There’s no such thing as a free launch: Launching John Quiggin’s Economics in Two Lessons.

Delivered at Melbourne University, Friday 19th July, 2019 and cross posted at The Mandarin.

Welcome to the launch of another book by Australia’s most overachieving economist. A global authority on decision theory, he also publishes in the daily press, in submissions to government inquiries on his blog and in academic journals in any number of other fields in environmental, agricultural, welfare, tax and finance economics to name a few areas I’m aware of. As you do.

I’m not much of a fan of the endless KPIs into which academic life has descended (it’s an important reason why I’m not an academic). I hate the reductive gravity to which they subject pretty much everything in their path. Academics’ KPIs enable the performance of those whom we trust to be at the forefront of human knowledge to be judged by people who know nothing of their field or their work. What could possibly go wrong?

Still, to paraphrase Groucho Marx, in John’s case I’ll make an exception. His KPIs have been achieved whilst actually addressing useful questions rather than disciplinary arcana. John’s been placed in the top 5% economists in the world according to IDEAS/RePEc and two Federation Fellowships from the Australian Research Council.

I don’t really believe a word of this.

The dark dirty secret is that these accomplishments stem from a time when John wore a big black beard that had people wondering who he really was – and why he looked so much like Captain Haddock from the Tin-Tin cartoon books. It’s not the kind of thing one is thanked for when launching a book obviously. But this is an existential matter for anyone who still clings – however quixotically, however much it offends the Nietzschean verities – to the idea that he’s still part of the reality based community.

To speak truth to a poster-boy of our KPI riddled academic community, behind that beard he could have been any number of people – all at once.

Since he’s cut his beard off his pace may not have slackened but I thought I’d get used to his unbearded face very quickly. However John lives in Queensland and I live in Melbourne. So I’m afraid I don’t really recognise him. It’s not the chin I used to know. So for me anyway, until I see that beard back, I think of him as the economist formerly known as John Quiggin.

Anyway, not content with the five books he’s already published:

• Work for All
• Great Expectations
• Taxing Times
• Uncertainty, Production, Choice, and Agency: The State-Contingent Approach
• Zombie Economics

John’s written another book – which on my reckoning is the economist formerly known as John Quiggin’s second unbearded book.

What’s the message of the book? I can explain that by telling you a story. I was once at a lunch following the launch of Nugget Coombs’ last book at which an acolyte was on my left and Nugget was on my right. She said that economics was far too complex and technical for her to understand. I responded that economics might look complex, but that it’s all based on one idea. Nugget, who, like surprisingly many economists towards the end of their days despair of their profession, leant across to her and said: “Yes and it’s wrong!”

The idea I was thinking of is the idea of opportunity cost. Which is a simple, but sometimes subtle idea. And John doesn’t think it’s wrong. He thinks it’s right.
It’s just that he thinks it hasn’t been taken seriously enough.

Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson states the lesson thus:

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

This is actually code for ‘the market’. Like a lot of economic rhetoricians (some of whom were fine economic theorists too), having called for a thorough investigation of all the impacts of policies, Hazlitt then proceeds to out-source this herculean intellectual task to the market. Hazlitt is trying to put one over on us – something he no doubt accomplished in the traditional way of the ideologue, by putting one over on himself.

Quiggin reformulates Lesson One thus:

Market prices reflect and determine opportunity costs faced by consumers and producers.

Reducing the ambitions of Hazlitt’s initial goal to this reductive dreck is the thing that Nugget Coombs had lost patience with all those years ago. So John proposes a second lesson as a corrective.

Lesson Two:

Market prices don’t reflect all the opportunity costs we face as a society.

Quite.

Let me name some of the things that I like about this.

• It’s simple and parsimonious
• It’s not based on an elaborate model of the way the economy works, but on a simple principle which works whatever one’s model of how the economy works (within reason) and it’s been at the heart of economics since Adam Smith. If people face the true costs and benefits of their actions, they’re likely to be the best judge of them.
• I like the way the economist formerly impersonating Captain Haddock has used this singular idea of opportunity cost and taken it as far as he can so that he cleans up all manner of puzzles, not by invoking the ‘government clause’ – Lesson Two – but by explaining how markets can be made to work better. He reels off lots of triumphs of market economics, but makes sure we don’t lose track of the finer points, where problems and puzzles remain.
  • Yes; airline deregulation worked better than what went before, but left us with some things that we’ll need lesson two for.
  • No; price regulating competitive markets will probably end in disaster, including in the area of rent control where John references a quote my father was fond of from Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck that “rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city – except for bombing”. I thought that was Milton Friedman, and my father used to say that rent control was more effective than bombing.
• Then he shows how the notion of opportunity cost shouldn’t just be the underpinning of microeconomics, but provides a bridge between it and macroeconomics. For when there’s slack in the economy, all kinds of divergences open up between the opportunity costs of labour from unemployed workers’ point of view and their employer. That’s what justifies government action from outside the market sector to alleviate the divergence by targeting full-employment.
• I also like the terminology of ‘one lesson’ and ‘two lesson’ economists. I have a particular dislike of tendentious labels like ‘market fundamentalist’. It’s the arguments that should do the work, not the name-calling. Still in the context of this book, the author has his revenge because after he’s been through it all, you don’t want to be a ‘one lesson’ economist.
• John’s popular books always have interesting bits of disciplinary history I’m glad I read about. I knew of Pareto’s patrician values, but not that he ended up supporting Mussolini.
• Friedrich von Wieser, the Austrian economist who coined the term “opportunity cost.” (‘Opportunitätskosten’ in German) along with the equally notable term “marginal utility”. But his elaborations of these ideas brought him to the same commonsensical conclusions about the different usefulness of money to poor and rich people that English economics had arrived at – courtesy of scholars like Marshall and Pigou – by the turn of the twentieth century. Still he put this humdrum insight, still struggling for recognition in today’s economic and policy discourse, in an arresting way.

It is … the distribution of wealth that decides what will be produced, and leads to a consumer of a more anti-economic variety: a consumer wastes on unnecessary, guilty enjoyment that could have served to heal the wounds of poverty.

What a pity that, in opening up valuable new vistas, Wieser’s students Mises and Hayek paid so little attention to such a commonsensical idea.

• I hadn’t thought of using the geometric mean to measure per capita economic wellbeing, but it’s a good idea. And yes, John was right, we’ve all forgotten what a geometric mean is – or at least I had.
• On page 69, John outlines a puzzle in which you get a free ticket to an Eric Clapton concert and can buy a ticket to a Bob Dylan concert on the same night for $40 which you value at $50. You’re asked what the opportunity cost of this is. It’s striking that, typically, economists don’t know the answer: Just another illustration of how economists are (sadly) taught to think of their discipline as nothing much more than the application of various techniques which get flashed in our work like we flash our credit cards at the counter, rather than according to the fundamental ideas from which the discipline is built. A discipline unmoored from its intellectual foundations is a tragedy, but John’s book shows us that it’s a farce as well given how simple they are. As Keynes put it pithily, economics is an “easy subject at which very few excel!”
• Finally I was mentioning this launch to a friend and colleague who sent me his favourite sentences from the book. “Whatever happens to Bitcoin, we must not lose sight of a more fundamental, and more worrisome, development. A financial product with a purely arbitrary value has been successfully introduced in the world’s most sophisticated financial markets.” Indeed.

The book doesn’t break any new ground in a disciplinary sense, because it’s intended as a general introduction to economics for the interested public, rather like another excellent book by John Kay. If you liked John Kay’s The Truth about Markets, you’ll like Economics in Two Lessons.

I thought I’d leave you with the thought that ran through my mind as I read this book. I wanted another lesson. I’m currently in the process of writing my own sixth book – well OK it’s my first book and I don’t have a publisher – so I probably shouldn’t get ahead of myself. But a central idea in it is this.

The complementarity of the private and the shared, of competition and collaboration exists not only at the level of the whole economy – where it’s represented by ‘the market’ and ‘the government’ – but at every level in our society and economy. Indeed it inhabits all our social institutions right down to every conversation.

Why am I telling you this? Because, although I’m not getting paid for this, there’s still no such thing as a free launch.

So buy as many copies of John’s book as you can afford, but remember there’ll be another book coming out some time later, and you’ll want to buy at least one copy of it. Just think of John as Bob Dylan and me as Eric Clapton, each coming with our own opportunity cost.

I’ll be watching sales of this book carefully. With the sellout 1946 edition of Economics in One Lesson now superseded by Economics in Two Lessons, keep an eye out and a small place in your budget for Economics in Three Lessons.

Postscript and tangent:
This book launch was at Melbourne University with an audience of agricultural and resource economists and as I was preparing my speech I wondered whether Alan Lloyd might come up. Alan was Dad’s best friend, someone he’d made friends with in the old NSW Department of Agriculture in the 1950s where so many of Australia’s economists of that generation cut their teeth.

When Bill Malcolm mentioned Alan and his marvellous sense of humour in introducing me, I did my best to recount from memory some verses he’d written – just jotted in the margins of a newspaper he was reading – about the fact that the shearers at our farm ‘Bindango’ outside of Canberra (Now the suburb of Kambah) had declared our woolshed black for some infraction of their union requirements. This would have been in around 1964.

I got in most of the punch lines, but mucked some of it up, so I was pleased to be able to recover the verses from a memorial to Alan in my library. I reproduce them below as well as a reference Alan wrote for a colleague. Both capture Alan’s remarkable humour and class as well as an Australia long since disappeared. All that’s left is its vapour trail lingering in margarine ads and Aussie ‘anthems’. (For the benefit of any international readers, this is a parody of The Man from Snowy River, by Banjo Patterson – who coincidentally was a cousin of my mother’s).

There was movement at the station
For the word had got around
That Gruen’s sheep were ready for the shears
And so they thought was Gruen
(The professor from the town)
They hadn’t seen a softer cop in years

All the tried and noted bludgers
To ‘Bindango’ made their way,
To optimise this slicker heaven sent,
Though the price of wool was falling
They thought that in their pay
They could insert some economic rent.

Here is Alan’s reference for a colleague

18th November, 1976
RE : MR. C. M. ALAOUZE

I have known Mr. Christian Alaouze for eight years, during which time he was an undergraduate and then a postgraduate student in my department (agricultural economics) at Melbourne University.

Mr. Alaouze is an excellent example of the intellectual and emotional chaos of the times. He is a reformed anarchist “reformed” only in the sense that now he doesn’t even believe in anarchism. But most of all he doesn’t believe in econometrics, and if you wish to inject some skepticism (if not disillusionment) into your postgraduate body -Alaouze is your man.

As an undergraduate his academic results were fair, but well below his ability. This was the result of an acute aversion to work, as well as a preoccupation with student activities, demos and various hallucinatory diversions. His academic performance was severely affected, I am sure, by distractions such as obscenity charges (he was found innocent) and various forms of harassment by police and dole inspectors.

Alaouze’s political philosophy well illustrates the extreme fertility of his imagination. He espouses a form of syndicalist nihilism which should add stimulating diversity to political activity on your campus.

In summary, I would say that if you can get Alaouze to work for you, you will be extremely fortunate.

Professor A. G. Lloyd Melbourne University