For some time I have been promising to write a blog about the role that manufacturing plays in a modern economy. There is a strong presumption, especially from the progressive side of the political debate that manufacturing – or what you produce – defines the capacity for a nation to enjoy growth in real wages and therefore standards of living. So when I have said in the past that I am against industry protection I usually get attacked from the left and I note that this if often coming from people who think it is cute to sound technical by saying the government should balance their budget over the course of the business cycle. As if! Neither viewpoint coming from that quarter has much credibility. I take a more experiential viewpoint. People prefer to consume than to work. What we consume is more likely to give us joy than what we produce especially if the latter is in the context of exploitative capitalist production relationships. I am painting this in black and white terms to garner your interest. Clearly it is more complicated but in general I do not think you need a manufacturing sector to enjoy strong growth in material living standards and perhaps a polluting manufacturing sector erodes the capacity to enjoy broader concepts of growth and well-being. My flame resistant suit is now in place … so here goes.

I often read articles that follow their own logic impeccably except they leave the main part of the story out. They ignore the elephant that is staring at them from the corner of the room. In doing so they avoid facing up to uncomfortable realities and just perpetuate the standard myths that characterise economic debate in this neo-liberal era. Some other articles build on this deception and just plain invent things to beguile their readers into thinking they have something important or valid to say. Tomorrow I will review the latest Morgan Stanley briefing (August 25, 2010) which is an example of the latter. But in general the conservative commentators exploit the fact that the general public do not what the debates are in economic theory and thus litter their proselytising with spurious claims while the elephant laughs away in the corner. It is almost comic book stuff except the standard of narrative in most comics is vastly superior to the trash is pumped out daily in the World’s press.

Remember what we were told a few months ago – that business and households were so terrified of higher future tax burdens associated with the budget deficits that they were not investing or spending and so governments were killing economic growth? This led to the deficit terrorists arguing (shouting) that the fiscal stimulus that governments had implemented to save their economies from the threat of a depression were actually undermining growth and that fiscal austerity was the key to growth. Accordingly, governments have increasingly been implementing or promising to implement so-called fiscal consolidation strategies because they have fallen prey to the austerity proponents. As the fiscal stimulus has waned across the world growth is slowing and there is now a real danger of a double-dip recession. In nations that have introduced formal austerity programs the evidence is now mounting … it damages growth and undermines business and household confidence. It has exactly the opposite effect to that predicted by the deficit terrorists which is no news to anyone who understands anything about how the economy works. The victims – the poor and disadvantaged …. AGAIN!

I read a brief report from the US Tax Policy Center – The Debate over Expiring Tax Cuts: What about the Deficit? – last week which raises broader questions than those it was addressing. I also note that Paul Krugman references them in his current New York Times column (published August 22, 2010) – Now That’s Rich. The point of my interest in these narratives is that I have been researching the distributional impacts of recession for a book I am writing. The issue also bears on the design of fiscal policy and how to maximise the benefits of a stimulus package.

There was an interesting forum in the The Economist Magazine on August 11, 2010 which considered the question – What actions should the Fed be taking?. The Economist assembled a group of academic economists (mainly) and the opinions expressed largely will make any person who understands how the monetary system operates and what the current problem is shudder in disbelief. What the discussion reinforces is that the mainstream economists really have failed to understand what the crisis was all about and do not comprehend the nature of the solution. Most of the contributions are just mindless repetition of what you might find in any mainstream macroeconomics textbook. It is very scary that these characters continue to be heard. If only the citizens knew what was going on!

The Australian federal election campaign is in full swing and last night the federal opposition in Australia staged their policy launch for the federal election to be held on August 21, 2010. This is a campaign where both sides of politics are running on their respective claims to be better at implementing fiscal austerity measures. It has become a matter of who is promising the biggest budget cuts the earliest. It has made the parties barely distinguishable in terms of their overall policy appeal and has rendered both unfit to govern this country. It used to be said that procyclical fiscal policy was destabilising. This was typically in the context of neo-liberals claiming that expansionary policy always came too late and added to private spending that was already on the rebound and thus increased the inflation risk. But the reverse doesn’t appear to apply for the mainstreamers. Cutting public spending when private spending is weak is being held out as virtuous and the only way to engender growth. This inconsistency exposes the ideological nature of the austerity measures, which reflect as one UK commentator said recently – a desire to complete the neo-liberal demolition of the welfare state started 30 years ago but still incomplete or a reflection that the deficit hawks are total lunatics.

Remember back last year when the predictions were coming in daily that Japan was heading for insolvency and the thirst for Japanese government bonds would soon disappear as the public debt to GDP ratio headed towards 200 per cent? Remember the likes of David Einhorn – see my earlier blog – On writing fiction – who was predicting that Japan was about to collapse – having probably gone past the point of no return. This has been a common theme wheeled out by the deficit terrorists intent on bullying governments into cutting net spending in the name of fiscal responsibility. Well once again the empirical world is moving against the deficit terrorists as it does with every macroeconomic data release that comes out each day. I haven’t seen one piece of evidence that supports their view that austerity will improve things. I see daily evidence to support the position represented by Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Anyway, there was more evidence overnight that I thought should be mentioned and relates to the idea that “the government is the last borrower left standing”.

Last year it was Reinhart and Rogoff being rammed down our throats as the deficit terrorists were claiming that governments in the advanced nations were on the cusp of defaulting on their sovereign debt. Their book was relentlessly misused by commentators and academics (like Niall Ferguson and others) and even the authors themselves left things ambiguous in interviews. The fact is that their research (if we dare call it that) is applicable to only a narrow set of situations none of them relevant in the contemporary setting. More recently, the deficit terrorists have been holding up a new effigy – a new hero. Another Harvard economist – Alberto Alesina. What is it about that place? Alesina has allegedly provided a solid theoretical case to support the absurd claims by the austerity proponents that cutting the very thing that is supporting growth at present will not damage that growth. He is now the new hero. Well it is another scam job! He chooses to use flawed orthodox textbook models to assert his case without mind to the situational context and other realities. He is no hero but just another mainstream economist seeking celebrity with zero substance to offer and very little else to sell other than a headline.

The OECD is held out by policy makers and commentators as an “independent” authority on economic modelling. The journalists love to report the latest OECD paper or report as if it means something. Most of these commentators only mimic the accompanying OECD press release and bring no independent scrutiny of their own to their writing. Government officials and politicians also quote OECD findings as if they are an authority. The reality is that the OECD is an ideological unit in the neo-liberal war on public policy and full employment. They employ all sorts of so-called sophisticated models that only the cogniscenti can understand to justify outrageous claims about how policy should be conducted. In an earlier blog – The OECD is at it again! – I explained how the OECD had bullied governments around the world into abandoning full employment. Now they are providing the “authority” to justify the claims being made by the austerity proponents that cutting public deficits at a time when private spending is still very weak will be beneficial. The report I discuss in this blog is just another addition to the litany of lying, deceptive reports that the OECD publish. These reports have no authority – they are just GIGO – garbage in, garbage out!

The increasingly alarmist commentator Niall Ferguson was at it again the Financial Times (July 20, 2010) in his article – Have Keynesians learnt nothing?. The article has a simple presumption – we are getting scared of deficits and as a result inflation is inevitable. What? We are scared because we expect there will be inflation and so we will act accordingly and start pushing up wages and prices to defend ourselves in real terms. The result will be inflation. This is a playback of the so-called rational expectations literature which Ferguson proudly cites as his authority. The problem is that the theory is defunct – it never was valid and only a butt of depressed cultists still hang on to it as their religion because they learned it when they were young and in doing so lost their capacity to experience the joys of wider education. We really must feel sorry for them.

As governments around the world are setting about to scorch their economies with austerity programs very little opposition is coming from my profession. It is quite astounding to me that the more extreme elements (the Ricardian Equivalence theories) are holding sway at present. These notions have been discredited often (see my blog – Pushing the fantasy barrow for a discussion). Generally, the austerity push is not being supported by any credible economic theory which enjoys empirical support. I get the impression that policy makers are now altering settings in an ad hoc manner without any real understanding of how the economy works. It is a triumph of neo-liberal dogman. However, in terms of evidence-based critiques of the austerity push, Bloomberg Opinion published an interesting article (July 13, 2010) – U.K. Bust Needs Big Spender – written by UK academic Vicki Chick and author/debt activist Ann Pettifor (thanks BM). The Op Ed summarises a more detailed research paper which demonstrates that key assumptions of the austerity proponents do not hold over a long historical period. The short message is that things are going to get worse.