Category Archives: Economics

Economics, Ludwig von Mises, Methodology

About Those Monotonic Transformations…

September 29, 2014 Garrett M. Petersen

Well, this is awkward. You told us that utility was strictly ordinal, that utility functions were unique up to a monotonic transformation. But whenever there’s a problem that requires them to be cardinal in some sense, you just revert right back to cardinality, don’t you? Remember how interpersonal comparisons of utility were supposed to be impossible? You made them anyways. You were never committed to the idea of ordinal utility. You just told us that to make us think we were safe. You lied to us.

In my newest post on Mises Canada, I critique expected utility theory on the grounds that it depends on cardinal utilities. Go read it and report back.

Economics, Education, Ludwig von Mises, Podcast

Economic Calculation and Education

Audio August 29, 2014 Garrett M. Petersen

A key difference between Austrian economics and the neoclassical-mathematical economics developed in the mid-twentieth century by Paul Samuelson and others is the assumption by the latter that people are essentially omniscient. What neoclassical economists call “rationality” effectively means omniscience. When the agents in neoclassical models face any uncertainty, the uncertainty is always fully understood in advance; for instance, a stock’s value tomorrow might be drawn from a normal distribution with a known mean and variance. Without the assumption of omniscience, the Austrian school faces the important question of how people can make economic decisions in a complex, uncertain world.

Ludwig von Mises’ answer (see his 1920 essay, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth) was that capitalist entrepreneurs calculate in monetary terms. That is, they use the prices of the immediate past as their starting data, and attempt to direct factors of production in such a way as to maximize the spread between costs and revenues. If their predictions of price changes are good, they earn profits. If their predictions are bad, they earn losses. Thus, their direction of scarce resources is subject to immediate and consequential feedback allowing a selective process for only the best entrepreneurial forecasting methods. Without monetary exchange and prices, the problem of directing factors of production to their highest uses becomes intractable.

An interesting thing about Mises’ calculation argument is that it does not only relate to socialism, but to free, capitalist societies also. Mises states that, “Economic goods only have part in this system [of monetary calculation] in proportion to the extent to which they may be exchanged for money.” Thus, when a good cannot be exchanged for money, for any reason, it is subject to a Misesian calculation problem. Continue reading Economic Calculation and Education →

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Economics, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk

Mainstream Economists Rediscover the Marginal Pair

August 19, 2014 Garrett M. Petersen

I have published my first blog post over at Mises Canada. The post relates Böhm-Bawerk’s price theory to modern job-matching models. Here are the key paragraphs:

[M]odern labour economists’ use of discrete reasoning in job-matching models should be lauded as a step towards greater realism. In these models, there are a discrete number of unemployed workers seeking to fill a discrete number of job openings. These models are summarized by Alvaredo, Atkinson, Piketty, and Saez:

“[I]n the now-standard models of job-matching, a job emerges as the result of the costly creation of a vacancy by the employer and of job search by the employee. A match creates a positive surplus, and there is Nash bargaining over the division of the surplus, leading to a proportion β going to the worker and (1 – β) to the employer.”[4]

In these models, as in the real world, workers and employers must find each other before they can engage in exchange. Often, the model is set up such that only one worker and one employer find each other at a given time, making their exchange a case of isolated exchange. If multiple workers or employers discover each other at the same time, then Böhm-Bawerk’s analysis of one- or two-sided competition applies. Both workers and employers form their valuations based on their expectations of the other opportunities they might find if they engage in further search.

However, while Böhm-Bawerk and his heirs in the Austrian school are satisfied to leave the determination of price unspecified within the range bounded by the marginal pairs, modern economists feel the need to uniquely determine prices within their models, thus the addition of Nash bargaining and the nebulous “β” term, the “bargaining power” of the worker. β must be precisely specified and known so that the homines economici in search models can form their valuations based on perfect knowledge of the random processes determining the future outcomes of search and of their exact payoffs under all possible matchings. If economists were to admit that the division of surplus is inherently idiosyncratic and unpredictable, their models would break.

Furthermore, simply by referring to “bargaining power,” economists imply more than their models can support. Suppose that the marginal pairs determined that the price of a given item should fall between $396 and $412. If the actual price attained is $400, should we conclude that buyers’ “bargaining power” is four times that of sellers, or that they settled on $400 simply because it is a round number acceptable to both buyers and sellers? One cannot know.

Read the whole thing.

Economics, Funny, John Maynard Keynes

Simple Keynesianism

July 29, 2014 Garrett M. Petersen 1 Comment

XKCD Comic about simple English Wikipedia — Source: http://xkcd.com/547/

Simple English Wikipedia is an edition of the open-source encyclopedia designed to be intelligible to small children, adults with learning disabilities, and people who are learning English. It is also an entertaining read, because the simple language often makes things silly. I found the article on Keynesian economics to be particularly silly and entertaining:

Keynesian economics (also called Keynesianism) describes the economics theories of John Maynard Keynes. Keynes wrote about his theories in his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. The book was published in 1936.

Keynes said capitalism was a good economic system. In a capitalism system, people earn money from their work. Businesses employ and pay people to work. Then people can spend their money on things they want. Other people work and make things to buy. Sometimes the capitalism system has problems. People lose their work. Businesses close. People cannot work and cannot spend money. Keynes said the government should step in and help people who do not have work.

This idea is called “demand-side policy”. If people are working, the economy is good. If people are not working, the economy is bad.

Keynes said when the economy is bad, people want to save their money. That is, they do not spend their money on things they want. As a result there is less economic activity.

Keynes said the government should spend more money when people do not have work. The government can borrow money and give people jobs (work). Then people can spend money again and buy things. This helps other people find work.

Some people, such as conservatives, libertarians, and people who believe in Austrian economics, do not like Keynes’ ideas. They say government work does not help capitalism. They say when the government borrows money, it takes money away from businesses. They do not like Keynesian economics because they say the economy can get better without government help.

During the late 1970s Keynesian economics became less popular because inflation was high.

When a big recession happened in 2007, Keynesian economics became more popular. Leaders around the world (including Barack Obama) created stimulus packages which would allow their government to spend a lot of money to create jobs.

Hilarious!

The Economics Detective

Category Archives: Economics

About Those Monotonic Transformations…

Mainstream Economists Rediscover the Marginal Pair

Garrett M. Petersen's blog about markets, institutions, and ideas.