The Conscience of a liberal, Paul Krugman

July 25, 2013, 2:56 pm, The New York Times

Stiglitz, Minsky, and Obama

Household debt as % of personal disposable income

I haven’t commented so far on the president’s economic speech, except to mock the journalists demanding “new ideas” for a very old-fashioned economic crisis. And as many people have pointed out, there weren’t any actual policy proposals.

What we got instead was a narrative, which is no small thing, since it was very much not the narrative that has been dominating Washington discourse — including Obama’s own pronouncements — for three and a half years. Gone was the deficit/Grand Bargain obsession; instead, this was about a depressed economy, suffering mainly from inadequate demand, and how to fix it.

Within the demand-side camp there is, however, a somewhat subtle and polite but non-trivial divide; Obama mainly came down on one side of that divide, although whether this reflects conviction or political strategy (or simply the vagaries of speechwriting) is less clear.

What we all agree on is that this crisis was a-building for a long time, especially through rising household debt, as shown above. But why was household debt rising?

The president came down pretty much for what we might call a Stiglitzian view (although it’s widely held): debt was driven by rising inequality. The rich were taking an ever-larger share of the pie, but not spending to match, while working Americans took on ever more debt to make ends meet.

What’s the alternative? Minsky: debt exploded because the Great Depression was receding into the mists of forgetfulness, and both lenders and borrowers — enabled and encouraged by financial deregulation — forgot the dangers of leverage.

Personally, I’m more of a Minskyite than a Stiglitzian, although not 100%; although things like subprime lending were, I believe, mainly about forgetting the past, Elizabeth Warren’s old work on bankruptcy pretty clearly shows that at least some families took on excess debt as a result of rising inequality. But I’m inherently suspicious of any story that makes economics a morality play in which all bad results come from things you consider bad for other reasons too; making soaring inequality the cause of our macro woes too is a bit too, well, comfortable for us liberals.

Also, there’s a danger in the Stiglitzian approach, namely that people might conclude that fixing the short-run shortfall in demand must wait until we fix the long-run problem of inequality, which is going to be very hard and a long time coming. We need stimulus, or at least an end to austerity, now, even if restoring a middle-class society isn’t going to happen any time soon.

I wouldn’t make too much of these differences; in practice Stiglitzians and Minskyites agree on what should be done,and it’s good to see the president finally talking about the right things. Still, it is interesting to see where he put his emphasis.