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MACROECONOMICS + 1.0 Introduction Animal Spirits & Psychic Alchemy |
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1.1 Animal Spirits & Psychic Alchemy
Elsewhere I have
raised the following questions:
What is wealth? What is a nation? And, accordingly, what is “the wealth of nations”? Through time the meaning of
these terms has changed and continues to change and mutate so that today we
stand at the threshold of what is known as ‘the knowledge-based economy’. How did we get here? What force is propelling us into a
future where science fiction becomes ‘economic’
reality? First, over time our
concept of what constitutes ‘wealth’ or alternatively “property”, has mutated
from physical things and persons to increasingly intangible things and
processes, especially the expectation of profit from business transactions
including those most intangible forms of wealth – intellectual property (please
see: J.R. Commons,
The Legal Foundations of
Capitalism, p. 274).
In this regard it should be
noted that econometrics is the sub-discipline of economics explicitly concerned
with quantitative measurement including that of national income and its causal
agents. Other sub-disciplines play
different roles. For example,
institutional and cultural economics are primarily concerned with the
‘qualitative’ nature of such agents as well as their emergent outcome - national
income. In reality, one can not
measure what one cannot name. The
history of national income as well as business accounting is rife with examples
of ‘new’ or ‘creative’ entries being ‘discovered’ then added to the asset and
liability statements of the balance sheet, e.g. ‘goodwill’ as well as new items
to the revenue and expenditure statements, e.g. intellectual property
royalties. Second, over time our
concept of the source of wealth has
mutated and
changed time.
Collectively called ‘factors of production’, these are the causal agents
of, what
Adam Smith
in 1776 called, “the wealth of nations”, or what today is called “national
income” that results from the actions of relatively tangible agents such as
capital, labor and natural resources as well as more intangibles ones including
entrepreneurship and technological change.
Thus until the late
18th century, national wealth increased, it was thought by the
Mercantilist School of economics, by acquiring more and more ‘capital’ in
the form of gold, silver and land (including chattel [‘moveable property’] which
comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for ‘cattle’) as well as more slaves, serfs,
peons, habitant and other human beings effectively ‘owned’ by a nation. By the mid-19th century the
concept expanded with the Classical School to include manufacturing plant and equipment combined
with division and specialization of labor.
By the last quarter of 19th century, it grew further with the Neoclassical School to embrace large-scale financial capital (especially
limited liability equity markets), increasingly organized labor and
‘disembodied’ technological change referring to general or systemic ‘progress’
in fields like transportation, manufacturing and communications. With the Keynesian School of the mid-20th century it expanded to
encompass the role of government in managing the wealth of nations as well as
‘embodied’ technological change referring to the specific marketable results of
organized research and development in the natural and engineering sciences, e.g.
the transistor in the transistor radio.
Today our conception increasingly focuses on intellectual property
including formal rights such as copyrights, patents, registered industrial
designs and trademarks as well as informal rights including ‘know-how’ and trade
secrets constituting what I call ‘the quaternary sector’ of the economy
complementing the three standard sectors: primary (agriculture, farming, fishing
and forestry); secondary (manufacturing); and tertiary (services). And with this development we have
entered the ‘knowledge-based economy’.
It is important to note that this economic evolution has been paralleled,
if not propeled, by legal evolution defining ever more intangible forms of
property rights (please see J.R. Commons,
The Legal Foundations of
Capitalism). The success of this new
economy depends particularly on two factors of production and their interaction
– entrepreneurship and technological change. Entrepreneurship is, compared to fixed
plant and equipment, workers and raw materials, a very ill-defined, intangible
factor of production. The word
‘entrepreneur’ comes from the French entreprendre which can be translated
alternatively as: (a) “undertaking” as the person in effective control of a
commercial undertaking; or, (b) “middling” as a contractor acting as an
intermediary. Undertaking
responsibility for a commercial venture or middling between producers and
consumers involves risk. The
willingness to undertake such risks are what John Maynard Keynes (p. 161) called the “animal spirits”. Since the time of John D.
Rockefeller Senior and the “Robber Barons” the business tycoon, the man (and
increasingly the woman) whose vision is ultimately realized in economic space,
has been an icon of both ‘democratic’ and economic thinking. Today the entrepreneur formerly
known as “Bill Gates” bestrides the globe opening and closing windows unto the
future. Thirty years ago he was a
‘nobody’, today this sometimes “richest man” in the world wrestles with his
co-patriot, Sam Robson Walton founder of Wal-Mart, for the title. But it is no longer just ‘captains of
industry’ who are ‘risk-takers’ for we have become an entrepreneurial society in
which a near majority risk financial capital, indirectly through RRSPs, company
retirement and ‘stock option’ plans (whose value is based on the market value of
a company’s stock) and mutual funds, or directly through equity ownership bought
and sold on the stock market.
The waxing and waning of
the animal spirits of investors and entrepreneurs, measured by investment in
real and financial capital, is a major cause of the so-called business cycle. The recent
‘dot.com bubble’ is an example of the impact of animal spirits, the
sense of risk-taking, that fuels the capitalist economy. Thus behind all of the equations and
‘rational’ economic models lays sheathing passion, greed and fear summed up in
Keynes’ term ‘animal spirits’. Keynes’s whole theory of
unemployment is ultimately the simple statement that rational expectation being
unattainable, we substitute for it first one and then another kind of irrational
expectation: and the shift from one arbitrary basis to another gives us from
time to time a moment of truth, when our artificial confidence is for the time
being dissolved, and we, as business men are afraid to invest, and so fail to
provide enough demand to match our society’s desire to produce. Keynes in the General Theory attempted a
rational theory of a field of conduct which by the nature of its terms could be
only semi-rational. Shackle,
p. 129 The other key factor is
technological change or what Joseph Schumpeter called ‘creative destruction’. The
contribution of technological change to growth in national income has been
estimated as high 66% (Shapiro,
p. 493). However,
we have no idea of why
somethings are invented while others are not, and why somethings invented are
innovated (brought to market) and others are not. In this
sense, the contribution of technological change to national income can be called
the ‘measure of our economic ignorance’.
It is important to note the two stages nature of this ignorance –
invention and innovation. While
invention appears to be a matter of realizing a natural science potential,
innovation is a matter of social or cultural factors. For example, the electric battery was
apparently invented more than 2,000 years ago outside what is now
Did Bill Gates or Sam
Robson Walton graduate from an ivy league “B” school? In fact, historically the most
successful economic alchemists have been mainly ‘outsiders’. Thus the founders of the Industrial
Revolution were ‘dissenters’, i.e., not members of the Church of England, and
excluded from the university. Eventually they became part of the establishment
with the result being what in economics was called in the last quarter of the
20th century, “the British disease” (please see:
English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit,
1850-1980 by Martin J. Wiener). The place
of … intellectual property is, after all, the
only absolute possession in the world...
The man who brings out of nothingness some child of his thought has
rights therein which cannot belong to any other sort of property… (Chaffe
1945). As a student I was told
that: “An economist is a tool bearing animal but the tool box is in his
head”. And what are the tools? Concepts! In this regard the word ‘concept’
derives from the Latin capere “to
take”, and was originally used in
the sense ‘to grasp firmly with the hand” or in Sicilian, “to steal”. So let’s take an inventory of what tools
you should be carrying, given the prerequisites for this
course. From your introductory and
intermediary microeconomics courses you should have a working knowledge of:
elasticity, equilibrium, externalities, marginal and opportunity cost, supply
(producer theory), demand (consumer theory) and markets (competition
theory). From introductory
macroeconomics you should know something about aggregate demand and supply,
comparative advantage, expectations, marginal propensity, money and the multiplier – all in
the Keynesian tradition. To this point these are
just a loose collection of tools you have ‘learned’ about. In this course they will be put to work;
some new ones will be added; and skill in using them assessed. Some of you will take them further,
refining and polishing their use, even creating new ones, through a career in
economics; but for all, however, you should come away with a sound grounding in,
and understanding of, the major economic theories guiding a post-modern world
striving for higher and higher levels of national income, and, hopefully,
higher and more equitably distributed global income together with a better, more fulfilling way of life for all
citizens of planet Earth. We will take these tools
and use them to construct and then operate the three primary engines of
macroeconomic analysis – Classical, Keynesian and Monetarist. We will then tinker with these
‘standard’ engines to construct mixed or hybrid engines. We will then ‘road test’ them on the
fiscal, monetary and growth policy highway system of national macroeconomic
policy. However, not only will
these engines be tested, your driving ability will also be assessed and
rated. To help you along the way
the website provides some pit stops that may prove helpful. The
Glossary
of the text is provided on-line.
Various ‘in-depth’
articles and extracts are provided so you more easily immerse yourself in
economic thinking and gain a somewhat different perspective from that presented
in the text book. Finally all my
lecture notes will be available on-line and will include links to relevant
graphics and other teaching aids.
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