Yesterday, March 13th had a special event, a virtual conference in honour of the great Wynne Godley.
If you hadn’t joined it, you can still view the recordings which have now been made available, thanks to Gennaro Zezza, who organised the event.
Here’s another poster, prior to the event. You can find the picture here.
Picture credit: Levy Institute on Twitter.
All videos now seem available. Check again with the conference page for the presentation or write-ups.
📅 Conference: The Legacy Of Wynne Godley
Levy Economics Institute has announced a virtual conference in commemoration of Wynne Godley on May 13th.
The site says that you can join by Google Meet.
Marc Lavoie’s talk is Wynne Godley And The Monetary Circuit. There’s a roundtable Godley’s Approach In The Current Crisis.
There are several new speakers who didn’t attend the conference in honour of Godley in 2011 such as Ken Coutts, Graham Gudgin, Bill Martin.
Poster from Levy Institute’s Facebook page.
Gennaro Zezza And Alan Shipman — Wynne Godley
There’s a nice recent six-page biography of Wynne Godley in The New Palgrave Dictionary Of Economics by Gennaro Zezza and Alan Shipman. Shipman had recently written a full biography on Wynne Godley’s life.
Abstract:
The chapter provides a brief biography of Wynne Godley (1926–2010), a British economist who informed the discussion of economic policy in the United Kingdom and later the United States. Godley was the main contributor to the development of the stock-flow-consistent approach to macroeconomics, setting out models based on rigorous accounting which allowed him to anticipate (ahead of more orthodox forecasters) adverse developments in the UK economy in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the global recessions of 2001 and 2007–2009.
Adam Tooze’s book Crashed seems popular. The book and two reviews have some good appreciation of Wynne Godley’s work used in the book to explain why the crisis happened. The two reviews, both published in New Left Review:
In the acknowledgments section of his book Adam Tooze writes:
Wynne Godley was a mentor and teacher of a very different kind. Spontaneously warm and generous in spirit, he took me under his cape in my first year at King’s and introduced me, and a group of my contemporaries, to what was, at the time, a highly idiosyncratic brand of economics. In so doing he provided a model of intellectual warmth and vitality. He also confirmed doubts that had been gestating in me about the IS-LM model that was my first great love in economics. Wynne introduced me to the importance of looking “beyond the flows” and insisting on stock-flow consistency in macro models. I don’t think this book, written almost thirty years later would have been the same without his early influence.
Cédric Durand says:
What, then, are the conceptual underpinnings of Tooze’s work? In Crashed, none are made explicit. Nevertheless, in his emphasis on balancesheet vulnerabilities he implicitly follows the lead of post-Keynesian research, one of the more creative currents in contemporary economics, deriving from a synthesis of Keynes with a specific form of Marxian macroeconomics pioneered in the 1940s by Michał Kalecki. Tooze appears to draw in part upon the post-Keynesian ‘stock-flow consistency’ model, an approach that seeks to combine the ‘real’ and financial spheres of the economy. The term ‘stockflow’ implies attentiveness to the build-up of vulnerabilities in the ‘stock’ of financial assets and liabilities, beyond the financial ‘flows’ themselves: for example, when a sector’s prolonged deficit results in an unsustainable stock of debt. This approach has become increasingly popular since the crash, and was incorporated in the Bank of England’s policy-making toolkit in 2016. Initially developed by Nicholas Kaldor in the 1940s, the methodology was transformed in the 1960s and 70s by the work of James Tobin and Wynne Godley, Tooze’s teacher at Cambridge. Godley is credited by Tooze here with introducing him to ‘the importance of looking “beyond the flows” and insisting on stock-flow consistency’.
At the heart of this approach is the idea that macroeconomic dynamics hinge on a three-way interaction between the financial balances of public, private and foreign sectors. This ‘three balances’ perspective arguably supplies the unstated backbone of Tooze’s general argument. His achievement is to dress the dryness of this technical skeleton with the dense and complex sensitivity of historical flesh. If this framework were to be made explicit, it would suggest that the adventures of the private-sector balance drove a spectacular upward distribution of wealth that ultimately backfired in the political arena as resurgent nationalism and xenophobia. Public-sector balances were the scene of dramatic deliberations about crisis-containment strategy, with central bankers standing far above the other actors in the hierarchy of policy-making. Finally, the international balance-sheet perspective sheds light on a multipolar world where monetary policy, currency reserves and financial sanctions can be as effective as military force in deciding geopolitical outcomes and national fates.
…
Tooze’s mentor Wynne Godley observed in 1992 that the establishment of a single currency on the Maastricht model ‘would bring to an end the sovereignty of its component nations’, leaving them with the economic autonomy of ‘a local authority or colony’, while no central government could emerge with sufficient fiscal muscle to take decisive economic action. As a result, in the case of a major macroeconomic shock, the populations of countries deprived of the power to devalue, and not benefiting from a system of fiscal equalization, will see ‘emigration as the only alternative to poverty’. This sounds like an impressive, prescient account of the role of macro-institutional systems—and not just bad policy-making, as Tooze would have it—in the fates the Greek, Portuguese and Spanish people have had to suffer. Political, geopolitical and economic dimensions are structurally intertwined via institutions in the process of crisis making and management. While Tooze perfectly demonstrates the latter, in particular in his magnificent account of the balance-sheet intricacy at the heart of the 2008 crisis, he doesn’t account for the former.
Perry Anderson:
Durand observes, its narrative is no simple—or rather in this case, of course, highly complex and intricate—empirical tracking of the crisis and its outcomes. It possesses definite ‘conceptual underpinnings’, suggested by Tooze himself in acknowledging his debt to Wynne Godley’s use of ‘stock-flow consistency’ modelling of the financial interactions between public, private and foreign sectors. This in Durand’s view supplies ‘the unstated backbone’ of Tooze’s general argument.
Both judgements appear sound. But in Durand’s exposition a paradox attaches to each of them, since by the end of his review, somewhat different notes are struck. For Godley, one of the key advantages of the stock-flow consistency approach was that it integrated the financial with the real economy, as alternative models did not. Durand, however, remarks that Crashed ‘does not discuss the concrete intertwining of the financial and productive sectors in the global economy at all’, and so ‘fails to set the financial crisis in the context of the structural crisis tendencies within contemporary capitalist economies.’ This observation in turn generates another, which might seem to put in question Durand’s overall tribute to the book. For there he writes of ‘Tooze’s unwillingness to investigate the relations between the political and the economic’, a reluctance that ‘ultimately undermines his account of the crisis decade.’ Logically, the question then arises: do these two apparent contradictions lie in Tooze’s work, or in Durand’s review of it? Or can both be coherent in their own terms?
So Adam Tooze is appreciated in using the correct mathematical formulation but not paying much attention to political economy. Of course Wynne Godley’s work is based with a background in Kaldorian/Post-Keynesian economics, so the critique doesn’t apply to him. Tooze has a preface to his response to Anderson which will appear soon.
Gennaro Zezza has shared a 1987 paper by him and Wynne Godley modeling the Italian economy using a “real stock flow monetary model”
Alan Shipman has written a biography of Wynne Godley!
Links:
Description:
This timely biography of the economist Wynne Godley (1926-2010) charts his long and often crisis-blown route to a new way of understanding whole economies. It shows how early frustrations as a policy-maker enabled him to glimpse the cliff-edges other macro-modellers missed, and re-arm ‘Keynesian’ theory against the orthodoxy that had tried to absorb it. Godley gained notoriety for his economic commentaries – foreseeing the malaise of the 1970s, the Reagan-Thatcher slump, the unsustainable 1980s and 1990s booms, and the crises in the Eurozone and world economies after 2008. This foresight arose from a series of advances in his understanding of national accounting, price-setting, the role of modern finance, and the use of economic data, especially to grasp the interlinkage of stocks and flows. This biography also gives due attention to Godley’s life outside academic economics – including his chaotic childhood, truncated career as a professional oboist, equally brief stints as a sculptor’s model and economist in industry, and a longer spell as as a Treasury adviser with a mystery gift for forecasting.
This first full-length biography traces Wynne Godley’s long career from professional musician to public servant, policymaker, tormentor of conventional macroeconomics and creator of a workable alternative – all after escaping a childhood of decaying mansions and draconian schools, and rescuing his private world from the legacy of two Freuds. Drawing on Godley’s published and unpublished work and extensive interviews with those who knew him, the author explores Godley’s improbable life and explains the lasting significance of his work.
Chapters:
Gerald Epstein of PERI has written a fine paper The Institutional, Empirical and Policy Limits of ‘Modern Money Theory’ critiquing the shortcoming of Neochartalism.
Epstein’s main critique is that Neochartalism ignores the role of international financial markets and the constraint it puts on fiscal policy. Abstract:
Modern Money Theory (MMT) economists acknowledge a number of empirical and institutional limitations on the applicability of MMT to macroeconomic policy, but they have not attempted to explore these empirically nor have they adequately addressed their implications for MMT’s main macroeconomic policy proposals. This paper identifies some of these important limitations, including those stemming from modern international financial markets, and argues that they are much more binding on the policy applicability of MMT than many of MMT’s advocates appear to recognize. To address these limitations, MMT analysts would have to enter the messy institutional, policy and empirical realms that undermine their simplistic policy conclusions that might be appealing to some policy-oriented followers of MMT. My conclusion is that, in light of these limitations, MMT’s major macroeconomic policy suggestions are of little practical relevance today for progressive politicians and activists, much less to macroeconomic policy formulation in general.
In addition, Epstein has a blog post, Is MMT “America First” Economics?, at INET, which is a short summary of his paper. Excerpt:
To start, even though MMT advocates claim that its macroeconomic framework applies to all countries with “sovereign currencies,” there is significant evidence that it does not apply to the vast majority of such countries in the developing world that are integrated into global financial markets. As is well-known, these countries are subject to the vagaries of international capital flows, sometimes called “sudden-stops.” The problem is that in light of these flows, these countries have limited fiscal and monetary policy space, surely insufficient to conduct MMT-prescribed monetary and fiscal policies for full employment. Wray argues that that flexible exchange rates are sufficient to provide sufficient policy space for these countries to undertake MMT macro-policies. Occasionally the issue of capital controls is briefly mentioned but not seriously discussed as a complementary policy. But a careful survey of the empirical evidence casts grave doubts on the effectiveness of flexible rates for giving policy autonomy or insulating these countries from the vagaries of global financial flows. This problem is worse for countries that cannot borrow in their own currencies, but also applies to small, open countries that are able to borrow in their own currencies. The upshot is that only countries that issue their own internationally accepted currency might have the policy space to conduct MMT policies.
Even for those countries that issue their own international currencies, the sustainability and “exploitability” of the international role is not absolute. The country that has the greatest fiscal and monetary space is the United States, which issues the predominant key currency, the US dollar. Whereas Wray has written that the predominance of the dollar is not something we will need to worry about in our lifetime, historical and empirical evidence suggests that even considerable forces for persistence of key currency positions can weaken over time, perhaps even rapidly and dramatically …
A note
It’s usually assumed that fiscal sustainability is the condition on the rate of interest, r, and the rate of growth, g. However Wynne Godley showed that it is neither necessary or sufficient. You can read more here from my blog.
Here’s a fantastic 2003 article in The Guardian by Wynne Godley and Alex Izurieta, one among many predicting the economic and financial crisis which started in 2007.
h/t Jo Michell.
Excerpt:
In fact the new regime is not working. After years of euphoric growth, the world has become locked into a stagnation which gets worse by the day. Large imbalances, particularly in trade and in personal debt, have been allowed to develop in the US and Britain which mean that the growth we have is unsustainable. Given the existing policy regime, medium term prospects begin to look frightening.
The US is already in a growth recession because private investment has fallen while a record balance of payments deficit has been bleeding the circular flow of income on an increasing scale. These negative forces have been partly offset by an unsustainable splurge in household borrowing, a consequence of the fall in interest rates and the boom in house prices, in the absence of any control over credit expansion.
The reference to golf is from British politics from 1989. Go to “Column 750” in the link.
Trinity Colleagues Pay Tribute To Robert Neild, 1924-2018
Hashem Pesaran, Partha Dasgupta and Gregory Winter remember Robert Neild.
Dasgupta:
Robert Neild was the last surviving member of a triumvirate that shaped the intellectual climate of economics at Cambridge in the 1970s. That influence lasted for over two decades. Together with Brian Reddaway (Professor of Political Economy) and Wynne Godley (Director of the Department of Applied Economics), Robert encouraged an approach to economics that was in sharp contrast to the then growing attention given in the leading university departments of economics in the UK and USA to economic theory and econometrics. The latter approach drew on mathematical techniques not only because they enabled one to reach conclusions with clarity, but also because they allowed one to trace those conclusions to the underlying hypotheses and data on which the studies were based. In modern economics policy is often kept at a distance. In contrast, the approach that Robert favoured insisted on a tight and constant link between analysis and policy; so much so that the separation between analysis and policy was wafer-thin.
