Arnold Kling: The Economy is Not ONE Big GDP Factory

More on the GDP Week.

Blogger and Adjunct Scholar for the Cato Institute, Arnold Kling, writing at the Econolog (Library for Economics and for Liberty) distinguishes camping trip economics (macroeconomics) with woolen coat economics (complex patterns of specialization, production methods, trade, and innovation.) to arrive at the GDP myth. (bold mine)

In macroeconomics, the conventional misrepresentation treats the economy as one big GDP factory. Macroeconomists look at total output, as measured by GDP, and they think of it as produced by homogeneous labor and homogeneous capital. Again, this is camping-trip economics, with value assumed to be embedded in the endowment of labor and capital, rather than in the coordination required to create patterns of specialization, production methods, trade, and innovation.

Conventional economists use the term "potential GDP," and they will say that the economy is operating "below potential" during a recession. From a coordination point of view, the meaning of such concepts is in doubt.

A conventional economist would say that the U.S. economy was operating at its potential in early 2007, prior to the onset of recession. Subsequently, it was operating far below potential.

From the coordination perspective, one might ask what this "potential GDP" means. If the United States in 2009 had produced exactly the set of goods and services that it produced in 2007, would this have meant that it was operating at its potential? In particular, that would mean going back to building the same number of houses, creating the same number of mortgage securities backed by sub-prime loans, discarding any post-2007 innovations in health care or computer technology, and so on.

It certainly is true that there are fluctuations in the proportions of employed and unemployed workers. Thinking of the economy as a GDP factory leads to a very limited view of the causes of such fluctuations. If there is only one good produced, then the only meaningful choice that people can make is an intertemporal one. They can decide when to work more and consume more, and, conversely, when to work less and consume less. In fact, this stunted theory of economic fluctuations is what macroeconomics degenerated into in the 1980s, particularly at the "freshwater" schools of the University of Chicago and the University of Minnesota. Meanwhile, the "saltwater" schools of MIT and Berkeley retained the GDP factory with intertemporal choice issues while adding some relatively arbitrary rigidities in nominal wages or prices, to arrive at what was called New Keynesian economics.

Instead, thinking of the economy in terms of coordination, there are myriad reasons for employment to fluctuate. Consider all of the adjustments that would have to take place in order for the economy to shift some resources from woolen-coat production to the development of smart-phone apps. In fact, the U.S. government's data on JOLTS (job openings and labor turnover statistics) shows that millions of jobs are created and destroyed each month, compared to which the aggregate net gains and losses of 200,000 or so per month seem relatively minor.

Read the start here.
 
In my view, macroeconomics is heuristics (mental shortcuts) clothed by mathematical formalism.