Working Papers on Capital as Power, No. 2021/07, December 2021
Steve Keen’s The New Economics: A Manifesto
Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan [1]
Jerusalem and Montreal
December 2021
bnarchives.net / Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Steve Keen’s book, The New
Economics: A Manifesto (2021), offers a new path for economics, and for good
reason. In his view, neoclassicism, the paradigm that rules modern-day
economics, has become a serious menace:
I regard Neoclassical economics as not merely a bad
methodology for economic analysis, but as an existential threat to the
continued existence of capitalism – and human civilization in general. It has to go. (155).
Strong words? Of course, but they are wholly
warranted. Neoclassical economics is the official scientific underpinning of
capitalism as well as its main ideological defence, and according to Keen, it
fails in both tasks. Contrary to received opinion, neoclassicism cannot
explain capitalism – either in detail or in the aggregate – and the policies it
prescribes do not support but undermine the very system it defends. It
must be scrapped, says Keen, and the purpose of his book is to explain why and
outline what should come in its stead.
Half a century worth of research and writing on the
subject has made Keen one of the world’s foremost critiques of neoclassical
economics. His previous bestseller, the rigorous-yet-accessible Debunking
Economics (2011), dismantled neoclassical microeconomics. His new
volume hammers its macro framework.
The book focuses on three key issues: (1) the bizarre
neoclassical perspective that money, credit and debt
do not matter for the macroeconomy; (2) the neoclassical insistence that the
economy’s complex, nonlinear turbulences are best explained in linear,
self-equilibrating terms; and (3) the fact that neoclassicists have hijacked
the economics of climate change, using patently false assumptions to justify
do-nothing policies with untold future consequences.
1.
Economics sans Money
Everyone knows that capitalism is about money, that
credit is king, and that debt is everywhere. Or perhaps we should say, everyone
except neoclassical macroeconomists. In their view, money, credit
and debt, although prevalent, don’t really matter.
To backtrack a bit, economists, both orthodox and
heterodox, divide the economy into two separate realms – real and nominal. The
more important of the two is the real sphere. This is where you find what
economists think really matter: production, capital and labour, technical
knowhow, goods and services, consumption, wellbeing, utility
and exploitation. The nominal sphere is about money, prices
and finance, including credit and debt, and this sphere is deemed secondary.
Metaphorically, the nominal sphere is like a giant mirror, a mere reflection of
the real economy – though exactly what is being reflected, how accurately, and
to what effect is subject to much debate.
Heterodox economists think the reflection is
inaccurate, that the mismatch distorts the real economy, and that the result is
booms and prosperity alternating with instability and hardship.
By contrast, neoclassicists view the reflection as
accurate. In their opinion, the nominal sphere doesn’t distort the real
economy, it facilitates it. Money and its financial derivatives mediate the
economy. Operating as a lubricant, they eliminate the friction of
commodity-for-commodity barter while bridging the past with the future. But a
lubricant doesn’t make things, it merely makes them move more easily. In and of
itself, the nominal lubricant produces nothing and generates no utility. It is
simply a veil we can see through and safely ignore.
And that is exactly what neoclassicists do. Their
basic models, both micro and macro, are articulated in real terms, usually
without any reference to money, nominal prices, debt
and credit. These latter entities enter the picture mostly as final
decorations, addons whose main purpose is to account for inflation, deflation,
currency fluctuations and other nuisances brought about – or so we are told –
by the distorting interventions of governments.
According to this perspective, points out Keen,
private credit and debt are inconsequential. A money loan of one person is a
money debt of another. They cancel out. And since banks simply translate the
saving deposits of some into loans made to others, they too are
inconsequential.
Of course, banks are not useless. They help eliminate
the friction of barter and facilitate the creation of deposits-read-money
through the money-multiplying cycle. But according to the neoclassicists, says
Keen, they do so merely as instruments of the state. It is the state
that issues high-powered money; it is the state that injects this high-powered
money into the banking sector; and it is the state that uses its reserve ratio
and interest rates to regulate the subsequent money-multiplying cycles in which
bank loans turn into bank deposits. The private sector – both banks and
borrowers – can only limit this process by lending and/or borrowing less than
the maximum, but it has no control over that maximum. Only the state does.
The neoclassical view of public finance is very
different. Unlike private debt, which neoclassicists claim is offset by private
credit and therefore has no macro consequences, public debt eats into private
activity. When the state spends – usually inefficiently and unproductively
according to the neoclassicists – it ‘crowds out’ efficient private investment.
Moreover, to finance its spending without stocking inflation, the state must
borrow from the private sector, and as this borrowing and its associated debt
services accumulate, they choke the country’s finances, causing more crowding
out and lowering economic growth even further. In the neoclassical universe,
government is bad business.
But this view, Keen argues, puts the world on its
head. To start with, as heterodox economists have long claimed and MMT (Modern
Monetary Theory) recently formalized, deficit spending does not require the
state to borrow anything: its very spending creates
new-deposits-read-new-money. In this context, the only reason for government to
tax is to eliminate this newly created money. Moreover, when the economy has
unused capacity – and modern capitalism almost always does – state spending
crowds out nothing. Putting unused capacity to work boosts economic activity,
not undermines it. Finally, unlike private debts, the public debt, provided it
is issued domestically, cannot drive a government that creates its own money
‘out of business’. In this sense, it is rarely if ever destabilizing.
The situation with private credit and debt is exactly
the opposite. First, contrary to the neoclassical stand, says Keen, banks are
not passive intermediaries under the thumb of their government regulators. Far
from it. According to recent Bank of England and Bundesbank publications,
private banks extend loans – and in so doing create new money – independently
of their existing deposits and usually with full accommodation from their
central-bank regulators. In other words, the new money they create does not
cancel out, which means that neither the banks nor the money they create can be
ignored by macroeconomic theory. Moreover, the size of this newly created
privately money can be as big as one third or more of aggregate demand, so it
has enormous impact on the level of economic activity. Finally, and crucially,
this ‘bank-originated money and debt’, or BOMD, as Keen calls it, is highly
volatile. According to Keen, these three considerations imply – and long-term
time series confirm – that bank-originated money and debt are a key driver of
the economy and a major contributor to its booms and crisis. And this
situation, he adds, must be changed.
In his opinion, high private debt, which
neoclassicists are indifferent to and even encourage, is in fact the biggest
threat to capitalist stability. And this threat, he and others argue, can and
should be defused in two main ways. One is a ‘modern debt jubilee’ that will
replace private bank debt with new fiat money and corporate debt with newly
issued equity. This scheme will keep the overall amount of money in the economy
unchanged, but in substituting fiat currency for private debt it will curtail
the risk of triggering what Irving Fisher famously called ‘debt deflation’. The
other way to reduce the risk posed by private debt is to redirect private
lending from speculative to productive activity and limit unproductive
debt-boosting trading on the secondary equity market.
This analysis is exactly opposite to the one offered
by neoclassical macroeconomics, and if credit money and debt – along with the
private banks that create and regulate them – matter as much as Keen insists,
it means that neoclassical macroeconomics must be rejected. And that’s just for
starters.
2.
Economics sans Complexity
Keen’s second point is that, regardless of their
theory, neoclassicists are locked into an outdated mode of analysis. The
economy, just like our brain and the ecosystem, he points out, is a ‘complex
system’. Its components interact in nonlinear ways, and the outcomes of
these nonlinear interactions are inherently unstable. Neoclassical
analysis, though, is oblivious to these patterns. In general, its models are
linear rather than nonlinear, and the way in which they are conceived and
constructed leads to stability rather than instability.
To non-economists, this latter type of modelling may
seem puzzling. If the neoclassical emphasis on linearity and equilibrium is
right, where do business cycles and major crises such as the Great Depression
of the 1930s and the Global Financial Crisis of the late 2000s come from? The
neoclassical answer is simple: they are ‘exogenous’.
They come from outside the model. In their scheme, the business cycle is
the fault of technological shocks; stagflation is the fault of greedy labour
unions, Middle East oil sheiks and the weather gods; and great depressions are
due to monetary policy errors and other sundry distortions. According to the
neoclassicists, these factors are all important; but since they are external to
the economy proper, they are someone else’s problem, not theirs.
And that’s even stranger. If important factors
affecting economic change come from outside the model, why not internalize
them? Just think how flaky it would look if physicists kept the bending of
space/time, entanglement, dark matter and black holes
exogenous to physics proper.
But neoclassical economists aren’t physicists. Yes,
they claim to be scientists. In fact, in their view, their economics is the
‘hardest’ social science of all. [2] Unlike physicists, though, neoclassicists
have another role, which is to protect and defend the capitalist system, and to
do so at all costs. And when these two roles conflict, it is always science
that yields.
The question of whether to use complex or linear
models is a case in point. Neoclassical dogma emphasizes the ‘invisible hand’.
A free market economy, it stipulates, doesn’t need instructions from God or his
earthly representatives. It governs itself, automatically and optimally. Left
to its own devices, it leads to prosperity, stability and justice, and this
supposed outcome serves a purpose. It makes capitalism look like the best of
all possible worlds and offers an effective slogan against alternative forms of
social organization. Clearly, it cannot be given up. And since complex-systems
analysis shows this outcome to be practically impossible, it will be suicidal for
neoclassicists to ever endorse let alone adopt it. Science be damned.
Of course, throwing away science has consequences.
During the 1970s and 1980s, post-Keynesian economist Hyman Minsky proposed his
‘financial instability hypothesis’, arguing that a relatively stable capitalism
encourages borrowing that is initially hedged (with enough earnings to cover
both repayment and interest), subsequently speculative (with earnings covering
only interest payments), and finally Ponzi-like (where earnings cover neither
repayment nor interest).
The surface tranquillity of this process, Keen points
out, misled neoclassicists to celebrate the apparent dampening of the business
cycle (the ‘great moderation’) while blinding them to the incessant build-up of
hedged-turned-speculative-turned-Ponzi private debt. No wonder they were
dumbstruck when the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-10 finally popped the
bubble.
Keen himself wasn’t fooled by this great moderation.
In the mid-1990s, he predicted the coming financial crisis, and his prediction
was not a mere hunch (Keen 1995). Impressed by complex-systems analysis, he developed
a nonlinear Minsky-like model (and subsequently named his software package
after him!). Using very simple macroeconomic aggregates, the model shows how
increasing economic stability encourages the build-up of private debt till the
system eventually crumbles under the weight of debt deflation. Instability, his
model demonstrates, is inherent in the complex-systems nature of
capitalism.
The success of such models puts neoclassicists in a
bind. On the one hand, having celebrated the end of deep crises while a major
calamity was brewing right under their nose made them look incompetent, if not
plain silly. On the other hand, they remain politically forbidden from adopting
nonlinear models such as Keen’s, lest these models show that crises come not
from outside capitalism, but from within.
Their usual justification for rejecting nonlinear
modelling is that they lack ‘micro-foundations’ – or, in simple words, that
they don’t rely on autonomous, maximizing agents. But this justification is
mis-founded, and for the most embarrassing of reasons.
First, as Keen points out, macroeconomic models cannot
be derived from neoclassical micro-economic foundations, because these
micro-foundations lead to macro-contradictions. In and of themselves, the
individual atoms of the neoclassical world – namely, its autonomous
utility-maximizing consumers and profit-maximizing producers – tell us exactly
nothing about market demand and supply curves. As neoclassical economists (should)
know full well, movements on downward-sloping individual demand curves change
the distribution of income and therefore shift those very curves; if the
individual downward-sloping demand curves shift, the ceteris paribus
assumption (all else remaining the same) no longer holds; and without ceteris
paribus these curves cannot be aggregated, let alone aggregated into
downward sloping market demand curves. [3] Similarly with the supply side. In
neoclassical theory, individual supply curves comprise the portion of the
firm’s marginal cost curve above its average cost curve. But as neoclassical
economists (should) know full well, empirical cost curves of individual firms
do not rise with output, but rather move sideways or down. In other words, they
lie either on or below average cost, leaving nothing to be aggregated into a
market supply curve! In short, the so-called micro-foundations of macroeconomic
models are a null set.
Second, the very idea that one can deduce the overall
rules of any system from its so-called micro particles is dubious to put it
politely. If this were the case, says Keen, we would need nothing other than
the elementary particles of physics to explain the whole of chemistry, biology,
physiology, society, the ecosystem and everything in
between. Even if neoclassical economics had legitimate micro-foundations (which
it doesn’t), they would not be enough to explain the system’s macro behaviour.
3.
Economics sans Nature
The last key point in Keen’s journey is that
neoclassical economics abstracts from nature (there are no energy inputs or
waste in the standard neoclassical production function), and that this
abstraction is not only theoretically misleading but deeply dangerous for
capitalism, the human race and planetary life more
generally.
If the economy continues to grow as fast as it did
over the past century, at roughly 2.3 per cent annually, in about 1400 years
humanity will need the entire energy emitted by sun, and in roughly 2500 years
it will require the energy generated by the entire Milky Ways – that is,
assuming we don’t toast ourselves out of existence much earlier (Murphy 2021: Table 1.3, p. 9).
And toast ourselves we will. In slightly more than 400
years, even without counting global warming, the waste energy of human industry
will raise the average temperature to 100 degrees Celsius, which is when water
boils – though, by then, the plant would have been made uninhabitable already
(ibid, Table 1.4, p. 12).
The neoclassicists, though, don’t see it this way. For
those of them dealing with this subject, climate change is really a non-issue.
Even if it occurs, they argue, its impact on the economy will be negligible.
According to one consensus estimate cited by Keen, a global rise of 3 degree
Celsius by 2090 will reduce annual GDP growth by a minute 0.015 per cent. In
other words, humanity is safe doing nothing about it.
The problem with these easy-going predictions and
do-nothing policy recommendations, says Keen, is that they are baseless. Not
only are they senseless, but they contradict the consensus view of real
scientists that climate change will make large parts of the world
uninhabitable, while undermining vegetation and other forms of life.
So where does this deep divide between the ‘two
cultures’ come from? For Keen, the original culprit is Milton Friedman, who
convinced his fellow neoclassicists that, in science, assumptions don’t matter.
You can assume anything you like. The only thing that matters is your
predictions. And that’s exactly how neoclassicists model their world.
They begin by observing that planetary temperatures
have a range. To illustrate, the difference between cold Canada and hot Burkina
Faso is nearly 34 degrees Celsius. And since this large cross-section
difference is tolerable, so must be a temporal increase in average global
temperature, particularly if that increase is only a few degrees Celsius.
The problem, says Keen, is that cross-section
differences in temperatures are nothing like temporal changes in the climate of
the entire plant. And there is more. Since assumptions don’t matter, the
neoclassicists go on to ignore the rise of ‘wet-bulb temperatures’ that
scientists warn will make large sections of the world lethal. They also
disregard changes to atmospheric and ocean currents that could radically alter
climate patterns around the world. And, most importantly, they snub the
numerous climate tipping points that scientists warn about, as well as the
possibly of a ‘tipping cascade’ that might amplify climate change many times
over.
And that isn’t the end of it. In their works,
neoclassicists disregard the socio-political turmoil that will begin way before
the full impact of these natural processes is felt. And they are totally silent
about financial markets, whose forward-looking anticipation of these changes
could rock the world before any of their material and social consequences come
to bear.
For the neoclassicists, assuming these conditions away
is sensible. After all, their main role is not to search for the truth, but to
defend capitalism. And since most scientists are convinced that capitalism
warms the plant, the neoclassical reply is that this warming is
inconsequential.
And that is where Keen sees a bitter-sweet ray of
hope. In his view, the rosy neoclassical climate predictions will prove dead
wrong; the gravity of this failure will help expose the fraudulent
underpinnings of the neoclassical dogma; and this exposure will open the door
to a ‘new economics’ where assumptions matter, and where money, complexity and
nature are taken seriously. Hopefully, we’ll survive to see it happen.
4.
Beyond Economics
This is a brilliant book. It deals with a crucial
subject, and it does so with precision, wit and accessible
prose (though some parts are more demanding than others). We recommend it
highly to anyone who wants to understand the key challenges of our time. Even
neoclassicists might find it educational!
But the book also has one important limitation: it is
about economics.
Keen offers to replace neoclassical dogma with a new
way of thinking, researching and engaging with the
economy. And while we agree that neoclassicism is a religion dressed as a
science, in our view, what should come in its stead is not a different type of
economics, but a new theory of capitalism more broadly.
This isn’t semantic nit-picking. All economic theories
– including neoclassicism – engage with non-economic entities and forces. They
all agree, willingly or reluctantly, that politics, sociology, anthropology,
psychology, international relations and other aspects
of society affect the economy. But these effects, whether supportive or
distortive, are assumed external to the economy proper. And this assumption is
pivotal. Although the effects of these so-called external factors alter
economic outcomes, they leave the economic categories themselves intact.
And this bifurcation, we argue, is the Achilles’ heel of all economic theories,
orthodox and heterodox, old and new.
In our view, capitalism is not an economic system, but
a conflictual mode of power. Those who rule this mode of power – its
dominant capitalists, politicians, mainstream academics, opinion makers and the
various organizations they control – make every effort to conceal its power
features. This is why neoclassical economics, beholden
to its masters, can never be a science. But the problem besieges every and any
economic theory that keeps power external to its basic categories. In our
opinion, it is only when the study of capitalism substitutes for the narrow
understanding of its economy that power can assume centre stage to reveal what
economics is structured to conceal.
Hopefully, Keen’s next project can expand in that
direction!
Endnotes
[1] Shimshon Bichler and
Jonathan Nitzan teach political economy at colleges and universities in Israel
and Canada, respectively. All their publications are available for free on The
Bichler & Nitzan Archives (http://bnarchives.net). Work on this review was partly supported by SSHRC
[2] Here is a telling anecdote. In
the late 2000s, just after the Great Financial Crisis, Nitzan requested to have
his political science undergraduate seminar, ‘Political Economy of Capital
Accumulation’, cross-listed with the economics department at York University.
The economists rejected the request with a one-liner: ‘we do things
rigorously’.
[3] Neoclassicists bypass the problem by
making all consumers identical and assuming their preferences don’t vary with
income, so that the redistribution of income no longer matters. Apparently,
replacing autonomous liberalism with a mind-numbing caricature stricter than
Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World is a tiny price to pay for theoretical
consistency. Way to go.
References
Keen, Steve.
2021. The New Economics. A Manifesto.
Cambridge, UK and Medford, USA: Polity.
Murphy, Tom W.
Jr. 2021. Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Palent.
Assessing and Adapting to Planetary Limits:
eScholarship, University of California.