I don’t think he is. I enjoyed his book, “The Big Questions”, and I even made a set of desktop images for him, which (if you’d like) I can send you the full sized images and you can use them for free if you enjoy them (p.s. I also do design work)!
In any case, his recent post has gotten play from Alex Tabarrok, Brad DeLong, and tonight, Noah Smith.
The only thing I find wrong is the fact that you can’t do economics from accounting identities. If you could, then Steven’s basic model would be correct, as a matter of arithmetic, and a matter of reality. To my mind, that is where you stop.
Start with GDP: Y = C + G + I + Nx. I think we can probably disregard Nx to make the model easier. In this case, consumption is constant, as the assumption is that our idle millionaire consumes zero at $84 million, and you can’t consume less than zero (even when dead!). In this case, we’ll hold C constant at $100. Now say G is currently 0, but the government sees a nice pile of money, maybe $84 million, sitting around in a bank account. Well, that money isn’t just sitting there, S (savings) is related to I in our GDP model! So assuming a quick 1:1 relationship between S and I, what the government is doing, in order consume $84 is reducing investment by $84. Assuming there is some sort of relationship between I and C, than in future periods, C will have to be reduced by a cumulative total of $84.
Of course, none of that is literally true. As I (and Noah) said before, doing economics from accounting identities leads to patently absurd conclusions. There are no concrete relationships between savings and investment. They are both dependent variables. Neither is there a concrete relationship between I and C. Both depend on other economic variables, as well. But, zero-sum accounting would get you this result.
But I think there is a deeper fallacy that Landsburg’s experiment falls into, and that is the myth of government as consumer. It is very common to hear in right-wing (usually non-economist) circles that the private sector produces wealth, and that the government produces nothing, it only consumes wealth that is generated in the private sector. The fact is that the state produces the exact same amount of wealth as the market. That is none at all.
The fact is people produce wealth, and people consume wealth. The state and the market are simply institutions which people have arranged to coordinate production and consumption. The socialist calculation debate was not regarding how the state stole wealth from the market, it was regarding the limitations of the state as an institution for coordinating economic activity. Corporations in-and-of themselves do not produce any wealth, either. The organization of a corporation is wealth enhancing, but that is only to the point that it is more efficient than other such arrangements that bring people together to produce and consume.
Per James Buchanan’s excellent analysis [JSTOR] of the political economy, the (tax and spend*) state is largely concerned with providing club goods, that is: goods that are largely non-rival, and at least partially non-excludable. So to assume away transaction costs, deadweight loss, and the like…in this simple model, a society is choosing to purchase some goods as the “club of everyone”, instead of as individuals. Consumption increases when the government steals “idle millionaire’s” money, and doesn’t decrease at all (assuming no effect on I, or rather, that he government’s investment produced a form of capital to substitute for direct savings) because the types of goods provided by the “club of everyone” wouldn’t necessarily be purchased by the individual, but individuals are (presumably) wealthier for having them.
Brad DeLong is actually correct (and this fallacy is what he is pointing out in his post, although he doesn’t explicitly state it). “We” are the state. Arnold Kling is also correct, “lose the we”…the catch is that he just wants a different arrangement of the provision of club goods. Kling is re-stating Milton Friedman’s sentiment when he said (paraphrasing), “I’ve never seen a tax cut I didn’t like”. Friedman was stating a preference for institutional arrangements, not a statement about consumption.
Note: This isn’t an argument that allows the government to run roughshod over “idle millions” sitting around. Our capital stock does determine investment in the long run. Savings do have a role in the economy. In a hypothetical situation, if the government can get a higher ROI from stealing a millionaire’s money from under his mattress, then society is richer. But if not; if the government simply determines that government mattresses are where money goes, society is no worse off, and if the government consumes goods or invests the money in a ridiculous fashion, then society is worse off.
*I specifically point to the tax and spend state because the “tax to finance regulations” state is a completely different animal. And so you can see how you can get mislead by simple accounting identities!
Filed under: Economics
