Tuesday, May 27, 2008

David Warsh on some heretical economicsts and Washington Consensus

in a long article in 'Economic Principals' (links via EconoSpeak) David Warsh says:
"So ten days ago I journeyed to James Madison University, in Harrisonburg, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley, to a meeting on “Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Economic Complexity,” to see what had become of them.
I was glad and, I confess, slightly surprised, to see how much real progress had been made in 25 years.
............
For the last 125 years, however, ever since the views of Leon Walras and other theorists of general equilibrium became encoded in a famous textbook of Alfred Marshall (or, rather, partially encoded), technical economists have viewed the economy as a system in which individuals deal with one another only through the market mechanism, reacting to signals about prices and quantities as if they were determined by some central authority, best thought of as an auctioneer. Individual actors adapt as best they can to market signals which they are powerless to affect, until some sort of balance between supply and demand is achieved. Then things settle down and no individual has any reason to change his behavior, unless some external “shock” to the system occurs.

What about “imperfect competition”? Present-day economists have plenty of models in which individuals have market power and seek to use it. But, says Kirman, such models depend on game theory, which attributes superpowers to individuals – unlimited calculating power and superior analytic ability. The complexity vision of the economy falls somewhere between these two approaches, says Kirman, requiring neither the coordinating mechanism of the market nor sophisticated game-players to make it work."
Some of the concrete developments are discussed in the article as well as the comments by Barkley Rosser in Economist's View.
Later inthe article, Warsh discusses the recent World Bank sponsored Report originally commisioned by Paul Wolfowitz The Growth Report:Strategies For Sustained Growth And Inclusive Development. Excerpt:
"As Spence explained last week to Krishna Guha of the Financial Times, “What we learned is not that things went crazily off base in the Washington Consensus, but that in some sense that set of propositions was not enough to get the job done.… I suspect that the role of government as envisaged by the Washington Consensus needs to be reconsidered. I think it was defined too narrowly and not sufficiently pragmatically… Things you can confidently delegate to the private sector in Europe or America are not so easily delegated where markets and institutions are less developed.” "
From the report:
"As a point of departure we review the cases of high, sustained growth in the postwar period. Thirteen economies qualify: Botswana, Brazil, China, Hong Kong (China), Indonesia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Malta, Oman, Singapore, Taiwan (China), and Thailand. Two other countries, India and Vietnam, may be on their way to joining this group. It is to be hoped other countries will emerge soon."

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