Austrian economists rightfully have some gripes about mainstream macroeconomics – specifically about aggregation. The conventional wisdom says that a fall in output can be prevented or remedied in the short-run by an expansion of total spending (via increasing the money supply). Total output is stabilized and the crisis is averted. Even if rising spending preceded the output decline, the standard prescription is the same.
The Austrian Business Cycle theory says that, actually, the prior expansion in spending resulted in yet-to-be-realized poor investments due to easy credit. The decline in output is self-inflicted by unsustainable endeavors, and the money supply expansion response prevents the correction. The consequence is more malinvestment. The Austrians say that the focus on gross investment is a misleading aggregation and commits the fallacy of composition that all investment is the same or the same on relevant margins.
Both schools of thought are on firm ground. I don’t see them as conflicting. They both make valid points and are correct about the world. The conventional wisdom is able to paper-over short-run hiccups, and the Austrians recognize that resources are suboptimally allocated. The two sides are talking past each other to some extent.
The market process of seeking profits and satisfying consumer demands is a messy process. Prices and profits (and losses) incentivize firms with information that they use to adjust their behavior. They innovate and reallocate resources from bad projects and toward money-making projects. When firms earn negative profits (a loss) they learn that their understanding of the world was wrong and that they malinvested their scarce resources. Therefore, malinvestment is a standard and *necessary* part of the market process of identifying and serving the changing and unknown demands of individuals. Without malinvestment we lack the necessary information to distinguish success from failure.
Mal-investment is harmful insofar as it represents resources that were invested such that future output did not rise as it could have otherwise. So, while malinvestment is necessary to the market process, a preponderance of it makes us poorer in the future. Luckily, firms have incentives and finite resources such that mal-investment remains somewhat tamed. Indeed, malinvestment is the cost that we bear for innovation and identifying what works.
The issue is that the above discussion is oriented to the long-run. The conventional wisdom is oriented toward resolving the short-run threats. The two meet one another when malinvestment realizations occur in a correlated manner. It’s not that policy causes malinvestment. Rather, depressed interest rates and easy credit prevent firms from identifying which of their projects turned out to be more or less productive. Firms persist in bad investments because they can’t discriminate between the failed and successful projects ex ante.
So, when interest rates suddenly rise, low or negative productivity projects are identified and resources are reallocated. The discovery and reallocation process takes time. And if many projects are found to be failures at once, then the result is a drop in economic activity that is detectable at the aggregate level. The problem is not that malinvestment exists. The problem is that malinvestment was permitted to persist and grow such that the eventual realization of losses is correlated and has macroeconomic effects. We observe spending, output, and employment declines. That’s the ‘business cycle’ part of the Austrian Business Cycle. Interest rates rising helps to identify the bad projects. That’s good. But policy that increases the popularity of bad projects is bad. It makes us poorer in the long-run and more vulnerable to declines in the short-run.
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