lens of transaction costs, and later through behavioral economics. Transaction costs dealt only a glancing blow to the assumption, however, because additional costs don’t really undermine it. One can certainly accept that some deals do not get done because the cost of negotiating them–the legal fees, the time required to induce the other party to accept a particular share of the benefits generated by the deal, and so on–are too high, without giving up on the notion that good deals, defined to be those that are mutually beneficial after transaction costs are taken into account, still always do get done.

Behavioral economics has turned out to be harder to dismiss because it suggests that neither party to a transaction may actually want to execute mutually beneficial trades. If the seller doesn’t place the right value on his good, thinking it is worth $20 to him when instead it is worth $5, and the buyer thinks the good is worth $5 to him when instead it is worth $10, then the two will not be able to agree on a price, and so a mutually beneficial trade will not take place. But objections based on behavioral economics are not what interest me about the assumption that good deals always get done.

What is really interesting about the struggle over whether good deals get done is that economics has always needed the fact that some good deals do not get done to create the tension that gives economic inquiry its meaning. An economics in which good deals always get done is an utterly uninteresting, unrealistic, and indeed solipsistic undertaking. And economics has always understood that. Long before transaction cost economics and behavioral economics, economists were careful to build into their models discrete loci of irrationality in order to give the models meaning. Without these areas of irrationality, the models would lack what a creative writing teacher would tell you is the essential element of any story: conflict.

But if a novelist were to try to introduce tension into a plot this way, by asking the main character to treat similarly situated supporting characters differently for arbitrary and unexplained reasons, the novel would be panned.

Consider, for example, as doctrinaire and orthodox a model as the general equilibrium model of Arrow and Debreu. If these men had really taken the assumption that all good deals get done seriously, they would have started with a bunch of households and firms, written down their utility and production functions, and then: bam! The model would have been done. For the assumption that all good deals get done would then have ensured that all trades that, according to the utility functions and production functions they had written down, are mutually beneficial, would then immediately be carried out.

To give the story the conflict it needs to be of interest, Arrow and Debreu added another assumption: that prices are uniform in all markets. (This assumption does not of course originate with them, but their model represents a sort of apotheosis of orthodox economics, making it useful to frame the discussion around it.) Uniform pricing creates tension because when prices are uniform a seller can make more money by intentionally refusing to sell to certain buyers, even when those sales would be mutually beneficial. This is the classic problem of the inefficiency of the uniformly-pricing monopolist.

Consider a seller who places $5 of value on a good and has two prospective buyers, one who places $100 of value on the good and the other who places $10 of value on the good. Without the uniform pricing restriction, the seller would always sell to both buyers, because whatever profits he happened to generate from his sale to the first buyer he could always increase by selling to the second buyer as well.

That changes with uniform pricing, because then the price the seller charges the first buyer must be the same as the price the seller charges the second buyer. If the seller is able to negotiate a price of $95 with the first buyer (a price the first buyer will, under the all-good-deals-get-done assumption, accept because he places a value of $100 on the good, and so would enjoy a net gain of $5 from the deal), then the seller will not sell at all to the second buyer, who is only willing to pay up to $10 for the good and therefore won’t buy at a price of $95. So a deal with the second buyer becomes impossible, even though, if a lower price could be charged to the second buyer, a deal would be mutually beneficial. If the seller and the second buyer could agree on a price of $7, for example, the seller would earn an additional $2 of profit.

But that price is impossible under uniform pricing, because to charge the second buyer $7 would require that the seller charge the first buyer $7 as well, eliminating $83 of profit from the deal with the first buyer relative to the $90 earned at a price of $95, in exchange for a paltry gain of only $2 in profit on the second deal. The seller could still ensure that all good deals get done, by charging that $7 price, or any price between $5 and $10, but it is not in the interest of the seller to do that.

Now the Arrow and Debreu model has the opportunity to become interesting, by giving the conditions under which all mutually beneficial deals will still get done, in spite of the uniform pricing restriction and therefore in spite of the failure of the assumption that all good deals get done as a general matter. In particular, the Arrow and Debreu model makes clear that perfect competition, or some other mechanism that leads to competitive prices, is required for all good deals to get done when prices are uniform. Competition ensures that if one seller tries to charge $95, the $90 in profits generated thereby will induce other sellers to enter the market and steal the buyer’s business by charging a slightly lower price, and as competition intensifies that price will be bid down to the $5 of value that sellers place on the product, ensuring that the second buyer is able to purchase the product as well. All good deals get done after all. By circumscribing the assumption that good deals always get done using a restriction that is realistic–many goods are sold at uniform prices–the model poses a problem that has a certain verisimilitude–how to ensure that all good deals get done when prices are uniform–and then gives the conditions sufficient to solve the problem (e.g., competitive markets).

All economic models follow the same playbook: all economic models create tension and practical interest by limiting the general economic assumption that all good deals get done in some way (usually, but not always by assuming that prices are uniform), and then trying to show what legal rules or policy interventions might be needed to ensure that all good deals do get done anyway. (Another example is the assumption of risk aversion in insurance economics.)

What is so peculiar about this rhetorical posture of economics is that the baseline assumption is always that good deals do always get done, and the model is then built around the introduction of some discrete deviation from that assumption. The model never starts from the assumption that good deals never get done.

Which gives all economic models an internally discordant character.

Why, for example, should I assume that when the monopolist charges $95 to the first buyer, that buyer will magically trade at that price, simply because trade is mutually beneficial, but at the same time I should also accept that the seller won’t try to charge a lower price in order to be able to engage in mutually-beneficial trade with the second buyer? Yes, the seller generates more profit by charging the higher price and selling only to one buyer. But by the same token, the first buyer could enjoy a greater net gain from the transaction by insisting on paying no more than $80 for the good, as opposed to the $95 price that I am asked to assume that the buyer will accept. The buyer does better insisting on a lower price, and if the seller insists on a higher price, then the two might never reach a deal, as Robert Cooter so insightfully pointed out years ago. I am therefore asked to accept that the profit motive is not the be-all-and-end-all for the seller and the first buyer, otherwise I could not assume that the good will sell at $95, and yet I am asked to accept that the profit motive is the be-all-and-end-all for the seller in relation to the second buyer, which is why the seller won’t think twice about pricing the second buyer out of the market and missing an opportunity for mutually beneficial trade with the second buyer. Why ever would that be the case?

Of course, it is in the nature of the introduction of a deviation from the assumption that good deals always get done to have such dissonance. But that just begs the question: does it make sense to rely upon inconsistent behavioral assumptions within the same model?

Keep in mind that in order for uniform pricing to give rise to tension in the Arrow and Debreu model, the same individual seller must be willing to compromise profits for the sake of completing mutually-beneficial transactions with buyers who are willing to pay high prices–inframarginal buyers, they’re called–but not be willing to compromise profits for the sake of completing mutually-beneficial transactions with buyers who are able to pay only lower prices–marginal buyers, these are called. There seems to be no basis for assuming that sellers are socially oriented with respect to inframarginal buyers but rapaciously-profit-driven with respect to marginal buyers, other than the rhetorical need of model builders to introduce tension into the stories they are telling about economic activity.

But if a novelist were to try to introduce tension into a plot this way, by asking the main character to treat similarly situated supporting characters differently for arbitrary and unexplained reasons, the novel would be panned. The trouble for economists is that if they start adding content to the personalities of economic actors, they end up falling down the behavioral economics rabbit hole. There are too many different personality types from which to select , and the mathematics required to build models in any case becomes intractable. But if economists stick with the basic assumption that all good deals get done, then they paint a Panglossian portrait of economic activity that leaves them unable to identify economic problems or solve them. The result is an economic theory built on arbitrary and self-contradictory assumptions about when deals get done.

A more tenable theoretical approach would be to accept that good deals don’t always get done, all the time, in all circumstances. That means that even in competitive markets, sellers will fail to sell to buyers at the market price. That also means that in monopoly markets, sellers may fail to sell to inframarginal buyers at the monopoly price. Laying off absolute assumptions regarding whether deals always get done should also release economics from going to the opposite extreme: assuming that when good deals do not always get done good deals must therefore never get done. Which means that we should not be surprised to come upon monopolists that charge competitive prices.

Jettisoning absolute assumptions about whether good deals get done would prevent economics from making grand claims, such as the claim of the Arrow and Debreu model that competitive markets are always efficient. But it would not make economic theory useless. Economic theory could still tell us plenty about potentials: such as the amount of gain that would be created were policymakers to encourage buyers and sellers to strive to make mutually beneficial deals whenever possible. (Guido Calabresi makes a similar point when he argues that economics should focus less on how to expand the production possibilities curve and more on how to get the economy to that curve.) It would also help explain economic institutions that economics has so far been unable to penetrate.

Like advertising. The classic economic explanation for advertising is that it provides consumers with useful product information, something that is almost impossible to believe in the information age, if it ever was credible. But in a world in which good deals don’t always get done, there is another potential economic justification for advertising: that it seeks to overcome whatever cognitive or bargaining failures otherwise prevent good deals from getting done. In a world in which mutually beneficial transactions don’t always happen, because consumers are irrational, one would expect to find sellers spending large amounts of money trying to cajole buyers into buying, even in situations in which the deals on offer are good for buyers and so in theory they should embrace them without needing to be persuaded to do so. (That would go some ways toward undermining my own argument here that persuasive advertising must be bad for consumers, because absent advertising rational consumers always purchase the products that are best for them.)

There’s nothing wrong with the use of simplifying assumptions in economics, or in thought of any kind. But the use of inconsistent assumptions about behavior in the same model–often in relation to the same economic actors in the model–is a different story.

And all of economic theory is based upon doing just that.

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Philoeconomica Quantity World

The Discreteness of Death

Death is a discrete phenomenon. It is a creature of units. Vegetation relies on sunlight for life. A plant can die, however, only because it is a unit of vegetation. When the amount of light falls from 3.481 to 2.377 on some scale, there is death only because each plant requires a minimum of 0.05 of light, or 0.3, or 0.4.

So, why? Why this discreteness?

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Philoeconomica

Ecoan

Suppose that you are indifferent between two fountain pens and one pencil and one fountain pen and a hundred pencils. But at current prices you need more wealth to buy a fountain pen plus a hundred pencils than to buy two fountain pens and one pencil. Are you therefore poorer if you are forced to give up 99 pencils in exchange for a fountain pen?

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Civilization Meta Philoeconomica Quantity

The Illiteracy of the Literate

The complex feelings of lawyers and humanist scholars with respect to quantitative subjects, and particularly the quantifization of the social sciences, ought to give them greater empathy for the illiterate and uneducated. The humanist scholar is to the scientist as the illiterate are to the literate.

The illiterate view books with distrust, for books are used to undermine their most heartfelt positions in ways against which they are unable to mount a defense. But this is precisely how the lawyer feels when her nuanced doctrinal argument is demolished by a mathematical model of the economy that shows that regardless of the substance of the legal rule, the same economic outcome will obtain.

“It’s just mathematical mumbo jumbo,” says the lawyer. “These economists don’t know how things work in the real world.” But what the lawyer cannot do is to beat the economist at her own game. She can’t show that the economic model cannot withstand close scrutiny; all she can do is try to delegitimize the entire method. But the illiterate levy the same charge on the literate: “it’s just book learning,” they say. They cannot defend themselves in writing; but they can try to delegitimize writing itself.

It is particularly bitter for the humanists that they have been socialized to occupy the power position. For millennia, since the invention of writing, they have been the ones who use their learning to lord it over others. But now these merely-literates, these innumerates, must know what it means to be crushed by ideas. A very bitter position indeed.

I do not mean to say that the mathematicians have any better claim on the truth. But if the humanists think the mathematicians don’t, then it should perhaps worry the humanists to think that maybe they don’t either, in relation to the illiterate. Or maybe we are marching forward, after all, from one stage of intellectual progress to the next!