Basic Economics Read online

  Competition in the market is what limits how much anyone can charge and still make sales, so what is at issue is not anyone’s disposition, whether greedy or not, but what the circumstances of the market cause to happen. A seller’s feelings—whether “greedy” or not—tell us nothing about what the buyer will be willing to pay.

  Resource Allocation by Prices

  We now need to look more closely at the process by which prices allocate scarce resources that have alternative uses. The situation where the consumers want product A and don’t want product B is the simplest example of how prices lead to efficiency in the use of scarce resources. But prices are equally important in more common and more complex situations, where consumers want both A and B, as well as many other things, some of which require the same ingredients in their production. For example, consumers not only want cheese, they also want ice cream and yogurt, as well as other products made from milk. How do prices help the economy to determine how much milk should go to each of these products?

  In paying for cheese, ice cream, and yogurt, consumers are in effect also bidding indirectly for the milk from which these products are produced. In other words, money that comes in from the sales of these products is what enables the producers to again buy milk to use to continue making their respective products. When the demand for cheese goes up, cheese-makers use their additional revenue to bid away some of the milk that before went into making ice cream or yogurt, in order to increase the output of their own product to meet the rising demand. When the cheese-makers demand more milk, this increased demand forces up the price of milk—to everyone, including the producers of ice cream and yogurt. As the producers of these other products raise the prices of ice cream and yogurt to cover the higher cost of the milk that goes into them, consumers are likely to buy less of these other dairy products at these higher prices.

  How will each producer know just how much milk to buy? Obviously they will buy only as much milk as will repay its higher costs from the higher prices of these dairy products. If consumers who buy ice cream are not as discouraged by rising prices as consumers of yogurt are, then very little of the additional milk that goes into making more cheese will come from a reduced production of ice cream and more will come from a reduced production of yogurt.

  What this all means as a general principle is that the price which one producer is willing to pay for any given ingredient becomes the price that other producers are forced to pay for that same ingredient. This applies whether we are talking about the milk that goes into making cheese, ice cream, and yogurt or we are talking about the wood that goes into making baseball bats, furniture, and paper. If the amount of paper demanded doubles, this means that the demand for wood pulp to make paper goes up. As the price of wood rises in response to this increased demand, that in turn means that the prices of baseball bats and furniture will have to go up, in order to cover the higher costs of the wood from which they are made.

  The repercussions go further. As the price of milk rises, dairies have incentives to produce more milk, which can mean buying more cows, which in turn can mean that more cows will be allowed to grow to maturity, instead of being slaughtered for meat as calves. Nor do the repercussions stop there. As fewer cows are slaughtered, there is less cowhide available, and the prices of baseball gloves can rise because of supply and demand. Such repercussions spread throughout the economy, much as waves spread across a pond when a stone drops into the water.

  No one is at the top coordinating all of this, mainly because no one would be capable of following all these repercussions in all directions. Such a task has proven to be too much for central planners in country after country.

  Incremental Substitution

  Since scarce resources have alternative uses, the value placed on one of these uses by one individual or company sets the cost that has to be paid by others who want to bid some of these resources away for their own use. From the standpoint of the economy as a whole, this means that resources tend to flow to their most valued uses when there is price competition in the marketplace. This does not mean that one use categorically precludes all other uses. On the contrary, adjustments are incremental. Only that amount of milk which is as valuable to ice cream consumers or consumers of yogurt as it is to cheese purchasers will be used to make ice cream or yogurt. Only that amount of wood which is as valuable to the makers of baseball bats or furniture as it is to the producers of paper will be used to make bats and furniture.

  Now look at the demand from the consumers’ standpoint: Whether considering consumers of cheese, ice cream, or yogurt, some will be anxious to have a certain amount, less anxious to have additional amounts, and finally—beyond some point—indifferent to having any more, or even unwilling to consume any more after becoming satiated. The same principle applies when more wood pulp is used to make paper and the producers and consumers of furniture and baseball bats have to make their incremental adjustments accordingly. In short, prices coordinate the use of resources, so that only that amount is used for one thing which is equal in value to what it is worth to others in other uses. That way, a price-coordinated economy does not flood people with cheese to the point where they are sick of it, while others are crying out in vain for more ice cream or yogurt.

  Absurd as such a situation would be, it has happened many times in economies where prices are not used to allocate scarce resources. Pelts were not the only unsalable goods that were piling up in Soviet warehouses while people were waiting in long lines trying to get other things that were in short supply.{ii} The efficient allocation of scarce resources which have alternative uses is not just some abstract notion of economists. It determines how well or how badly millions of people live.

  Again, as in the example of beach-front property, prices convey an underlying reality: From the standpoint of society as a whole, the “cost” of anything is the value that it has in alternative uses. That cost is reflected in the market when the price that one individual is willing to pay becomes a cost that others are forced to pay, in order to get a share of the same scarce resource or the products made from it. But, no matter whether a particular society has a capitalist price system or a socialist economy or a feudal or other system, the real cost of anything is still its value in alternative uses. The real cost of building a bridge is whatever else could have been built with that same labor and material. This is also true at the level of a given individual, even when no money is involved. The cost of watching a television sitcom or soap opera is the value of the other things that could have been done with that same time.

  Economic Systems

  Different economic systems deal with this underlying reality in different ways and with different degrees of efficiency, but the underlying reality exists independently of whatever particular kind of economic system happens to exist in a given society. Once we recognize that, we can then compare how economic systems which use prices to force people to share scarce resources among themselves differ in efficiency from economic systems which determine such things by having kings, politicians, or bureaucrats issue orders saying who can get how much of what.

  During a brief era of greater openness in the last years of the Soviet Union, when people became more free to speak their minds, the two Soviet economists already mentioned wrote a book giving a very candid account of how their economy worked, and this book was later translated into English.{iii} As Shmelev and Popov put it, production enterprises in the Soviet Union “always ask for more than they need” from the government in the way of raw materials, equipment, and other resources used in production. “They take everything they can get, regardless of how much they actually need, and they don’t worry about economizing on materials,” according to these economists. “After all, nobody ‘at the top’ knows exactly what the real requirements are,” so “squandering” made sense{19}—from the standpoint of the manager of a Soviet enterprise.

  Among the resources that were squandered were workers. These economists estimated that “fro
m 5 to 15 percent of the workers in the majority of enterprises are surplus and are kept ‘just in case.’”{20} The consequence was that far more resources were used to produce a given amount of output in the Soviet economy as compared to a price-coordinated economic system, such as that in Japan, Germany and other market economies. Citing official statistics, Shmelev and Popov lamented:

  To make one ton of copper we use about 1,000 kilowatt hours of electrical energy, as against 300 in West Germany. To produce one ton of cement we use twice the amount of energy that Japan does.{21}

  The Soviet Union did not lack for resources, but was in fact one of the most richly endowed nations on earth—if not the most richly endowed in natural resources. Nor was it lacking in highly educated and well-trained people. What it lacked was an economic system that made efficient use of its resources.

  Because Soviet enterprises were not under the same financial constraints as capitalist enterprises, they acquired more machines than they needed, “which then gather dust in warehouses or rust out of doors,”{22} as the Soviet economists put it. In short, Soviet enterprises were not forced to economize—that is, to treat their resources as both scarce and valuable in alternative uses, for the alternative users were not bidding for those resources, as they would in a market economy. While such waste cost individual Soviet enterprises little or nothing, they cost the Soviet people dearly, in the form of a lower standard of living than their resources and technology were capable of producing.

  Such a waste of inputs as these economists described could not of course continue in the kind of economy where these inputs would have to be purchased in competition with alternative users, and where the enterprise itself could survive only by keeping its costs lower than its sales receipts. In such a price-coordinated capitalist system, the amount of inputs ordered would be based on the enterprise’s most accurate estimate of what was really required, not on how much its managers could persuade higher government officials to let them have.

  These higher officials could not possibly be experts on all the wide range of industries and products under their control, so those with the power in the central planning agencies were to some extent dependent on those with the knowledge of their own particular industries and enterprises. This separation of power and knowledge was at the heart of the problem.

  Central planners could be skeptical of what the enterprise managers told them but skepticism is not knowledge. If resources were denied, production could suffer—and heads could roll in the central planning agencies. The net result was the excessive use of resources described by the Soviet economists. The contrast between the Soviet economy and the economies of Japan and Germany is just one of many that can be made between economic systems which use prices to allocate resources and those which have relied on political or bureaucratic control. In other regions of the world as well, and in other political systems, there have been similar contrasts between places that used prices to ration goods and allocate resources versus places that have relied on hereditary rulers, elected officials or appointed planning commissions.

  When many African colonies achieved national independence in the 1960s, a famous bet was made between the president of Ghana and the president of the neighboring Ivory Coast as to which country would be more prosperous in the years ahead. At that time, Ghana was not only more prosperous than the Ivory Coast, it had more natural resources, so the bet might have seemed reckless on the part of the president of the Ivory Coast. However, he knew that Ghana was committed to a government-run economy and the Ivory Coast to a freer market. By 1982, the Ivory Coast had so surpassed Ghana economically that the poorest 20 percent of its people had a higher real income per capita than most of the people in Ghana.{23}

  This could not be attributed to any superiority of the country or its people. In fact, in later years, when the government of the Ivory Coast eventually succumbed to the temptation to control more of their country’s economy, while Ghana finally learned from its mistakes and began to loosen government controls on the market, these two countries’ roles reversed—and now Ghana’s economy began to grow, while that of the Ivory Coast declined.{24}

  Similar comparisons could be made between Burma and Thailand, the former having had the higher standard of living before instituting socialism, and the latter a much higher standard of living afterwards. Other countries—India, Germany, China, New Zealand, South Korea, Sri Lanka—have experienced sharp upturns in their economies when they freed those economies from many government controls and relied more on prices to allocate resources. As of 1960, India and South Korea were at comparable economic levels but, by the late 1980s, South Korea’s per capita income was ten times that in India.{25}

  India remained committed to a government-controlled economy for many years after achieving independence in 1947. However, in the 1990s, India “jettisoned four decades of economic isolation and planning, and freed the country’s entrepreneurs for the first time since independence,” in the words of the distinguished London magazine The Economist. There followed a new growth rate of 6 percent a year, making it “one of the world’s fastest-growing big economies.”{26} From 1950 to 1990, India’s average growth rate had been 2 percent.{27} The cumulative effect of growing three times as fast as before was that millions of Indians rose out of poverty.

  In China, the transition to a market economy began earlier, in the 1980s. Government controls were at first relaxed on an experimental basis in particular economic sectors and in particular geographic regions earlier than in others. This led to stunning economic contrasts within the same country, as well as rapid economic growth overall.

  Back in 1978, less than 10 percent of China’s agricultural output was sold in open markets, instead of being turned over to the government for distribution. But, by 1990, 80 percent was sold directly in the market.{28} The net result was more food and a greater variety of food available to city dwellers in China, and a rise in farmers’ income by more than 50 percent within a few years.{29} In contrast to China’s severe economic problems when there was heavy-handed government control under Mao, who died in 1976, the subsequent freeing up of prices in the marketplace led to an astonishing economic growth rate of 9 percent per year between 1978 and 1995.

  While history can tell us that such things happened, economics helps explain why they happened—what there is about prices that allows them to accomplish what political control of an economy can seldom match. There is more to economics than prices, but understanding how prices function is the foundation for understanding much of the rest of economics. A rationally planned economy sounds more plausible than an economy coordinated only by prices linking millions of separate decisions by individuals and organizations. Yet Soviet economists who saw the actual consequences of a centrally planned economy reached very different conclusions—namely, “there are far too many economic relationships, and it is impossible to take them all into account and coordinate them sensibly.”{30}

  Knowledge is one of the most scarce of all resources, and a pricing system economizes on its use by forcing those with the most knowledge of their own particular situation to make bids for goods and resources based on that knowledge, rather than on their ability to influence other people in planning commissions, legislatures, or royal palaces. However much articulation may be valued by intellectuals, it is not nearly as efficient a way of conveying accurate information as confronting people with a need to “put your money where your mouth is.” That forces them to summon up their most accurate information, rather than their most plausible words.

  Human beings are going to make mistakes in any kind of economic system. The key question is: What kinds of incentives and constraints will force them to correct their own mistakes? In a price-coordinated economy, any producer who uses ingredients which are more valuable elsewhere in the economy is likely to discover that the costs of those ingredients cannot be repaid from what the consumers are willing to pay for the product. After all, the producer has had to bid those resource
s away from alternative users, paying more than the resources are worth to some of those alternative users. If it turns out that these resources are not more valuable in the uses to which this producer puts them, then he is going to lose money. There will be no choice but to discontinue making that product with those ingredients.

  For those producers who are too blind or too stubborn to change, continuing losses will force their businesses into bankruptcy, so that the waste of the resources available to the society will be stopped that way. That is why losses are just as important as profits, from the standpoint of the economy, even though losses are not nearly as popular with businesses.

  In a price-coordinated economy, employees and creditors insist on being paid, regardless of whether the managers and owners have made mistakes. This means that capitalist businesses can make only so many mistakes for so long before they have to either stop or get stopped—whether by an inability to get the labor and supplies they need or by bankruptcy. In a feudal economy or a socialist economy, leaders can continue to make the same mistakes indefinitely. The consequences are paid by others in the form of a standard of living lower than it would be if there were greater efficiency in the use of scarce resources.

  In the absence of compelling price signals and the threat of financial losses to the producers that they convey, inefficiency and waste in the Soviet Union could continue until such time as each particular instance of waste reached proportions big enough and blatant enough to attract the attention of central planners in Moscow, who were preoccupied with thousands of other decisions.