Archive for the Category Methodology


More evidence that public opinion polls don’t measure policy preferences

I frequently argue that public opinion polls on complex policy issues are almost meaningless.  (Although polls can be useful for predicting election outcomes.)  It all depends on the framing.  Here’s another study that reached the same conclusion:

We presented respondents with two different education plans, the details of which are unimportant in this context. What is important is that half the sample was told A was the Democratic plan and B was the Republican plan, while the other half of our national sample was told A was the Republican plan and B was the Democrats’ approach.

The questions dealt with substantive policy on a subject quite important to most Americans “” education “” and issues that people are familiar with “” class size, teacher pay and the like.

Nonetheless, when the specifics in Plan A were presented as the Democratic plan and B as the Republican plan, Democrats preferred A by 75 percent to 17 percent, and Republicans favored B by 13 percent to 78 percent. When the exact same elements of A were presented in the exact same words, but as the Republicans’ plan, and with B as the Democrats’ plan, Democrats preferred B by 80 percent to 12 percent, while Republicans preferred “their party’s plan” by 70 percent to 10 percent. Independents split fairly evenly both times. In short, support for an identical education plan shifted by more than 60 points among partisans, depending on which party was said to back it.

Most polls on policy questions report little more than mood affiliation.

Update:  Here’s how Yahoo describes the charges against Dennis Hastert:

Hastert pleads not guilty in hush money case

The former House Speaker is accused of agreeing to paying $3.5M to hide past misconduct claims

Interesting that the American press is so ashamed of our country that they refuse come right out and say that it can be illegal to withdraw cash from your own bank account, and instead feel a need to make up lies about Hastert being charged with paying hush money.

Update#2:  Et tu, Vox?

The quasi-monetarists are winning . . .

Check out this interview with Chicago Fed president Charles Evans(sent to me by JimP):

Where is the common ground on the committee right now?

Evans:The statement is fairly clear on that. We see the economy is recovering. We see inflationary pressures lower and we see the unemployment rate high and it is going to be slower to come down. With the funds rate already at zero, there is a pretty valid question as to how accommodative is monetary policy. Some people would point to the size of our balance sheet and say there is an enormous amount of accommodation. Just look at the amount of excess reserves in the system. Milton Friedman looked at the U.S. economy in the 1930s and he saw low interest rates as inadequate accommodation, that there should have been more money creation at that time to support the economy. That wasn’t based upon the narrowest measure of money, like the monetary base or our balance sheet. It was based on broader measures like M1 and M2 and how weak those measures were. I’ve come to the conclusion that conditions continue to be restrictive even though we have a lot of so called accommodation in place. An improvement would be a dramatic increase in bank lending. That would be associated with broader monetary aggregate increases. Then we would begin to see more growth and more inflationary pressures and then that would be a time to be responding.

It’s so gratifying to read this.  As you may know, a small band of us “quasi-monetarists” have been making some of these points for several years.  Most people unthinkingly assumed Fed policy was ultra-loose in 2008-09, merely because interest rates were low and the base had grown enormously.  We pointed out that the same thing had occurred during the early 1930s, and Friedman and Schwartz showed that policy was actually tight in the only sense that really matters—relative to what was needed for on-target inflation and/or NGDP.

Now we have a top Fed official saying things are actually “restrictive,” and using some of the same examples from the 1930s that we often cite.  In my view quasi-monetarism is the best way to diagnose the stance on monetary policy, as we understand that low interest rates often merely reflect a weak economy and severe disinflation.

I suppose I should try to define ‘quasi-monetarism.’



Unfortunately there are almost as many nuances to quasi-monetarism as there are quasi-monetarists. I’ll list a few names in the blogging community, with apologies to those who don’t wanted to be included, and those I leave out accidentally.  I think of monetary bloggers like Nick Rowe, David Beckworth, Bill Woolsey, Josh Hendrickson, myself, and I’m sure there are others.  Some of my frequent commenters have their own blogs, but if I try to list everyone the omissions will just become more noticeable.  If you have a blog and consider yourself quasi-monetarist leave your name in the comment section and I’ll add it here:

Update:  Marcus Nunes, (who has a Portuguese language blog.)  Also commenter “123” who has a blog entitled “TheMoneyDemand”.

I think in the long run quasi-monetarism will merge with monetarism, and become one big school of thought with different perspectives.  If Steven Williamson hadn’t already taken “new monetarism” that might be the right term.  But his perspective and methods are quite different.

HT:  Liberal Roman

Why won’t those &$*%#@ bloggers go away?

In a recent essay Kartik Athreya suggests that almost all economics bloggers are basically quacks, hardly worth paying attention to.  OK, take a deep breath and don’t get defensive Sumner; constructive criticism is always welcome:

In summary,  what  I’d like to convince the public that  economics is far, far, more complicated than most commentators seem to recognize.  Because if they did, they could not honestly write the way they  now do.  Everything “depends”,  and this  is just  the  way it is.  And learning  what  “it” depends on, exactly,  takes enormous eï¬€ort.  Moreover, just below the surface of all the chatter that appears  in blogs and op-ed pages, there is a vibrant, highly competitive, and transparent scientific enterprise  hard  at work.  At this point, the public remains  largely unaware  of this work.  In part,  it is because  few of the economists  engaged in serious science spend any  of their  time connecting to the outer  world (Greg Mankiw and Steve Williamson  are two counterexamples that essentially prove the rule), leaving that to a group almost defined by its willingness to make exaggerated claims about  economics and overrepresent its ability  to determine  clear answers.

That’s right; no need to pay attention to Gary Becker, John Taylor, Paul Krugman, and all the other quacks who lack Athreya’s sophisticated understanding of the “science” of economics.  BTW, any time someone wields the term ‘science’ as a weapon, you pretty much know they are an intellectual philistine.  Am I being defensive yet?

To get serious for a moment, in this essay Athreya is confusing a bunch of unrelated issues:

1.  The style of bloggers; are they polite or not?

2.  The ideology of bloggers

3.  The views of bloggers on methodological issues

4.  Are bloggers competent to opine on important public policy issues?

I don’t recall ever reading a Greg Mankiw post that I didn’t feel knowledgeable enough to write.  On the other hand I’ve read lots of Mankiw posts that I didn’t feel clever enough to write.  That’s an important distinction.  Mankiw is a great economist in the “scientific” tradition, and he’s a great blogger—but for completely different reasons.  He’s a great blogger for the same reason he is a great textbook writer.  There are other bloggers who are also very clever; Krugman, Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson, Steve Landsburg, Nick Rowe, etc, etc.  Several on that list also wrote textbooks.

I don’t know if Krugman has done a lot of recent research on macro, but he knows enough about the literature to offer an informed opinion.  I often disagree with the views of Krugman, DeLong, Thoma, et al, on fiscal policy, but they can cite highly “scientific” papers by people like Woodford and Eggertsson for all of their fiscal policy views.  There must be dozens of economics bloggers who either teach at elite schools, or have a PhD from elite schools, and who are qualified to comment on current policy issues.

Athreya also takes on those who (he claims) lack formal qualifications in economics.  Here’s how he opens his essay:



Where do I begin?  Yes, bloggers who address important public policy issues sometimes “seem unable to resist” commenting on the biggest economic crisis since the 1930s.  Unlike Athreya, I don’t judge people by their credentials, but rather by the quality of their arguments.  Yglesias is the only person listed above that I read routinely.  Although he is much more liberal than I, and we differ on many public policy issues, I find his reasoning ability on economic issues to be superior to the majority of professional economists that I have met or read.

I guess no one will accuse me of being one of those “worker bees” who churn out ever more macro studies that follow accepted scientific methods.  I notice that those economists had little or no useful advice to offer the Fed when the current crisis hit in 2008.  I may be incorrect in my policy views, but at least I am trying to offer pragmatic policy suggestions.

But maybe it’s not the fault of economists.  Maybe there is nothing that could have been done to prevent this crisis:


This confuses two unrelated issues, the ability to predict a crisis and the ability to prevent a crisis.  In 1932 no one could have predicted the rapid inflation that occurred during 1933.  But we know exactly what policy choices caused that inflation, the sharp depreciation of the dollar that began in April 1933.  We could have easily prevented the inflation.   (Thank God we didn’t.)  We knew how to prevent the sharp fall in NGDP after mid-2008; we simply chose not to do so.  In contrast, we do not know how to prevent earthquakes and tsunamis.

Athreya ignores the role of the medium of account, and the importance of nominal shocks.  Yes, the economy is incredibly complex, but nominal aggregates are relatively simple.  The Fed has a monopoly on the supply of the medium of account.  It’s their job to target some sort variable linked to aggregate demand (prices, NGDP, etc.)  The tsunami of falling AD all around the world that occurred in late 2008 was not some sort of mysterious event, but rather reflected the loss of monetary policy credibility.  The Fed has the tools to prevent something like that from occurring.  Bernanke explained to the Japanese how to use those tools in 2003.  The fact that he refused to use them in 2008, and never explained why, is certainly grounds for criticism.

A lot of the more scientific economists have a very limited understanding of economic history.  Many do not realize that in the Great Depression some of the most promising ideas came from those on the fringes, like George Warren and Irving Fisher, and that most “respected” economists were peddling snake oil.  Today it is bloggers who are offering ideas on how to boost AD, the sort of ideas that almost everyone now agrees should have been tried in the 1930s, and it is respected economists who are often recommending that no further effort be made to boost AD.  One example in the latter category is Athreya’s boss, the president of the Richmond Fed.  According to press reports he is pressing for tighter money (as if money isn’t already tight.)  Perhaps he’s not convinced that models linking nominal GDP growth with unemployment are sufficiently “scientific.”

In the 1930s many “respected” economists warned that inflation was just around the corner, even as prices kept falling.  Today, many of the more conservative respected economists are issuing the same warning, despite the fact that the markets are signaling lower that target inflation and despite the fact that conservative economists (claim to) believe that markets are efficient.  It seems to me that it is mostly bloggers (on both the left and the right) who insist that the real problem is disinflation.  So who’s right Mr. Scientific Economist, the bloggers with their market signals, or the scientists with their abstract models that were completely unable to predict the current crisis, are unable to explain 16 years of deflation in Japan, but are somehow able to tell us that inflation is the real long term threat?

I don’t think the real problem is that bloggers oversimplify.  If you disagree with someone their views will always seems simplistic.  No, the real problem here is that Athreya likes some simplistic models more than others:


When you combine this passage with his previous praise for Steve Williamson’s blog, it becomes pretty clear what sort of research Athreya considers scientific.  What would be an example of non-scientific research?  How about Milton Friedman’s partial equilibrium approach to monetary economics and business cycle theory?  I am a big fan of Lucas’ work on rational expectations, especially the Lucas Critique.  Those were genuine improvements over Friedman’s macro theory.  But that is all.  Lucas’s insistence that good macro can only be done by carefully embedding all the assumptions in general equilibrium models with micro foundations turned out to be an intellectual dead end.  There is not a single idea in monetary economics of use to policymakers that can’t be explained in partial equilibrium terms on the back of an envelope.

If blogs had been around in the 1960s and 1970s, Friedman would have been the world’s best economics blogger.  Here’s what Friedman said about the Japanese crisis in 1998:



The same point is made in Mishkin’s textbook.  And Mishkin is a respected “scientific economist” by anyone’s standards.  So why is it that 90% of the respected scientific macroeconomists don’t understand this?  Why do most keep insisting that the Fed has conducted an “accommodative” or “easy” money policy since 2008?  Maybe they think that doubling the base is easy money, and are unaware that the Fed started paying interest on base money in October 2008.  As Cochrane pointed out, this means that reserves are now effectively bonds, not money.

My claim is that despite all these fancy mathematical models, most scientific economists lack Milton Friedman’s intuitive grasp on what is really important, what is really going on below the swirling mass of data with which we are constantly bombarded.  And I don’t pick Friedman merely because I happen to agree with his politics, Krugman is also very good at looking below the surface (when he doesn’t let ideology get in the way.)

I’m afraid that we won’t get the answers we need from “worker bees.”  Matt Yglesias may not have an economics PhD, but he has a sure grasp of the importance of preventing a sharp break in NGDP growth, something that some much more distinguished economists seemed to overlook in the turmoil of the recent financial crisis.

If Athreya really thinks we are so shallow, then I encourage him to enter the fray, start his own blog.  I’d love to debate monetary policy with him.  He might find out that bloggers know a bit more than he imagined.

HT:  David Beckworth

Catching up on Econlog

Returning from vacation I found some very interesting items from the three bloggers on Econlog.  I am so far behind that I only went back to the 13th of May.  Perhaps someone can tell me if I missed something essential.

Here is an excellent Arnold Kling post on econometrics.  I share Kling’s skepticism about progress in methods, and also his view that a low tech, eclectic approach is much more reliable that searching for some sort of statistical magic bullet that can answer extremely complicated questions.  I’d say the same about theory.  In the 1970s and 80s I recall Robert Lucas saying we were making great progress in macro modeling.  During the recent crisis I saw him give a talk where he concentrated on the drop in velocity, and the Fed needing to offset that.  Good advice, but it’s hard to see how it is based on anything that Irving Fisher didn’t know.

Both Bryan Caplan and David Henderson had good pieces on the role of real wages in the business cycle.  And even Kling gave me a nice plug.  A few comments:

1.  Real wages are not reliably pro- or countercyclical.  They tend to be more countercyclical if the downturn is caused by demand-side factors.  When the negative demand shock is strong enough to produce deflation, real wages get especially countercyclical.  I would add that the Phillips Curve also tends to be most reliably downward-sloping when there are demand shocks severe enough to produce deflation.  This is why over the past 25 years the Phillips curve in places like Japan and Hong Kong looks most like the textbook model.

2.  When there is a negative demand shock, real wages often rise more sharply if deflated by wholesale prices (the PPI).  This is partly because the CPI is severely biased over the business cycle.

3.  For all these reasons, I prefer to compare nominal wage growth to NGDP growth.  As you know, I don’t believe “inflation” is a very useful concept in business cycle theory.  When per capita  NGDP growth rates fall far below nominal wage growth rates, then it is likely that sticky wages are contributing to high unemployment.

BTW, I also had the same reaction as David Henderson to this Mark Lilla article.  Lilla is a very impressive political thinker, but economics is not his strong suit.

It’s (not) different this time.






Den ganzen Beitrag lesen…