The Causes of Endoegenous Crises: Heterodox Explanations and Empirical Analysis
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
THE CAUSES OF ENDOEGENOUS CRISES: HETERODOX EXPLANATIONS AND EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS AUTHOR: Jordi Schröder Bosch UNDERGRADUATE: Economics TUTOR: Anna Solé del Barrio DATE: 25.05.2020 ABSTRACT The possibility of endogenous economic crises is an issue that divides economists. Many orthodox approaches reject the existence of this kind of crises (economic recessions are the result of exogenous shocks), while various heterodox schools of thought have conceptualised crisis as an endogenous phenomenon of the cycle. However, these schools differ on what are the causes and the origin of such crisis. The main explanations offered about the main driving of the cycle and its ultimate effect producing crisis are underconsumption, the evolution of profits, and investment. The most relevant schools that have contributed to the debate on endogenous crisis are the classical political economists, the Marxist, and the Keynesian schools of thought. However, so far, this is still a topic of intense debate among many scholars and no agreement on the factors leading to crisis has been reached. A distributed lag model is applied to a time series of profits and investment in the UK economy in order to explore for the relationship between variables. The empirical analysis does not provide robust conclusions and more discussion and debate is needed on that issue. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................... 4 1.1 Motivation ................................................................................................................................... 4 1.2 Objective of the dissertation ....................................................................................................... 5 1.3 Structure of the essay .................................................................................................................. 6 2 HETERODOX EXPLANATIONS TO CRISES ................................................................................. 8 2.1 The underconsumptionist theories of crises ................................................................................ 8 2.1.1 Debating Say’s Law ........................................................................................................... 9 2.1.2 Simonde de Sismondi ....................................................................................................... 10 2.1.3 Robert Malthus ................................................................................................................. 12 2.1.4 Monthly review school ..................................................................................................... 14 2.2 Profit squeeze as the main driver of crises ................................................................................ 15 2.2.1 Marxist circuit of industrial capital .................................................................................. 16 2.2.2 Rashford Boddy and James Crotty ................................................................................... 16 2.2.3 Makoto Itoh ...................................................................................................................... 18 2.2.4 Critics of the profit squeeze ............................................................................................. 21 2.3 (Post)Keynesian explanations of the cycle ............................................................................... 23 2.3.1 John Maynard Keynes ...................................................................................................... 23 2.3.2 Michał Kalecki ................................................................................................................. 25 2.4 The tendency of the rate of profit to fall ................................................................................... 32 2.4.1 Karl Marx ......................................................................................................................... 32 3 EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS ................................................................................................................. 38 3.1 Data ........................................................................................................................................... 38 3.2 Methodology ............................................................................................................................. 39 3.3 Descriptive Statistics ................................................................................................................. 41 3.4 Regression Analysis .................................................................................................................. 43 4 CONCLUSIONS ............................................................................................................................... 46 5 BIBLIOGRAPHY.............................................................................................................................. 49 6 SOURCES ......................................................................................................................................... 52 3 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Motivation Expansions and crises are two sides of the same coin, the latter being the cycle. Crises have been a recurrent phenomenon in the history of capitalism. These crises and its recurrence have been explained by exogenous shocks in mainstream neoclassical economics. In this essay, I am going to study heterodox schools who though of crisis as an endogenous phenomenon of the dynamics of the cycle. This type of conceptualisation of crisis disrupts the mainstream theoretical framework of a smooth and self-regulating cycle. Due to this conceptual framework, mainstream economics have had some issues by predicting the severity of incoming crisis. For example, Irving Fisher, two months before the “Wall Street Crash” of 1929, denied the possibility of such event and its subsequent crisis, as he was expecting: “to see the stock market a good deal higher than it is today within few months” (Irving Fisher quoted by McNally, 2011, p. 63). The economy had to wait 25 years to see the stock market to the same heights again (McNally, 2011). In 1969, just at the beginning of the stagflation crisis, in the colloquium “Is the Business Cycle Obsolete”, Paul Samuelson stated that the NBER: “has worked itself out of one of its first jobs, namely, the business cycle” (quoted by Gordon, 1986, p. 1-2). Robert Lucas, four years before the triggering of the Great Recession, declared that the macroeconomic discipline had succeeded in solving depression prevention: Macroeconomics was born as a distinct field in the 1940’s, as a part of the intellectual response to the Great Depression. (…) My thesis in this lecture is that macroeconomics in this original sense has succeeded: Its central problem of depression prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes, and has in fact been solved for many decades. – (Lucas, 2003, p. 1) In 2004, Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, forecasted an everlasting prosperity due to the perfection of state and central bank policies (Stockman, 2013). In 2007, when the subprime mortgage market collapsed, Bernanke declared he was not expecting any significant spillover to the rest of the economy. 4 As we can see, leading mainstream economists have failed to predict the end of the recurrence of economic crises. Criticizing this fact, Solow, in a conference in 2011, proclaimed: Here we are, still near the bottom of a deep and prolonged recession, with the immediate future uncertain, desperately short of jobs, and the approach to macroeconomics that dominates serious thinking, (…) , seems to have absolutely nothing to say about the problem. Not only does it offer no guidance or insight, it really seems to have nothing useful to say. – (Solow, 2011, p.12-13) The mainstream studies the cycle as a process of small fluctuations, in which the system self-regulates, and where adjustment is done cyclically. In neoclassical economics, the cycle is not the same as a crisis or recession. Cycles are inherent and internal to the system; however, these smooth contractions and expansions can be converted into rough expansions and contractions through the effect of an exogenous shocks (Shaikh, 1990). Therefore, crises do not appear endogenously as the manifestation of the contradictions of the system, but they appear as the effect of an external cause. Without such shocks, the system self-reproduces smoothly with small fluctuations. The shocks have been described by different economists as the effects of oil prices, lunar cycles, human nature, or other factors (Tapia, 2017). Therefore, crises are not a normal event within capitalist reproduction, but the effect of external factors in the smooth cycle. In this essay, I am going to revise heterodox economic schools such as the Marxist or Post-Keynesian, that tried to understand which were the mechanisms of the cycle that caused the outbreak of crisis without the necessity of exogenous shocks. By that, the purpose is not to deny the existence of exogenous shocks. But to relegate them into a secondary position, and to study the possibility of crises without having to use such concept. Therefore, what motivates this essay is, on the one hand, the study of crisis as an endogenous phenomenon of the cycle. On the other hand, it is to study the different mechanisms of the cycle in the different schools of thought that we will