Matt Nolan

Will current expansionary policy lead to “bubbles”

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An excellent post over at Marginal Revolution on this.  The points raised are:

1. If a more expansionary monetary policy helps an economy recover, yes it may well raise the risk of a later bubble.  We should then be cautious, but that is no reason to turn down the prospect of a recovery.  Anything leading to recovery could have a similar risk.

2. There are already plenty of reserves in the system and there is plenty of room for credit to expand over its current level.  Maybe we don’t know what triggers bubble-inducing investment behavior, but why should raising ngdp expectations and realities raise the risk of a bubble, if not for the factor cited in #1?

3. Arguably a flat yield curve induces a quest for higher returns elsewhere or in more dubious investment areas.  Yet the flattening yield curve did not follow quickly from the massive injection of reserves.  Rather it evolved slowly as prospects for real recovery deteriorated and the long-run outlook for the advanced economies turned down.  Real factors drove the flattening, and if monetary expansion brought a bit of recovery it likely would unflatten that curve a bit.  That could well lower the risk of a bubble.

4. I may consider Austrian theory, with regard to this question, in a separate post.

There are two points I would raise here though.

With regards to bullet three – although I agree that the flat yield cuve is likely the result of weak prosepects for the economy, we can’t really pretend that the long end of the yield curve is currently independent of relatively direct government involvement.  The Fed’s willingness to buy up longer term Treasury bonds in order to stimulate growth could indicate that the low yield curve is partially the result of intervention, rather than true expectations of long term inflation and growth propsects.

Interestingly, I agree with bullet point three – I think that if there were sufficient asset purchases we would actually see the yield curve steepen (through its impact on expectations).  But this is clear, or necessarily the mainstream, view of what is going on.

The second point is that bubbles aren’t necessarily bad – in any sense of the word.  They transfer resources between groups, groups who chose to take risk.  They lead to a change in the timing of investment, often in a way that is suboptimal – but not disasterous.  A “bubble” in of itself doesn’t lead to a failure of monetary policy, and it doesn’t lead to a large scale downturn – there are other significant factors that have lead to these things internationally, factors that were correlated with the bubble (maybe even related to it) but not caused by it!

jamesz

Models vs knowledge

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The Age reports on Australian legislation that forced banks to make ATM transaction fees explicit to the customer:

In place of the indirect fees were direct fees in which the owner of each foreign ATM took the money directly from our accounts each time we made a foreign withdrawal. But the size of the charge, typically two dollars, didn’t change. All of the economic models – including the Reserve Bank’s own model – suggested we would use ATMs pretty much as we had before. The incentives were much as they had been.

Instead withdrawals from foreign machines dived from around half of all ATM withdrawals to just 40 per cent. …A Reserve Bank study released yesterday says it’s behaviour that “cannot be accounted for by the model of ATM fees presented in this or any other existing paper”. To work out why, it has turned to research on retailing and a finding that point-of-sale displays can change purchasing decisions even when they convey no new information… The RBA’s tentative conclusion is that it is not the fee that is frightening us, it is being continually told about it.

  1. Framing effects such as loss aversion are hardly new so I’d be staggered if the RBA didn’t know about them.
  2. Just because your model doesn’t include an effect that you know to exist, that doesn’t mean it disappears or has no effect. It also doesn’t mean that you don’t know about it. I think we all know that being prompted to pay money affects behaviour so it would be surprising if the legislation was expected to have no effect. Of course, since it isn’t normally a relevant effect for the RBA they may well not have included it in their models previously. That doesn’t mean they’re idiots or didn’t know about framing.
Matt Nolan

Ethics and description

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In the past couple of days I’ve run into a couple of places in the internet that left we confused.

First, via Education Directions I noticed this article on the way of “valuing assets” that takes into account social value.  The claim is that:

Western accounting needs to recast the narrow, individualistic and economically bound concept of asset, claiming that much would be gained from recognising that there are things of value beyond those defined by individual property rights and economic reckoning

This seems like an aimless statement to me.  Private individuals value their asset based on issues of private value – this is hardly surprising.  Government takes into account concepts of broader “social value” when they do accounts, or look at the value of policies.  What methodological value is there from using a different word for social value to describe it?

Giving things new names doesn’t actually add value to how we describe them, unless the context is to translate these broad concepts for a cultural specific context!  In truth, it isn’t “western accounting” that needs to learn from this – if the government is trying to work out social value, then we would want to use standard western accounting methodologies with these specific cultural contexts in mind.

Now don’t get me wrong, the willingness to attack “western” accounting immediately shows that the authors want to attack an arbitrary strawman, than to credibly discuss what organisations are trying to achieve with accounting values and then asking how to transparently represent that.  And this brings me to my second link – Buddhist economics.

Contrary to the description given of “western” economics on this post, there is a focus on “social value” in mainstream economics – there is a huge focus on it.

But the very description behind Buddhist economics here is worse than that – for some reason the author of the Wikipedia page has decided that the purpose of economics is to tell people how to live their lives, rather than describing scarcity and trade-offs.  Given this, the article finds fault with economics because it dares to assume that people act in a self-interested way.

Of course, we’ve seen this ethical confusion before – a million times.  People presume that since economists are willing to discuss trade-offs we lack morals.  Now, a clear moral and ethical standpoint IS required to decide on what SHOULD be done, and what policy SHOULD be picked by government.  But everything that I keep seeing economists attacked for, and in this case accountants as well, is merely describing something.

Now does this happen because people find it hard to distinguish between description and prescription?  Or is the issue that people think economists framing of issues IS the driver of certain ethical outcomes in policy, and that our pretense of separating “description” and “prescription” is flawed?

jamesz

How should interdisciplinary exchange occur?

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A question that’s regularly arisen of late is how economics can learn from, and inform, other disciplines. I think it’s been sparked by the prevalence of scientists commenting on economic growth. We’ve had numerous bloggers up in arms about Shaun Hendy’s semi-informed comments, and now the Royal Society is broadcasting a discussion of the matter.

Economists all seem to agree that it would be a good idea if scientists took the time to understand something about economics before making pronouncements. Where there is substantial disagreement is over the way in which the exchange with practitioners of other disciplines should occur. I don’t think there’s any doubt that disciplines borrow from each other in a fashion that is helpful to both. Witness the success in economics of optimisation and evolutionary game theory, borrowed from physics and biology respectively. The question is how that should occur. Read more

jamesz

Progress is hard to measure

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Wellington Regional Council have recently published their Genuine Progress Indicator, which is intended to measure changes in regional well-being. Measuring well-being is very difficult and the technical documentation provided by the WRC shows how hard they have found it to overcome the challenges.

The GPI has been constructed by taking about 100 variables of relevance to well-being, normalising each, and averaging the 100 indices. The Council have declined to weight the aggregation because they recognise that people may disagree over the weighting. They seem to want to avoid arguments over the normative weighting decisions. Unfortunately, weighting everything equally is just as much of a value judgement as any other weighting system. For instance, the council consider the prevalence of smoking to be a negative indicator. Due to the equal weightings, a 1% decrease in smoking in the region would be as good for progress as a 1% increase in incomes, or a 1% decrease in unemployment. With other variables, from access to public transport to dairy farm soil quality, it seems unlikely that many people would agree with weighting them all equally.

There are plenty of other difficulties, too: ensuring comparability of the variables measured and selecting a baseline for normalisation, for instance. What these difficulties illustrate are the importance of value judgments in creating these GPIs, even when the architects try to steer away from making them. Each of us, given the opportunity to choose our own variables and weightings, could come up with a different result for the region’s progress. Because of that it’s hard to take the GPI seriously as a reliable measure of regional progress, except insofar as it is defined by the council’s own preferences.

jamesz

Black box modelling

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Nick Rowe is concerned that agent-based modelling (ABM) is a black box that provides no intuition and doesn’t really add to our knowledge:

Agent-based models, or any computer simulations, strike me as being a bit like [a] black box. A paper written by a very reliable economist where all the middle pages are missing and we’ve only got the assumptions and conclusions. I can see why computer simulations could be useful. If that’s the only way to figure out if a bridge will fall down, then please go ahead and run them. But if we put agents in one end of the computer, and recessions get printed out the other end, and that’s all we know, does that mean we understand recessions?

My question is how a model where you set the rules can ever be a black box? Shouldn’t the results always be understandable by reference to the initial conditions and ‘rules of the game’? Read more