Friday, October 17, 2014

REAL WORLD AND ECONOMICS

[In this second column based on my reading of management in Stanford, I noted how problems of the real world intruded on economics, and trying to solve them led to new developments in the subject. This column was published in Business Standard of 25 June 2001.]

ECONOMICS IN MANAGEMENT


As I said last week, what one needs to manage well is a thorough understanding of the business one is in. However, this understanding is not a once-and-final thing. Social sciences have no laboratory to test their ideas; social scientists imagine social mechanisms, and revise them only when they become egregiously inconsistent with reality. Management is a continuous, day-to-day activity; so one would expect that it provides frequent opportunities for the testing and revision of ideas. Has it, then, led to repeated revolutions in the social sciences that cater to it?
Perhaps the best test of whether this has been so is the economic model of business: that the goal of business is profit maximization. Application of elementary calculus to this single proposition leads to clear guidelines - which may be called marginalism. Most of the chairs of political economy in universities were established in the second half of the 19th century; at that time, marginalism became a staple of economics teaching. But at that time, the economic view of the environment that faced business was exceedingly simple. Businesses were either monopolies or competitive firms; there was nothing in between.
Then, in the 1930s, competitors in trouble began to collude. The response to economics was remarkably quick; Chamberlin in America, Joan Robinson in Britain, and Zeuthen in Germany all wrote immediately influential books on hybrid market situations between monopoly and competition. This was also the time when profit maximization acquired a bad name, and with it, economics. It came to be known as the dismal science; it became fashionable to nail the flag of other social sciences on their being against economics.
Actually, it was not economics that was dismal; it was the world economy, and economics only reflected the reality. What was wrong with economics did not lie in its psychological orientation, but in its disconnexion with reality. No businessman practised marginal cost pricing; most of them would have thought it barmy. It is perfectly true that fixed costs do not have to be covered in the short run, and that any price above marginal cost adds to the profit. But in the long run, all costs are variable, and businessmen who do not think of the long run will not survive to see it.
However, the entire marginal economics came to life during World War II. The warring governments faced the need to maximize effort with constrained resources, and problems requiring optimum allocation of resources abounded: shells had to be directed so as to do maximum damage, supplies had to be moved to armies with lowest transport inputs, ships and planes had to be produced in the shortest time from a large number of inputs, doctors had to decide which casualties to attend to first. These demands encountered economists and mathematicians who created linear programming. They commandeered statistical techniques that had been developed for seed and animal improvement and applied them to create statistical quality control. In this way, the War converted marginal economics into the immensely useful discipline of programming. It led to inventory planning and the formulation of rules regarding the economic order quantity, to the critical path method of scheduling, to waiting line models, to location models, to the planning of factory layouts, and many other useful applications.
Although there has been no such spectacular business application of microeconomics since the War, its ideas have been applied, adapted and confronted in a variety of influential developments. They were brought together in the monumental work of Holt, Modigliani, Muth and Simon, Planning, Production, Inventories and Work Force. By the 1950s, the intellectual development of programming had passed its peak. Then Herbert Simon, one of its pioneers, turned to psychology. He created the concept of satisficing, as opposed to maximizing – the idea that decision-makers aimed at an outcome that was satisfactory rather than optimum, and thereby economized both on the information needed as well as on complexity of decision-making. Over the next 20 years he created and inspired a hugely fertile body of work on bounded rationality. Michael Porter’s applications of the concept of competitive advantage, embodied in a series of extremely popular publications starting with Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance, have their basis in marginal economics.
Despite people’s aversion to the idea, and despite the fact that businessmen do not always follow it, the principle of profit maximization has found repeated, fertile applications in management. Even if businessmen do not want to follow it, their financiers – shareholders, lenders and bankers – will force them to follow it. And if they neglect it for a while, they will have make a painful return to it through the minefield of restructuring, reengineering and downsizing or they will go under.
This idea no doubt lay behind Frederick Taylor’s advocacy of what he called scientific management. His basic idea was to divorce the issue of work from that of payment for it, and to determine the work to be done on the basis of what the worker could do using movements that were most economical of time and effort. His ideas never found widespread application; Taylor has perhaps inspired greater activity amongst management theorists than amongst managers. But with the coming of assembly lines and automation, the idea of externally imposed work norms had to be faced, even if it was not accepted.
Its antithesis is the Japanese manufacturing practices, which probably arose in the 1950s and began to get known in the west in the 1980s following the extreme success of Japanese companies. In these practices, workers can stop the assembly line if they find anything wrong; a number of models are made on the same assembly line, which requires workers to read instructions on the kanban or card attached to each item and change his input to suit it; workers are given a number of tasks to be performed at the same time; and groups of workers are given considerable autonomy in organizing and improving manufacturing practices. These practices enjoyed considerable vogue in the 1980s, and have spread all over the west by now. There are other Japanese practices that are less well known, and which also modify what one would recommend on a simple economic view. The common Japanese practice of outsourcing is really a variant of payments by results: often the vendors are so dependent on the outsourcing company that they are little different from factory workers.
The economic model has recently made a comeback in a curious way. The 1990s saw the rise of the software industry; here, neither the quantity nor the quality of the work done by a code-writer can be measured easily. So this industry adopted a practice, hitherto confined to the remuneration of top executives, of basing the payments to workers upon the price of the company’s shares. The device worked well while the stock prices of IT companies were booming; now, presumably, it is getting less popular. But it reflects the fact that a worker is a stakeholder in a business; the business would be more stable and less vulnerable to economic cycles if the worker shared in the risk.