More fiatsplainin': let's play fiat-or-not

The (Great) Tower of Babel, 1563, Bruegel the Elder. "Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth"

People bandy the term fiat currency around a lot, but what exactly does it mean? None of us wants to live in a Babel where people use fiat to indicate twenty different thing. So let's try to zero in on what most people mean by playing a game called fiat-or-not. I will describe a monetary system as it evolves away from a pure commodity arrangement and you will tell me when it has slipped into being a fiat system. (The technique I am using in this post cribs from a classic Nick Rowe post).

So let's start the game.

1) An economy in which gold coins circulate as the medium of exchange.

Fiat or not? I think we can all agree that there is nothing fiat at all here. (For simplicity's sake let's assume for the duration of this post that taxes can be paid with anything, and that there is no legal tender.)

2) A government-owned central bank begins to issue banknotes that are redeemable into a fixed amount of gold. Owners of banknotes need only line up at the central bank's redemption window to convert their $1 notes into 1 gram of the yellow metal. The central bank ensures that its vaults contain 100% gold backing for its notes.

Fiat or not? Some people associate fiat with the invention of paper money or IOUs, but in general I don't think very many of us would say that these banknotes qualify as fiat.

3) The central bank sells off a chunk of its gold and invests in safe bearer bonds. Its banknotes are no longer 100% backed by gold coins, but are backed 70% bonds/30% gold. The central bank continues to redeem notes on demand with gold at a rate of $1 to 1 gram.

Say the public suddenly wants to hold more coins. A lineup develops at the central bank's redemption window and eventually the central bank uses up its coin reserves as it meets redemption requests. To continue meeting additional requests, it need only sell some of the low-risk bonds from its vault and use the proceeds to buy additional gold coins.   

Fiat or not? Since low-risk bonds have now become part of the backing for the banknote issue, a few readers may choose step 3 banknotes as the entry point for fiat money. But this would be unconventional, since most note-issuing central banks in the 1800s were running this sort of 70%/30% system, and we usually call the monetary system that prevailed in the 1800s a gold standard, not a fiat standard.

4) The central bank announces that it  will undergo extensive renovations. As a result, its redemption window will have to be shut for two months. People can no longer redeem their $1 for 1 gram of gold on demand, but will have to wait until the renovations are over.

Fiat or not? Two months is a long time. But it could be that the central bank already closes its doors on the weekends anyways, banknotes being inconvertible for 48-hours. I doubt many of us would describe the weekend as a fiat currency episode. Should we think of the renovation closure as an extended weekend, or is it long enough that it generates fiat money?

5) Unfortunately the central bank chose an incompetent construction company. Renovations will take another two years!

To make up for the inconvenience of the redemption window being closed for such a long time, the central bank promises to send agents to the local gold market who will ensure that the market rate stays fixed at $1/gram. These agents will buy & sell whatever amount of gold is necessary to maintain the peg (by selling and buying banknotes).

Fiat or not? Thanks to the strategy of buying and selling in the local gold market, the $1/gram price holds just as well as it did in steps 2 and 3. So the public notices no difference in the purchasing power of the money in their wallets. On the other hand, two years without a redemption window at the central bank may be long enough for many readers to tick the fiat money box.    

6) The central bank is still undergoing renovations, but instead of dispatching agents to the market to buy and sell gold to enforce the peg, they go with bonds in hand.

If the market price for gold threatens to rise from $1/gram to $1.01/gram, because there is too much money chasing too few goods, the agents sell bonds and withdraw banknotes, thus reducing pressure on the exchange rate and bringing it back to $1/gram. And when the exchange rate threatens to fall below $1/gram to $0.99/gram, because there is too little money chasing goods, agents buy bonds with banknotes.

Fiat or not? Not only are notes not redeemable in gold, but now the central bank no longer operates directly in the gold market. With this step we are getting a bit closer to modern central bank money. The Federal Reserve, the Bank of Canada, and other major central banks all regulate the purchasing power of money by purchases and sales of bonds. The $1/gram peg still holds thanks to bond purchases and sales, so step 6 money does almost everything that step 2 and 3 money does.

7) With the renovation dragging on, the central bank decides that it doesn't need a redemption window after all. So what was initially a temporary suspension of convertibility becomes permanent. But the central bank continues to send agents to the market to buy or sell whatever quantity of bonds are necessary to maintain the $1/gram peg.

Fiat or not? You tell me. Perhaps permanent inconvertibility is the very definition of fiat. However, if steps 2-6 didn't qualify as fiat money, because gold stayed at $1/gram, why would step 7 be any different?

8) The central bank decides that, rather than fixing the market price of gold at $1/gram, it will set the market price of a typical consumer basket of goods and services (i.e. meat, car repairs, school, etc). 

This is a bit trickier to think about than the other steps. So for example, say that the central bank is currently setting the price of gold at $1/gram. And people can buy a consumer basket for $1000. But the price of that basket starts to rise to $1010, $1020, and then $1030. To stop this inflation, the central bank will announce its intention to reduce the price of gold to $0.99/gram. It does this by selling bonds and withdrawing money from the system, so that there is less money chasing goods. It keeps repeating gold price decreases/money withdrawals until it has successfully reigned in the inflation and brought the consumer price basket back to $1000. The net effect is that consumers are always guaranteed that the money in their pocket has constant purchasing power.

Fiat or not? This is pretty much the monetary system we have now in the U.S. and Canada where central banks target inflation. Well, there are a few small differences. Instead of temporarily setting the price of gold in order to regulate the value of a consumer price basket, the Fed and Bank of Canada temporarily set the price of a very short-term debt instrument to hit their target for the basket. And rather than shooting for constant consumer goods and services prices, these central banks prefer one that shrinks by 2% a year.

Given that step 8 describes something close to modern money, and it is common practice to refer to modern money as fiat, then it would only make sense that many readers raise their hands at this point. Complicating matters is that step 8 money isn't really that different from steps 2 to 7. After all, the central bank is establishing a fixed price for banknotes, the only difference being that the fix has been adjusted from gold to a basket of consumer goods and services. 

9) The central bank donates all of its assets to charity, closes its doors and shuts down for good. But it leaves all its banknotes outstanding. Money floats around the economy without a tether to reality. Or as Stephen Williamson says, money is a bubble.

Fiat or not? By this stage, everyone will probably have ticked the fiat money box. 

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Here is a collection of unconnected thoughts on the fiat-or-not game.

A) My guess it that readers will have chosen different stages as their preferred debut for fiat money. This is a bit tragic, since with no commonly-accepted definition for the term, most debates about fiat money have been and will continue to be meaningless.

B) We apply our definitions like cookie cutters to the real world. So if you chose step 7 (when banknotes became permanently irredeemable) as your flipping point, then 1971 would be a very important date in your scheme of the world since this is when the U.S. permanently removed gold convertibility.

But if you chose step 9 as your transition point to fiat, then the global monetary system is not currently on a fiat standard, since central banks have neither closed their doors nor donated their assets to charity. So 1971 really isn't an interesting date. I'm aware of only one country on a step 9 fiat standard: Somalia. Its central bank burned down yet Somali shilling banknotes continued to circulate. And ironically enough, if we choose to adopt a step 9 definition of fiat money, then bitcoin—which was designed to destroy central bank "fiat" money—is itself fiat, because it is unbacked, whereas most central bank money is not fiat.

What I've described is the Borges problem. Categories pre-digest the world for us. We get very different results depending on what definition we use and how we apply it to the world.

C) I think many readers associate fiat with hyperinflatable. For instance, here is Dror Golberg:

Was Canada ground zero for fiat money? This paper claims that fiat money was independently invented by French Canadians in 1685, copied by Massachusetts in 1690, adopted in Europe, and diffused to the rest of the world: https://t.co/bSXyYLYzwp pic.twitter.com/kWVWbi43hH

— JP Koning (@jp_koning) March 14, 2018

Readers who conflate fiat and hyperinflatable will probably have played the fiat-or-not game by gauging each step to see if it introduced (or removed) a set of features perceived to be conducive (inhibitory) to high inflation. They probably toggled the fiat button somewhere in the murk of temporary inconvertibility (step 4) and permanent inconvertibility (step 7). The thinking here is that convertibility into specie imposes a more imposing restriction on a central bank than a mere promise to hold gold's value at $1/gram by using open market operations (step 6). With the removal of convertibility, hyperinflatability is activated and thus money has become fiat.

There are certainly some good historical reasons for assuming that inconvertibility leads to hyperinflatability. Some of the most famous hyperinflations occurred after redemption was removed, including John Law's paper money scheme, the American Greenback episode, and the Wiemar inflation. But there is no inherent reason that these systems must lead to hyperinflation, or that step 1 (coin-based systems) and step 2 (fully convertible) systems aren't themselves hyperinflatable. In the case of coin-based systems, all that it takes is a rapid series of reductions in the silver content of coins to set off inflation, Henry VIII's consistent debasement of the English coinage being one example. And there is no reason that a fully convertible step 2 banknote system can't undergo a series of large devaluations leading to hyperinflation. 

D) Fiatness, fiatish? If we can't agree on what constitutes fiat-or-not, maybe we can agree that there might be a fiat scale, from pure fiat to not fiat at all, with most monetary systems existing somewhere in between. I am already on record advocating moneyness over money, so this fits with the general them of the blog. On the other hand, fiatness seems a bit of a cop-out.

E) We don't need gobbledygook like fiat. The term carries too much baggage. Let's select a more precise set of words, then apply them to the real world in order to understand what our monetary systems were like, how they are now, and where we are going. Until we settle on these words, let's avoid all conversations with the term fiat in them.

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P.S. I have a recent post about the desirability of coin debasements at the Sound Money Project and another post on money as a measuring stick at Bullionstar. 

Quibbling with the language of trade

The way we ascribe labels to things results in the creation of categories, and this in turn affects the construction of our mental landscapes—best to get the words and categories right from the start lest our thinking goes astray. In this post I quibble with some of the common words and categories we use to describe trade.

Walking out the front door last night, I told my wife that I was going to buy a few items at the grocery store. But as I trekked down the street, I asked myself why I hadn't chosen to tell her an alternate version: that I was going to the grocery store to sell my cash. The problem with this wording, I figured, was that if I was to be the one selling stuff in the upcoming transaction, then by process of elimination the grocery store could no longer be the seller in the deal but the buyer—of my cash. And that would be a weird way to view things.

Linguistic convention requires that there be a seller and a buyer in any trade. One side spends, the other receives. That separate terms are given to participants in an exchange implies that the two parties are irreconcilably different. By spending, buyers are doing something that stands in binary opposition to whatever it is that sellers are doing.

I don't think this dichotomization is a good way to characterize the intuition behind a transaction. All parties to any deal are essentially engaged in the same activity: trade. Escaping linguistic convention for a moment, let's put things this way: when I go to the grocery store I am a seller of coloured bits of paper, and the store is in turn spending its food to buy those bits. The binary opposition between buyers and sellers melts away since both myself and the store are simultaneously buyer and seller, spender and receiver. The exclusivity that previously characterized our positions no longer exists, rather, we are each engaged in mutual trade.

For the sake of simplification we should just drop all references to buyers, sellers, and spending. Instead, so-called buyers and sellers are best described as being equal counterparties to a swap. In last night's trip to the grocery store, the store and me were counterparties to a swap of paper notes for groceries.

It could be argued that the use of the terms 'buyer' and 'seller' are useful in that they capture the fact that one party to the trade is offering 'money' and the other asking for it. But the word 'money' is just as arbitrary. What is to fall into this category, what is to be excluded?

For instance, fan's of Arrested Development may remember the scene where Tobias and Lindsay walk into C.W. Swappigan's and trade a cocktail tray for mozzarella sticks. With neither item classified as money, is Lindsay the buyer or the seller? What is being spent: mozzarella sticks or a cocktail tray? We hem and haw when we try to describe this scene because we can't apply the language of buying/selling, spending/earning to situations involving the exchange of goods that are relatively illiquid. But these sorts of exchanges shouldn't be excluded from discussion just because we can't use regular language to describe them. Nor are they categorically different from exchanges that involve slightly more liquid goods. The language of swapping comes to the rescue: Lindsay and C.W. Swappigans are equal counterparties to a swap that involves two illiquid goods.

Classifying people as buyers or sellers is just as tricky when we start talking about exchanges of one currency for another. When you walk into a currency exchange shop to trade Canadian money for US money, are you the buyer or is the shopkeeper the buyer? Which one of you is spending? Again, the more universal language of swaps makes things easier: both you and the exchange shop are engaged in a swap of two highly-liquid items. Even if one item is slightly more liquid than the other (perhaps greenbacks are a shade more liquid than loonies), what separates the two of you in this trade isn't a Chinese wall of buyer vs seller, but simply a difference in the degree of liquidity (or not) of the items you are swapping.

And while I'm griping, why not exorcise the words borrower and lender? Like buyer and seller, the terms borrower and lender imply a stern barrier between two participants to a temporary trade when these participants are in fact undertaking the very same activity—trade. If we unbundle a transaction between a customer and a bank, what is happening? A consumer, the "borrower", is providing their personal IOU to the bank which in turn is offering its own IOU, a deposit, to the customer. While it is usually said that the customer borrows deposits from the lender bank, we might just as likely say that the customer is lending his or her IOU to the bank, and the bank is borrowing the customer's IOU.

So if we can boil a banking transaction down to a swap that reverses after a period of time, participants in this swap needn't be ring-fenced with their own unique noun. Rather, each can be simultaneously described with the same term: as counterparties.

But what about interest? Isn't the payment of interest a distinguishing enough feature that necessitates the terms debtor and lender? Interest emerges (in part) when parties agree to swap equally risky IOUs for a period of time, but one IOU is more liquid than the other. The counterparty that accepts the illiquid IOU while providing the liquid IOU, usually the bank, will ask for a fee, or a stream of interest payments, from the counterparty customer to compensate (the bank) for forgone liquidity. The other party to the trade, the customer, will be willing to pay an interest penalty as restitution for the superior liquidity return that the bank's IOU provides them. This doesn't change the fact that both bank and customer are engaged in a swap.

Things get tricky when a temporary swap involves exchanges of IOUs that are equally-liquid (and equally risky). Since no one forgoes liquidity over the course of this swap, interest doesn't arise. A good example of this is the repo market, where short term swaps of deposits for highly-liquid treasury bills occur at rates no different from 0%. The lender/borrower lexicon breaks down here since without interest we don't know which party is to earn which moniker. Is the bond owner the lender or the borrower? The deposit-taker?

Again, the clearer way to describe this situation is to default to more universal swap terminology. Both participants are counterparties to a swap of items of equal or varying liquidity profiles.

In sum, our language tries to find strict differences between participants in an exchange when there are none. There are no buyers nor sellers, no spenders, no lenders nor borrowers. Instead, we are all engaged in the same activity—trade. The things we own have varying degrees of liquidity and in endeavoring to swap them for things that are more, equally, or less liquid than that which we already own, we make efforts to grope towards a preferred final state of either greater or diminished liquidity.

Consumption isn't a fleeting burst of pleasure, it's a long-lived asset

I've learnt enough about the terms income, savings, consumption, investment, capital, and other major macroeconomic categorizations to pass a basic economics exam. But I've never been a big fan of the style of thinking these terms force on me. Am I just being lazy? I'll lay out my points and give an alternative.

Squarely Rooted recently commented on the somewhat arbitrary nature of the boundary economists set between consumption and saving, opining that travel should be thought of as investment, not consumption. On twinkies as savings, here is Squarely Rooted from an earlier post:

Think of a Twinkie. Twinkies are an odd product; on the one hand, they are a cheap, delicious, unhealthy snack; on the other hand, they are (at least according to legend) practically immortal. So is buying a Twinkie consumption or saving? Does it depend when you eat it? And for those who will say “but Twinkies aren’t an investment, they bear no interest, they just sit there” – so does money under the mattress, and nobody thinks that isn’t saving.

As Squarely Rooted notes, dividing the world into categories allows for discussion, but it also "pre-digests" the world for us. This is what Nick Rowe once called the Borges Problem:

We get very different results depending on how we categorise the world. And sometimes the categories we use are chosen by someone long ago who had a totally different purpose and/or a totally different theory to ours. Our way of seeing the world gets distorted by the dead hand of historical ways of seeing.

This cuts both ways. While the dominant technique of linguistically dividing up the world may distort our way of seeing things, having multiple languages can be equally problematic. Here is Steve Randy Waldman:

Our various allegiances — to schools or tribes or policy ideas — exploit the ambiguity of language to manufacture conflicts, through which we reassure ourselves that we are right and they are wrong. (And no, math doesn’t help much, because we must map it arbitrarily to the same ambiguous language for it to be of any use.) Now I will reassure myself that I am right and they are wrong.

It seems to me that looking at the world through a set of different categorical lenses can give us some great insights, as long as those lenses are coherent. But we need to be aware that there are many different taxonomies. Learning how to recognize each and being able to translate between them will probably save us eons in lost time arguing about semantics.

Back to the basic set of categories under discussion. The typical view is that income is a flow, part of which gets apportioned to consumption. Consumption spending is immediately used up, providing a sudden burst of consumptive joy before disappearing for eternity. The unspent income that remains is defined as savings, and this in turn will be invested with an eye to the future, primarily to fund consumption down the road. Most savings will go into capital, though some of it might leak into money hoardings.  Equipped with these categorizations, economists can go out into the real world and determine what falls in one basket and what falls in the other.

The line being drawn between consumption and savings is based on the distinctions between now vs. later and durable vs. nondurable. Let's try a different way of splitting up the world. Suppose that all consumption goods and experiences are long-lived durable assets. They are forms of income-yielding capital in which one invests. Canned beans bought for my pantry will provide a burst of consumptive joy several months from now. Until then, just having them in a pantry provides a stream of useful services, much like a fire alarm provides utility even though it is never used. These are what Steve Horwitz calls availability services. Both the food we keep in our larders and our fire alarm quell uncertainty and soothe us.

If I take out my employees to the bowling alley, I'm investing in organizational capital. But when I go out to bowl by myself, I'm drawing down my wealth on a one-time shot of consumptive joy, at least according to way the lines are currently drawn. Why not consider both to be long term investments?

Take travel spending. As Squarely Rooted points out, travel is a perpetuity. The travel asset that you might be considering purchasing provides an immediate burst of raw travel experience (not all of it fun), followed by a perpetual flow of memories, experiences, and knowledge that continues till death. Any one who swaps out a security, say Microsoft, from their portfolio for a travel asset has determined that on the margin, the present value of the flow of dividends provided by a voyage exceeds the present value of a flow of Microsoft dividends.

I recently splurged on an expensive meal and did so not only to enjoy the near-term burst of flavours, but also for the long-term flow of returns that my investment would produce, namely the opportunity to remember my experience and talk about it with others. Until I forget my experience a few years from now, it'll have provided me with repeating chain of returns. On the other hand, I'll probably sell out of the gold futures contract I just bought in a month or two. Which of these two swaps is the future-oriented durable one and which is about the here & now?

When someone spends their income on so-called consumption they aren't drawing down their stock of savings. Rather, they're swapping asset x in their portfolio for asset z.  The choice to buy food, travel, and get a haircut isn't a depletion or exhaustion of wealth—it's a portfolio adjustment. Consumption is a stock, not a flow. We can calculate the discounted value of all yields thrown off by a consumption good or experience over time and sum these flows up into a stock value.

We are always conducting asset swaps in order to grope towards portfolios with the highest net present value. Our personal capital is probably our greatest asset. When we earn income, all we've really done is swapped personal capital, time & effort, for a bank-issued liability. We commit to this swap because we estimate that the NPV of additional bank-issued liabilities will more than offset the lost NPV of personal capital.

In equilibrium, the returns on all assets are equilibrated through arbitrage. Investing $10 in cigarettes should provide the same prospective flow of services as investing $10 in a trip to somewhere, $10 on a massage, or $10 in Microsoft. If the yield on some consumptive asset, say a massage, exceeds the economy wide rate of return, individuals will sell their Microsoft shares and go off to the masseuse. This process continues until the price of massages has increased to the point that it no longer makes sense to conduct this arbitrage.

What about the classical bias against so-called consumption? Say that rather than swapping out bank-issued liabilities for Microsoft shares we swap them for a long-lived travel asset. Economists would say that we have high time preference and are sacrificing future consumption for present. Society says we've splurged on silly consumption. It seems to me that as long as we've made this decision by appraising each asset's future earnings stream, who cares if we've chosen Microsoft or travel? All we've done is clocked the two NPVs against each other and purchased the one with the best yield relative to its cost.

Microsoft shares have one advantage over a travel asset. They are liquid. Travel experience can't be resold. In committing your entire portfolio to travel, the problem isn't that you've sacrificed future consumption for present consumption, nor that you've sent money down a black hole. Rather, you've rendered your portfolio less liquid. People who reallocate their portfolios towards travel are asset rich, but liquidity-poor.

While we can't directly remonetize our travel asset, we can indirectly remonetize it. If travel and good food improve our spirits and productivity, then we can recombine these benefits with our labour and resell the total product at a higher price than before. So investing in consumption assets can be a great idea. But in general, it's probably not a good idea to invest everything one owns in illiquid consumption assets. Liquid assets will always be good in a bind.

Getting back to the Borges problem, how does reconceptualizing things this way lead to different results? The old lines between capital, land, and labour aren't so important, nor is the axis between the household and firm. Nor does the distinction between durable and non-durable goods concern us. All we have are millions of yield-generating assets that are constantly moving in or out of individual's portfolios. The main difference between these assets is their swappability, or their liquidity. It's a good platform on which to start thinking about moneyness.

Even if you don't agree with me on any of this, I hope you see how the Borges problem operates. How we choose to linguistically parcel up the world influences the way we take in and sort data, and the data we generate is the base for our actions, policies, and institutions. We've built up an incredibly large edifice based on our initial categorizations. Hopefully we've gotten them right.

GDP totalitarianism: Krugman's mischaracterization of Japan's plight as "star performance"

Paul Krugman points to Japan's apparent resurgence in GDP and asks: "There seems to be some kind of lesson here about macroeconomics, but I can’t quite put my finger on it …"

My comment:

The lesson here is that one needs to be careful when trying to understand natural disasters using flow-based identities like Y=C+I+G. The latter fails to account for large draw-downs in national wealth due to, say, tsunamis. Using a stock identity, and stock related data like national net worth, will be more helpful in this situation.

For a proper accounting treatment of Japan's experience, Krugman should refer to the 722 page UN System of National Accounts Manual (pdf). Krugman wants to use the production accounts for his analysis, which are represented as flows. He should be using the wealth account, in particular new worth, which is a stock. The tsunami will have resulted in a large fall in Japan's net worth. This is elementary, so I don't know why a Nobel-prize winning economist wouldn't know this.

I agree with Nick Rowe that GDP has a totalitarian grip on our way of economic thinking.

Thinking in terms of stocks: From Fisher to Fischer

In an older post, Scott Sumner had an interesting comment:

The most recent inflation rate in Greece is 1.7%, whereas Spain has 1.9% inflation. I don’t know about you, but I find those figures to be astounding. That’s not deflation, and yet Tyler’s clearly right that they are being buffeted by powerful deflationary forces. I’d make several observations:

1. This shows the poverty of our language. Economics lacks a term for falling NGDP, even though falling NGDP is arguably the single most important concept in all of macro, indeed the cause of the Great Depression. So we call it “deflation” which is actually an entirely different concept. I wouldn’t be the first to find connections between the poverty of our language and the poverty of our thinking.

The Borges Problem part II

Nick Rowe writes a post called Macroeconomics and the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge.

It is a conjunction of a bunch of themes he has touched on in the last few weeks, including the great debt debate and categorization.

I asked him:

In your previous post, you advocated adopting the most "useful" way of dividing up the world into categories. But what does that mean? Useful in terms of teaching students, reaching the layman, articulating theory amongst other economists, calculating statistics, conducting policy?

Are you saying that economists should have multiple "categorical universes" in their head? Or is their "one ring to rule them all" way of dividing up the universe that you are trying to tease out?

One useful reason for having one standardized way of splitting the world into categories is it makes conversation easier. Having multiple ways adds subtlety but confusion.

I am learning that the core of economics (or at least near to it) is about words. We create meanings for things in the real world using some of our existing words, and this creates categories, but since other words can also be used to create similiar-though-not-overlapping categories, we have to choose between categories. This process comes prior to mathematical econ, since the math needs categories like C and I before mathematical phrases can be put together. 

The last bit about mathematics reminds me of an exchange I had with Daniel Kuehn a while back about the use of words and math in economics. 

Here is Nick's response:

I'm not sure on the answers to all your questions. Even if we all agreed on what the true theories were, we might want one theory for one purpose and a different theory for another purpose. And each theory would have its own most useful set of categories.

Yep, it might make conversation harder. But maybe some conversations would be impossible if we had to stick to one set of categories that didn't fit the topic at hand.

I can't disagree with him. Is this an argument in favor of heterodox economic? After all, entire schools can form around a divergent way of categorizing the world. Should economists be fluent in multiple economic viewpoints? The blogosphere is surely a great place for that. Actually, this reminds me of a recent Perry Mehrling post on which I participated. Here is Mehrling:

...it is important to emphasize that each of these heterodox schools exist, and persist, because it is organized around some essentially correct insight about how the banking system works... The problem is that, so far as I can see, each of the heterodox schools has part of the truth, not the whole thing. The same could be said about the orthodoxy against which the heterodox schools define themselves... We don't therefore want to choose which school to belong to; rather we want to determine which of these correct insights provides the most useful explanatory frame for whatever issue is currently at hand. Today it might be one; tomorrow it might be another. That is what the debate is about, or should be anyway.

See an earlier and related post.

Debt, generations, savings, and economic categorization or the "Borges Problem"

I didn't comment much on the great debt debate, stirred up a Krugman post called Debt Is (Mostly) Money We Owe to Ourselves, but followed it quite closely.

Nick Rowe taught me (here, here, here, and here), and Bob Murphy clarified (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), that present generations can indeed take resources from future generations via debt issuance.

I also learnt via Daniel Kuehn here and here that if you use a very unintuitive definition of "generations", than this is not the case. Basically, you can swap the meanings of terms to argue your way out of a tight spot.

My comment is from a Murphy post:

I’ve learnt that the method by which one aggregates individuals into groups, and the labels that one attaches to such groups, can have an important influence on a debate’s ability to reach resolution. If people are aggregating differently, and using non-standard words for their categories, then the debate will degenerate into shouting matches.

In a comment on a post called Why "saving" should be abolished, Nick describes this as the Borges Problem, which I rather like. Says Nick,

Let me first do one general response:

 There are lots of different ways we can divide up the world into categories see Borges on "animals" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolent_Knowledge%27s_Taxonomy

 Which would be the most useful way to divide up income, and define saving?

 Which of these 3 definitions of desired saving is the most useful?

Nick later on:

Notice also that the recent debate about the burden of the debt was also an example of the "Borges Problem". Do we divide the future up into time periods or into cohorts? We get very different results depending on how we categorise the world. And sometimes the categories we use are chosen by someone long ago who had a totally different purpose and/or a totally different theory to ours. Our way of seeing the world gets distorted by the dead hand of historical ways of seeing.

Yes! I did notice that. It caused me a lot of confusion. Nick also notes that the solution is to choose the most useful categorization out of all possible options, and proceeds to advocate a different category to which we should attach the word "savings". Interesting stuff. I'm not sure how Nick proposes we solve for "usefulness" though. Isn't the fact that almost everyone uses the same term for a given categorization a good enough claim for usefulness?

Here's another Rowe comment on Kuehn's blog which is relevant:

Put it another way: there's more than one way to aggregate. We shouldn't let our theories of what is happening in the world be determined by the choices made by long-dead National Income Accountants.

Anyways, in my comment on Nick's savings post, I proposed a more useful (at least to me) Borgian response to the categorization problem. Instead of categorizing the world on the basis of flows, categorize it as a series of balance sheets, or stocks. The result is that consumption, investment, and savings are all attached to entirely different bins (and more intuitive ones, to me at least) than in a world composed in terms of flows:

Nick, I agree with you that the conversation on debt was mainly about categorizations and the lack of standardized terms associated with categorizations. That made it very frustrating to follow.

So I am all in favor of standardizing terms, as you advocate in this post. 

I noticed you originally introduced C and I as flows and A and M as stocks. Then when you brought in the individual's economy, you introduced not a stock of antique furniture, but a flow of antiques, and not a stock of money, but a flow of money. Presumably you did this to preserve stock flow consistency.

The idea of a flow of antiques or money is very unintuitive to me. Why not go the other way? Not flows of consumption and investment, but stocks? Thus you have and individual's goods C, I, A, and M, which are all stocks. Sum them all up and you have S (the noun form of S, not the verb). This S can rise or fall. As a solution to the Borgian categorization problem, this configuration makes more intuitive sense to me.

And later:

N: "but if we think of income as a flow, then thinking of C and I as stocks is going to create problems."

 Me: You start out with the C and I that you have produced in your stock of assets, hold this C and I until you find someone who'll exchange for them with the M they have in their stock of assets. Now they are holding C and I and you are holding M. So here income isn't a flow, it's just a trade, an instantaneous swap of assets held in a portfolio.

 How much of economics is taken up by definitional debates and confusion? You'd think there would be a universal set of definitions for economic terms somewhere so these issues don't pop up. When I read William Hutt's books I'm always pleased because he uses his first chapter to explicitly define every term he'll be using.

and once more *phew*:

N: "Will those trades all take place in an instant, with some buying and some selling a stock of antiques? Or will those trades happen slowly over time, as people buy or sell a flow of antiques, and slowly get back to their long run desired stocks? That depends. If antiques are a small part of your wealth, and the market is frictionless with all antiques identical and so zero search costs (obviously not, for antiques). Each person would instantly buy or sell a stock of antiques to get back to his personal desired stock. Otherwise, there will be a flow of trades. If antiques are a large fraction of your wealth, you may only buy and sell slowly, in a flow."

 me: Ok, thinking in a world with stocks, (an infinite series of balance sheets), trades still happen in an instant, even if you introduce search costs. You hold the antique on your balance sheet until you don't. The antique is in your hand up until the moment it enters the hand of the buyer.

 Introducing frictions means that someone can have the intention of selling that antique and will need to incur costs to search out someone to trade. But it doesn't mean the process must be a conceptualized as a flow. Rather, the intention of selling an antique just moves the antique to a different part of an individual's balance sheet. It continues to lie in the asset column of their balance sheet, but is moved from long-term assets to current or liquid assets. Introducing search costs means that instead of an interval of two balance sheets before a swap occurring, the interval is some number larger than two.

My rough final thoughts are that thinking in terms of stocks, not flows, introduces a number of important categories that flow-based economics ignores because it is focused on flows. The most important of these is a stock of non-durable consumption goods. In flow-based economics, it's always been odd to me that factories produce, and we instantaneously use up, consumption goods.

A stock based world also is terribly confusing way to go about things, because the word savings in a flow-based world is attached to a different category than that which it is attached to in a stock based world, much like how in the Great Debt debate the word "our children" can be attached to either a period of time or a cohort.