We are not short of causes for our current economic crisis. The basic machinery of capitalism, including the process of making loans, did not work as it was supposed to. Capital flows around the world proved much more destabilizing than even before (and we’ve seen some damaging capital flows over the past 200 years.) And there are plenty of distinguished individuals with something to answer for, including anyone who thought they understood risk and how to manage it.
But perhaps the real problem lies even deeper, for example, either with a natural human tendency towards bubbles or with how we think about the world. All of our thinking about the economy – a vast abstract concept – has to be in some form of model, with or without mathematics. And we should listen when a leading expert on a large set of influential models says (1) they are broken, and (2) this helped cause the crisis and – unless fixed – will lead to further instability down the road.
This is an important part of what my colleague, Daron Acemoglu, is saying in a new essay, “The Crisis of 2008: Structural Lessons for and from Economics.” (If you like to check intellectual credentials, start here and if you don’t understand what I mean about models, look at his new book.) To me there are three major points in his essay. Continue reading
The Limits of Economics
In honor of Mark Sanford and that other guy from Nevada, the fun-loving crowd over at Planet Money has been talking about the economics of adultery, and even got Simon to comment for them. I’m all in favor of a cute model, but I think this is as much a sign of the over-expansion of economic reason as anything else.
Chana Joffe-Walt’s post asks this question of the typical cheating politician: “Didn’t he know he’ll get caught, put his family through hell, exhaust all of us with the details and jeopardize his career? The costs are so great, how could the affair possibly be worth it?”
Well, that assumes that he was going to get caught, and the odds of being caught in an affair are one of those things that are inherently very difficult to measure (and that cheaters are likely to underestimate, because of selection bias). We can see the numerator, but we can’t see the denominator. It also assumes that trading your political career for a steamy affair is a bad outcome. On some level, don’t you suspect that a lot of male politicians do it because they want to impress women, and that affairs are part of the payoff of politics? And what sane person would really want to be in electoral politics anyway?
More generally, the motivations that drive people to want to have sex with people they are not married to, or otherwise live secret lives other than the one they are supposed to live, seem to me not only too complex for a Chicago-school rational-actor model, but even perhaps too complex for a behavioral model. That is, I suspect that this type of behavior involves multiple actors inside the same person: one person who combines the ambitious, values-touting politician; the typical middle-aged man going through a midlife crisis and hoping for someone to validate his self-image; and, of course, the lout who thinks with something other than his brain. I think combining those sides of the psyche into a single utility model and maximizing it subject to a budget constraint (be it money or time) is basically a fantasy. But economists these days wil stop at nothing.
By James Kwak
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Posted in Commentary
Tagged economics