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German economic policy and chameleons

Wolfgang Munchau's FT article today is one of the most complete explanations I have seen about the origin and contradictions of the German economic orthodox dogma. The only issue that he does not address is how these economic views have survived over time despite the increasing evidence that their advice does not deliver the expected results.

Here is my guess from what I have learned from many heated discussions over the last years about economic policy in Europe: the resilience (stubbornness) of this view on economic policy comes from a combination of faith and the inability of the economic profession to apply enough real world filters to models.

Faith in a certain economic model comes from many years of being trained about the beauty of markets and all the inefficiencies that governments generate. But faith also comes from the belief that only through (individual) hard work and sacrifice (saving) one can achieve any economic progress. In this world (what Wolfgang Munchau refers to as Germany's parallel universe) there is no room for an economic crisis caused by lack of demand. Recessions only take place as a result of misbehavior, debt and lack of willingness to work hard (and reform). The only way to get out is to behave.

But faith alone might not be enough, policy makers and their advisors are required to look at the data and check how their priors allow them to understand economic outcomes. Here is where the economics profession and its ability to hide under economic models that have little empirical relevance provide the necessary support. A recent paper by Paul Pfleiderer about the misuse of theoretical models in finance and economics explains this logic very well. Many economic models are used in ways that make them "chameleons", they do not go through any real world filter and they fight back their criticisms with the argument that "the empirical-test jury is still out". In other words, we start with unrealistic assumptions, we generate a result that fits what we are looking for, we do not find evidence to support it but we can always claim that the evidence cannot conclusively reject the model either and we continue using the model for our economic policy advice.

So it is faith and the use of "chameleon" models that keeps the stubbornness of the German economic policy advice alive in Europe. And while this is going on, the Euro fatigue and discontent in many European countries keeps growing and polarizing the political landscape. The next round of elections will be an interesting test for the Euro/EU project.

Antonio Fatás

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