Behavioral Economics

Mind Over Money

PBS Nova (2010)

Film Review

Mind Over Money is an intriguing Nova documentary about the new field of behavioral economics. At present, banks and governments use complex mathematical models in making decisions about lending, investment, taxation and government borrowing. These models are based on the premise Adam Smith put forward in Wealth of Nations that the “rational self-interest” of groups of individuals causes economic markets to be perfectly self-regulating without government regulation or control.

While the economic “rationalists” who subscribe to this belief acknowledge that not everyone makes totally rational decisions about money, they claim enough do to enable bankers, governments and economists to 1) predict the behavior of markets mathematically and 2) guarantee the overall stability of markets without government interference.

In contrast, behavioral economists argue that most decisions around money are based on emotional and unconscious factors. They further argue that without government regulation, waves of irrationally sweep through the stock market and mercantile exchange (where commodities are traded), causing destructive speculative bubbles and crashes as they did in in 1929 and 2008.

John Maynard Keynes was the first economist (during the Great Depression) to raise concerns that destructive booms and busts result from irrational investing behavior. Because he could offer no clear explanation why this was happening, his views were largely dismissed.

Economist Robert Shiller echoed Keynes concerns in his 2005 book Irrational Exuberance, in which he predicted the 2008 global economic crash.

Thanks to a pressing need to understand the 2008 downturn (and prevent another one), social psychology research into spending and investing behavior is enjoying its own boom. The documentary describes a number of fascinating experiments that validate Keynes’s original claim that these decisions are largely controlled by emotional and unconscious factors.

For my own part, I question why we need to produce absolutely scientific certainty for something that’s blatantly obvious. In contrast to economists, Wall Street traders all readily agree that Wall Street volatility is driven by waves of emotion. It strikes me that Wall Street economists refuse to accept the behavioral basis of market activity because they have a vested interest in continuing the high priesthood of complex mathematical models.

The film implies that more market regulation is needed to prevent this type of market volatility. I disagree. In my mind, the best way to strip Wall Street of this vested interest is to strip banks of the power to create money out of thin air and restore money creation to public control (as Andrew Johnson and Abraham Lincoln attempted to do.) See An IMF Proposal to Ban Banks from Creating Money

 

Giving Capitalism a Feminine Face

Historically the IMF and World Bank, like the WTO, have been characterized by “faceless” leadership. Prior to the mid-nineties, only a handful of liberal intellectuals knew these powerful international institutions existed. Even after the 1999 Battle of Seattle effectively launched the antiglobalization movement, the leaders of these august institutions remained anonymous. When the IMF issued warnings against countries with excessive public spending, they originated from the agency itself, rather than IMF officials.

Prior to his June 2011 arrest for alleged sexual assault, no one outside of France had heard of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who ran the IMF between 2007 and 2011.

The Historic Role of the IMF

The IMF was founded at the end of World War II at Bretton Woods. The British delegation, led by economist Maynard Keynes, wanted the IMF to be a cooperative fund member states could draw on to maintain economic activity and employment through the periodic economic crises that are characteristic of capitalist economies. The US delegation saw the IMF as more of a bank serving the needs of private lenders by ensuring borrowing states repaid their debts on time (see IMF History).

The US prevailed, and IMF loans came to be known as “structural adjustment” loans because they forced borrowing governments to adjust the structure of their economic activity. In most cases, this involved extreme austerity measures favorable to multinational corporations seeking access to cheap resources and labor markets. Such measures included privatizing publicly owned assets (airlines, telecoms, railroads, health systems, etc); liberalizing trade and financial markets; increasing incentives (corporate and individual tax cuts and waivers of environmental/labor regulations) for foreign investment; and supporting commercial export crops at the expense of food production.

Developing countries that blindly followed these policies, especially in South America and Africa, found their countries mired in debt and huge social inequalities. Russia was one of the most extreme cases: its economy shrank by 55% before President Vladimir Putin set the country on an alternative path to recovery.

Repackaging the IMF’s Image

Given the historic anonymity of the IMF leadership, you have to wonder about all the publicity being lavished on Christine Lagarde, the current IMF managing director. Although global economics is a low priority in the US media, she receives near daily attention in the British and international media. At sixty, Lagarde is still a strikingly attractive woman. Presumably, however, there is some political agenda behind the decision to promote this “rock star of the economic world,” as several media outlets have branded her

Lagarde’s Mission

Besides her carefully cultivated public persona, Lagarde is also unique in her willingness to lay out the IMF’s economic and political agenda. The policies she advocates include

• Stronger economic growth (allegedly to promote global re-employment)
• Deeper “integration” of European economies (translation: creation of a centralized fiscal body capable of making budgetary decisions for the entire Eurozone)
• Improved “fiscal consolidation” for the US and Japan (translation: less deficit spending)
• More domestic consumption and less reliance on foreign investment and exports in emerging economies (especially China)
• A stronger firewall against debt contagion (translation: no bailouts) around weaker Eurozone nations like Greece, Italy and Spain
• “Structural reform” (translation: anti-union legislation and reduced public spending) to improve the “competitiveness” of the industrial north.

Rebranding Structural Adjustment

Lagarde gives double messages about structural adjustment and austerity cuts. After warning that budget cuts lead to “recessionary tendencies,” she states that some countries (which, like Greece, are on the verge of economic collapse) need to cut their public budgets immediately. She feels others can stretch their cuts out over time.

Among specific “structural reforms” Lagarde favors are pension reform, with an optimal retirement age of 67, “wage restraint” (i.e. abandoning the expectation that wages will keep pace with inflation), and social service reforms in which “recipients of social assistance are expected to improve their situation.”*

The Fox Guarding the Henhouse

LaGarde isn’t without her critics. Former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson refers to her appointment as “the fox guarding the henhouse.” Johnson, like former World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz, has been highly critical of the extreme concentration of financial power and it threat it poses to the global economy. This is the subject of Johnson’s recent book, Thirteen Bankers.

His criticism.of Lagarde centers mainly around her proposal to solve the Eurozone crisis by issuing additional loans to the debt-ridden “peripheral” countries (Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Belgium). He maintains all these countries are looking at a default scenario, no matter how much money she throws at them. He accuses her of allowing EU leaders to use the IMF to conceal flaws in the Eurozone structure from voters.

*A questionable objective in countries with double digit unemployment

photo credit: Adam Tinworth via photopin cc