I recall a movie where a guy asks his buddy if his girlfriend is intelligent. The buddy replies “she’s average.” And the other guy responds “average is dumb.” Most people agree. I don’t know if that’s fair overall (I doubt it), but it’s probably true of economics. And this has led lots of people to be skeptical of the Rational Expectations Hypothesis (ratex.)
Mile Kimball and Noah Smith have a nice Quartz column on freshwater vs. saltwater economics. I mostly agree, but take issue with this assertion:
The labels “Freshwater” and “Saltwater” go back to the arguments and new ideas generated by the double-digit inflation in the 1970s. The names refer to the geography of key combatants in that period, when economists at the University of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Minnesota spearheaded the “Rational Expectations Revolution.” They believed that people are very, very smart and sensible in their economic decisions.
And this assertion:
The idea of rationality is both a great strength and the greatest blind spot of economics. Economists routinely pretend in their models that everyone (with the possible exception of government officials) is infinitely intelligent–or at least smart enough to make excellent economic decisions, even in very complex environments. Although there is a touching humility to this pretense (not always matched by humility of economists in relation to the real flesh-and-blood people they interact with), it is not true.
I don’t believe this is the right way to think about ratex. I use the ratex assumption in all my work, and yet I also assume that people suffer from money illusion, and that people are not very smart, nor very good at forecasting. Bennett McCallum has suggested that the term “consistent expectations” better describes what economists are actually doing with the ratex assumption. We assume that if the model predicts X, the public does not predict “not X.” The public’s expectations should be consistent with the model.
To see this distinction more clearly consider the famous example that led to the concept of the “wisdom of crowds.” The statistician Francis Galton attended a country fair where there was a contest of guessing the weight of an ox. He looked at all the guesses, and not surprisingly found that many were very far from the actual weight. It’s not easy to guess the weight of an ox! But even though the individual members of the crowd were not very smart, the crowd was brilliant, as the median guess was within about 1% of the actual weight–even better than the “expert guesses.” In ratex we don’t even assume that much. We don’t even assume that the public is particularly good at predicting the weight of an ox, but rather that if the ox weighs 2200 pounds, the model should not assume that the public believes it weighs 1800 pounds. That the predictions are unbiased. That’s all.
I don’t think individual people are very good at forecasting inflation, but I believe the market is very, very good, better than any single individual in the universe. Thus when modeling the economy it makes sense to assume that the public predicts an inflation rate that is equal to the prediction of the model. Our models from the 1960s failed to do this, and the mistake was quite costly.
As an aside, I am not claiming that surveys of inflation (such as the Michigan survey) will be unbiased. First, they might be wrong on occasion because people make mistakes. But there is also a more subtle problem. The public defines inflation differently than the BLS. The BLS adjusts for quality improvements whereas the public does not. The public is interested in “how much more money you need to live the way we live today.” In the 1950s that was a black and white TV, in the 1980s a color TV, in the 2010 a flat panel HDTV. Thus the public sees TV prices falling less rapidly than the BLS does. So the fact that the Michigan survey of inflation expectations tends to run a bit above the BLS data is not surprising.
Here’s a second misconception about ratex. The models seem to assume that the public would need a deep understanding of concepts like monetary theory, QE, forward guidance, etc. This is not so. The public’s expectations regarding monetary policy are mediated by the financial markets. Thus if QE causes asset prices to rise, the public notices the market response and changes its expectations of economic growth partly on that basis. All we really need to assume is that the asset markets know what is going on (a much weaker assumption) and that the public pays attention to the asset markets–also highly plausible. The dollar fell 6 cents against the euro on the day QE1 was announced, and yet I doubt one person in 100,000 can explain Rudi Dornbusch’s overshooting model (which predicts that sort of effect.)
Financial markets are kind of like Consumer Reports magazine. The average shopper cannot tell that a Mercedes car is better than a Hyundai Sonata with leather seats, even by looking under the hood. They don’t look that different. But the consumer knows the Mercedes is the better car because he or she is aware that experts who have studied cars have reached that conclusion.
Of course none of this proves that ratex is correct, or even a useful assumption. But it should not be rejected merely because it seems to imply an implausibly high level of intelligence on the part of the public. It does not, just as the (similarly misunderstood) Efficient Markets Hypothesis does not assume that individual investors are smart.
And finally, The Kimball and Smith piece seems to suggest that ratex is the crucial difference between the freshwater and saltwater schools. I say, “seems” because in fairness they later note that ratex has worked its way into the saltwater school, and also that sticky wages and prices are a key difference (in my view the key difference.) But the average reader might not pick up those subtle distinctions.
I end up in the same place as Kimball and Smith, leaning toward the saltwater side. But not because there is anything wrong with ratex, rather because the freshwater people tend to underestimate the importance of sticky wages and prices.
HT: Stephen Silver
READER COMMENTS
Kevin Erdmann
May 14 2014 at 1:14pm
From the article:
“A few months later, at the end of 2008, America tumbled into its biggest economic slump since the Great Depression, soon followed by much of the rest of the world. Freshwater macroeconomists were left scratching their heads. How could this calamity represent the efficient outcome of a well-functioning economy? But the Saltwater New Keynesians—who included Fed chairman Ben Bernanke—had an answer:”
So, I guess their theory is that markets aren’t full of very,very smart people, but the FOMC is! Oy….
I thought the understanding of ratex as you present it here was pretty universal. I can’t believe they present it the way they do.
This reminds me of when I argue that housing wasn’t in a bubble in the 2000’s and people respond with anecdotes about people who were buying homes for stupid reasons. If dumb individual decisions are a sign of bubbles then a quick perusal of Yahoo! Finance message boards suggests that every stock of every firm is in a permanent bubble.
Philo
May 14 2014 at 1:37pm
Kimball and Smith write: “Freshwater macroeconomics often pushes the idea that the government should keep its hands off the economy in other policy domains as well [as in monetary policy].” Well, maybe we shouldn’t have a system in which a branch of the government (the Fed) controls the monetary system, but given that that’s what we have it makes no sense to call for the government to “keep its hands off” money. Whatever the Fed does, it will be pursuing some monetary policy or other; there is no “hands off” option. Kimball and Smith should have pointed out the absurdity, or else they should have rephrased their (nonsensical) description of what freshwater economists prescribe.
jc
May 14 2014 at 3:58pm
Nice post, Scott.
One minor note w/ respect to the wisdom of crowds, miracles of aggregation, etc. Sometimes individuals are systematically biased in a specific direction, meaning the crowd will get it wrong in the same direction. Think of cognitive biases or Bryan’s irrational voter biases.
(Positive feedback loops may even exist, as opinions within reinforce and strengthen each other until they reach fever pitch levels.)
Of course, this still simply means that while markets and crowds are sometimes far less accurate assessors of the present and predictors of the future than we might prefer, they’re still as good as it gets, i.e., when systemic biases don’t exist, they’re great, and when they do exist, they’re no worse than the other inaccurate alternatives.
(Oracles at their best, one eyed men in a land of other one eyed men when they’re not.)
Scott Sumner
May 14 2014 at 5:16pm
Kevin and Philo, Good points.
JC, I understand your point, but there’s a difference between forecasts and views on policy issues. With forecasts we can tell who was right by just waiting. With issues like trade and immigration and the minimum wage it’s not at all clear that simply waiting will provide an answer as to who is right. But I certainly agree that the public holds many political/policy views that are silly. That’s why ratex works even better that democracy.
MingoV
May 14 2014 at 6:51pm
This is true because we’ve had the Lake Wobegon effect for decades. Average is called good. Below average is average.
Example: The proportion of high school grads in four year higher ed programs is about five times higher than it was forty years ago. This great increase obviously means that the average four year degree student today is not as intelligent as the average four year degree student in 1974. Yet, GPAs are substantially higher. Students who would have failed in 1974 are B students today.
Steve Sailer
May 15 2014 at 1:21am
jc says:
“Sometimes individuals are systematically biased in a specific direction”
One way to find systematic biases is to look for taboos. For example, the mortgage disaster had much to do with what turned out to be irrational expectations by elites about the earning power of the rapidly growing Hispanic population in the Sand States. But, how much have elites learned since that catastrophe? The firing of Jason Richwine in 2013 suggests that the taboos are still in place.
A
May 15 2014 at 2:31am
Is the notion of Rational Expectations related to Milton Friedman’s positivist assertion that prediction counts for more than the reasonableness of underlying assumptions? So, theoretically, individuals may display idiosyncratic, and even systematic, biases that are mitigated by useful decision rules.
What about psychological quirks like framework dependency and addiction? If people are not directly connected to RATEX outcomes through rational thought processes, then wouldn’t we see cottage industries devoted to hacking any systematic biases?
Scott Sumner
May 15 2014 at 11:58am
A, I’m not sure. It’s not clear to me that the rationality of each individual is essential to the hypothesis. On the other hand that may be the easiest way to model it.
Brett
May 18 2014 at 3:40pm
That’s the comparison one of my ECON teachers made about the stock market and investors before Depression-Era laws that explicitly banned insider trading. Most investors in the stock market didn’t understand it, knew there was the possibility that there was funny business going on with the accounting and public offerings, but generally “followed the leader” on bigger investors with more access to information.
John T. Kennedy
May 19 2014 at 3:15pm
The “average is dumb” quote has to be from American Splendour, the film about Harvey Pekar. It’s originally form the cover of one of his comics, linked below:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_-qF6CbJo2vY/TD0odctqvYI/AAAAAAAAI7E/66xdIb3qvNs/s1600/American+Splendor+%232.jpg
Noah Smith
May 22 2014 at 7:09pm
Scott –
I agree with you that rational expectations does not require individual rationality, but I don’t think this quote of ours was talking about rational expectations. We were talking about the idea that individual behavior can be modeled by assuming that individuals take into account all relevant info when making decisions. Some models, like the Lucas islands model or the Mankiw-Reis sticky information model, do away with this assumption.
Best,
Noah
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