Politicians often tell us that we should live within our means. True enough. Unfortunately, many of them do not appear to understand what this actually entails when it comes to fiscal policy. So far as most economists are concerned, the events of the last decade have thoroughly discredited advocates of austerity. Yet, it remains quite common to hear politicians from across the political spectrum calling for reductions in fiscal deficits or even fiscal surpluses. There appears to be little awareness that, in most countries, a call for a fiscal surplus is, literally, a call for the society to live beyond its means.
Category Archives: Economics
Three Economic Ideas Threatening to Defenders of the Status Quo
Neoclassical economics, which remains the prevailing orthodoxy, emerged in the late nineteenth century in the context of rising working-class opposition to capitalism. The theory’s appeal in certain circles as an apologetic for the status quo probably assisted its rise to prominence, which is not to imply that this was necessarily a motivation of the neoclassical economists themselves. The rise of any economic theory requires a receptive audience. Classical political economy had not provided defenders of the system with a comparable apologetic. Not only had it informed Marx’s analysis of capitalism but there were socialist movements drawing on interpretations of Ricardo’s labor theory of value. Class was central to the understanding of capitalism in both classical political economy and Marx, and no attempt had been made to conceal the class antagonisms characterizing the system.
Productivity, Labor Complexity, and Wage Determination Procedures
This post concerns an implication of Marx’s treatment of productivity and labor complexity for the appropriateness of alternative processes of wage determination. For simplicity, it is assumed that all activity is productive in Marx’s sense (that is, productive of surplus value) and that conditions are competitive in the Marxian (and classical) sense that investment is free to flow in and out of sectors in search of the highest return. Introducing unproductive labor, including a substantial role for public sector and not-for-profit activity, and non-competitive elements would considerably complicate the analysis. The point of the exercise is to consider the incentive effects of alternative wage-determination procedures, from the perspective of Marx’s theory. It is suggested that Marx’s distinction between abstract and concrete labor implies that centralized wage determination, more than alternative wage-setting approaches, will be conducive to productivity growth.
Politically Motivated Attempts to Own or Disown China as “Capitalist”
There are often attempts in the west to depict China as capitalist rather than socialist. After decades of China going from strength to strength on macroeconomic criteria – and in view of its undeniable achievement in reducing poverty at a rate unmatched in recorded human history – some on the right wish to deny that this could have been accomplished through socialism and so instead claim China to be capitalist. At the same time, there are those on the left who wish to distance notions of socialism from China’s economic system.
Labor Power as the ‘Money Commodity’
For Marx and many Marxists, money is based in a commodity; in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), it is not, being based instead in a social relationship that holds more generally than just to commodity production and exchange. Even so, to the extent that commodity production and exchange are given sway within ‘modern money’ economies, operation of the Marxian ‘law of value’ appears to be compatible with MMT. It is just that, from an MMT perspective, private for-profit market-based activity will be embedded within, and delimited by, a broader social and legal framework that is – or at least can be – decisively shaped by currency-issuing government. Therefore, even though in MMT money is not regarded as a commodity, it seems that a commodity theory of money can be reconciled with MMT provided, first of all, that the connection between a money commodity and currency is understood to apply only to the sphere of commodities and, secondly, that it is legitimate to regard labor power as the ‘money commodity’. An earlier post gave some consideration to the social embeddedness of commodity production and exchange. The present focus is on the notion of labor power as money commodity. On this point, MMT can be understood as directly linking currency to labor power, which, in Marx’s theory, is reduced to the status of a commodity when subjected to the laws of commodity production and exchange. This raises the question of whether labor power can serve the role of money commodity in Marx’s theory.
Labor Complexity in Relation to Aggregate Marxian Value
Value, in Marxist theory, is an amount of abstract labor that is measured in hours of simple labor or a monetary equivalent. Marx argued that complex labor is reducible, for the purposes of commodity production and exchange, to amounts of simple labor. Qualitatively, complex and simple labor are the same. Both count as abstract labor, and so create value. But, quantitatively, complex labor creates value at a faster rate than simple labor.
Currency Acceptance, Currency Value, and Transcending Capitalism
While revisiting old files on Marx and Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), I came across an interesting discussion. In it, somebody raised an argument that seems worth addressing:
MMT treats money as a public utility, while Marxism treats it as an expression of value. And I think that no matter the engagement between these two schools of thought, one has to choose either one or another. Either money is an abstract public utility (grounded only in people’s accepting it, through the force of taxation or whatever), which can then be used quite unproblematically for public goods within any context whatsoever … or one realises that money is not an abstract public utility, but is concretely rooted in material processes, i.e. is a concrete expression of value. In which case the one can’t really treat it unproblematically as a public utility to be used by fiscal policy to achieve any ends under any circumstances.
Disregard the references to policy being viable “within any context whatsoever” and “under any circumstances”. MMT emphasizes that policy is constrained by the availability of real resources, as well as political factors. The focus, instead, can be on the substance of the comment, which concerns what I consider to be an insightful distinction between currency as public utility and currency as expression of value.
Currency Value in Terms of Socially Necessary Labor
An economy’s minimum wage equates a unit of the currency to an amount of labor time. For instance, in Marxist terms, a minimum wage of $15/hour sets a dollar equal to 4 minutes of simple labor power. At a macro level, this enables currency value to be defined in terms of simple labor. There are, however, at least two ways in which this connection between currency value and labor could be drawn. One way would be to adopt a labor command theory of currency value. In effect, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) takes this approach. A second way would be to link the value of the currency to the commodity labor power. Adopting the second approach leads to a definition of currency value that is distinct from the MMT definition but closely (and simply) related to it. So far as policy implications go, especially in relation to MMT’s proposed job guarantee and prescriptions for price stability, there appear to be no important differences between the two approaches.
Banks are Capital Constrained, Not Reserve Constrained
Generations of economics students have been misled into believing that banks are reserve constrained. Even today, though most specialist monetary economists would likely cringe at the idea, there are widely used textbooks that teach this mistaken view to a new generation of students. Usually the story is framed in terms of a ‘money multiplier’ model in which an addition of reserves into the monetary system by the central bank will supposedly cause a multiplied increase in bank lending and in doing so expand the ‘money supply’ (in this context meaning currency plus deposits). In reality, banks create deposits (add to the money supply) in the act of lending. If they subsequently find themselves short of reserves, they can obtain them from other banks or, in the event of a system-wide shortage, they can borrow them from the central bank which is committed to acting as lender of last resort, a function that it must perform under present institutional arrangements to ensure smooth functioning of the system. The constraint on bank lending is profitability and bank capital, not reserves.
Fiscal Policy and the Inflation Constraint
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) makes clear that, for currency-issuing governments, the macroeconomic constraint on fiscal policy is resource availability, not revenue. This is sometimes summarized as “the constraint on fiscal policy is inflation” in recognition of the link between resource availability and the macro impacts of spending. So long as there are available workers, materials, plant and equipment, it is possible to produce more. Under these circumstances, extra spending on goods and services can initiate or encourage production without necessarily affecting prices. Although this point is elementary, recent public debate suggests that it is not obvious to everyone. Some appear to believe that inflation will result whenever there is: (i) money creation; (ii) spending; or (iii) fiscal deficits. These concerns are addressed in turn.