El Gran Macronomics DT

Nostalgias como la del Huracán del 73´ también las hay en la economía. Ayer The Guardian publicó un interesante artículo preguntándose cuál sería el dream-team de la macroeconomía actual: su respuesta fue que, sorprendentemente, es muy complicado armar tal equipo, porque, por así decirlo, no existe. Pero esa complicación desaparece, dice la nota, si pensamos en la macro, vista en perspectiva:

"Let's play Fantasy Economics. It's a simple game based on Fantasy Football, where fans select a dream squad from the Premier League and win points if their players score, create or save goals. (...) Putting a team together of economists no longer with us is a breeze. A team of dead economists drawn from all strands of the discipline might include Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, Karl Marx, Alfred Marshall, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, Richard Kahn, Joseph Schumpeter, Hyman Minsky and Herman Daly. (...) Picking a modern 11 of comparable quality is a lot tougher. "

El artículo sugiere dos jugadores de un probable equipo moderno, pero no más que eso: Stiglitz y Krugman (yo también agregaría a Rodrik y a otros tantos). Pero, ¿por qué este abandono de la macro y los grandes nombres en sus filas?

"Until the crisis broke in 2007, it was assumed that the big picture was largely sorted and economists needed to concentrate on micro-economics, where much good work has been done, incidentally. (...) As a profession, economics not only has nothing to say about what caused the world to come to the brink of financial collapse last autumn, but also a supreme lack of interest in it. (...) There is no Keynes, Schumpeter or Hayek out there with answers to our predicament."

Micro, modelización y consecuente falta de interés por las grandes variables. Como dicen en un post de Freakonomics en el que se comenta a The Guardian, la dificultad para armar el equipo está en la forma en que la "ciencia" económica se desarrolla y progresa actualmente:

"The single easiest way to make a mark in a modern macro paper is to solve a problem that is really, really hard mathematically. Even if it is not that relevant to anything, it is seen as a sign that the author has “impressive skills,” which is enough to get a job — and even tenure sometimes — at top universities."

Se escuchan listas de convocados...

Washington Consensus

Leyendo el texto de John Williamson, "What Washington Means by Policy Reform" (1990), uno se encuentra con frases como estas:

"Left-wing believers in "Keynesian" stimulation via large budget deficits are almost an extinct species."

Y la conclusión es simple: cómo cambiaron las cosas en estos 19 años. Recordemos ese título del Economist de hace unos días, "We Are All Keynesians Now", y también esa aventurada idea de que la historia se había terminado. Errores de previsión.

"We Are All Keynesians Now"

The Economist abre el debate sobre si en estos tiempos de tanto keynesianismo, todo el mundo es keynesiano. En una serie de discusiones, se pronen armar una especie de "arena" económica, donde uno de un bando, y otro del otro, dan los argumentos a favor y en contra de las ideas de JMK y su aplicación a la situación actual.

La contienda comenzó con Brad DeLong y Luigi Zingales.

El primero, a favor: "Even though Say's law is not true in general, could it possibly be true in this particular case? Could it happen that as the government starts its spending that the spending is, in Fama's words, "funded by issuing more government debt ... The added debt absorbs savings that would otherwise go to private investment ... and just moves resources from one use [private investment] to another [government purchases]"? Yes, it can happen. When government deficit spending triggers a sharp rise in interest rates, that rise in interest rates will discourage and crowd out private investment spending. But you have to have that rise in interest rates, and we don't: the ten-year Treasury rate last Friday was 3.02% per year, down from 4.01% back before Obama's election victory."

El segundo, en contra: "If Keynesian principles and education are the cause of the current depression, it is hard to imagine they can be the solution. Thus, even the third interpretation of the house statement—that we should follow Keynesian prescriptions to combat the current economic crisis—is false. I am not disputing the idea that some government intervention can alleviate the current economic conditions, I am disputing that a Keynesian economic policy can do it. With a current-account deficit that in 2008 was $614 billion, a budget deficit that was $455 billion and military expenditures of $731 billion, it is hard to argue that the government is not stimulating demand sufficiently. The current crisis is not a demand crisis, it is a trust crisis. Bad corporate governance coupled with bad government policies has destroyed the financial sector, scaring investors and freezing lending. It is as if a nuclear bomb had destroyed all roads in America and we claimed that to alleviate the economic impact of such an event we should invest in banks. It is possible that eventually the effect will trickle down. But if the problem is the roads, you want to rebuild roads, not subsidise the financial sector. And if the problem is the financial sector, you want to fix this and not build roads."


Que pase el que sigue.