Winner of the New Statesman SPERI Prize in Political Economy 2016


Friday 17 February 2017

NAIRU bashing

The NAIRU is the level of unemployment at which inflation is stable. Ever since economists invented the concept people have poked fun at how difficult to measure and elusive the NAIRU appears to be, and these articles often end with the proclamation that it is time we ditched the concept. Even good journalists can do it. But few of these attempts to trash the NAIRU answer a very simple and obvious question - how else do we link the real economy to inflation?

One exception are those that attempt to suggest that all we need to effectively control the economy is a nominal anchor, like the money supply or the exchange rate. But to cut a long story short, attempts to put this into practice have never worked out too well. The most recent attempt has been the Euro: just adopt a common currency, and inflation in individual countries will be forced to follow the average. This didn’t prove to be true for either Germany or the periphery, with disastrous results.

The NAIRU is one of those economic concepts which is essential to understand the economy but is extremely difficult to measure. Let’s start with the reasons for difficulty. First, unemployment is not perfectly measured (with people giving up looking for work who start looking again when the economy grows strongly), and may not capture the idea it is meant to represent, which is excess supply or demand in the labour market. Second, it looks at only the labour market, whereas inflation may also have something to do with excess demand in the goods market. Third, even if neither of these problems existed, the way unemployment interacts with inflation is still not clear.

The way economists have thought about the relationship between unemployment and inflation over the last 50 years is the Phillips curve. That says that inflation depends on expected inflation and unemployment. The importance of expected inflation means that simply drawing unemployment against inflation will always produce a mess. I remember from one of the earlier editions of Mankiw’s textbook he had a lovely plot of this for the US, that contradicted what I just said: it displayed clear ‘Phillips curve loops’. But it was always messier for other countries and it got messier for the US once we had inflation targeting (as it should with rational expectations). See this post for details.

The ubiquity of the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) in current macroeconomics should not fool anyone that we finally have the true model of inflation. Its frequency of use reflects the obsession with microfoundations methodology and the consequent downgrading of empirical analysis. We know that workers and employers don’t like nominal wage cuts, but that aversion is not in the NKPC. If monetary policy is stuck at the Zero Lower Bound the NKPC says that inflation should become rather volatile, but that did not appear to happen, a point John Cochrane has stressed.

I could go on and on, and write my own NAIRU bashing piece. But here is the rub. If we really think there is no relationship between unemployment and inflation, why on earth are we not trying to get unemployment below 4%? We know that the government could, by spending more, raise demand and reduce unemployment. And why would we ever raise interest rates above their lower bound?

I’ve been there, done that. While we should not be obsessed by the 1970s, we should not wipe it from our minds either. Then policy makers did in effect ditch the NAIRU, and we got uncomfortably high inflation. In 1980 in the US and UK policy changed and increased unemployment, and inflation fell. There is a relationship between inflation and unemployment, but it is just very difficult to pin down. For most macroeconomists, the concept of the NAIRU really just stands for that basic macroeconomic truth.

A more subtle critique of the NAIRU would be to acknowledge that truth, but say that because the relationship is difficult to measure, we should stop using unemployment as a guide to setting monetary policy. Let’s just focus on the objective, inflation, and move rates according to what actually happens to inflation. In other words forget forecasting, and let monetary policy operate like a thermostat, raising rates when inflation is above target and vice versa.

That could lead to large oscillations in inflation, but there is a more serious problem. This tends to be forgotten, but inflation is not the only goal of monetary policy. Take what is currently happening in the UK. Inflation is rising, and is expected to soon exceed its target, but the central bank has cut interest rates because it is more concerned about the impact of Brexit on the real economy. That shows quite clearly that policy makers in reality target some measure of the output gap as well as inflation. And they are quite right to, because why create a recession just to smooth inflation.

OK, so just target some weighted average of inflation and unemployment like a thermostat. But what level of unemployment? There is a danger that would always mean we would tolerate high inflation if unemployment is low. We know that is not a good idea, because inflation would just go on rising. So why not target the difference between unemployment and some level which is consistent with stable inflation. We could call that level X, but we should try to be more descriptive. Any suggestions?

123 comments:

  1. So according to you a fraction of the workforce needs to be kept unemployed.

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    1. What a stupid statement. It tells you the level of unemployment consistent with stable inflation. If you think that is too high, take measures to reduce the NAIRU. But pumping up demand will only reduce unemployment below the NAIRU by increasing inflation.

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    2. Well yes stupid statement in the sense that it's a stand of economists.

      So now you are saying that if some "reforms" are not undertaken, people are to kept unemployed.

      You can't escape the extrapolation of your economics which is a political stand really.

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    3. What it tells you is that if you try and get very low unemployment, you will find inflation rising with no end. That is very clear and simple. If you can do anything to reduce the NAIRU that is obviously good, but to wish it away is irresponsible.

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    4. You are just repeating "zOMG HYPERINFLATION" with some academic coating.

      When a politician listens to you, he'll stop short of reaching full employment.

      That's irresponsible of you, not me.

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    5. Do you think a politician should keep on reducing unemployment even if inflation is rising?

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    6. Well, there you go. Exactly confirming what you said was silly: that a fraction of the workforce needs to be kept unemployed.

      What happens is the reverse. Politicians listen to economists such as you and refuse to reduce inflation despite inflation not being threatened. All because of fears you created.

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    7. You didn't answer my question, unless your answer would be that this would never happen because you just KNOW it would not. But that contradicts pretty well every Phillips curve ever estimated.

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    8. You are the asking an ideologically loaded question -- which has a lot of assumptions. Including that people should be kept unemployed because apparently prices start accelerating necessarily.

      So you assume that there's a point where prices start accelerating. In reality full employment would only have higher inflation, not price acceleration. True wage-price spirals can form sometimes. Then you need an incomes policy.

      But according to you prices always start accelerating below some unemployment level.

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    9. So you think there are no limits to demand side expansion, and if inflation starts rising we should have an incomes policy. I don't think you will find many people agreeing with that position. I certainly don't, because in the UK it resulted in 25% inflation, social chaos and eventually 18 years of Conservative rule.

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    10. But many countries have used and still use income policies well. Why do you think they work in Germany but not in the UK? Did it occur to you that perhaps high inflation, and its containment, might have less to do with the existence or otherwise of incomes policies than what you are saying - including the 1970s? Are you saying that without those incomes policies we would not have had that runaway inflation and that without their removal inflation would have been contained? It is true that trade union power existed then, and the UK has a long tradition of antagonism between capital and labour, but it was perhaps wrong to throw the baby out with the bathwater.


      NK.

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    11. Perhaps economists could volunteer to be unemployed when inflation heads for the nether regions?

      Henry

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    12. Can we not say it may be possible to get very low unemployment with higher inflation but not increasing inflation?

      And may the NAIRU concept not have been economists' overreaction to double-digit inflation?

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    13. " I don't think you will find many people agreeing with that position. I certainly don't, because in the UK it resulted in 25% inflation, social chaos and eventually 18 years of Conservative rule."

      Oh please. This is a complete misrepresentation of what actually caused those outcomes - the problem wasnt that fullemployment+incomes policies failed to constraint demand-led inflation, it's that incomes policies weren't properly implemented and failed to constrain a wage-price spiral. With the exception of the initial flat‐rate policy in 1975, every round of wage negotiations under the Social Contract saw average earnings grow at a faster rate than the retail price index. The real problem was that the TUC local labor leaders didn't have the discipline to actually implement the Social Contract properly, causing a breakdown between the Wilson government and the TUC leadership over their preferred strategy of wage growth suppression in exchange for social wage increases. For example, On 13 December 1978, parliament formally rejected the Callaghan government’s employer sanctions policy, rendering wage norms completely unenforceable by law.

      Which is why, although the TUC's economic committee basically drafted the Joint Agreement with the Labor government in November 1978, its general council subsequently shot it down, only hours after the economic committee had ratified it.

      Len Murray said at the time:

      From TUC General Secretary's Len Murray's account:

      “...Those union conferences passing resolutions calling for wage increases of 30-­40 percent. I also remember in tea rooms, in bars, the delegates – the same delegates who were voting the 30 percent wage increases – saying to me directly: “Look, we’ve got to something about this. We can’t go on like this””

      Then, in January 1979, Moss Evans, General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, said in response to wage-price spiraling pressure: “I’m not bothered with percentages. It’s not my responsibility to manage the economy. We are concerned about getting the rates for the job”.

      Point is, you design policies and pressure-release valves around the core political commitments you make. I could easily come up with a NAIRU-like theory for why it's impossible to teach the bottom 5% of students in k-12 school, and why there is a "natural rate of student dropout" consistent with efficient use of public education resources. But that is fundamentally myopic. Instead, we commit to designing a system where every child has a right to an education, and work around the problems that creates.

      So it goes back to Ramanan's point - either you're committed to trying to resolve the problems of designing an economy where everyone who wants to can work, *including any potential inflationary risks that result*, or you accept the inevitability of keeping 4-5% of people involuntarily unemployed, so that the game, by design, can only ever have 95 bones for 100 dogs. If you do that, don't be surprised when that 5% gets pissed off and calls you a political hack.

      By contrast, if you want an alternative theory of the relationship between the real and nominal economy, you could try Fred Lee's work:

      https://heterodoxnews.com/leefs/lavoie-lee-pk-pricing/

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    14. More importantly I think SW-L is not answering part of Ramanan's point. That u/e below NAIRU necessarily means that inflation will CONTINUE to rise. His contention is that it needn't, even though there have indeed been true wage-price spirals in the past. Then incomes policy is for those times and not forever.

      Need higher inflation always lead to high expected inflation and higher inflation again without end? What if you can get to 0.01% unemployment with higher, and not ever-increasing, inflation? Hence "zOMG hypierinflation!"

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  2. Quite agree with the above article: NAIRU bashers are a waste of space (to use technically correct economics jargon).

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  3. Set a nominal gdp target growth path (for instance a yearly 4% nominal growth) and each year target the nominal gdp that follows that path. After a boom the actual nominal growth target would be lower and after a slump the actual nominal growth target would be higher. Otherwise use prime age participation rate rather than unemployment rate to set the target (or even more specific:participation age for prime age skilled men). These alternative measures of underemployment are to the unemployment rate what the core inflation is to inflation: it allows to filter out exogenous factors or factors less relevant to monetary policy.

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  4. Simon, there is a clear and important difference between a short-term and a long-term NAIRU. Very few people would disagree that there is always a short-term capacity utilization constraint on the economy, above which inflationary pressures would increase.

    But that does not mean that a long-run NAIRU based only on labor market frictions exists and is independent of the state of the economy. Something like that assumes perfect substitution between labor and capital, meaning that a shortfall of investment will not affect the NAIRU. Nor does it take into account concepts such as hysterisis regarding the labor market.

    What most people have trouble with is the second concept which is used to introduce "money neutrality" in the long-run, in the sense that we can use stabilizing policy only in the short-run and worry about labor market "reform" in order to lower the long-run NAIRU. If economists paid much more attention on hysterisis, investment, real interest rates as drivers of the long-run NAIRU apart from labor market frictions and flexibility I think that a lot more people would be much happier with the concept.

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    1. Oh and recent research by Blanchard, the Fed, CEA (to name a few) points to the fact that the Phillips curve is now a level level relationship rather than Friedman's accelerationist type. In such a context the A in NAIRU does not make that much sense.
      http://www.piie.com/publications/pb/pb16-1.pdf
      https://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/feds/2016/files/2016078pap.pdf
      https://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/feds/2015/files/2015042pap.pdf
      https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/ERP_2016_Book_Complete%20JA.pdf

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    2. «clear and important difference between a short-term and a long-term NAIRU. Very few people would disagree that there is always a short-term capacity utilization constraint on the economy, above which inflationary pressures would increase.»

      Sure, but that "short-term" is pretty short given the typical multi-year lags expected of policy, so the "short-term" NAIRU, in the cases where it does exist, is rarely of interest.

      «If economists paid much more attention on hysterisis, investment, real interest rates as drivers of the long-run NAIRU apart from labor market frictions and flexibility»

      Then those would not be Economists, but political economists, relegated to working at the margins of the academe and outside policy circles, and make a meager living on mere upper-middle class professorial salaries.
      There is no market demand for definitions of "inflation" that are not proxies for wages, and for explanations of inflation that are not limited to "unaffordable" wages.

      «I think that a lot more people would be much happier with the concept»

      Your thinking seems to me realistic, but «drivers of the long-run NAIRU apart from labor market frictions and flexibility» is quite a limiting concept: because it gives for granted that "inflation" really means just "wage rises" and that there is a hard tradeoff between only "inflation" and unemployment, while instead "inflation" could be well (and statistical studies indeed support that) the result of several factors, some more important than others at different times.

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    3. «drivers of the long-run NAIRU apart from labor market frictions and flexibility»

      Put another way, the whole framing of the "inflation" discussion in terms of the prices of wage-intensive goods and their relationship to unemployment is a very political way to ensure that the discussion in essence is about the thesis "wages rises are caused by employment", with the natural policy conclusion that unemployment must be the "cure" for wage rises, which is what "aligned" central banks fervently work to achieve.
      Quite a few people outside the "magic circle" of Economists would object to that framing as a whole, not just to parts of it.

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    4. Kostas: I do not have any objection to what you say in the first comment. But for the 2nd, you have to ask why the PC might have become a levels relationship. The obvious explanation is that people are confident that the central bank will meet its inflation target, so they do not need to form inflation expectations. If that was true, the relationship would not survive a prolonged departure from that target.

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    5. Simon, if you do not object to the first argument then:
      1) You should always push for a "high pressure" economy since deficient investment will raise the long-run "NAIRU".
      2) You will find it very hard to pinpoint any short-term unemployment level below which inflation pressures will get stronger by using time series analysis. The obvious reason will be that such a number will be endogenous to the state of the economy and change with the level of investment.

      Regarding my second argument it is definitely true that periods of non-stationary inflation existed as well periods of stationary inflation rates and inflation targeting played a role in moving from the first to the second. But recent research does not just imply anchoring of inflationary expectations but also a very low PC slope along with low R2. That means that you will have a very hard time estimating a specific NAIRU value while you can use expansionary policy to push unemployment down until you see definite signs of price pressures with minimum risk of either expectations deanchoring or inflation exploding.

      See for instance CEA 2016: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/ERP_2016_Book_Complete%20JA.pdf for the current estimate of NAIRU

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    6. I have advocated that policy ever since I started blogging. Given the present uncertainty about the NAIRU, it makes sense to allow inflation to rise a little above target to see where it is. But our current position is exceptional, and it does not invalidate the concept of a NAIRU. It is because we can think in NAIRU terms that we can contemplate this policy.

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    7. Simon, first of all allowing inflation to overshoot an inflation target is consistent with inflation targeting. Otherwise we are not talking about an inflation target but rather about an inflation ceiling.

      If you do not have a clear NAIRU estimate with tight confidence intervals what is the importance of using it?

      Mind you that I am talking about a NAIRU, an unemployment rate below which the inflation rate process will move from a stationary to a non-stationary regime, not just a rate below which inflation will increase from 2% to 2.5%.

      If a fall in unemployment might induce higher productivity growth through Verdoorn law, a fall in the profit share without an increase in inflation, an increase in investment and productive capacity (with no acceleration of inflation), a level increase in the inflation rate with no change in inflation expectations why are we still talking about the non-ACCELERATING inflation rate of unemployment?

      What some people are saying is that you can obviously think of a model where inflation is non-stationary and lower unemployment can lead to its acceleration. But that is not the only model possible and it requires (up to a point) a high level of indexation within the economy. You can clearly have a high pressure economy with anchored inflationary expectations where low unemployment might lead to level increase of inflation which will negate itself as soon as unemployment increases. Insisting on a very specific model which does not seem to describe current inflation dynamics very well is what the criticism this post is receiving is all about.

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  5. I cannot believe what I am reading here, how many people should be excluded from a proper place in their community in order to control inflation, a "tax" rich people hate because they can't avoid it? The link between unemployment and inflation is tenuous at best, indeed without full employment inflation cannot be properly measured.

    I am not academic as such but from my reading a far better predictor of inflation is the oil price, obviously with various lags and other variables to be taken into account. Why millions of people wordlwide should be kept unemployed by design is such a sick proposition it shouldn't ever have been contemplated. bill40

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    1. This seems like wishing away a real world problem. Are you prepared for ever increasing inflation to get unemployment lower? Wouldn't it be better to look at ways of reducing the NAIRU?

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    2. Why should we believe that there is a NAIRU, i.e. that below that level of u/e inflation will be "ever increasing"? Wage-price spirals are possible and have happened in the past. Inflation and u/e are connected. That does not mean NAIRU is true. Why should we believe that inflation will always rise indefinitely when we reduce u/e below a certain point?

      Why not just higher inflation? Not ever-rising inflation? How can you be so certain? (I mean certain about the difference between ever-rising inflation and merely higher inflation, not certainty about where NAIRU is at any given moment.)

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  6. “There is a danger that would always mean we would tolerate high inflation if unemployment is low. We know that is not a good idea, because inflation would just go on rising.”
    This might be an obvious question, but why would low unemployment inevitably mean constantly rising inflation as opposed to a rise in inflation that could be stemmed by tighter monetary policy? Can’t inflation be stabilised at a higher level by the central bank adopting higher interest rates, perhaps the 4% many economists suggested in the aftermath of the Great Recession when the very real risk of the economy hitting the ZLB became apparent?
    And isn’t the experience of the 1970’s misleading in this regard? That decade saw the collapse of the Keynesian orthodoxy that prevailed during the 50’s and 60’s that held there was a simple trade off between inflation and unemployment, but it was exceptional in that the 70s saw the oil price shocks that were the biggest supply-side recession of modern history (perhaps since famine was a significant risk in the early 1800s) - a macroeconomic shock that because of inappropriate policy it took Western economies a long time to recover from.

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    1. The way monetary policy reduces inflation is by reducing aggregate demand which increases unemployment.

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    2. The full statement should go: The way monetary policy reduces inflation is by... making burden of debt more costly, reducing disposable income, by making new projects less profitable and by making indebted corporations less profitable leading them to closing.... which reduces agregate demannd which increases unemployment.

      Countereffect of such monetary policy is that interest income grows countering reduction in demand from wages and employment. Employing such policy over long term favors redistribution of income from workers to capital.

      Hmmm i wonder how many economists really think this policy through and its implications? And when it is crucial to recall such desicions from before do they remember it? By not giving full explanation, by skipping over the mechanisms of money and credit and debt, it is easy to forget why we are in Secular Stagnation

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  7. If I recall correctly Hyman Minsky assumes that stagflation cannot be sustained for a long period of time without a government transfer of purchasing power to the unemployed who otherwise would not have money to buy goods at inflated prices. The other "finance" component of aggregate demand is the pace of credit formation. The unemployed are a poor credit risk so a rise in unemployment should couple to a reduced pace of credit formation. If inflation is generated by a fiscal position and private credit formation with any level of employment whatsoever, and if Congress does not provide automatic stabilizers in the fiscal mix, then the central bank must operate on the pace of credit formation in the financial system to break excessive inflation or deflation. When short term interest rates rise rapidly it should cause cash flow problems in the income statement for financial intermediaries and their customers who must rollover short term liabilities at higher cost. This is the mechanism that induces recession to break inflation. The question is how an economy transitions to a threat of deflation versus a threat of excessive inflation? The balance sheets and income statements of working class households appear to be the signal for inflation or deflation with a little bit of group-think or so-called "animal spirits" since the exact timing of the group-think cannot be predicted with any certainty. Feedbacks in the economy are caused by convergence of sentiment based on the financial position and income forecast combined with government fiscal commitments.

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  8. "why on earth are we not trying to get unemployment below 4%?"

    That's very simple Simon. People like you believe we need a reserve army of the unemployed to keep inflation under control. Your models requires millions of people in destitution and excluded from contributing usefully to society.

    We don't have to put up with such waste.

    Actually it is very easy to eliminate unemployment completely. You give people a job working for the public good at the living wage. And you just pay them. Using the Ways and Means account that is now completely freed up thanks to Brexit.

    Then everybody that wants a job has a job, and everybody that is short of work can get enough work, and the private sector has to compete for labour - ending the race to the bottom, eliminating the parasite economy at a stroke and forcing businesses to invest and automate. Which we can let them do because we always have enough jobs at the living wage. The more jobs the private sector automates and eliminates the more productive we are and the higher standard of living we enjoy.

    You turn NAIRU into a NAIBER with a Job Guarantee.

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    1. You are talking about a policy to reduce the NAIRU, which I'm all for if it works. Why not talk about it like that?

      Instead you say utterly stupid things like 'your models require millions of people in destitution'. My models tell you that, with current policies and institutional arrangements, what the relationship between unemployment and inflation is. Nothing more than that.

      By attacking these models, which are simply designed to explain the world as it is, you seem to want to defy reality. Just as those who used prices and incomes policies did in the 70s. If that is not your intention, why make it appear as if it is.

      What you do seems to be the same as condemning the models used by weather forecasters because they force us to have rainy days.

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    2. Prices and incomes policies were inadequate social responses to this howling flaw in present job market and product market systems

      Yes you are a realist ala Malthus

      But surely you have considered social remedies
      Thru other institutional arrangements

      It's not utopia anymore then pollution controls or congestion contrails
      Or panic controls

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    3. «these models, which are simply designed to explain the world as it is,»

      I do understand that is the attempt, and I may even believe that it is the result of "deformation professionelle", but simply *assuming* both that "inflation" is the change in prices of only wage-intensive goods and services (and the use of "core inflation" makes it very clear) and *assuming* that there is a tradeoff *only* between wages/unemployment and "inflation", that is that "inflation" in practice means "wage inflation", is a very political act. It voids the claim that the attempt is to «explain the world as it is».

      If the attempt was indeed to «explain the world as it is» then *all* prices would be included in "inflation" and "inflation" would be explained as the result of several factors, including credit policy and regulatory policy.
      "Inflation", as that old fraud M Friedman did not write, is always and everywhere a *political* phenomenon, and "just like that" assumptions that end up blaming it all on wages as if it was just a simple economic relationship between wages and prices seem obfuscatory to me.

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    4. I agree with points from both you and Neil here. Neil is advocating going out and giving the unemployed a coat cut to the person, using that analogy, which is *going off on a tangent* of this post, and advocating economists support coat-wearing. If we cannot force the private sector to hire everyone (matching problem) provide the unemployed with public sector jobs fitted to the person at minimum wage.

      To put it another, JG makes it easier to hire off the bottom and allows more private sector employment for a given level of inflation (assuming NAIRU) but its *main* purpose is to create a relationship between *employment* and inflation.

      "what the relationship between unemployment and inflation is."

      Let's get back to this, assuming "current policies and institutional arrangements." Now I'm not sure whether this is true, the NAIRU seems much more like linear increases until about 3% unemployment in inflation, not acceleration as NAIRU predicts. I remember Bill Mitchell says in one of his blogs (I will try to find.) Also consider the commentator "Blissex" points. There is not much statistical evidence of NAIRU.

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  9. A Job Guarantee, Simon.

    Surely you know of it?

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    1. Why is this any different from telling people on the dole that they have to work to get it?

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    2. I think to challenge to job guarantee advocates
      Is to show how it avoids become a humanist open air gulag

      The history of the works project administration here is sobering

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    3. If you dont understand the social, economic and political difference between having a job on a living wage and a dole payment handed out, then I can't help you.

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    4. How is it different from telling people in the private sector they have to work to get it? Why advocate forcing a certain % of population on the dole?

      This seems to see JG jobs are 'proper jobs' but they are.

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    5. Oh nooo
      Why is that any different? Thats really dissapointing. The worst ever yet of dissapointments i read on your blog.
      Without JG you tell them that they have to work for really meager wage-dole which is under minimum wage. With living wage JG you offer them a job, you do not tell them you have to work to be on the dole.
      With JG you have both JG and on the dole that are different pay.

      Your question really tells that you never paid any interest in JG.
      Another important aspect of JG is inflation control through constant total wage so there is less variations in agregate demand.
      Also there is financial stability from having full employment and with it ability to keep paying debt servicing. It is like automatic stabiliser for loan repayments.

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    6. "I think to challenge to job guarantee advocates
      Is to show how it avoids become a humanist open air gulag"

      You could say that about all forms of employment. The JG is libertarian. Nobody is forcing anyone to take a JG job. It is the ultimate auto stabiliser and ultimate social security system.

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    7. Suppose we are at the NAIRU: inflation is stable. You introduce a JG to people who have been unemployed for more than a certain amount of time. Surely it would be better to retrain those people in the skills for jobs where there are vacancies, or help them to move to where there were vacancies, or give incentives to firms with vacancies to move to where the unemployed were.

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    8. "Surely it would be better to retrain those people in the skills for jobs where there are vacancies, or help them to move to where there were vacancies, or give incentives to firms with vacancies to move to where the unemployed were."
      A JG job may involve retraining. They is always a matching issue though which no amount of retraining will fix though.
      People should not need to move. Business should come to service their needs, not the other way around. A JG would help poor areas prosper. Not everyone should have to move to London.

      You really need to read some JG literature, Simon. It is an elegant auto stabiliser and minimum wage and conditions setter for the private sector. No need to ban anything either. You could even abolish minimum wage legislation and just set a socially acceptable JG rate.

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    9. Some people are no good for the private sector too. However JG could be a step closer to employment for this cohort and provide specialised jobs for people with disabilities etc.

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    10. I have so many critical questions of JG and I cannot find anywhere where these are addressed. Like, if a factory producing widgets in a town closes because the demand for widgets falls, what would these people do on a JG scheme. Produce widgets? Produce something that uses similar skills that the state thinks is useful? This could be just filling holes in the road.

      Wouldn't it be better to offer incentives to private sector firms to open a new factor in the town, producing something that was in demand, and help those who used to produce widgets get the skills to work in the new factory?

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    11. "Wouldn't it be better to offer incentives to private sector firms to open a new factor in the town, producing something that was in demand, and help those who used to produce widgets get the skills to work in the new factory?"

      Why do you present a false choice here? A JG would exist nationwide regardless of local private employment issues. It takes up the slack when the local widget factory closes and could contain skills training. The local businesses that supported the widget factory's employees may be able to continue. None of that means that the state doesn't have some industrial policy on top to attract other private businesses.

      Any replacement widget manufacturer would much prefer to invest in an area where the population were not long term unemployed and where there was good social cohesion.

      They could even bid off the JG wage floor during busy times and return workers to the JG buffer if demand has settled. No long term unemployment and all the social ills that go with it could be avoided. All unemployment really would be voluntary.

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  10. Measuring, or at least nowing how to measure, variables is the hall mark of science. In the case of NAIRU, economists do make a mess of it, in fact taking a kind of (complicated) running average of actual unemployment data to estimate it. Which, in the case of Spain, led to official EC estimates of over 20% (because, as Spain is in the Eurozone, it is hard to get inflation a lot lower than the Eurozone average and 26% Spanish unemployment did not lead to 10% deflation). This does not pass the laugh test. At least taking some kind of kinked curve would be more serious science.

    This is, turning attention to policy, made worse by capital flows. In the end, the ECB targets Eurozone variables (less so than in the times of Trichet, but eventually it does). And it really seems to have been the case that capital flows between Spain and Germany led to a situation where high inflation/low eunemployment in Spain coincided with low inflatin/high unemployment in Germany which, when you take the average... https://rwer.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/there-is-no-eurozone-phillips-curve-1-graph/

    Writing from a eurozone country I have do have to admit that, though the treaty's say otherwise, many state, again and again, that the only purpose of monetary economy is getting inflation down to a little below 2%. And in true rational expectations style Trichet did have the idea that he only had to be 'credible'(i.e. wanting to crash the economy) and state that this was his goal to obtain it... No NAIRU there. In true Robert Lucas style: n unemployment there! Which is the real problem. If NAIRU is the price we have to pay to make central bankers take unemployment serious: let it be! But even then they should not make a fool of themselves by messing up with, among others, data about Spain. When my normal temperature is 36,5 degrees Celsius we should not change this to 39 degrees after two days of fever - which is what the EC economists de facto do.

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  11. I think Dr. Wren-Lewis had a typo regarding NAIRU:

    "how else do we link the real economy to inflation?"

    Changed to:

    "how else do we link the real economy to our models that repeatedly fail to predict the real economy?"

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Please read my post on conditional and unconditional forecasts.

      Delete
  12. «inflation depends on expected inflation and unemployment»

    That depends on a very political assumption that our blogger seems to me comfortable with: that "inflation" is largely synonymous with "wage inflation", while big increases in profits or rents should not be called "inflation". In practice this means rewriting the statement above as "wage inflation depends on expected wage inflation and unemployment of workers", and rewritten like that it sounds a lot clearer.

    Then it follows that only "unaffordable" worker incomes are "inflationary", and that the incomes of "wealth creating" business and property workers are "not inflationary", and that "competitiveness" means pushing down the "inflationary" incomes of workers.

    «The importance of expected inflation means that simply drawing unemployment against inflation will always produce a mess. I remember from one of the earlier editions of Mankiw’s textbook he had a lovely plot of this for the US, that contradicted what I just said: it displayed clear ‘Phillips curve loops’»

    NAIRU and/or most variants of the Phillips curve are fiendishly difficult to support with statistical evidence; the best paper I read concluded that they seem to a relationship to the price of wage-intensive goods in some periods, but not in others, and there is no way of telling in advance; put another way, the influence of wages and unemployment on the price of wage-intensive goods is only partial, and other factors must be surely in play.

    That to me suggests that NAIRU and/or most variants of the Phillips curve are fundamentally political tools, to support the assumption that not only "inflation" means "wage inflation", but a political reading of the 1970s that there was a "wage to prices spiral" triggered by the "unaffordable" demands of wage earners.

    A more realistic view of the 1970s is that there was a "commodity prices to prices" push and then a huge three-way fight among business owners, property owners and workers as to the distributional impact of that commodity price push. First property owners lost (all those bonds vaporized by rising interest rates), then business and property owners, aided very enthusiastically by central banks, pushed the whole (and then some) distributional cost onto workers, to this day.

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    1. So you skipped the bit in the post about inflation generated outside the labour market!

      Delete
    2. «inflation generated outside the labour market!»

      «Second, it looks at only the labour market, whereas inflation may also have something to do with excess demand in the goods market.»

      That, in my understanding of the NAIRU/Philips curve debate, is still about inflation generated inside the labour market: because in the conventional narrative when there is "unaffordable" «demand in the goods market» that must be because wages are too high, as most of the demand, as not just the supply, of goods/services is from wage earners themselves.
      So both parts of your statement seem to mirror the conventional narrative that wage rises are the (sole or at least by far primary) source of "Accelerating Inflation", and the "wage-to-prices spiral" story does not depend on whether "unaffordable" wages push on factory prices or pull on retail prices or both; the "Washington consensus" prescription of higher unemployment and lower wages applies regardless.

      If I understand well your post it says that while «difficult to pin down» there is a relationship between "inflation" and employment, leading to the conclusion «target some weighted average of inflation and unemployment like a thermostat».
      But in the other view that "inflation" is not just a proxy for wage rises, but applies to "abnormal" price rises in whichever market, being fundamentally the symptom of a distributional issue (e.g. ever rising asset prices thanks to a debt-collateral spiral), not just of excess cost push or demand pull by wage earners, to «let monetary policy operate like a thermostat» to discipline wage rises does not apply universally.

      To explain the politics, let's imagine that the policy rule is indeed «let monetary policy» «target some weighted average of inflation and unemployment like a thermostat», with "inflation" defined as "core CPI", that is wage-intensive goods and services, in two scenarios:

      #1 With unemployment constant "core CPI" rises because of some other factor than wage rises (for example a commodity-price cost push): then monetary policy rule will drive wages and employment down to compensate for the other factor driving prices up (that is in effect make workers pay for someone else's inflation). As the policy rule targets *also* unemployment, a tight monetary policy should not be driven as hard as one that targets just "inflation" («because why create a recession just to smooth inflation»), but we all know that one instrument cannot target two objectives in the general case. Plus because of "anchoring" central banks are far more keen to bring wage inflation down than wage employment up, as the triple-target (employment, inflation, rates) USA FOMC has demonstrated many times.

      #2 With unemployment and "core CPI" constant, asset prices zoom because of credit policy being very loose but only for collateralized debt, that is credit is targeted only at asset stripping and not at "inflationary" real investment. Since this affects "core CPI" only marginally, the overall effect of asset price inflation will be a massive redistribution of wealth from wage earners to asset owners, and then as bigger rents happen and capital gains get spent, scenario #1 happens, and montary policy will discipline workers to compensate for the extra demand from rising property incomes.

      Delete
  13. I would also like to point out that the risks of doing the wrong thing are extremely asymmetric: if monetary policy is too tight when we are near the zero lower bound, we risk long-term stagnation. If monetary policy is too loose, at most we risk a little bit of overheating and a short-term recession to bring inflation back under control.

    To me, these argue strongly that what we really should be doing most is increasing the inflation target substantially above 2% (maybe 4-5%?). This would push our economies further from the zero lower bound, providing more leeway for future monetary policy and reducing the danger of deflationary shocks (such as accidentally setting the interest rates too high).

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    1. This is a fair point, that is not dissimilar to positions taken by the Nobel laureaute Paul Krugman. It would be good to understand Simon's counter-response.
      This debate goes to the heart of political economy. My take on what I have read here and elsewhere is that NAIRU is a theoretical construct that is not amenable to precise measurement, nor is it a sage lodestar for policy. Conceptually it appears that Simon is wedded to it because it provides a pillar on which his chosen New Keynesian model rests in the same way that competing business cycle models depend on obedience of assumptions that do not exist in the real world. In reality the relationship between changes in employment and inflation within an economy responds to a host of different factors that change in magnitude and significance over time that are subject to uncertainty and knowledge gaps. I also agree with other posts that criticise Simon for the use of the 70's to support his position, when particular institutional and exogenous factors were at play. What about the 50's when the NAIRU (if it existed) was less than 2%? In effect, the labour government attempted to use incomes and prices policies as an alternative antidote to engineering or tolerating substantially increased unemployment as a means to reverse accelerating inflation.

      The permanent impact of subsequent recessions including the Great Recession proved to be the permanent loss of productive and human capacity they cause, which then raises the NAIRU. The problem with using NAIRU (now apparently just shy of 5%) as the determining measure of monetary policy adjustment, is that the resulting impacts of doing can tend to increase NAIRU.

      Adherence to the theoretical construct of NAIRU and the associated subservience of employment and output outcomes to a primary stable prices objective mean that policies that could sustain higher levels of employment at a non-accelerating inflation rate, are often crowded out.

      Delete
    2. I don't have a counter response. I have consistently made this argument over the last five years. But it does not negate the concept of a NAIRU, which will exist. Right now we have no idea where it is, so we could use inflation to find it, but the concept is still there.

      Delete
  14. Dear Prof Wren-Lewis,

    You ask: “... why create a recession just to smooth inflation?”

    Why indeed? How about trying to minimize Arthur Okun's Misery Index = Unemployment Rate + Inflation Rate, giving equal weight to each?

    Currently in the U.S., MI = 4.7 + 2.1 (CPI) = 6.8. Historically, this is very good although it has been a bit lower. You worry: “There is a danger that [an average] would always mean we would tolerate high inflation if unemployment is low.”

    Due to frictional unemployment, the lower bound is probably 3.0. So, an MI of 6.8 would produce an inflation rate of 3.8. Why is that intolerable?

    [From a Non-Economist]

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  15. I am curious how total disposable income relates to inflation, particularly for the middle n% to eliminate edge effects. I believe, but do not have historical data to demonstrate, that the number of unemployed is irrelevant to inflation if there is no excess income to drive prices up. For instance, if wages grow rapidly while unemployment goes up slightly, it is easy to imagine that there could still be inflation. It is also easy to imagine scenarios where inflation in a core need like housing or energy saps typical money supply growth from wage inflation or higher employment.

    Factors such as above long term trend housing prices inflation (http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2016/08/daily-chart-20), higher wealth disparity, slowly growing incomes, and lower mandated debt loads all seem to be conspiring to keep disposable income in check. Consequently low unemployment seems to have less impact than it might have in the past.

    I would greatly appreciate any insight you could provide either suporting or refuting my assertion...

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    1. «total disposable income relates to inflation»

      That depends on defining "inflation" in a certain way or another, and then violating the assumption that "inflation" is caused only by wage earners, and therefore that only wage repression (achieved by imports of good and services from low wage economies, of immigration of workers from low wage economies, or by unemployment) can tame inflation by making "unaffordable" wages more "competitive".

      There is little space in public debate for alternative definitions of "inflation" or for investigating alternative possible factors for "inflation".

      There was for example an interesting paper that showed that in the USA in areas where property prices were rising fast retail prices were also rising rather faster than others; but that is one against dozens of papers going through extreme sophistry trying to find a *systematic* medium-term or long-term tradeoff between CPI and wages.
      Just as there are legions of researchers trying to estimate the thoroughly imaginary "natural rate of interest" or straining to find "hedonic" sophistry to argue that "inflation" has been overestimated for decades. It is all about politics.

      Delete
  16. As I understand it what you propose is that to control inflation 5% or so of the working age population should be unemployed. Two questions do they have to be those on the lowest income or can they be the rich? If they are on the lowest income what level of unemployment benefit do you propose they receive?

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    1. "what level of unemployment benefit do you propose they receive?"

      It doesn't really matter. People will resent others who are getting "something for nothing" and then politically agitate to get the programme shut down. Also because it is not seen as a systemic problem (the poor are blamed.)

      If people simply haven’t earned their monetary earnings, then to solve the problem you need have more capacity to earn, an ability to sell Labour Hours for a wage.

      Delete
    2. Seriously, do you not understand the difference between describing the way the economy works and describing what you would like to happen. I'm saying there is some level of unemployment, the NAIRU, at which inflation will be stable. A doctor does not propose your body works in a particular way.

      Delete
    3. Of course I understand the difference but you are still looking for some number X which will allow policy makers to decide how much unemployment to have in order to have stable inflation so my questions still remain valid.

      Delete
    4. You are content with blind surgeons ?

      If we can 't establish where the NAIRU zone lies at any particular juncture
      And if we are inflation acceleration phobic
      We will chronically miss to the side of caution
      And in the long run wage class types
      will suffer as well as actual production

      Delete
    5. "some level of unemployment, the NAIRU, at which inflation will be stable."

      I fully agree with that. The (un)employment level at which "inflation is stable" is going to be difficult to ever find though. Why? The concept, analysis and application of NAIRU is totally bogus. Yes, there is a relationship between unemployment, wage growth, productivity and inflation. But we have no idea what that relationship is on a formal mathematical level. This is because of the complexity of instiutional and policital arrangements and their impact on supply, employment, and income distribution. These things vary between countries, within countries and over time. So even if you were able to build a relevant mathematical model that approximated the data for a specific place at a specific moment in time, all the relevant inputs are dynamic and changing meaning the relevance of the model is basically extremely limited and decays over time.

      All of this is far different then the Fed or BoE announcing that "full employment" is 5% because thats what our NAIRU model says. This is a factually inaccurate statement and not relevant to the underlying economic situation as the UE rates (specifically U3) that is primarily used as measuring sticks is itself misrepresenting the employment situation as the U3 excludes 6 million people who want a job but stopped looking as as such are not counted in the U3 figure.

      In summary, to say there is a relationship between the employment, productive capacity and inflation is not at all the same thing as saying "unemployment below 5% will lead to accelerating inflation".

      Delete
    6. Yes, Random's analysis makes sense to me as per my post reply to Kimberly above.
      Essentially the debate should gravitate on what is driving the unemployment/inflation mix, future prospects of that mix, and in the light of both the best future trajectory of monetary policy to combine the highest level of employment and growth without accelerating inflation.

      Delete
  17. You say in your piece "we should not be obsessed by the 1970s." but what strikes me most about significant parts of economics is how fashions seem to change and you acknowledge this: "Then policy makers did in effect ditch the NAIRU" but that "For most macroeconomists, the concept of the NAIRU really just stands for that basic macroeconomic truth.".

    Surely this begs the question: are there basic macroeconomic truths like the NAIRU? After all this assertion seems inconsistent with the fact that there are fashions which I assume you would acknowledge as fact. In this context does that not question whether such ideas as the NAIRU have any long term validity in explaining economic phenomena?

    I'm sorry I can't think of anything positive in this respect but I'm sure you'll see that I'm saying: what's the point?

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    1. There are fashions of sorts in economics but it is also a progressive science. The NAIRU story was about discovering something that was politically difficult, so some economists did not want to accept it, but since the 1980s it has become received wisdom.

      That is among mainstream economist that it. It seems from comments both here and on twitter that some heterodox economists are still living in that pre-1980s wish fulfillment world.

      Delete
    2. Average annual levels of growth has lagged performance in the 60's and 70's, at higher levels of unemployment, and dramatically increased levels of inequality. A great achievement for economics at whose cost and benefit?
      Of course inflation accelerating to near 27% in the mid-seventies could not be tolerated, but it was brought down By Callaghan and Healey.

      Delete
  18. "few of these attempts to trash the NAIRU answer a very simple and obvious question - how else do we link the real economy to inflation?"
    Why SHOULD there be a mechanical link between the 'real economy' and inflation?!?
    Both unemployment and inflation are high-level abstractions of social reality, not parts of the same machine that must, somehow be linked.
    The economy (the way in which we organize that people get what they need) is the sum total of largely subconscious collective behaviour (that can be modelled).
    Its proper micro-foundation is in our subconscious reflexes as social animal: follow the flock, do what you're told when in doubt, look for what you lack & look for clear symbols and ideas.
    Individual human agency, choice behaviour, comprises less than 10% of our behaviour, so can't be the basis of economic models.
    That makes 'demand & supply' into a wrong starting point for analysis of economies.
    Human agency IS essential for economies of homo sapiens, because even less than 10% of our behaviour can seriously disrupt any mechanical link between abstractions describing it.
    That conscious part of our behaviour is guided by performative language coined by economists (among others) and employed in the political arena, by the 'parables' (Coen Teulings, 2016) that help us understand the world around us.
    If you want to know why unemployment and inflation do not correlate nicely, you have to engage in analysis of economic discourse in schools and public debate, of the drivers of trust and anxiety, of what look like 'animal spirits' if as economist you are raised in the homo economicus paradigm.
    Actually correlations in economics are based on 'social animal spirits' and they are fucked up by homo sapiens acting as conscious humans, intentionally, letting her/himself be convinced by this or that story told by people she/he trusts.
    Can economists be trusted to tell the right stories?

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  19. Simon, you dismiss the idea of a nominal anchor based on past attempts at monetary supply targeting and exchange rate targeting. Both are obviously flawed (in hindsight anyway) because they effectively let monetary policy be controlled by changes in velocity, for supply, or outside forces in the case of exchange rate (or not mentioned, commodity) targeting.

    But there have been proposals to use nominal income or nominal GDP as a target instead of inflation, and it seems that with a high enough target, they should fairly naturally keep us from zero bound problems as well as a higher inflation target would.

    I'd of course agree in principle that there's such a thing as a NAIRU, but in practice, it's very difficult to know exactly where it is until you experience the beginning of an actual inflation spiral, and it's sometimes difficult to pick out exactly wage-based inflation vs. supply shock inflation. Part of the problem in 2008 with central bank response is that we had some supply shocks (peak oil among them) that temporarily spiked inflation despite a weak and slipping nominal economy across NA and Europe, and banks focused on the inflation numbers while velocity was tanking because we didn't yet have good nominal income/GDP numbers.

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    1. How would you set the initial level of the NGDP target? My guess is you would use some form of NAIRU estimate.

      Delete
  20. With an adequate model of job markets we can avoid this woeful short cut

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  21. We need to socialize the price setting mechanism
    Along the lines suggested by weintraub Lerner et al

    It's essentially an externalities problem
    A simple market failure

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  22. You make a good case for targeting NAIRU. However, that brings us back to the original problem. We don't know how to calculate NAIRU to the required accuracy.

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    1. I hope I do not make a good case for targeting the NAIRU, for the reason you state. At no point do I suggest this.

      Delete
  23. To summerise Neil's point, with a job guarantee, we could have 0% involuntary unemployment with stable inflation. Contradicts NAIRU even if the relatio ship (unemployment/inflation) is correct. Can you add a correction in the piece assuming current institional arrangements!

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    1. Would inflation be independent of the number of people in the JG scheme?

      Delete
    2. "Would inflation be independent of the number of people in the JG scheme?"

      Perhaps not, but hiring someone for £10/hour from £9/hour generates far less inflation than hiring from unemployment benefit. It is fair to say the less people in the JG the greater inflation (although we don't know how much and I don't claim to know.) Plus the pool of JG workers will take longer to move to exhaustion. Which is why I am defending you on NAIRU.

      In addition normal businesses can be allowed to go bust, not pay redundancy, etc because the JG will catch people who lose their jobs during a retrenchment. That disciplines the spending and wage channels since there need be no bailouts or the 'special industries' that pump-priming requires. Overpaid workers get an imposed wage cut when they are forced to move to the JG as do greedy bosses. 'Corporate confidence' is no longer of overriding concern. And people can take wage cuts below the minimum wage in a recession - they have two choice of job not zero.

      I remember in 2013 UK 1.5 billion days of output were lost to the economy per year for no reason at all.

      Very large number – immediately relatable by anybody to their personal experience.

      To put it another way, that's why there isn't a 'Phillips curve' or NAIRU in MMT. Because both of those rely upon the traditional notion of 'unemployment' and there is none in MMT. Therefore they can't apply as standard. The 'trade off' changes to reference those on the Job Guarantee scheme instead.

      There may be some one off inflation implementing the JG scheme.

      Delete
    3. My main point is JG is a powerful and useful tool for economists: with correct demand management, we can help prevent recessions and rein in inflation. The workers on the JG are a much more credible threat to taking positions of currently employed than the unemployed.

      I accept this is a fringe position but it is helpful in maintaining 'order' and a swipe at crime at the very least, that could appeal to 'establishment' type people.

      Delete
    4. No the price anchor is the wage itself.

      Delete
  24. Also as to JG not being 'real jobs' private sector jobs especially at the low end are rubbish and JG jobs are awesome, so that will not apply :-)

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  25. NAIRU is the economic equivalent of "Muslim ban".

    ReplyDelete
  26. How do we relate the real economy to inflation? For over 30 years from 1941 to 1974 unemployment averaged around 2% and inflation was at acceptable levels typically less that 5%. Why not return to the policy descriptions of that time?

    If we were still using these policies which I understand were aimed at full employment what would the consequences be for the real economy now?

    The excessive inflation in the 1970s was anomalous in the UK context and surely was an input price shock and nothing to do with excess aggregate demand. Therefore to dismiss 30 years of a successful policy because of this seems short sighted.

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  27. What is "inflation"?

    Economic definition: Continuous rise in the price level.

    How is it observed?

    There there a standard for correlating interest rate changes with changes in the inflation rate that is medically established?

    Is there a correlation of change in the interest rate and employment rate empirically?

    How tight is it?

    What is the time frame?

    As far as I can see there is little empirical evidence involved. It's based on theory.

    There is a correlate in medicine. Some causation is educed theoretically involving either cause or cure of disease. Empirical testing often shows that there is no close correlation that can be detected. Often single studies are contradicted by subsequent studies that are either fail to replicate the initial study or are more tightly formulated to eliminate confounding variables.

    Nothing like this in NAIRU. It's basically theory that is reducible to ideology. Claiming any relationship means NAIRU true.

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    Replies
    1. The NAIRU is simply the implication of an empirically estimated Phillips curve. It always has been! When you say 'as far as I can see there is little empirical evidence involved' who on earth have you been reading?

      Delete
  28. SW-L
    The post is showing fine reasoning and argumentation. I respect the all of it except the explanation of stagflation (OPEC had no influence on inflation????)

    But then how do you explain the real world observation that NAIRU was raised in time of falling or low inflation? By all logic NAIRU should fall in times of low inflation yet the observation of official NAIRU showes that officials raised NAIRU level in times of ZLB. How is that calculated?

    Or is it that raising animal spirits is more important then some theory of NAIRU and officials completely discard mathematics of NAIRU just to raise animal spirits?

    So, all of your attack on NAIRU bashers is trown away when you look at real world. You defend theory (and so eloquently) while bashers watch real world. Who should have more sway on policy?

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    Replies
    1. The NAIRU is not constant. Its a function of various variables like union power or the degree of monopoly in the goods market, the degree of mismatch etc. I did not mention it above because it is so obvious in the data. But it is not a function of short run changes in aggregate demand, so it puts a limit on demand policy.

      Delete
    2. Union power has been low in the UK for decades, while I am not sure that the degree of monopoly in the goods market is actively used in constructing estimates of NAIRU.

      Delete
  29. Hey Prof,

    You've missed a label off this post.
    Please add under 'masochism'.

    ReplyDelete
  30. Simon,

    Here is a recent economic paper


    ‘Maximizing Currency Stability in a Market Economy’ that Warren co authored with Professor Damiano Silipo

    http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0161893817300017

    It uses the job guarantee wage as the price anchor.

    Please read then provide a critque.

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  31. Bill Mitchell explains the mmt job guarantee proposal including a discussion of its differne from the nairu ad effect on inflation here:
    http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=23719

    ReplyDelete
  32. Very briefly, the JG proposal is essentially that when the government beleves the economy is nearing capacity it uses fiscal and/or monetary policy to reduce aggregate demand as usual, but absorbs any resultant private sector unemployment by offering a minimum wage job in the public sector to anyone who wants one. These JG jobs aew additional to those required to fulfill essential public services - the idea is that the jg sector expands and contracts counter cyclically with the economy. Obviously there are plenty of arguments about whether or not this will work but the mmt proponents claim to have refuted them all.

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  33. 'Suppose we are at the NAIRU: inflation is stable. You introduce a JG to people who have been unemployed for more than a certain amount of time. Surely it would be better to retrain those people in the skills for jobs where there are vacancies, or help them to move to where there were vacancies, or give incentives to firms with vacancies to move to where the unemployed were.'

    All good ideas but not inconsistent with offering a jg as well

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    Replies
    1. But why offer JG, when retraining would be better for everyone?

      Delete
  34. Hi Simon,

    Firstly, I must say your blog is insightful and always raises interesting insights into macro-economic questions.

    Personally, I have been trying to find information SOMEWHERE on the internet from any economist (whether 'mainstream' or not) that outlines a potential solution to the accepted idea of the NAIRU that would allow full employment without rising inflation.

    I have yet to find a potential proscription for this and, as such, it appears that the NAIRU is a seemingly deterministic fact of capitalist economics.

    In your opinion, is there any way that the NAIRU's implications for lack of full employment can be overcome? Additionally, is there any way a healthy economy could function with full employment? If so, is there any economist who has come up with a detailed programme of HOW this might be achieved?

    Thanks in advance for any response,

    Benjamin

    P.S. Could the UK and US Second World War economies potentially be put forward as exemplars of almost full employment and low inflation?

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    Replies
    1. Actually there is quite a lot: just look at labour economics. Basically it goes along the lines of making the labour market work efficiently. But that may conflict with aspects of working that we find desirable, like job security.

      Delete
    2. Hi Simon, What text or whose work would you advise provides the most compelling overview of this attempt to overcome the NAIRU inflation/employment problem?

      Delete
  35. N.B. I meant prescription, not proscription in my last comment!

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  36. Inflation is a sign of objective scarcity of goods/services (GS) in relation to desires (of purchasing) expressed in monetary offers.
    Unemployment is not mere joblessness, but scarcity of available jobs (AJ) in relation to desires (of working) expressed in monetary demands.
    Inflation of prices is a multi-causal phenomenon. Yet the major drivers of inflation are:
    (1) Sudden scarcity of everyday goods (e.g. the price of bread after a poor harvest, oligopolist restrictive practices…)
    (2) Extra injections of money through wages or credit or ‘printing money’
    (3) Sudden abundance of demand (e.g. the tickets for the Champions League Final in the black market outside the stadium; or the new iPhone model upon its launching).

    Joblessness is also multi-causal, but the major drivers are:
    (1) Alternative allowances to taking a job (previous savings, a breadwinner partner at home, social benefits)
    (2) Unfitness: worker’s skills are no longer interesting for the economy
    (3) Net costs of taking a job are unbearable (to buy or rent a house in another town, to hire a service for childcare, the fiscal pressure, the benefits you lose ‘for you have now a job’).

    So, a formula for overcoming the Phillips Curve would weigh these two sets of conditions. I would say that, being essentially three kinds of inflation (in offer, in demand, in money supply) and three kinds of unemployment (other incomes, unskillfulness, punitive employment), there will be as well 9 different basic GS-AJ curves.
    I’m sure most inflation/unemployment situations are a complex mix of these, so Economics has to identify the historical stage before applying any equation.





    CHEAP FASHION CURVE Unskilled workers might increase the prices of education (e.g. university masters if it is felt that only these qualify for a great job), but also reduce the prices of some goods in they are customers in permanent joblessness

    RAGS & RICHES CURVE Someone can embark on a punitive job for joining a sudden demand (e.g. to buy tickets for running away from a war, or to buy a new vaccine for children). This case is very similar to inflation by sudden scarcity, although in a more subjective way

    SCARY CURVE

    I’m sure most inflation/unemployment situations are a complex mix of these, so Economics has to identify the historical stage before applying any equation.

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  37. Vickrey's demolition of the NAIRU in fallacies 4 through 6 of his fifteen fatal fallacies is preferred to your tone deaf take drawn narrowly from a decidedly unrepresentative period of economic history. Scholasticism at its finest here on the mainly macro blog.

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    1. What I find very dispiriting about most of the comments on this post is a complete failure to engage with what I have said, and say where they disagree. Instead it is more along the lines of repeating the NAIRU is rubbish, without ever giving a coherent account of what exactly is rubbish.

      Delete
    2. «repeating the NAIRU is rubbish, without ever giving a coherent account of what exactly is rubbish»

      Well, there are two arguments that I have used and I think justified:

      #1 The concept of NAIRU itself is objectionable, because "inflation" is not just "core CPI", and employment is not the sole major cause of "inflation" (as you partially write); and this is just politically motivated.

      #2 As you write, the evidence for a systematic NAIRU is weak, and as another commenter noted there is a big difference between short term and long term NAIRU; which reinforces #1.

      As to the statistical evidence against a long term NAIREU I have hinted at this:

      www.ritholtz.com/blog/2015/07/assessing-the-recent-behavior-of-inflation/
      «inflation declines in 2008 and 2009 were well described by a Phillips curve equation that included the unemployment rate as an explanatory variable. More generally, however, research has shown that over long periods spanning several decades, there is not a stable quantitative relationship between inflation and the size of production or employment gaps, where gaps are measured by the deviations from long-run trends. As such, there is much debate among economists regarding the usefulness of the Phillips curve as a tool for forecasting inflation»

      Translation: employment is not the sole cause of "inflation" and it is unpredictable, when it is the major cause of "inflation".

      Just noticed that I used that quote in a previous post in this blog as comment on this realistic but incomplete assessment:

      mainlymacro.blogspot.be/2015/07/the-f-story-about-great-inflation.html
      «essentially a hunch based on a very small dataset that in some cases there is a tradeoffs between labour market pressure and accelerating inflation»

      which is of course consistent with: this post's «There is a relationship between inflation and unemployment, but it is just very difficult to pin down».

      But for me #2 is just a supporting element for #1, which is the big problem with NAIRU/Phillips curve(s) and politically biased policy rules based on them.

      Delete
  38. NAIRU: an exhaustive dancing-angels-on-a-pinpoint blather
    Comment on Simon Wren-Lewis on ‘NAIRU bashing’

    NAIRU is dead, not because of measurement problems, but because the underlying employment theory is false.

    You say: “The way economists have thought about the relationship between unemployment and inflation over the last 50 years is the Phillips curve.”

    This hallucinatory Phillips curve has first of all to be rectified.#1 The objective systemic employment equation is shown on Wikimedia
    https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AXEC62.png

    From this equation follows:
    (i) An increase of the expenditure ratio rhoE leads to higher employment (the Greek letter rho stands for ratio). An expenditure ratio rhoE greater than 1 indicates credit expansion, a ratio rhoE less than 1 indicates credit contraction.
    (ii) Increasing investment expenditures I exert a positive influence on employment, a slowdown of growth does the opposite.
    (iii) An increase of the factor cost ratio rhoF=W/PR leads to higher employment.

    The complete employment equation contains in addition profit distribution, government deficit/surplus, and the trade balance.

    Item (i) and (ii) cover Keynes’s well-known arguments about aggregate demand. The factor cost ratio rhoF as defined in (iii) embodies the price mechanism which, however, does NOT work as standard economics hallucinates. As a matter of fact, overall employment INCREASES if the average wage rate W INCREASES relative to average price P and productivity R and vice versa. If the average price increases faster than the average wage rate employment decreases.

    The systemic employment equation fully replaces the hallucinatory Phillips curve and NAIRU. The equation contains nothing but measurable variables and is therefore testable. No prohibiting measurement problems at all!

    Right policy depends on true theory: “In order to tell the politicians and practitioners something about causes and best means, the economist needs the true theory or else he has not much more to offer than educated common sense or his personal opinion.” (Stigum)

    Economists do NOT have the true employment theory and this explains their endless inconclusive blather about NAIRU which is a NONENTITY like the Tooth Fairy or dancing-angels-on-a-pinpoint.

    Egmont Kakarot-Handtke

    #1 See ‘Keynes’ Employment Function and the Gratuitous Phillips Curve Disaster’
    https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2130421

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Mr Karakot-Handkte, I entirely agree that higher wages are good for employment (except perhaps in small open economies where the competitiveness effect dominates the effect on domestic aggregate demand), but in what way does this invalidate the converse effect, of employment on wages, as described by the Phillips curve?

      Delete
    2. Anonymous

      The fatal mistake of the discussion is to accept the NAIRU-Phillips curve (with the well-known disclaimers) and to focus on the economic policy implications with regard to the given situation in the US/UK/etc. But there is NO use to discuss policy if the underlying theory is defective.

      Right policy depends on true theory: “In order to tell the politicians and practitioners something about causes and best means, the economist needs the true theory or else he has not much more to offer than educated common sense or his personal opinion.” (Stigum)

      So what FIRST has to be done is to fix the NAIRU-Phillips curve.* The insight that there is NO such thing as a NAIRU then opens up new economic policy perspectives.

      The correct theory of the macroeconomic price mechanism tells us that ― for purely SYSTEMIC reasons ― the average wage rate has in the given situation to rise faster than the average price. This opens the way out of mass unemployment, deflation, and stagnation.

      If the price mechanism does not spontaneously deliver, as standard economics claims since 200+ years, THIS becomes an issue for economic policy and economics has to figure out the optimal rates of change for wage rate and price.

      Egmont Kakarot-Handtke

      * For details see ‘NAIRU, wage-led growth, and Samuelson’s Dyscalculia’

      http://axecorg.blogspot.de/2015/01/nairu-wage-led-growth-and-samuelsons.html

      Delete
  39. «OK, so just target some weighted average of inflation and unemployment like a thermostat. But what level of unemployment? There is a danger that would always mean we would tolerate high inflation if unemployment is low. We know that is not a good idea, because inflation would just go on rising. So why not target the difference between unemployment and some level which is consistent with stable inflation. We could call that level X, but we should try to be more descriptive. Any suggestions?»

    Too bad that I am so dense, but I think I figured out (thinking of the politics implicit in his argument) what our blogger "really means", and it is quite interesting in a way.

    My impression from the above quote and various other details is that his proposal is for a "rule" which is a function of "inflation" *and* unemployment, rather than a weighted *average* of "inflation" with employment. The thinking I reconstruct, which may not be his at all, but I think fits is:

    * A rule that drives "the interest rate" based on unemployment is supported by sometimes weak links between unemployment and "inflation", but what else can we do?

    * In some circumstances however we may want to change the inflation target, because of special circumstances, so we need a rule to determine the target rate of "inflation", for example when "inflation" comes from a fall in the currency rather than from "unaffordable" wages.

    So policy would proceed in three stages:

    #1 First we use the SWL rule (to be determined) to determine the target rate of "inflation".
    #2 Then we look up the NAIRU/Philips curve(s) that tells us which level of unemployment is needed to hit that "inflation" target.
    #3 Then we use a suitable monetary policy rule to determine which "the interest rate" is needed to hit that level of unemployment.

    The really new idea implicit in «some weighted average of inflation and unemployment» is that in effect target "inflation" should change with circumstances:

    «Take what is currently happening in the UK. [ ... ] That shows quite clearly that policy makers in reality target some measure of the output gap as well as inflation.»

    If my understanding of our blogger's logic is applicable that should be reworded as "target a different level of 'inflation' dependent on the output gap".

    The interesting aspect of this blog post in my opinion is that our blogger in effect wants to take setting the target rate of inflation away from policy makers, and let it be driven by an automatic rule.
    Presumably policy maker would then decide the shape of the rule in #1 above, that is the target "inflation" rule, rather than the target inflation level.

    ReplyDelete
  40. «The interesting aspect of this blog post in my opinion is that our blogger in effect wants to take setting the target rate of inflation away from policy makers, and let it be driven by an automatic rule.»

    I should expand on this: an obvious already discussed similar rule is NGDP growth rate targeting, where in effect the target level of inflation is "whatever"; but then NGDP growth rate targeting could be reinterpreted as setting an "inflation" target according to a rule that makes it depend on the *nominal* output gap.

    It is possible to see some distinct advantages of an policy framework that targets different levels of "inflation" dependent on something else rather than target the something else directly:

    * It gives better predictability to the level of "inflation", if it needs changing at all, to have a rule that makes the changes in target level of "inflation" depend on a rule.

    * It offers the opportunity to non-central bank policy makes to keep the target level of "inflation" stable by ensuring that they target the "something else" appropriately, or viceversa.

    That may matter. When there are discussions about NGDP growth rate targeting my usual objection is that any explicit or implicit change in "inflation" target involves a massive repricing of any fixed-nominal-interest security, and in particular that any *increase* in target "inflation" means a collapse in the valuation of fixed-nominal-interest securities, and thus changes in the "inflation" target are very asymmetrical.

    BTW, terminology note, I put "inflation" and "the interest rate" in "ahem" quotes because those terms as used in most monetary policy discussions are *at best* euphemisms.

    ReplyDelete
  41. So looking at the politics and big picture of "inflation" targeting regimes, and my understanding (or misunderstanding) of our blogger's proposal:

    * "Old" regime: at any point the policy maker may decide that some other distributional goal is more important than preserving the value of fixed-nominal-rate securities, and may confiscate a large part of that value with a surprise increase in "inflation". The value of those securities is uncertain (the sense of JM Keynes), and there is is a large uncertainty premium in their fixed-nominal-rate level.

    * Fixed inflation target regime: the policy makers have decided that the most important distributional goal is to protect the value of fixed-nominal-rate securities, and have published in advanced and stick to a target nominal "inflation" level, and will sacrifice employment and the "little people" in general to preserve the value of those securities. That value is not uncertain and is free from inflation risk.

    * Rule-based "inflation" level target: the level of target "inflation" is not fixed in advance, because the policy makers don't prioritize fixed-nominal-rate value over all other distributional goals, but the rule according to which that target level is determined is published in advance, and therefore there is quantifiable inflation risk as to the value of those securities, but no uncertainty (well, depending on how tightly the rule is written).

    ReplyDelete
  42. Since I always look at the *political* motivations for policy frameworks, I'll add some more to the tradeoffs of the sort «Fixed inflation target regime: the policy makers have decided that the most important distributional goal is to protect the value of fixed-nominal-rate securities».

    These political decisions are based, or perhaps should be, on the obvious insight that for every given structure of the economy "stability" is largely conserved: that is making one sector more stable almost always means making other sectors less stable. This is sort of implicit in «why create a recession just to smooth inflation».

    That is sort of the insight encapsulated in the NAIRU/Phillips curve(s): that to stabilize the value of fixed-nominal-rate securities, employment has to be destabilized, becoming the absorber of "shocks".

    The "old" regime of uncertain (in the JM Keynes sense) "inflation" instead stabilized employment at the cost of potentially destabilizing "inflation".
    The regime proposed (as I understand it) by our blogger in which the target "inflation" level is adjusted depending on circumstances trades some "inflation" stability for some employment or output gap stability.

    Two further points on the dangers of attempting unnatural "smoothing":
    * H Minsky's warning that "stability is destabilizing" amounts to the argument that the lump-of-stability is conserved across time: excessive stability today breeds instability tomorrow.
    * The trade-off of stability across distributional sectors and across time can be super-linear or sub-linear: sometimes adding a little stability here or now results in adding a lot of instability there or after, or more hopefully viceversa. It could be very interesting to see research on what the trade-offs look like across sectors and time.

    ReplyDelete
  43. Using the job guarentee wage as a price anchor inflation actually reduces after 2 years.

    The results proved that funding a job guarentee across all the countries that use the Euro would result in an inflation rate of slightly over 2%. Which then falls back to under 2% and settles at 1.65% after 2 years.

    ReplyDelete
  44. "comments on this post is a complete failure to engage with what I have said, and say where they disagree."

    Or is it that you just do not understand what they are saying and how that applys to NAIRU problem?

    The main problem of NAIRU is that it is used as hard data to calculate policy prescriptions which is always biased toward tougher policy then reality could take it.

    Nobody denied here that there is no relationship between inflation and unemployment, but that relationship is calculated completely off mark by officials which is then used to make policy. Main problem is that such policiy is always against wages and employment by having interest rates higher then NAIRU allows if used properly.

    My recomendation is that NAIRU resets back to 2% a year after have been tested and confirmed by rising inflation. If it is not being tested and meassured in the real world it stay at 2% as when calculating for policy.
    At the present, NAIRU is used to make politicians complacent about having high unemployment so they do not do nothing about suffering of people. That is what major complaint is about and that is why everyone is talking about JG.
    NAIRU is abused because it is not possible to determine it percisely but it is used as if it was, which have hard implications on people's lives. It is used to keep wages down and employment down, to make politicians complacent about unemployment.

    You say that NAIRU isn't constant and everyone agrees, but how it was determined is the problem. The real world says it is bellow 2% yet it was calculated as 5% so that FED can raise interest rate. Is that an add hoc aproach that you prefer? Let's abandon theory and add hoc it to whatever we want.... That is what CBankers are doing. And this is what the majority of complaints is about.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I think this gets to part of the problem. You can argue against what policy makers are doing, as I have, without throwing away the concept of the NAIRU. You are confusing the concept with how it is being currently applied.

      Delete
    2. I am not confused, i just said it a bit less clearly the first time then this time. You just think that i am arguing as a part of the group and do not consider what i say as a separate argument.
      I

      Delete
  45. Simon Wren-Lewis

    You say: “What I find very dispiriting about most of the comments on this post is a complete failure to engage with what I have said, and say where they disagree. Instead it is more along the lines of repeating the NAIRU is rubbish, without ever giving a coherent account of what exactly is rubbish.”

    The microfounded NAIRU-Phillips curve has first of all to be rectified.* The macrofounded SYSTEM-Phillips curve is shown on Wikimedia
    https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AXEC62.png

    From this correct employment equation follows in the MOST ELEMENTARY case that an increase of the macro-ratio rhoF=W/PR leads to higher total employment L.

    The ratio rhoF embodies the price mechanism. Let the rate of change of productivity R for simplicity be zero, i.e. r=0, then there are three logical cases:

    (i) The rate of change of the wage rate W is equal to the rate of change of the price P, i.e. w=p, then employment does NOT change NO MATTER how big or small the rates of change are. That is NO amount of inflation or deflation has any effect on employment.

    (ii) The rate of change of the wage rate is greater than the rate of change of the price then employment INCREASES.

    (iii) The rate of change of the wage rate is smaller than the rate of change of the price then employment DECREASES.

    So, it is DIFFERENCES in the rates of change of wage rate and price and not the absolute magnitude of change. Every PERFECTLY SYNCHRONOUS inflation/deflation is employment-neutral, that is, employment sticks indefinitely where it is. In more general terms the neutrality condition reads W(1+w)/P(1+p)(R(1+r)=rhoF=constant.

    There is NO such thing as a NAIRU, all depends on relative rates of change. This is a testable proposition.

    Egmont Kakarot-Handtke

    * See ‘NAIRU: an exhaustive dancing-angels-on-a-pinpoint blather’
    http://axecorg.blogspot.de/2017/02/nairu-exhaustive-dancing-angels-on.html

    ReplyDelete
  46. Is it easier to accurately measure the level of Unemployment, or actual Employed people? Just a thought.

    ReplyDelete
  47. The unemployment rate is not an effective proxy of deviation from 'full employment'. Mark Carney discovered this with his 7% forward guidance calamity not too long ago. The focus of balancing inflation against 'output deviation' should focus on more pragmatic measures of spare capacity.

    ** For any conservatives reading - self employment expansion of those unable to find a job is not representative of a strong recovery. Nor is the expansion of the Gigg economy. Young people don't want 'flexible' working, they want a career**

    In my mind the policy objectives should attempt the following:
    1) Keeping CPI/RPI inflation low.
    2) Keeping Wage inflation high.

    The two mechanism work to keep policy objectives balanced as they naturally contradict each other. Both rates should naturally (in normal times) fall to a commensurate and steady state around 2%. With a loss function ensuring both the policy setters are punished for a paired deviation from the steady state levels (e.g. 3%,3% would be worse than 2%,2%) and also for a decoupling deviation (e.g 3%,1% would be worse than 2%,2%)

    Focus on unemployment rates and perceived 'full employment' is far to ideological - policy should be focused purely on outcomes and results. Wage and price pressures are the truest manifestations of outcomes we will be able to obtain.






    ReplyDelete
  48. Professor
    How does Mr Carney's new term 'lamda' impact NAIRU thinking. If the bank is no longer able to state clear inflation target intentions because it seeks to retain discretion to look through political events, and no longer pretends to use a rule to achieve that target, doesn't it damage the micro founded inflation expectations story at the heart of NAIRU.
    My belief is that the CBs are focused less on some hypothetical link between employment and inflation, but on holding down the wage share of output, that is, if deflated wages rise faster than productivity, then interest rates may rise regardless of inflation.
    Is NAIRU still really part of the story?

    ReplyDelete
  49. I know that I am late to this party, and my remark may be unfair to what is simply a blog post, but I think that there is an important logical and scientific point to make.

    "There is a relationship between inflation and unemployment, but it is just very difficult to pin down. For most macroeconomists, the concept of the NAIRU really just stands for that basic macroeconomic truth. . . .

    "There is a danger that would always mean we would tolerate high inflation if unemployment is low. We know that is not a good idea, because inflation would just go on rising."

    That apparently begs the question. The NAIRU exists because it exists. Unless we grant the reality of the NAIRU, we cannot justify that last statement.

    If inflation just kept on rising, that implies a runaway feedback loop. Such loops are not uncommon in human systems. For instance, arguments can, and sometimes do, escalate. That escalation can lead to breakups of relationships, even to murder. But most often the escalation stops, people cool off, and reconcile. That is because, as with inflation, things are not so simple, and other factors apply. I have not quoted this note extensively, but even given a relationship between unemployment and inflation, we cannot say that unemployment by itself can cause runaway inflation. We have historical examples of hyperinflation. Were any of them caused by low unemployment alone?

    ReplyDelete

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