Sunday, January 19, 2020

"What is the Most Useful Idea in Economics?"


NPR's Planet Money went to the 2020 American Economic Association conference in San Diego where they asked economists, "what is the most useful idea in economics?" David Autor appears near the end of the episode (minute 16:00) to talk about the lump-of-labor fallacy. Almost exactly 87 years earlier, on January 18, 1933, Arthur Dahlberg appeared before a Senate subcommittee to give testimony on the thirty-hour work week bill. The lump-of-labor fallacy would be a useful idea indeed if it would show economists how little they have learned and how much they have forgotten in the intervening 87 years.

In his Planet Money interview, Autor rehearses the standard refrain about there not being a "finite" amount of work to be done so we are not in danger of running out of jobs. Then he introduces the caveat that although we will not run out of jobs, that doesn't mean that there is nothing to worry about -- some people will end up in worse jobs than they previously had or would have had. Autor's remedy for this is to develop policy that will improve people's skills so they qualify for better jobs or raise the productivity in personal service jobs so they pay more.

Eighty-seven years earlier, Dahlberg also disagreed with the idea that machines create technological unemployment. He also saw that the new jobs created by technological change would be different than the old ones. But Dahlberg carried his analysis several steps further than Autor. In Dahlberg's view many of the new jobs would differ from those they replaced in that the demand for their products or services would not be spontaneous but would need to be artificially induced by, for example, advertising.

Autor acknowledges something similar when he mentions that a hundred years ago 70 percent of consumer spending was on necessities compared to only around 40 percent now. But Dahlberg raised the issue that wages are determined by bargaining and the shift away from spontaneously-demanded goods and services undermines labor's relative bargaining power, resulting in a smaller labor share of income. Recipients of capital income may spend their larger share either on personal consumption or investment but eventually they will want to "cash in" on that investment. Spending on new investment will decline faster than spending on consumption rises. Dahlberg thus invoked the business cycle as the "slow-moving effect" of the introduction of labor-saving technology.

Here is a link to the transcript of the Planet Money interview with David Autor. Below is the transcript of Arthur Dahlberg's testimony to the Senate subcommittee on the thirty-hour work week:

STATEMENT OF ARTHUR DAHLBERG, ECONOMIST AND ENGINEER [January 18, 1933]

The CHAIRMAN. State your name and occupation.

Mr. DAHLBERG. My name is Arthur Dahlberg. I am an economist and engineer. I am at present the research fellow of Social Science Research Council, and for many years I have been making a study of the rôle which the number of hours plays in the economic scheme.

Senator BLACK. You have written a book on it?

Mr. DAHLBERG. Called Jobs, Machines, and Capitalism, which was published by McMillan a few months ago.

The CHAIRMAN. So many books are coming out on the subject I can not keep track of them. I have tried to read them.

Mr. DAHLBERG. I had an advantage that I did the work and wrote most of it before the depression hit us, and it was not done in desperation.

I think I discovered a new outgrowth coming from the interaction, the injection of machinery and retention of long working hours that has not been commented upon, and they are yet very vital things in the economic scheme. I disagree with those who believe that technological unemployment is created by employment of high-class machines. I have concerned myself with the nature of the new type of work and service to which the man hours are diverted, when the length of the working day is maintained relatively constant and machinery is injected. A pretty good case can be made to disprove that technological unemployment comes by the labor-saving machine, if we refer to the unemployment statistics. They have remained relatively constant during 1920, when the machine was being injected at a very rapid rate, but if we look at the figures more closely we see this, for instance, that the type of work and service changes, while in the manufacturing industries in 1919 to 1927 the number of workers actually decreased by a little over 2 per cent, and in the major industrial groups or more basic industries, manufacturing, construction, and so forth, the employment in those fields did absorb about one million of the five million and some hundred, which I think is significant, and I think it is also significant that about two and a half million of those five million workers were forced to join the miscellaneous group.

The thing I stress is that workers are diverted by the injection of labor-saving machinery from these activities which are spontaneously demanded by people with purchasing power into these activities the demand for which they must themselves create; that is, economic theorists used illustrations like this: If we displace printers with machinery more pressmen are created. That was true for a long time, but we finally get a situation where the displaced men have to get into other occupations, like advertisers, life-insurance agents, hot-dog attendants, and those new jobs are different from the former jobs, in that they have relatively little bargaining power as compared with the services in the basic industries.

Now, after all, this capitalistic economy of ours is a bargaining economy. It is the same animal whether labor return is 90 per cent of the national income or 60, and the capital return 10 or 40 per cent.

The injection of machinery has diverted labor effort, has generated positions which undermine the bargaining power of workers in their dickering with employers.

During the course of the 1920s, for instance, when machinery came in very rapidly, they were unable to bargain to themselves a share of the national income commensurate with that going to the employer. The employers got most of the benefits from the injection of labor-saving machinery.

I also want to point out another effect generated, slow-moving effect, generated by this injection of labor-saving machinery. The very nature of the capitalistic process is this: that the recipients of claims to wealth must pour them back either in buying commodities or in investment in plant or stock. We got unemployment and a devitalized behavior.

If I was an employer and employed 100 men, and am spending, either for commodities, whatever they are, or for new plant, if I spend immediately the system clicks along without breakdown, but if I then inject, we will say, labor-saving machinery, which permits me to lay off 50 men, those men are unemployed until I utilize my increased profit derived from the injection of that machinery in buying other commodities for myself, or in building new plants, employing men to put up more brick.
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We have this slow-moving effect generated, that as the people in the upper income group have their incomes increased in size, the wants presented to them go out further and further, and changes in the wants change in their essential nature; they are no longer dictated by nature. They are not commodities which seek to satisfy natural organic wants. The wants become man made, and are not demanded until man makes them.

Now, we have that growth increasing at a rapid rate in the last decade or two. We displace men from our basic industries and have to have advertisers out creating wants, tempting our upper income group to spend, but they will not spend until the want is created, and we get that lag in the demand for these man-made commodities upon the supply of labor. We get that lag in the demand for labor, and with that lag comes this decreased bargaining power in the labor market.

We had in the 1920's, for instance, a bargaining situation which has permitted the upper income groups to get enough of the national income not only to supply themselves with all the commodities that advertising men could make them buy, not only enough to supply them with functionally necessary plant, but over and above that they have got enough to engage in the competitive game of sales competition, to engage in building unnecessary plants to pour $10,000,000,000 of that net into foreign investments, and of course the system runs as long as they are willing to exercise their increased in new commodities or in building more and more excess plants.

Labor is employed in the process, and purchasing power is distributed in the form of wages and salaries, but they continue to make these investments, hoping always someday to cash in, in the belief that prices for the commodities will stay put as they cut their costs of production. The time comes, however, when they may wish to cash in on that, and do not reinvest their income in more and more excess plants. The business opportunities available to them become more and more inane and the time comes when they stop their reinvesting. The moment they do that less is paid out in wages and salaries and the marginal producer has to cut wages. The others must fall in line and the market is cut down and curtailed.

The stream of sales dollars from which they extract a little profit is consequently choked off, and when the rivulet of profit is choked off their capitalization goes on the bottom.

From the early point of view I think it necessary that society establish through the control of man-hour supplied industry a bar gaining situation where the share diverted to salaries to those who use the income for consumers' goods be adequate to provide a market for that share of the national income diverted to those who use it primarily for investment goods. The only way to maintain stable capitalization is to maintain your stable market. There is no other alternative than that. The very moment your market decreases, your capitalization must fall. It seems to me that the depression was necessarily generated when we poured into the economic mechanism more man-hours than are spontaneously demanded by the people with purchasing power. I maintain that the trouble has been that we have operated our system under a chronic scarcity of jobs and business property.

During the World War the system accidentally did operate the same operating mechanism under a chronic scarcity of man-hours. We had employers bidding for men instead of workers bidding for jobs. Unemployment dried up immediately. The distribution of the national income was changed so that the share going to the upper 5 per cent of the population went down from 33 per cent in 1914 and 1915 to 26 and 24 per cent in 1918 and 1919. We had during the war period because we accidentally poured into our old industrial activity only two-thirds as many man-hours as we had been injecting before, a diversion of about one-third into war activities, and building war supplies. We generated a new bargaining situation because we operated under a scarcity of man-hours, and we threw 8 per cent more of the national income to the lower 95 per cent of the population, which together, through the lower 95 per cent of the population in 1918, we only had to get through the $3,700 group. We threw 8 per cent more of the national income to the lower income groups, who used that income and did use it for consumers’ goods, pianos, electric lights, and all these, and we provided business with a market greater than the productive capacity of the plants to handle. That was accentuated by war orders.

I want to point out an internal adjustment in industry which was generated because the market outran the productivity of the plant. Employers, [before the war] faced with the scarcity of markets, diversified their styles and shapes, in an attempt to extract some of the money of the income groups who had incomes still available, and consequently, while the individual machine is made more and more efficient, the use of that machine is made more and more uneconomic.

During the war we reversed that and gave the employers themselves an economic incentive to get together, as they did under the help of the War Industries Board, the big manufacturers themselves on these committees. They got together then because of their economic incentive in simplifying and standardizing fashions, shapes, and styles. For instance, in the tire industry they cut the varieties from 287 to 32; and that adjustment went throughout the whole of the products of industry, and because of that simplification and utilization of engineering technique at their best, the output of the industrial machine was for an average 12 per cent greater than pre-war. That is, about two-thirds as many man-hours poured into the industrial machine, generated a greater commodity output, and commodity output is real income or real wages, as had been before the war. I want to point out that as carried through, it seems to me, on a national scale, we operate this economic system of ours on a scarcity man-hour basis so that we have the employers bidding for workers, we give business a market. We throw the purchasing power to those who patronize business and induce it to run full blast and actually to generate greater output in short hours than in long hours.

I disagree completely with these people who think the output of industry will fall with decrease in working hours. Due to these uneconomic adjustments which took place in our economic system in the last 10 years while operating under chronic scarcity of jobs, if we shorten now we get an internal readjustment which would by better engineering utilization actually permit us to give a higher wage under short hours than under long ones. The whole economic mechanism is so involved that we get lost in following the process.

As I say, I made this analysis before the depression hit us, but that was the new era of prosperity and was not listened to, and I tried to devise a technique by which I could more vividly present these economic interrelationships. I concluded the technique of the use of words for describing social process is inadequate. It is almost impossible to get agreement on what is happening, much misinterpretation over words. The memory forgets, and the best ones can not consider more than one aspect of the problem at a time. It is tariff, unemployment insurance, wage policies and such things. I finally devised a diagrammatic means for showing the machinery skeleton of the economic system simultaneously in one diagrammatic outline. I tried to show diagrammatically the concurrent flow of man-hours in industry, the raw materials going into industry, the commodity output from it, the flow of purchasing power in the system, the flow of social controls modifying and directing these flows.

I have that here on a large chart. Not more than two or three of you can see it, and I do not know whether the committee would care to hº me explain, but I think it is a much better device than words can do.

The CHAIRMAN. The difficulty is I would not know how to put it in the record.

Senator BLACK. I have seen it myself in the book.

Mr. DAHLBERG. It looks like a hopeless thing when unexplained, but it is very easy to follow.

The CHAIRMAN. I do not see how you can explain it so that it will be understood in the record. If you could, we would like to have it in.

Mr. DAHLBERG. I thank you for your courtesy.



11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Having read this post carefully, I do not understand what I should have learned from the reading. The question seems foolish; the response by Autor seems trivial. Please explain what I am missing.

Sandwichman said...

anon,

Autor uses the lump-of-labor fallacy as a rhetorical foil to make his simplistic, mechanical explanation (assuming long-run equilibrium) seem more sophisticated.

Dahlberg's analysis is a complex systems analysis that traces the trajectory of disequilibrium from changes in the effectiveness of consumer demand through bargaining inequality, income inequality, and speculative investment to liquidity crisis.

Which do you think is more compelling?

Anonymous said...

Thank you for this helpful summary, which tells me I was right in my initial reading in that the lump of labor concept should be of no interest in any setting in which there is a political commitment to high employment levels. China is putting virtually all who are able to work to productive work, this with increasing technology advance and increasing productivity and with a population of 1.4. India unfortunately is at this time politically uninterested in putting large numbers of men and women to work productively.

Anonymous said...

The point is there is obviously ample necessary work to be done in China and India, and here.

Anonymous said...

China is fortunately not worried about labor lumps:

http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-01/22/c_138724656.htm

January 22, 2020

Xi's Yunnan tour a big push for China's moderately prosperous society
The message of his first domestic tour in 2020 is clear: The nation is making a final push to complete the building of "xiaokang," or a moderately prosperous society in all respects, and not a single ethnic group, family or individual will be left behind.

ken melvin said...

I think that we study history in order to understand the present/now. It seems neccessary to under stand the now in order to prepare ouraelves for the future.

AXEC / E.K-H said...

The futile search for “the most useful idea in economics”
Comment on Sandwichman on ‘What is the Most Useful Idea in Economics?’ and ‘War, Peace and the End of Shorter Hours’.

“NPR’s Planet Money went to the 2020 American Economic Association conference in San Diego where they asked economists, ‘what is the most useful idea in economics?’ David Autor appears near the end of the episode to talk about the lump-of-labor fallacy. Almost exactly 87 years earlier, on January 18, 1933, Arthur Dahlberg appeared before a Senate subcommittee to give testimony on the thirty-hour work week bill. The lump-of-labor fallacy would be a useful idea indeed if it would show economists how little they have learned and how much they have forgotten in the intervening 87 years.”#1

For a summary, Sandwichman quotes Dahlberg: “The whole economic mechanism is so involved that we get lost in following the process.” and “… I tried to devise a technique by which I could more vividly present these economic interrelationships. I concluded the technique of the use of words for describing social process is inadequate. It is almost impossible to get agreement on what is happening, much misinterpretation over words. The memory forgets, and the best ones can not consider more than one aspect of the problem at a time.”

Indeed, that is why economists have not figured out in 200+ years how the economy works. Economists are still in the proto-scientific swamp where “nothing is clear and everything is possible” (Keynes), they have NOTHING of scientific value to show for. The major approaches — Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism, MMT — are mutually contradictory, axiomatically false, materially/formally inconsistent and all got the foundational economic concept profit wrong. The usefulness of economists consists NOT of any scientific achievement but their employability as useful political idiots.

This keeps economists occupied in decently paid jobs. Economists, in turn, keep their lump-of-labor intact by recycling brain-dead stuff ad infinitum.

Now, the fun is over. The Employment Law is given as a testable formula.#2 This puts an abrupt end to the conversation and makes scores of economists unemployed — including Sandwichman.

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke

#1 To begin with, it is a naive idea to go to the ASSA in order to find out whether economists have produced anything useful or worthwhile. ASSA is a rally where economists get their marching orders. See
ASSA2020 has been a success ― sorta kinda
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2020/01/assa2020-has-been-success-sorta-kinda.html

#2 Go! ― test the Profit and Employment Law
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2018/09/go-test-profit-and-employment-law.html

Sandwichman said...

"This puts an abrupt end to the conversation and makes scores of economists unemployed — including Sandwichman."

#1 Sorry to disappoint you, Egmont, but I am not an economist thus I will not be unemployed by your brilliant "Law."

#2 As a devout non-economist, the only "Law" I respect is "what happened." All the models, metaphors and formulas in the world don't mean a thing if they don't offer some insight into what's happening and how that came about.

AXEC / E.K-H said...

Sandwichman

“Economics is the study of the economy, not the study of economists.” (Ricardo Reis)

So, it is absolutely irrelevant that you are a devout non-economist.

The question is how the actual economy works. If you know, tell it but do not recycle silly dialogues from the history of garbage economics.

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke

AXEC / E.K-H said...

Water is wet, the economy is complex, economists are stupid/corrupt.

Cross-posting

Economics: Not a pretty story
Comment on Bill Mitchell on ‘Be careful of what parades as academic research’*

Bill Mitchell directs attention to ugly facts and top names: “Remember the 2010 film ― Inside Job ― which documented how my profession had become corrupted by the financial services sector into producing, allegedly, independent research reports extolling the virtues of deregulation etc and not admitting they were being paid for by the beneficiaries of the propaganda masquerading as research. It shows how corruption runs deep in the economics profession to accompany the incompetence that mainstream macroeconomists display. Well, I have been following an unfolding story about how Uber has decided to draw on that corrupt tendency for their own gains. It is not a pretty story.” and “I will leave it to you to check if you are interested. 1. Top names in the field ― Judd Cramer, Alan B. Krueger, Jonathan V. Hall, Peter Cohen, Robert Hahn, Steven Levitt, Robert Metcalfe, 2. Top ranked journals ― NBER Working Papers, American Economic Review.”

By pointing at an individual case of wrongdoing Bill Mitchell draws the attention away from (i) that economics as a WHOLE is a scientific fraud since the founding fathers, and (ii), that he is part of it.

The general public and the representative economist have NO proper understanding of what economics is all about. For a start, it is of utmost importance to distinguish between political and theoretical economics. The main differences are: (i) The goal of political economics is to successfully push an agenda, the goal of theoretical economics is to successfully explain how the actual economy works. (ii) In political economics anything goes; in theoretical economics, the scientific standards of material and formal consistency are observed.

A closer look at the history of economic thought shows that theoretical economics (= science) had been hijacked from the very beginning by the agenda pushers of political economics. The founding fathers were quite outspoken about their agenda: “That Political Economy is a science which teaches, or professes to teach, in what manner a nation may be made rich. This notion of what constitutes the science, is in some degree countenanced by the title and arrangement which Adam Smith gave to his invaluable work. A systematic treatise on Political Economy, he chose to call an Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations; …” (J. S. Mill)

Political economics has produced NOTHING of scientific value in the last 200+ years. The major approaches — Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism — are mutually contradictory, axiomatically false, and materially/formally inconsistent. Economics does NOT satisfy scientific standards to this day.#2

From this follows that economic policy guidance from Adam Smith/Karl Marx onward NEVER had sound scientific foundations. Left/center/right does NOT matter, ALL of economics is proto-scientific garbage, or in other words, political propaganda in a scientific bluff package.

To point at individual wrongdoers obscures the fact that economics is failure/fake/fraud from Econ 101 to textbooks to the peer-review process of journals to the EconNobel.#3

See part 2

AXEC / E.K-H said...

Part 2

This holds also for MMT#4 and Bill Mitchell#5. MMT claims that deficit-spending/money-creation is for the benefit of WeThePeople and the solution of almost all problems between unemployment and the survival of humanity. This is not the case, MMT is provably false as economic theory and MMT policy is ultimately for the benefit of the Oligarchy. The observable distribution of financial wealth is the result mainly of public deficit-spending. MMTers are not scientists but agenda pushers.

Bill Mitchell claims: “In fact, as a life-long educator, I clearly form the view that most of the distasteful things we read or hear from others are the result of ignorance and a lack of education. These things are clearly manipulated for ideological and political purposes by others but at the root of the problem is a lack of education. Education is the path to a more enlightened, tolerant and inclusive society. That is the driving principle I have always operated on. Which is why the relatively recent trend on social media that is variously called ― Cancel culture or Call-out culture ― is disturbing to say the least.”

True, but entirely beside the point. Bill Mitchell is NOT a teacher but a manipulator of public opinion. He is NOT a progressive fighter for WeThePeople but an agenda pusher for the Oligarchy. Like his academic colleagues, Bill Mitchell lacks the defining characteristic of a scientist: “A genuine inquirer aims to find out the truth of some question, whatever the color of that truth. ... A pseudo-inquirer seeks to make a case for the truth of some proposition(s) determined in advance. There are two kinds of pseudo-inquirer, the sham and the fake. A sham reasoner is concerned, not to find out how things really are, but to make a case for some immovably-held preconceived conviction. A fake reasoner is concerned, not to find out how things really are, but to advance himself by making a case for some proposition to the truth-value of which he is indifferent.” (Haack)#6

For economics in general and MMT, in particular, there is NO future. It holds: “Scrap the lot and start again.” (Joan Robinson)

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke

* Billy Blog
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=44186

#1 For details of the big picture see cross-references Failed/Fake Scientists
http://axecorg.blogspot.com/2015/11/failedfake-scientists-cross-references.html

#2 Failed economics: The losers’ long list of lame excuses
http://axecorg.blogspot.com/2017/01/failed-economics-losers-long-list-of.html

#3 Links on the Economics Nobel
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2019/08/links-on-economics-nobel.html

#4 For the full-spectrum refutation of MMT see cross-references MMT
http://axecorg.blogspot.com/2017/07/mmt-cross-references.html

#5 Bill Mitchell’s dishonorable discharge from the sciences
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2019/08/bill-mitchells-dishonorable-discharge.html

#6 Circus Maximus: Economics as entertainment, personality gossip, virtue signaling, and lifestyle promotion
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2019/07/circus-maximus-economics-as.html