Globalization: What Did Paul Krugman Miss?

This is a very nice short framework-for-thinking-about-globalization-and-the-world piece by Paul Krugman: Paul Krugman (2018): Globalization: What Did We Miss?

It is excellently written. It contains a number of important insights.

But.

I have, unusually, a number of complaints about it. I will make them stridenly:

First, Paul Krugman claims that, in Heckscher-Ohlin models at least, from the early 1970s to the mid 1990s international trade put only a little bit of downward pressure on the wages of American “unskilled” and semi-skilled workers. I think that is wrong. I think that from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s international trade, at least working through the Heckscher-Ohlin channels, put less than zero downward pressure on the wages of American “unskilled” and semi-skilled workers.

As I see it, it is important to note that “emerging markets” and “global north” are not static categories. Japan, Spain, Italy, Ireland were low-wage countries in the 1970s. From the early 1970s to the mid-1990s the relative wage levels of the then-current sources of America’s manufacturing imports were rising more rapidly than new low-wage sources of manufacturing imports were being added. The typical American manufacturing worker faced less low-wage competition from imports in the mid-1990s than they had faced in the early 1970s.

As I see it, where manufacturing workers came under pressure (and they did) it was not from increased low-wage competition from abroad but rather from:

  1. fiscal policy failures that produced the Reagan (and then Bush II) deficits as Republican governance redirected dollars earned by foreigners from buying our exports to buying our bonds
  2. managerial failures in Detroit (and elsewhere in the U.S.) and successes abroad
  3. technological failures in Pittsburgh (and elsewhere in the U.S.) and successes abroad

As I see it, yes, we could have protected Detroit and Pittsburgh from the consequences of their managerial and technological failings—but it would have been at immense cost for the rest of the economy, a very unfavorable benefit-cost tradeoff. And we should not have elected Republicans and given them the keys to the economic policy car: that rarely works. But given that we did give the Republicans the keys, and given Detroit’s and Pittsburgh’s managerial and technological failings, globalization from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s was a wonderful thing for America as a whole: it provided us with enormous benefits in every scenario, and in the unfortunate scenario we were dealt by the Reagan Democrats and the Big Three auto executives of Detroit, globalization greatly reduced the damage.

Second, I agree with Paul Krugman when he writes as though the “hyperglobalization” from the mid-1990s to the financial crisis was a big deal (which it was):

This huge surge… Containerization was not… new… [but] t took time for business to realize… [the] possibilities…. [Plus] a broad move… toward outward-looking policies…. China made a dramatic shift from central planning….

But I disagree when he writes that “hyperglobalization” was in some sense a threat to blue-collar Americans’ economic and social position:

It’s clear that the impact of developing-country exports grew much more between 1995 and 2010 than the 90s consensus imagined possible, which may be one reason concerns about globalization made a comeback…

Why? For reasons that Paul recognizes and summarizes:

A fairly novel form of trade… break[ing] up value chains, moving labor-intensive parts of the production process overseas…. The factor content of North-South trade hasn’t risen nearly as fast as the volume…

Let’s unpack this. In the age of widely-separated intercontinental value chains, we can see that there are actually more types of “blue collar” manufacturing jobs than the skilled-craft, semiskilled-assembly line, and unskilled traditional classification. Most importantly, we can see that the blue-collar jobs that are traditionally called semiskilled-assembly line are actually divided into two. The first are those jobs that require relatively literate workers with substantial experience and tacit knowledge who plug into sophisticated and highly productive divisions of labor supported by very productive communities of engineering practice. The second are those jobs that plug into those divisions of labor supported by those communities of engineering practice, but that actually do not require relative literacy or involve a great deal of tacit knowledge or experience—jobs that are doable by virtually everybody with the standard mental structure and eye-brain-hand loop of the East African Plains Ape, and that we thus call “unskilled”, even though they involve tasks that are currently regarded as very hard AI problems.

Before the coming of intercontinental global value chains, the distinction between these two types of semiskilled manufacturing jobs was of relatively little importance. Both paid relatively well for jobs requiring little formal education: both benefited from the requirement that workers be located near to engineers (and marketers, and executives) and from their participation in highly productive production processes, so both shared in the rents produced therein. But the truly unskilled portion—even though they were called “semiskilled” were not truly good jobs: they were boring, repetitive, and not very productive. An economy that could figure out a way to offshore those jobs would find that it had a global competitive advantage, and that would strengthen its truly valuable communities of engineering practice and ability to productively employ those relatively literate workers with valuable experience and tacit knowledge.

This was brought home to me most strongly in the years after the NAFTA debate. Opponents of NAFTA from Harley Shaiken and Thea Lee to Ross Perot had claimed it would be very damaging to the American automobile industry. Not so. And not just the firms executives, the shareholders, and the marketers were better off as a result than they would have been otherwise: the blue-collar workers with tacit knowledge and experience were better off as well from Detroit’s larger market share, and the truly unskilled portion—perhaps we should call them “polyester uniform”?—did not have jobs in the auto industry but had jobs about as good outside of it.

So, at least as I see it, the coming of “hyperglobalization” strengthened opportunities for U.S. workers without formal education to find jobs where their skills, experience, and tacit knowledge could be deployed in ways that were highly productive. What “hyperglobalization” did do was provide the top 1% and the top 0.1% with another lever to break apart the Dunlopian labor relations order, break the Treaty of Detroit, and redistribute the shared joint product from highly productive mass production backed by valuable communities of engineering practice upward in the income distribution. But there were many such levers in the U.S. from the 1970s to today. And “hyperglobalization” was, as I see it, one of the weakest and shortest of them. It gets blamed not because it was an important driver of the process, but because it allows one to blame others: brown people, yellow people, and, of course, the rootless cosmopolites.

Third, I quarrel with Krugman’s—and with Autor, Dorn, and Hanson’s (2013)—assessment of the China shock. Paul writes:

[While] trade deficits explain only a small part of the long-term shift toward… service[s]… soaring imports did impose a significant shock on some U.S. workers…. Fights over tariffs look very much as if they come out of a specific-factors world…. This is where the now-famous analysis of the “China shock” by Autor, Dorn, and Hanson (2013) comes in. What ADH mainly did was to shift focus from broad questions of income distribution to the effects of rapid import growth on local labor markets, showing that these effects were large and persistent. This represented a new and important insight…

Put me down as believing that, as I see it, Autor, Dorn, and Hanson’s focus on the stable absolute number of U.S. manufacturing jobs before the China shock of the 2000s and its drop as a result of the China shock is substantially misleading. One might look at the share of the workforce who have—and the share of those entering the workforce who get “good blue-colllar” jobs, in which we see not stability but rather a smooth decline in the proportion. One might look at individual towns, cities, and regions, in which case one sees patterns of regional industrial growth and collapse: the defense cycles, the collapse of New England textiles and leather, the rise of the Carolinas, the shift out of the Midwest to the falsely-called “right to work” states, plus the general desire of people after air conditioning to live in places where the winters are not so dire. It is not a new insight that such shocks to regional labor markets had effects that were large and persistent: anybody who had ever driven through Lowell or Fall RIver, MA knew that before Paul Krugman had published his first paper. It is, however, a very important insight.

Yes, the reduction in the share of the U.S. workforce in tacit knowledge and experience semiskilled blue collar jobs has been a big deal. But the overwhelming bulk of that is due to technology, not trade. Yes, there has been an additional reduction beyond technology. But the bulk of that has been a second-best compensation and adjustment for the disastrous Republican habit of running large budget deficits at full employment. Yes, the U.S. government should have done much more to support communities and workers who found themselves under the hammer. But for that blame the legacy influence of social darwinism on American politics: the U.S. government did little for Lowell or Fall River back in the day. And complaints about the failure to properly manage a process that is, globally, overwhemlingly positive-sum should be mailed to the address of the Reagan and Trump Democrats of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, not to poorer brown and yellow people in Mexico and in China.

Moreover, from the perspective of the country as a whole and from the perspective of many of the communities affected, the China shock was not a big deal for local labor markets. Yes, people are no longer buying as many of the products of American factories as Chinese imports flood in. But those selling the imports are turning around and spending their dollars investing in America: financing government purchases, infrastructure, some corporate investment, and housing. The circular flow will it: the dollars are of no use outside the U.S. and so the dollar flow has to go somewhere, and as long as the Federal Reserve does its job and makes Say’s Law roughly true in practice, it is a redistribution of demand for labor and not a fall in the demand for labor.

And here is the kicker, as I see it: the types of people and the types of jobs funded by the imports of the China shock looks very much like the types of people and the types of jobs displaced from the tradeable manufacturing sector. Yes, some local labor markets got a substantial and persistent negative shock to manufacturing, often substantially cushioned by a boost to construction. Other local local labor markets got a substantial and persistent positive shock to construction. And on the level of the country as a whole the factor of production that is (truly) semiskilled blue collar labor does not look to me to have been adversely affected.

Until 2008.

Now we get to my fourth quarrel: the play is Hamlet. But where is the Prince of Denmark? Zero references to “recession”, “finance”, “financial crisis”, or “recession”. Yet, at least as I see it, the key thing that we missed about globalization was not its impact on factor prices in some Heckscher-Ohlin model or an shared rents in some specific-factors model but rather that when a big financial crisis and depression came “globaization”—and poor people elsewhere—would provide an excuse to distract blame. There was a lot of blame: Blame financiers who had no control over their derivatives books because they failed to manage. Blame financeirs who had control over their deiverative books but who thought, like Charles Price of Citigroup: “you have to keep dancing as long as the music is playing”. Blame Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan. Blame Treasury Secretary John Snow. They were at the heads of the agencies responsible for controlling systemic risk when the vulnerabilities emerged. And they did not no—control it, that is. Blame Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke. Blame Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. They were at the heads of the agencies responsible for controlling systemic risk while there was still time to shore up the system—and they did not.

The Prince of Denmark here is the Greenspan-Snow shock, not the China shock. What we missed about globalization was not its impact on blue-collar semiskilled workers with experience and tacit knowledge and communities, but how it would interact with attempts to shift resoponsibility and blame off of the appropriate properties.

And then, of course, ther is 2010: Barack Obama’s declaration in his State of the Union Address that the time for bold action to boost employment was over:

We took office amid a crisis, and our efforts to prevent a second Depression have added another $1 trillion to our national debt…. Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same. So tonight, I’m proposing specific steps to pay for the $1 trillion that it took to rescue the economy last year…. Like any cash-strapped family, we will work within a budget to invest in what we need and sacrifice what we don’t. And if I have to enforce this discipline by veto, I will…

I have never found anybody working in economic policy in the Obama administration who thought that this large a shift this quickly was a good idea. Some have admitted to believing that it was a meaningless rhetorical nothingburger—after all, it excepted “spending related to our national security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security”, and you can do anything macroeconomic you want on the spending side in those categories. They were wrong. Others were strongly opposed. Others say that they were quiet, but certainly not boosters.

And, indeed it wasn’t a good idea.

If the Greenspan-Snow shock is the Prince of Denmark in this play, the idea that the crisis was over and the need for stimulative policy was at an end as of early 2010—call it the Obama-Geithner shock, perhaps—is King Claudius, or at least Queen Gertrude here.

And this gets me to my fifth quarrel with Paul Krugman here. As I see it, the most important thing we missed about globalization was how much it required support from stable and continuous full employment. That, I think, ought to have been the focus of his talk to the IMF.

It is now 81 years since John Maynard Keynes published:

Whilst… the enlargement of the functions of government involved in the task of adjusting to one another the propensity to consume and the inducement to invest would seem to a nineteenth-century publicist or to a contemporary American financier to be a terrific encroachment on individualism. I defend it… as the only practicable means of avoiding the destruction of existing economic forms in their entirety and as the condition of the successful functioning of individual initiative….

If effective demand is deficient… the public scandal of wasted resources… the individual enterpriser… is operating with the odds loaded against him. The game of hazard which he plays is furnished with many zeros…. The authoritarian state systems of today seem to solve the problem of unemployment at the expense of efficiency and of freedom. It is certain that the world will not much longer tolerate the unemployment which, apart from brief intervals of excitement, is associated and in my opinion, inevitably associated with present-day capitalistic individualism. But it may be possible by a right analysis of the problem to cure the disease whilst preserving efficiency and freedom…

True. Now as much as ever.

Brink Lindsey and the Road to Utopia

Let me put a spotlight on the very sharp Brink Lindsey here…

Brink Lindsey believes utopia is in our grasp. Our problems today are, he thinks, at their root problems about the creation of truly human identities that people can embrace.

This is a remarkable shift.

Previous human societies have had very different problems:

  • how to keep famine and plague from the door;
  • how to maintain the peace;
  • how to somehow scrape up the resources to make the investments to raise average productivity to a level that would support even a half-human standard of living; and
  • how to avoid gross maldistribution.

Keeping the peace remains a problem.

Avoiding gross maldistribution remains a problem—but the consequences of maldistribution in creating dire and life-threatening poverty are now much much less.

But famine, plague, and low productivity are now very far from our doors. And while productivity could be higher (and it would be nice if it were higher), an absence or an insufficiency of calories or of simply stuff is no longer a huge problem.

Instead, the problem seems, at least in Brink Lindsey’s conceptualization, to be “the progressive unraveling of the human connections that give life structure and meaning…”

That is a statement I find needs unpacking. But how to unpack this? Let’s let him try to unpack it. I don’t think he gets all the way there, but he makes a lot of progress:

Brink Lindsey: The End of the Working Class: “Outside a well-educated and comfortable elite comprising 20-25 percent of Americans, we see unmistakable signs of social collapse… https://www.the-american-interest.com/2017/08/30/end-working-class/

…the progressive unraveling of the human connections that give life structure and meaning: declining attachment to work; declining participation in community life; declining rates of marriage and two-parent childrearing…. Its roots are spiritual, not material, deprivation…. Anne Case and Angus Deaton have alerted us to a shocking rise in mortality among middle-aged whites, fueled by suicide, substance abuse—opioids make headlines these days but they hardly exhaust the list—and other “deaths of despair.” And this past November, whites in Rust Belt states made the difference in putting the incompetent demagogue Donald Trump into the White House. What we are witnessing is the human wreckage of a great historical turning point, a profound change in the social requirements of economic life. We have come to the end of the working class….

The working class was a distinctive historical phenomenon with real internal coherence. Its members shared a whole set of binding institutions (most prominently, labor unions), an ethos of solidarity and resistance to corporate exploitation, and a genuine pride about their place and role in society. Their successors, by contrast, are just an aggregation of loose, unconnected individuals… [who] failed to… enter the meritocracy…. That failure puts them on the outside looking in, with no place of their own to give them a sense of belonging, status, and, above all, dignity. Here then is the social reality that the narrowly economic perspective cannot apprehend….

From the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century until relatively recently, the miraculous technological progress and wealth creation of modern economic growth depended on large inputs of unskilled, physically demanding labor…. In the skill-neutral transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy… workers displaced from farm jobs by mechanization could find factory work without first having to acquire any new specialized expertise. By contrast, former steel and autoworkers in the Rust Belt did not have the skills needed to take advantage of the new job opportunities created by the information technology revolution….

The best part of working-class life, solidarity, was… inextricably tied up with all the worst parts. As work softened, moving out of hot, clanging factories and into air-conditioned offices, the fellow-feeling born of shared pain and struggle inevitably dissipated…. The postwar ascendancy of the working class was… due… not just [to] favorable labor laws, not just inspired collective action, but the combination of the two in conjunction with the heavy dependence on manual labor by technologically progressive industries of critical importance…. The truly essential element was the dependence of industry on manual labor. For it was that dependence, and the conflicts between companies and workers that it produced, which led to the labor movement that was responsible both for passage of the Wagner Act and the solidarity that translated law into mass unionization….

We must remember that, even in the halcyon postwar decades, blue-collar existence was a kind of bondage…. The creation of the working class was capitalism’s original sin. The economic revolution that would ultimately liberate humanity from mass poverty was made possible by a new and brutal form of domination. Yes, employment relations were voluntary: a worker was always free to quit his job and seek a better position elsewhere. And yes, over time the institution of wage labor became the primary mechanism for translating capitalism’s miraculous productivity into higher living standards for ordinary people…. Meager pay and appalling working conditions during the earlier stages of industrialization reflected not capitalist perfidy but objective reality. The abysmal poverty of the agrarian societies out of which industrialization emerged meant that nothing much better was affordable, or on offer to the great majority of families. But that is not the end of the inquiry…. Workers routinely rebelled against the factory system…. The recurrent want and physical hardships of rural life had existed since time immemorial, and thus seemed part of the natural order…. By contrast, the new energy-intensive, mechanized methods of production were jarringly novel and profoundly unnatural. And the new hierarchy of bourgeois master and proletarian servant had been erected intentionally by capitalists for their own private gain….

At the heart of the matter, though, was the nature of the work…. Humans are most productive in filling in the gaps of mechanization when they perform likewise. The problem, of course, is that people are not machines, and they don’t like being treated as such…. The nightmare of the industrial age was that the dependence of technological civilization on brute labor was never-ending….

Those old nightmares are gone—and for that we owe a prayer of thanks. Never has there been a source of human conflict more incendiary than the reliance of mass progress on mass misery…. But the old nightmare, alas, has been replaced…. Before, the problem was the immense usefulness of dehumanizing work; now, it is feelings of uselessness that threaten to leach away people’s humanity. Anchored in their unquestioned usefulness, industrial workers could struggle personally to endure their lot for the sake of their families, and they could struggle collectively to better their lot. The working class’s struggle was the source of working-class identity and pride. For today’s post-working-class “precariat,” though, the anchor is gone, and people drift aimlessly from one dead-end job to the next. Being ill-used gave industrial workers the opportunity to find dignity in fighting back. But how does one fight back against being discarded and ignored? Where is the dignity in obsolescence?…

There is at least one reason for hope. We can hope for something better because, for the first time in history, we are free to choose something better. The low productivity of traditional agriculture meant that mass oppression was unavoidable…. Once the possibilities of a productivity revolution through energy-intensive mass production were glimpsed, the creation of urban proletariats in one country after another was likewise driven by historical necessity…. The political incentives were truly decisive. When military might hinged on industrial success, geopolitical competition ensured that mass mobilizations of working classes would ensue. No equivalent dynamics operate today. There is no iron law of history impelling us to treat the majority of our fellow citizens as superfluous afterthoughts…. There is a land of milk and honey beyond this wilderness, if we have the vision and resolve to reach it.

The New Socialism of Fools

Project Syndicate: The New Socialism of Fools by J. Bradford DeLong https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/anti-globalization-socialism-of-fools-by-j–bradford-delong-2017-08: BERKELEY – According to mainstream economic theory, globalization tends to “lift all boats,” and has little effect on the broad distribution of incomes. But “globalization” is not the same as the elimination of tariffs and other import barriers that confer rent-seeking advantages to politically influential domestic producers. As Harvard University economist Dani Rodrik frequently points out, economic theory predicts that removing tariffs and non-tariff barriers does produce net gains; but it also results in large redistributions, wherein eliminating smaller barriers yields larger redistributions relative to the net gains. Globalization, for our purposes, is different. It should be understood as a process in which the world becomes increasingly interconnected through technological advances that drive down transportation and communication costs…Read MOAR at Project Syndicate

Very Brief Musings on Democracy

Cf.: Christopher H. Achen and Larry M. Bartels: Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

And:

Cf: Martin Wolf: Capitalism and Democracy: The Strain Is Showing:

Confidence in an enduring marriage between liberal democracy and global capitalism seems unwarranted….

So what might take its place? One possibility[:]… a global plutocracy and so in effect the end of national democracies. As in the Roman empire, the forms of republics might endure but the reality would be gone.

An opposite alternative would be the rise of illiberal democracies or outright plebiscitary dictatorships… [like] Russia and Turkey…. Something rather like that happened in the 1930s. It is not hard to identify western politicians who would love to go in exactly this direction. Meanwhile, those of us who wish to preserve both liberal democracy and global capitalism must confront serious questions. One is whether it makes sense to promote further international agreements that tightly constrain national regulatory discretion in the interests of existing corporations…. Above all… economic policy must be orientated towards promoting the interests of the many not the few; in the first place would be the citizenry, to whom the politicians are accountable. If we fail to do this, the basis of our political order seems likely to founder. That would be good for no one. The marriage of liberal democracy with capitalism needs some nurturing. It must not be taken for granted…

As I see it:

  1. Democracy has never been an especially good way of choosing smart, technocratic leaders. Democracy has different excellences…

  2. Democracy’s primary excellence is that it rules out the mirage of violent revolution as a chiliastic solution to current disappointments: the problem is not that the people are oppressed but rather that the people chose to be governed by the current group of clowns–and that is the problem that needs to be fixed…

  3. Democracy’s secondary excellence is that it provides a powerful degree of insulation against rent-seeking by the currently rich, who are always in favor of wealth extraction from the rest and generally opposed to the creative destruction that economic growth brings–for they are the ones creatively destroyed…

  4. We have the wrong kind of democracy in Europe: the electorate that matters is the German electorate, and from the perspective of the holders of political power in Germany, depression elsewhere in Europe is not a problem but rather a source of support from an electorate feeling the schadenfreude–as long as Germany continues to be an export powerhouse…

  5. We have the wrong kind of democracy in the United States: the gerrymandered Republican legislators of Capitol Hill see a sluggish economy not as a threat to their position to be solved but rather as a demonstration that they are right in their contempt for the Democratic president…

  6. We have the wrong kind of democracy in Britain–Cameron and Osborne’s economic policy failure has indeed gotten that set of bastards thrown out, but their successors have no better ideas about how to generate economic prosperity than they did…

  7. The result has been the rise of a movement opposed to the norms of representative compromise government that has more than faint echoes of the fascist moments of early twentieth century Europe–but this time not just in Europe and on the fringe in the United States…

  8. Nevertheless, if we can get back to a non-wrong kind of democracy–on the European continent, in Britain, and in the U.S.–its primary and secondary excellences will still be of enormous value…

Must-read: Branko Milanovic: “There is a trade-off between citizenship and migration”

Must-Read: A surprisingly-large (to me) number of people have been trashing the very sharp Branko Milanovic for what seems to any normal economist to be an obvious point: At one pole is (1) restricting immigration far below the economically-rational level for any economic welfare analysis because the political system rejects providing full national-community citizenship rights and powers to every migrant. At the other pole is (2) completely decoupling political voice from geographic location and affective ties to the local community. The best policy has to be somewhere in the middle. Yet many more so-called “leftists” than really ought to or than I expected to see say that (1) is obviously correct, and that Branko is guilty of ThoughtCrime for thinking about where in the middle the proper balance might lie…

Branko Milanovic: There is a trade-off between citizenship and migration: “The rich world believes it has reached the limits of acceptable migration….

…We know that migration does more to reduce global poverty and inequality than any other factor. Calculations done by Alan Winters of the University of Sussex show that even a small increase in migration would be far more beneficial to the world’s poor than any other policy…. So is there a way to make greater migration acceptable to the native populations of the rich countries?… Most of a person’s lifetime income is determined by where he or she lives…. Citizens of rich countries receive a citizenship premium, while citizens of poor countries suffer a citizenship penalty. Migration is the attempt by the global poor to enjoy that premium, or at least a part of it, for themselves….

We [need to find a way to] redefine “citizenship” in such a way that migrants are not allowed to lay claim to the entire premium falling to citizens straight away, if at all… [to] assuage the concerns of the native population, while still ensuring the migrants are better off than they would be had they stayed in their own countries…. Migrants could be allowed to work for a limited number of years, or to work only for a given employer, or else be obliged to return to their country of origin… pay higher taxes since they are the largest net beneficiaries of migration…. This would require significant adjustments to traditional ways of thinking about migration and citizenship….

It is not clear that the old conception of nation-state citizenship as a binary category that in principle confers all the benefits of citizenship to anyone who happens to be physically present within a country’s borders is adequate in a globalised world. In effect, there is a trade-off between such a view of citizenship and the flow of migration…. If graduated categories of citizenship were created… we would be able to reconcile the objective of reducing world poverty with reducing migration to acceptable levels. If we do not do something, we will be stuck in a position in which everyone who makes it to the rich world is given full rights of citizenship, but we do everything in our power to make sure that nobody gets here.

Must-Read: Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick, and Christoph Trebesch: The Political Aftermath of financial Crises: Going to Extremes

Must-Read: Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick, and Christoph Trebesch: The Political Aftermath of financial Crises: Going to Extremes: “Far-right parties are the biggest beneficiaries…

…of financial crises, while the fractionalisation of parliaments complicates post-crisis governance. These effects are not observed following normal recessions or severe non-financial macroeconomic shocks.

Must-Read: Paul Krugman: That 30s Show

Must-Read: As John Maynard Keynes wrote 80 years ago:

It is certain that the world will not much longer tolerate the unemployment which, apart from brief intervals of excitement, is associated… with present-day capitalistic individualism. But it may be possible by a right analysis of the problem to cure the disease while preserving efficiency and freedom…

But not with European orthodox policymakers and establishment elites who appear clueless with respect to what the real stakes are here:

Paul Krugman: That 30s Show: “A few years ago de Bromhead, Eichengreen, and O’Rourke looked…

…at the determinants of right-wing extremism in the 1930s. They found…

what mattered was not the current growth of the economy but cumulative growth or, more to the point, the depth of the cumulative recession. One year of contraction was not enough to significantly boost extremism, in other words, but a depression that persisted for years was.

How’s Europe doing?… And now the [French] National Front has scored a first-place finish in regional elections…. Economics isn’t the only factor; immigration, refugees, and terrorism play into the mix. But Europe’s underperformance is slowly eroding the legitimacy, not just of the European project, but of the open society itself…


Alan de Bromhead, Barry Eichengreen, and Kevin Hjortshøj O’Rourke (2012): Right-Wing Political Extremism in the Great Depression: “The enduring global crisis is giving rise to fears that economic hard times will feed political extremism…

…as it did in the 1930s…. The danger… is greatest in countries with relatively recent histories of democracy, with existing right-wing extremist parties, and with electoral systems that create low hurdles to parliamentary representation of new parties. But above all, it is greatest where depressed economic conditions are allowed to persist.