Chapter 27 The National Income Approach
No analysis of Keynesian economics would be complete without at least some discussion of
what is variously called aggregative economics, macroeconomics and the national income approach.
Many of his disciples are under the impression that it was Keynes who created the national
income concept.
This is pure fantasy.
Efforts to calculate the national income have a long history.
Though Keynes does have a great deal to say about aggregative economics, which we have
The National Income Approach owes at least part of its present vogue to Keynesian ways
Is National Income Determinant?
The first thing to be emphasized about the national income is that it is an arbitrary
and from the standpoint of scientific precision an indeterminate figure.
The ablest students of the subject have recognized this.
I need merely refer to the fine pioneering study of Simon Kuznets.
Kuznets devotes his entire first chapter of fifty-seven pages to a discussion of the problems
The Statistician who supposes that he can make a purely objective estimate of national
income, not influenced by preconceptions concerning the facts, is deluding himself, for whenever
he includes one item or excludes another, he is implicitly accepting some standard of
Kuznets goes on to show that estimates of the national income necessarily involve legal
and moral considerations.
Should we include the compensation of robbers, murderers, drug peddlers and smugglers?
And how shall we draw a line between economic activity and economic goods on the one hand,
and active life in general and its stream of satisfactions on the other?
Should washing, shaving and playing for amusement on the piano be treated as economic activity?
When judged by the attributes of satisfaction yielding scarcity and disposability, they
They do not differ from the same activities carried on for money as services to other
people—nursing, barbering and giving concerts.
And yet Kuznets decides to include only items that are dealt in on the market.
This of course excludes all do-it-yourself activities, which in total are probably enormous.
It excludes all the products of the family economy, including all the activities of housewives.
So we get to such paradoxes as these.
When a man marries his cook, the value of her work disappears from the national income
accounts.
When an opera singer sings professionally, she is considered as adding the equivalent
of her salary to the national income.
When she sings for charity or for friends, it doesn't count.
How are we to prevent double counting at a hundred points?
If we count the income of doctors and dentists, should we or should we not deduct it from
the income of patients?
What is it that we are trying to measure anyway?
What is the difference between economic activity and active life in general?
How, except by arbitrary value judgments, do we distinguish between productive and unproductive
activities?
Are we trying to measure national income produced, national income paid out, national income
spent or national income consumed?
No doubt today, most laymen and a large number of statisticians and economists assume that
all these problems must have been satisfactorily solved because they read daily in their newspapers
official figures showing exactly what the national income, personal income, disposable
personal income, and above all, the gross national product, or GNP, were not only in
and Past Periods, but at what annual rate they are currently running.
And these figures are presented with great precision, with decimal points.
Few laymen are aware that these figures are made up, not of definite items which can be
lined up and counted, but in large part of estimates subject to error.
Let us take a few quite recent illustrations.
The President's Annual Economic Report of January 1958 boasted in its opening paragraph
that the nation's GNP, or Output of Goods and Services, in 1957 totaled $434 billion,
five percent larger than in the preceding year.
Only later in the report were we explicitly told that four-fifths of this increase was
was accounted for by rising prices, and that therefore, in physical terms, the increase
was only about 1%.
In July of 1958, however, the National Income Estimates received one of their periodic revisions,
and the Department of Commerce Statisticians decided that our GNP in 1957 was not $434
This brings us to one of the great problems
in Estimating National Income. It is measured in a dollar which has itself no fixed value.
In a period of inflation, all values are falsified. Today, the most frequently cited overall figure
is not that of national income, but of gross national product, or GNP. I shall therefore
used this for purposes of illustration.
For 1939, the GNP was estimated at $91.1 billion.
For 1957, it was estimated at $440.3 billion.
Here is an apparent quadrupling, or better, of the GNP.
But when the government statisticians restate the figures in constant dollars, specifically
in 1954 dollars, they find that the GNP in 1939 has to be raised to 189.3 billion dollars,
and that the 1957 GNP has to be lowered to 407 billion dollars.
In other words, real GNP did not quadruple, but only about doubled in the 18-year period.
The government statisticians get this result by dividing actual dollar amounts by an index
number of prices for each year.
They print, in fact, a separate table of implicit price deflators for the gross national product
figures for each year based on an index number of 100 for 1954.
The price deflator for 1939 on this basis is 48.1 and for 1957 is 108.2.
If we take the GNP in 1939 at the prices that prevailed in that year, it comes, as we have
have seen to $91.1 billion.
But if we translate 1957 national income into 1939 prices, we get, instead of $440.3 billion,
only $195.7 billion for 1957.
This does not look nearly as impressive.
If again we divide these figures by the population, we find a much lower rate of per capita growth
than we are at all likely to gather from the crude overall figures.
But though inflation and the changing value of the dollar make comparative overall national
income figures quite misleading, is it, in fact, possible to correct the comparison by
Applying Implicit Price Deflators?
Only Approximately, Never Accurately.
As Kuznets and every other serious student of index numbers has pointed out, goods never
remain the same for two years in succession either in relative quantities or in comparative
of Quality, and no index number can be completely scientific.
There is one further factor that distorts and falsifies comparative national income figures.
It is a factor I do not recall ever having seen discussed in connection with these figures.
Yet it goes to the heart of the whole problem of measurability.
Major crops often have a smaller total dollar value than smaller crops, hence crop restriction
schemes, but this merely illustrates a wider principle.
Economists have pointed out since the time of Adam Smith that it is not value in use
but scarcity that determines value in exchange or money price.
Water is an indispensable commodity that ordinarily commands no price at all.
If more and more things became plentiful, except dollars, the national income, as measured
in dollars, might begin to fall.
If we could imagine a situation in which everything we could wish for was in as adequate supply
as Air and Water, we might have no monetary national income at all.
When one seeks to be clear about basic principles, it is never a bad idea, in spite of the ridicule
that has been heaped upon it since the days of Karl Marx, to go back to Crusoe economics.
Suppose then, we begin with a community of just two persons, one of whom raises beans,
say one thousand pounds, and the other of whom raises potatoes, also one thousand pounds.
This is their total wealth.
The total wealth, or, if we wish, income of the community, is thus one thousand pounds
of beans plus one thousand pounds of potatoes.
But someone may wish to know which is the wealthier, Ben, who raises beans, or Peter,
who raises potatoes, and what is the total wealth or annual income of the community expressed
in terms of some common measure.
Suppose Ben and Peter exchange their beans and potatoes at a ratio of a pound for a pound,
to such an extent as to bring the relative marginal utilities of each to both of them
into equilibrium.
And suppose we elect to regard the potatoes as the medium of exchange and the money of
account.
Then the total income of the community is obviously 2,000 pounds of potatoes made up
Up of one thousand pounds of potatoes and one thousand pounds of beans a year.
But now, certain paradoxical results appear.
Suppose Peter doubles the amount of potatoes he grows, while Ben raises only the same amount
of beans.
Then, the income of the community has risen, in real terms, to two thousand pounds of potatoes
plus one thousand pounds of beans. We might be tempted to conclude that, in terms of the
common standard of value, the income of the community was now three thousand pounds of
potatoes. But because potatoes were now twice as plentiful and beans were unchanged in supply,
Ben might demand, and Peter might be willing to pay, two pounds of potatoes for every pound
of Beans.
But this would mean that the supply of beans was twice as valuable as before.
Therefore, the total income of the community, as expressed in potatoes, would not be 3,000
pounds of potatoes, but 4,000.
Suppose on the other hand it was the supply of beans that had doubled, and Peter was able
is capable to demand and get two pounds of beans for every pound of potatoes.
Then the income of the community measured in pounds of potatoes would not be three thousand pounds but only two thousand.
So our national income figure expressed in a common medium of exchange or money of account
does not express any absolute total at all, but merely an internal relationship of marginal
values times quantities.
We could go on to illustrate this by a more complex model, assuming, say, a hundred different
commodities, one of which would be gold, and assuming that a certain weight of gold, a
A dollar or one thirty-fifth of an ounce was the medium of exchange and the money of account.
It would then be easy to show that an increase in the other ninety-nine commodities would
by no means mean a proportionate increase in the national income as measured in dollars,
and yet that a doubling of the amount of dollars alone might double the national income as
as expressed in dollars.
Nor would it be possible to correct for these paradoxical results, except in an inaccurate
and untrustworthy fashion, by using implicit price deflators or inflators.
And if the real problem of translating money value income into real or heterogeneous physical
income is insoluble, still more so is the problem of translating either into psychic
or enjoyment income, hence the impossibility of a scientific comparison of the income of
Russia and the United States.
In brief, national income estimates have a very limited value, a far more modest value
than is now commonly supposed.
They might have some value in comparing the national incomes of two different countries
if the figures in both countries were compiled by the same methods and largely arbitrary
or conventional standards, if both countries have the same monetary standard, say gold,
and if complete freedom of currency convertibility and of trade prevailed.
Such comparisons have little value when currency ratios are fixed by government, UKs or exchange
control rather than by free markets or free convertibility into a common commodity.
Its Dangers for Policy
It is impossible, in some, to arrive at a precise scientific, objective or absolute
measurement of the national income in terms of dollars.
But the assumption that we can do so has led to dangerous policies, and threatens to lead
to even more dangerous policies.
Policy implications, in fact, are already found in the national income approach.
For this embodies an attempt to deal with economic problems, starting from an arbitrarily
The
Acting Individuals
This macroeconomic, as differentiated from the microeconomic approach, raises first
of all the question, why is the nation considered the collective to be chosen and not the state
State, State of New York, the Municipality, City of New York, the Borough, Manhattan,
or on the other side, the continent, America, or the whole world.
The chief answer to this question is that the choice of the collective is determined
mainly by political considerations.
Many of our American progressives aim at an equalization of incomes within the United
States, but not at a world equalization.
This political tendency explains also why these people are always talking about the
distribution of the national income and not about the contribution of the various individuals
and Groups of Individuals to its Coming into Existence.
Logically, the contribution problem ought to be considered first.
Much of the national income discussion is dominated by the Marxian thesis according
to which goods are socially produced and, afterwards, individually appropriated.
I have said that though the government compiles quarterly estimates, both of gross national
product and of national income, it is the former figure that is much more frequently
cited.
This is partly because it appears earlier, as a private firm knows its gross income before
it knows its net income, and partly because it is the larger figure.
Real planners love big figures.
We are constantly being told that we, the government, can easily afford to spend or
give away, say, to foreign governments, this or that huge sum, because it is, after all,
only such-and-such a percentage of our gross national product.
No one would dream of considering such reasoning valid as applied to a private firm.
The average industrial company's net profit, for example, amounts, 1956 through 1957,
to only five or six cents on every dollar of sales.
There are great deductions to be made from gross national product before we can estimate
National Income.
For example, in 1957 gross national product was estimated at $440.3 billion, whereas national
income was estimated at only $364 billion.
In arriving at the latter figure, some $34 billion was deducted for depreciation charges
and some $38 billion for indirect business taxes.
But depreciation charges are the result of estimates.
The right amount of depreciation is never precisely known.
Contrary to the belief of laymen and even of many accountants, a depreciation charge
is not so much an estimate of past deterioration as a forecast of future probabilities.
It is never known, for example, when an old machine is going to be made obsolete by a
a New Invention, and particularly in a period of monetary inflation such as we have been
undergoing for the last generation, depreciation charges are systematically underestimated
because they fail to allow forever-mounting replacement costs.
Another bad practice to which a too literal reliance on national income figures has led
is that of insisting on the urgency of a certain rate of growth of the national income, no
matter what level it has already reached.
Thus, a report of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in 1958, looking ten years ahead, came
came up with the remarkable discovery that an economic growth rate of 5% a year would
lead to a bigger growth in 10 years than a 3% rate or even a 4% rate.
This insistence on achieving or maintaining a certain rate of growth is the result of
several misconceptions.
Professor G. Warren Nutter has pointed out that there is a long-run tendency for the
industrial growth rates to slow down or retard as the level of production gets higher.
There are several basic explanations of this.
One has to do with a trick of percentage figures.
Another has to do with a physical satiety point in human needs.
If only one family in a country has a bathtub and the next year fifty families get one,
the rate of growth is five thousand percent.
But once everybody has a bathtub, net growth stops.
This principle applies to houses, automobiles, radios, television sets, etc.
In addition, as we have just noticed a little while back, as more and more things become
plentiful, except dollars, there might even be a tendency for the national income figures
to reflect this by falling, because prices might fall faster than output rows.
Still another practical danger of the religious use of national income figures is that it
can lead to a confusing or reversal of economic cause and effect.
The national income of a given year is the total result of all the production and transactions
during that year.
In this respect, the national income figures are similar to the account books of a private
firm.
But more and more, in current discussion, one finds the national income figure treated
as a cause of production.
The national income is thought of as the purchasing power that automatically creates and buys
the production.
The truth is that the national income is the production itself, looked at from another
side.
Broadly speaking, national income does not cause national production, but national production
causes national income.
In so far as the causation is the other way round, it is because of the truth in that
very Say's law that the Keynesians and national income addicts tell us has been discredited.
The national income figures seem to have given birth to all sorts of cause and effect fallacies.
For example, if we look at the composition of the national income figures for, say, 1957,
we find that part of the GNP total of $440.3 billion is arrived at by including $87.1 billion
for government purchases of goods and services.
When the national income figures of $364 billion for that year are broken down into specific
industries, we find that nearly $43 billion is unaccounted for by government and government
enterprises.
It is easy to jump to the conclusion, which Keynesians do, that if it were not for these
People with a less favorable opinion of the role of government would point out that whatever
the government spends, it takes away from somebody in taxes.
This applies also to the hidden tax involved in monetary inflation.
Undoubtedly, such government employees as policemen, firemen, judges and road builders
do increase by an unassertainable amount real national income.
But it may be questioned whether such agencies as price controllers, rent boards, the tariff
If we think of the national income as a mere lump overall sum in dollars and it falls short
of some goal by X billion dollars, it is a tempting step for economic planners to assume
that the X billion dollars could be easily supplied by that much deficit spending or even
by printing that much money.
This leads indirectly to inflation, for we can raise our national income to any figure
Here We Want simply by depreciating the dollar enough to raise prices to reach that income.
In Germany in 1923, the national income in marks actually rose to hundreds of billions
of times higher than its previous level, because the paper mark was depreciated to one trillionth
of its former purchasing power.
To be sure, when explicitly taxed with the point, economic planners will say that their
goal is a national income of X billions in dollars of present purchasing power.
But they forget this qualification in actual practice.
They are always citing the latest national income figures in terms of the latest and
most inflated dollar.
They do not stop to remind us, or even themselves, of how much the national income would have
to be written down to reflect the price level of, say, 20 years ago.
The national income approach has become one of the important incitements to inflation.
For the easiest and surest way to get constantly bigger national income figures is not by increasing
Output and Consumer Satisfactions, but by constantly shrinking the measuring rod, by
constantly depreciating the dollar.
It remains to be pointed out, finally, that economic forecasting based on aggregative
economics or the national income approach has been a failure.
David McCord Wright, who declared that In practical experience, the Keynesian forecasters
have quite a poor record, cites in evidence the egregious failure of most Keynesian forecasts
after World War II, which was very largely due to an unexpected upward jump of the consumption
level.
Similarly, he adds, in 1953 and again in 1958, the Keynesian models of mechanical interrelationships
between investment and consumption did not work out.
This judgment corroborates that of John H. Williams.
The consumption function in particular has given the mathematicians an ideal concept
for Building Models of National Income and Making Forecasts.
Thus far, the forecasts have been almost uniformly bad.