Catallaxy Files

John Papola, the producer of the Keynes-Hayek Rap, has an extraordinary article titled “Think Consumption Is The ‘Engine’ Of Our Economy? Think Again” which is in every way an all points defence of Say’s Law right down to quoting John Stuart Mill on “demand for commodities is not demand for labour”. This is an edited version. Go to the link to read the entire article, including all of its links to other articles, which is found at Forbes.com.

The American people are repeatedly told by financial pundits and politicians that consumption is an ‘engine’ that ‘drives’ economic growth because it makes up 70% of GDP. . . .

Not so fast, Speed Racer. The systematic failure by Keynesian economists and pundits to distinguish between consuming and producing value is the single most damaging fallacy in popular economic thinking. This past Christmas, we produced a playful video called ‘Deck the Halls with Macro Follies’ exploring the history of this popular myth. . . .

A History of Macro Follies

The historical record on economic growth conflicts with this consumption doctrine. Economic growth (booms) and declines (bust) have always been led by changes in business and durable goods investment, while final consumer goods spending has been relatively stable through the business cycle. Booms and busts in financial markets, heavy industry and housing have always been leading indicators of recession and recovery. The dot-com boom and bust, the Great Depression and our current crisis all exhibit the pattern. . . .

As John Stuart Mill put it two centuries ago, ‘the demand for commodities is not the demand for labor.’ Consumer demand does not necessarily translate into increased employment. That’s because ‘consumers’ don’t employ people. Businesses do. Since new hires are a risky and costly investment with unknown future returns, employers must rely on their expectations about the future and weigh those decision very carefully. . . .

The past several decades in America have been marked by a collapse of real savings encouraged by artificially easy credit from the Fed, along with explosive growth in government spending. All these combined to bring about a debt-fueled spending binge, with disastrous consequences.

Increased investment drives economic growth, while retrenched investment leads to recession and reduced employment–and it always has. Those who blame our stagnation on a lack of consumer demand rely on a toxic brew of dubious data and dangerous theory.

Before I Can Consume, I Must Produce for Others

By definition, GDP is a summary of final sales for new goods and services and not of all economic activity. Raw materials, intermediate goods and labor costs, which comprise the bulk of business spending are not treated in GDP, but are rather rolled up in the final sale price of the ‘consumer’ spending. Only capital equipment, net inventory changes and purchase of newly constructed homes constitute ‘investment’ according to GDP. This framing of the data makes the ‘consumption drives the economy’ a foregone conclusion. But this is circular reasoning.

Where do these ‘consumers’ get their money to spend? Before we can consume, we need to produce and earn a paycheck. And paychecks have to flow to productive — that is value-creating — behavior, or value is simply being transferred and destroyed. Our various demands as consumers are enabled by our supply as workers/producers for others. That’s the classical ‘Law of Markets’, often referred to as Say’s Law, in a nutshell.

For employees, those paychecks are income, but for the employers, wages represent most business’ single largest expense. Yet GDP does not treat employee wages or materials as ‘investment spending’ — even though any business owner regards salaries as the most important and largest investment that they make. Instead, employee wages appear in GDP data as consumption when income is spent on final goods like food, clothing, gadgets, and vacations. Moreover, since GDP is an accounting summary, it adds consumption and investment spending together. But this summarizing masks the fact that these two activities are actually in opposition in the short run. In order to invest more today, we have to save more and consume less. As a result, GDP in-and-of-itself reveals nothing about what grows an economy; at best, it demonstrates how large the economy is and whether it’s growing or shrinking.

Digging below the surface of GDP reveals a structure of value-adding production far more complex than the simplistic analysis given by most media reports. According to government data, more than 70% of Americans earn their incomes from employment in domestic business. Yet the retail sector of our economy, for example, only contributed 6% of GDP. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data on employment show that only about 11% of employed Americans work in ‘sales and related occupations’. That leaves a great deal of economic activity and employment to the ‘business to business’ sector, which composes most of the real economy.

Most of the value-adding activities occurred between a vast structure of businesses and workers starting with raw materials and blueprints and coming together over months (sometimes years when R&D is included) before a final sale can be made. At each stage, the activity is funded not by current ‘consumer spending’ but through a combination of new investment and savings such as each company’s reinvested earnings. The farther from a final good a business’s output is, the more it relies on credit markets and the more it is subject to distortions on the savings and investment side. And since employment is spread across this time structure with relatively few working in final retail stage, savings and investment changes have dramatic impacts on employment. . . .

Don’t Put the Shopping Cart Before the Horse

There is a fundamental illogic to the notion that an economy can be grown by encouraging consumption. When a person consumes, by definition, they use things up. The very process leaves us with less than before. Growing the availability of valuable goods and services for society by using them up is not just an impossibility—it’s an absurdity. Consumption is the goal, but it is production that is the means.

For most of human history, ordinary people had to spend their lives growing food. Today, we have many billions more people on the planet. And yet food is cheaper, better and of greater variety than ever before. Still, almost nobody works in agriculture. We didn’t create this wealthy, amazing world… by eating. We did it by saving our seed corn, investing and ultimately inventing our way out of farming jobs. Thank heavens we did.

There are important lessons for public policy that come from these classical insights. Any program which accelerates the consumption of value, or worse, the destruction of value, ultimately make our society poorer. Despite what Keynes and his modern followers claim, Wars, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, faked alien invasions, or programs that encourage us to destroy our used cars — all make us poorer. These schemes reduce the amount of valuable goods and services available for society. Some may consider unemployment benefits to be a necessary policy on humanitarian grounds, but they by no means ‘stimulate’ the economy. The recipient, after all, is consuming without producing any value for others. Disincentives for people to be productive, which have exploded in recent years, not only reduce employment, but reduce output and growth as well. . . .

Savings and investment which enable increased productivity, greater specialization and trade are the true engines of economic growth. Increasing consumption is a result of that growth, never the cause of it. If we want sound and sustainable economic growth, each of us has to discover the most valuable ways to serve others and contribute to the supply of wealth before we can take from it. Much like everyone else, even Santa Claus must produce all year long before people get to enjoy their presents.