I’m starting now on what will I think be the hardest and most controversial chapter of my book – the argument that the search for a macroeconomic theory founded on (roughly) neoclassical micro, which has been the main direction of macro research for 40 years or so, was a wrong turning, forcing us to retrace our steps and look for another route. As always, comments and criticisms accepted with gratitude.

Refuted doctrines

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Micro-based macro

We are now all Friedmanites, Lawrence Summers, (former US Treasury Secretary, now Director of the White House’s National Economic Council, and prominent New Keynesian economist) and

At the end of the 19th century, British Liberal politician Sir William Harcourt observed “we are all socialists now”. Harcourt was referring to a radical land reform measure that had been denounced as socialist when it was introduced, but was generally accepted by the time he was speaking (a couple of years later). Harcourt’s point was applicable to the whole trend of economic and social policy, in Britain and elsewhere, from the 1867 Reform Bill that gave millions of working class men the vote (women had to wait until after World War I) to the crisis of the 1970s. From progressive income taxes to publicly-owned infrastructure services (both prominent items in the 10-point program of the Communist Manifesto)) ideas that were unthinkable in mainstream politics became issues of political contention and then established institutions.

As a pithy summary of the way ideas that were once radical become acceptable, and are ultimately embodied in conventional wisdom, Harcourt’s quip has never been bettered. As a result, it has been reused many times over.

One of the most notable adaptations of Harcourt was that of Time Magazine in 1965, which noted, following the successful use of fiscal policy to stabilize the economy that “we are all Keynesians” now. This statement was made by Keynes’ greatest modern critic, Milton Friedman (though he later said it had been taken out of context). Even more famously, it was repeated by Richard Nixon in 1971.

But whereas Harcourt was speaking at the beginning of a nearly a century of reform that did indeed take economic policy in a socialist, or at least social-democratic direction, Nixon’s statement marked the end of the era of Keynesian dominance.

In fact, Nixon was citing Keynes’ aversion to the gold standard (a “barbarous relic”) as a justification for abandoning the pegging of the US dollar to gold, which was a central feature of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates that had underpinned Keynesian economic management since World War II. The outcome was not a system of stable exchange rates backed by a basket of commodities rather than gold, as Keynes had proposed, but the complete breakdown of Bretton Woods and a shift to the floating exchange rate system advocated by the greatest critic of Keynesian economics, Milton Friedman.

In the course of the 1970s, Friedman and his supporters, centred on the University of Chicago, won a series of political and intellectual victories over the Keynesians. Following the failure of attempts to stabilise the economy using Keynesian fiscal policy, governments around the world switched to Friedman’s preferred remedies based on controlling the growth of the monetary supply. Even though this did not work particularly well, and was later replaced by policies based on managing interest rates, the resurgence of the Chicago School was not reversed. Their case against government intervention, both to stabilise the macroeconomy and to address market failures in particular industries, was widely accepted.

The Keynesians conceded Friedman’s central points: and that macroeconomic policy can affect real variables, like the levels of employment and unemployment, only in the short run. They sought to develop a ‘New Keynesian’ economics, by showing that, given small deviations from the competitive market assumptions of the basic neoclassical economics model, it would be possible to explain the recurrence of booms and recessions and to justify the modest stabilisation policies pursued by central banks during the Great Moderation. Because prominent representatives of this group were located at Princeton and Harvard on the East Coast of the US, and at Berkeley on the West Coast, they were sometimes called the ‘saltwater school’ as opposed to the ‘freshwater school’, located in the lakeside settings of Chicago and Minnesota.

Members of the freshwater school sought to push Friedman’s conclusions even further, arguing that macroeconomic policy could not be beneficial even in the short run. They tried to show that government intervention could only add uncertainty and instability to the economic system, and that, in the absence of such intervention, economic fluctuations like booms and slumps were actually good things, reflecting economic adjustments to changes in technology and consumer tastes. The resulting models went by various names, but the most popular was ‘Real Business Cycle Theory’.

Despite their often heated disagreements, saltwater and freshwater economists were in agreement on one fundamental point: that macroeconomic analysis must be based on the foundations of neoclassical microeconomics. And, although they disagreed about economic policy, these disagreements could be contained within a very narrow compass. With a handful of exceptions, both schools took it for granted that macroeconomic management should be implemented through the monetary policies of central banks, that the only important instrument of monetary policy was the setting of short-term interest rates and that the central goal of monetary policy should be the maintenance of low and stable inflation. Granting these premises, saltwater economists argued that stability could only be achieved if central banks paid attention to output and employment as well as inflation, while the freshwater school favored an exclusive focus on price stability.

The global financial crisis did not so much confirm or refute the elaborate arguments of the competing schools as render them irrelevant. The saltwater school could claim vindication for their view that the economy is not inherently stable, but their models had little to say about the kind of crisis we have actually observed, driven by an interaction between macroeconomic imbalances and massive financial speculation.

The freshwater-saltwater disputes were similarly irrelevant to the policy debate which was conducted in terms that would be familiar to someone who had not looked at an economics book since 1970. (In fact, the freshwater side of the dispute rapidly reverted to arguments from the 19th century, which had been debunked by Keynes and Irving Fisher).

As Gregory Clark of UC Davis observed ‘ The debate about the bank bailout, and the stimulus package, has all revolved around issues that are entirely at the level of Econ 1. What is the multiplier from government spending? Does government spending crowd out private spending? How quickly can you increase government spending? If you got a A in college in Econ 1 you are an expert in this debate: fully an equal of Summers and Geithner.’

If we are to develop a macroeconomic theory that can help us to understand, and hopefully prevent the recurrence of, crises like the current one, and help us to improve policy responses, economics must take a different road from that it has followed since the 1970s. The appealing idea that macroeconomics should develop naturally from standard microeconomic foundations must be recognised as a distraction. In its place, we must accept, in the language of systems theory that macroeconomic phenomena are emergent, arising from complex interactions of behaviors we do not fully understand, but must nevertheless respond to.