'Did the Keynesians Get It Wrong in Predicting a Recession in 2013?'
Dean Baker:
Did the Keynesians Get It Wrong in Predicting a Recession in 2013?: I have had several readers send me a blogpost from Scott Sumner saying that the Keynesians have been dishonest in not owning up to the fact that they were wrong in predicting a recession in 2013. The argument is that supposedly us Keynesian types all said that the budget cuts and the ending of the payroll tax cut at the start of 2013 would throw the economy back into recession. (Jeffrey Sachs has made similar claims.)
That isn't my memory of what I said at the time, but hey we can check these things. I looked at a few of my columns from the fall of 2012 and they mostly ran in the opposite direction. The Washington insider types were hyping the threat of the "fiscal cliff" in the hope of pressuring President Obama and the Democrats to make big concessions on Social Security and Medicare. They were saying that even the risk of falling off the cliff could have a big impact on growth in the third and fourth quarter of 2012.
My columns and blogposts (e.g. here, here, here, here, and here) were largely devoted to saying this was crap. I certainly agreed that budget cutbacks and the end of the payroll tax cuts would dampen growth, but the number was between 0.5-0.8 percentage points. This left us far from recession. (All my columns and blogposts from this time are at the CEPR website, so folks can verify that I didn't do any cherry picking here.)
I know Paul Krugman is the real target here, not me, but we've been seeing the economy pretty much the same way since the beginning of the recession. If he had a different story at the time I think I would remember it. But his columns and blogposts are archived too. I really don't think anyone will find him predicting a recession in 2013, although I'm sure he also said that budget cuts and tax increases would dampen growth.
Anyhow, I'm generally happy to stand behind the things I've said, and when they are proven wrong I hope I own up to it. But I don't see any apologies in order. No recession happened in 2013 and none was predicted here.
I don't recall predicting a recession either (the "they" intended to tar all Keynesians refers to just a few people), just that it would be a drag on growth (the CBO predicted 0.6%). In any case, not much can be said unless one takes the time to estimate a model, use it as a baseline, and then ask the model how the economy would have done in an alternative world where policy was different. Just because we still had growth after the budget cuts does not prove or disprove anything. Even if growth rises under austerity, you can't say it would not have risen a bit more more without austerity (all else is far from equal) unless you have done the hard work of estimating a defensible model and then asking it these questions. Similarly, you can't say much about the degree of monetary offset unless you have taken the time to do the econometrics to support it. But with changes this small -- the impact was predicted to be much less than one percent of growth by most models -- it is very hard to get statistically significant differences in any case.
The problem is that there is no model that all economists agree is "best" for these purposes, and the answer one gets depends upon the particular choice of models. Choose a model that delivers small fiscal multipliers and you get one answer, use a model with bigger multipliers and the answer changes. But even the models with the largest multipliers did not predict a recession, only a drag on growth (generally less than one percent) so the fact that we still had growth says nothing about the impact of the policy, or the degree of monetary offset.
Posted by Mark Thoma on Saturday, January 24, 2015 at 10:32 AM in Econometrics, Economics, Fiscal Policy, Monetary Policy |
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