I received some very interesting comments from Yaneer Bar-Yam to my recent Evonomics post— “Capital’s Share of Income is Far Higher than You Think.” He pointed me to his very interesting paper, “Preliminary steps toward a universal economic dynamics for monetary and fiscal policy.”

I’m using this space to reply with with some thoughts that can’t display in that comments space.

I haven’t gotten to the full-boat, multipart reply that I have floating in my head, but wanted to get back on two items for the nonce, a question plus a response on recession prediction:

1. What is the function in this model that “causes” capital gains? This always strikes me as the core problem in a complete SFC model where flows (including holding gain “flows”) balance to and fully explain (change in) net worth: if you can write a reaction function that predicts asset-price changes, you’re a very rich person… 😉

2. The recession-prediction based on investment/consumption ratio misses a bunch of recessions (false negatives). Contrasted here with a personal favorite: every recession since 1970 has been preceded by a year-over-year decline in real household total assets/net worth. (Including liabilities to arrive at net worth instead of just using assets adds no predictive value). Click for FRED.

This predictor is seven for seven. Though: there are two recent false positives — shortly following the 2001 and 2008 recessions.

The investment:consumption ratio bruited as a predictor/cause in the paper is four for seven, and even there: the first year of decline in this ratio seems late in each case (as opposed to the measure’s peak) to suggest it as a cause:

I have various ideas and explanations for all this, but apologies, haven’t found time to write them all up.