Tag: Neoliberalism

A Plea for Some Sympathy for Repentant Left Neoliberals…

Posted on by Brad DeLong
1848

As always, when the extremely sharp Danny Rodrick stuffs a book-length argument into an 800-word op-ed column, phrases acti as gestures toward what are properly chapter-long arguments. So there is lots to talk about.

Must-Read: Dani Rodrik: The Abdication of the Left: “This backlash was predictable…

…Hyper-globalization in trade and finance, intended to create seamlessly integrated world markets, tore domestic societies apart. The bigger surprise is the decidedly right-wing tilt the political reaction has taken. In Europe, it is predominantly nationalists and nativist populists that have risen to prominence, with the left advancing only in a few places such as Greece and Spain…. As an emerging new establishment consensus grudgingly concedes, globalization accentuates class divisions between those who have the skills and resources to take advantage of global markets and those who don’t. Income and class cleavages, in contrast to identity cleavages based on race, ethnicity, or religion, have traditionally strengthened the political left. So why has the left been unable to mount a significant political challenge to globalization?

I think that this paragraph above is largely wrong.

As the very sharp Patrick Iber tweeted somewhere, the usual response to economic distress in democracies with broad franchises is: “Throw the bastards out!” Consider the Great Depression: Labour collapses in Britain in 1931. The Republicans collapse in the U.S. in 1932. And in Germany… shudder. And it is now 1 2/3 centuries since Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:

Alexis de Tocqueville: Recollections: “I woke very early in the morning…

…I heard a sharp, metallic sound, which shook the window-panes and immediately died out amid the silence of Paris. ‘What is that?’ I asked. My wife replied, ‘It is the cannon; I have heard it for over an hour, but would not wake you, for I knew you would want your strength during the day.’ I dressed hurriedly….

Thousands of men were hastening to our aid from every part of France, and entering the city by all the roads not commanded by the insurgents. Thanks to the railroads, some had already come from fifty leagues’ distance, although the fighting had only begun the night before. On the next and the subsequent days, they came from distances of a hundred and two hundred leagues. These men belonged indiscriminately to every class of society; among them were many peasants, many shopkeepers, many landlords and nobles, all mingled together in the same ranks. They were armed in an irregular and insufficient manner, but they rushed into Paris with unequalled ardour: a spectacle as strange and unprecedented in our revolutionary annals as that offered by the insurrection itself. It was evident from that moment that we should end by gaining the day, for the insurgents received no reinforcements, whereas we had all France for reserves.

On the Place Louis XV, I met, surrounded by the armed inhabitants of his canton, my kinsman Lepelletier d’Aunay, who was Vice-President of the Chamber of Deputies during the last days of the Monarchy. He wore neither uniform nor musket, but only a little silver-hilted sword which he had slung at his side over his coat by a narrow white linen bandolier. I was touched to tears on seeing this venerable white-haired man thus accoutred. ‘Won’t you come and dine with us this evening?’ ‘No, no,’ he replied; ‘what would these good folk who are with me, and who know that I have more to lose than they by the victory of the insurrection—what would they say if they saw me leaving them to take it easy? No, I will share their repast and sleep here at their bivouac. The only thing I would beg you is, if possible, to hurry the despatch of the provision of bread promised us, for we have had no food since morning’…

It was in June 1849 that the depression-driven insurrection of the urban craftworker proletariat of Paris was suppressed—bloodily suppressed—by a largely spontaneous mass mobilization of those of the Ile de France who thought that they had something to lose from further revolution. They might see what little property they had confiscated and redistributed to the unemployed slackers of the city—to the urban “dangerous classes”. They might be taxed to pay for the reopening of the National Workshops that were to provide a guarantee of employment for those who could not find other jobs. They might see worse—their friends arrested for insufficient enthusiasm for revolution, or their priests and their hope of heaven taken away. For all these reasons they shifted rightward, voted for a firm nationalist authoritarian hand on the government, and voted for Louis Bonaparte first as President of the Second French Republic and then as Emperor Napoleon III of the Second French Empire.

The belief that economic distress leads democratic politics to shift left is, I think, in general wrong. It leads democratic politics to shift away from the establishment, whatever the establishment is. It can move left—as in FDR’s America and in France with Leon Blum and the Front Populaire. It can move right—as in France in 1849 and in the early stages of the Great Depression, as in Britain in 1931 and 2010, as in the U.S. in 2010, and as in, ahem, Germany…

Dani continues:

One answer is that immigration has overshadowed other globalization ‘shocks.’… Latin American democracies provide a telling contrast. These countries experienced globalization mostly as a trade and foreign-investment shock, rather than as an immigration shock. Globalization became synonymous with so-called Washington Consensus policies and financial opening. Immigration from the Middle East or Africa remained limited and had little political salience. So the populist backlash in Latin America—in Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, and, most disastrously, Venezuela – took a left-wing form…

Well, no: as I said, a form that was primarily antiestablishment. In Latin America, the establishment had bought into the relatively center-right Washington Consensus. In Europe, the establishment had bought into the relatively center-left continent-wide social market. Only where, as Dani says, the European establishment comes to be perceived as centered around Berlin’s ordoliberalism rather than around Brussel’s social market is their space for distress to push politics left.

Then, I think, Dani firmly grasps the correct thread:

A greater weakness of the left [is] the absence of a clear program to refashion capitalism and globalization for the twenty-first century…. The left has failed to come up with ideas that are economically sound and politically popular, beyond ameliorative policies such as income transfers. Economists and technocrats on the left bear a large part of the blame. Instead of contributing to such a program, they abdicated too easily to market fundamentalism and bought in to its central tenets.

In retrospect, who can disagree? We misjudged the proper balance between state and market, between command-and-control and market-incentive roads to social democratic ends.

But then I must, again, dissent in part. Dani:

Worse still, [Economists and technocrats on the left] led the hyper-globalization movement at crucial junctures. The enthroning of free capital mobility—especially of the short-term kind—as a policy norm by the European Union, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the IMF was arguably the most fateful decision for the global economy in recent decades. As Harvard Business School professor Rawi Abdelal has shown, this effort was spearheaded in the late 1980s and early 1990s not by free-market ideologues, but by French technocrats such as Jacques Delors (at the European Commission) and Henri Chavranski (at the OECD), who were closely associated with the Socialist Party in France. Similarly, in the US, it was technocrats associated with the more Keynesian Democratic Party, such as Lawrence Summers, who led the charge for financial deregulation. France’s Socialist technocrats appear to have concluded from the failed Mitterrand experiment with Keynesianism in the early 1980s that domestic economic management was no longer possible, and that there was no real alternative to financial globalization. The best that could be done was to enact Europe-wide and global rules, instead of allowing powerful countries like Germany or the US to impose their own.

And here I whimper.

Financial globalization was intended to take down barriers to capital inflows erected by rent-seekers in developing countries, and so speed growth in economies that had been starved of capital while also equalizing incomes. Financial deregulation was supposed to break up the cozy investment banking and other oligarchies of Wall Street and diminish their private-sector tax on the American economy. Financial deregulation was supposed to provide the poorer half of America with the access to fairly priced credit that it lacked and with the opportunity to invest in assets that would yield equity-class returns, which it also lacked. And, in a world in which central banks had the powers and the will to successfully stabilize aggregate demand, there seemed little downside to letting people who could not put together a 20% down payment buy a house, to forcing Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to deal with competition from Citigroup and Bank of America, and to allow entrepreneurs in Mexico to raise funds not just from a cozy oligarchy of Mexico City banks but on the global capital market.

And France’s socialist technocrats were right: in highly-open economies the task of managing aggregate demand has to be a global, or at least a North Atlantic-wide, or at least a continent-wide exercise. In a good world, large exchange rate changes should only take place in response to persistent fundamental disequilibria rather than being used as first-line tools for demand management.

It all did go horribly wrong. But the restriction of the ECB to an inflation-control mandate alone was never a policy plank of the left—and all on the left assumed that the technocrats of the ECB were not stupid enough to take the single mandate as more than cheap talk to reassure bond markets in good times. And the decision by money-center banks to use derivative markets not to diversify but to concentrate housing-price risk on their own balance sheets did not happen on our watch.

And then I must dissent again. Dani’s penultimate paragraph is, I think, much too optimistic:

The good news is that the intellectual vacuum on the left is being filled, and there is no longer any reason to believe in the tyranny of ‘no alternatives.’ Politicians on the left have less and less reason not to draw on ‘respectable’ academic firepower in economics…. Anat Admati and Simon Johnson have advocated radical banking reforms; Thomas Piketty and Tony Atkinson have proposed a rich menu of policies to deal with inequality at the national level; Mariana Mazzucato and Ha-Joon Chang have written insightfully on how to deploy the public sector to foster inclusive innovation; Joseph Stiglitz and José Antonio Ocampo have proposed global reforms; Brad DeLong, Jeffrey Sachs, and Lawrence Summers (the very same!) have argued for long-term public investment in infrastructure and the green economy. There are enough elements here for building a programmatic economic response from the left.

Here I agree, rather, with something Keynes wrote in 1933:

John Maynard Keynes (1933): On Trotsky: “We lack more than usual a coherent scheme of progress, a tangible ideal…

…All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas and none more conspicuously so than the Marxists…. No one has a gospel. The next move is with the head…

The problem is that our current policy agenda is too much “do it again!”, where “it” is “Keynesianism, social democracy, the welfare state.” And I believe we need more I think Dani gets it right when he notes:

The right thrives on deepening divisions in society—‘us’ versus ‘them’—while the left, when successful, overcomes these cleavages through reforms that bridge them…

But when he says:

Earlier waves of reforms from the left—Keynesianism, social democracy, the welfare state—both saved capitalism from itself and effectively rendered themselves superfluous…

he is both right and wrong: the earlier waves did save capitalism from itself, but they only rendered themselves apparently superfluous during the Years of Global Convergence and the Years of the Great Moderation. They are not superfluous. We need them. And we need more. For Dani is right to close:

Absent such a response again, the field will be left wide open for populists and far-right groups, who will lead the world—as they always have—to deeper division and more frequent conflict.

Must-Read: Dani Rodrik: The Abdication of the Left

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Dani Rodrik is very sharp indeed. But I think that this is mostly wrong. However, it remains a must-read:

Dani Rodrik: The Abdication of the Left: “This backlash was predictable…

…Hyper-globalization in trade and finance, intended to create seamlessly integrated world markets, tore domestic societies apart. The bigger surprise is the decidedly right-wing tilt the political reaction has taken. In Europe, it is predominantly nationalists and nativist populists that have risen to prominence…. As an emerging new establishment consensus grudgingly concedes, globalization accentuates class divisions between those who have the skills and resources to take advantage of global markets and those who don’t. Income and class cleavages, in contrast to identity cleavages based on race, ethnicity, or religion, have traditionally strengthened the political left. So why has the left been unable to mount a significant political challenge to globalization?

One answer is that immigration has overshadowed other globalization ‘shocks.’… Latin American democracies provide a telling contrast. These countries experienced globalization mostly as a trade and foreign-investment shock, rather than as an immigration shock. Globalization became synonymous with so-called Washington Consensus policies and financial opening…. So the populist backlash in Latin America – in Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, and, most disastrously, Venezuela – took a left-wing form….

The enthroning of free capital mobility – especially of the short-term kind – as a policy norm by the European Union, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the IMF was arguably the most fateful decision for the global economy in recent decades. As Harvard Business School professor Rawi Abdelal has shown, this effort was spearheaded in the late 1980s and early 1990s not by free-market ideologues, but by French technocrats such as Jacques Delors (at the European Commission) and Henri Chavranski (at the OECD), who were closely associated with the Socialist Party in France. Similarly, in the US, it was technocrats associated with the more Keynesian Democratic Party, such as Lawrence Summers, who led the charge for financial deregulation….

A crucial difference between the right and the left is that the right thrives on deepening divisions in society – ‘us’ versus ‘them’ – while the left, when successful, overcomes these cleavages through reforms that bridge them. Hence the paradox that earlier waves of reforms from the left – Keynesianism, social democracy, the welfare state – both saved capitalism from itself and effectively rendered themselves superfluous. Absent such a response again, the field will be left wide open for populists and far-right groups, who will lead the world – as they always have – to deeper division and more frequent conflict.

Must-Read: Maury Obstfeld: Evolution Not Revolution: Rethinking Policy at the IMF

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Maurice Obstfeld: Evolution Not Revolution: Rethinking Policy at the IMF: “I would describe the process as evolution, not revolution…

…The Fund has long tried to build on its experiences in the field and on new research to improve its effectiveness in economic surveillance, technical assistance, and crisis response. It’s fair to say that the shock of the global financial crisis led to a broad rethink of macroeconomic and financial policy in the global academic and policy community. The Fund has been part of that, but, given the impacts of our decisions on member countries and the global economic system, we view it as especially important for us constantly to re-evaluate our thinking in light of new evidence. That process has not fundamentally changed the core of our approach, which is based on open and competitive markets, robust macro policy frameworks, financial stability, and strong institutions. But it has added important insights about how best to achieve those results in a sustainable way….

We are in favor of fiscal policies that support growth and equity over the long term. What those policies will be can differ from country to country and from situation to situation. Governments simply have to live within their means on a long-term basis, or face some form of debt default, which normally is quite costly for citizens, and especially the poorest. This is a fact, not an ideological position. Our job is to advise how governments can best manage their fiscal policies so as to avoid bad outcomes. Sometimes, this requires us to recognize situations in which excessive budget cutting can be counterproductive to growth, equity, and even fiscal sustainability goals….

Countries need credible medium-term fiscal frameworks that leave markets confident the public debt can be repaid without very high inflation. Countries with such frameworks will typically have room to soften economic slumps through fiscal means, including automatic stabilizers…. There are limits to the pain economies can or should sustain, so in especially difficult cases we recommend debt re-profiling or debt reduction, which require creditors to bear part of the cost of adjustment. That is the approach we are currently recommending for Greece…

Must-Read: Fred Clark: That Time I Was the Evil Opposite of Neoliberalism

Posted on by Brad DeLong

Must-Read: Fred Clark: That Time I Was the Evil Opposite of Neoliberalism: “Bill Clinton was a Neoliberal. No, no, no…

…Bill Clinton was a betrayal of Neoliberalism. Or neither. Or both. For some the ‘Neo’ just meant ‘I’m a liberal who wants our agenda to carry more states than Mondale and Dukakis’… a semantic way of avoiding the negative associations the right had worked so hard to affix to the word liberal…. For others, the term ‘Neo-liberal’ was a way of avoiding the ethical and economic baggage of their own anti-liberal legacy…. The word was contested, with competing meanings by competing claimants for ownership of it. Neoliberalism was large, it encompassed multitudes. And it still does, which is why George Monbiot can write this: ‘Neoliberalism: The ideology at the root of all our problems.’ That’s a fascinating, but muddling essay. He sometimes focuses the meaning of this word, ‘Neoliberalism,’ to mean basically what we used to call laissez-faire capitalism–unfettered free markets, Voodoo economics, the 1980s writ large, etc. But he also uses the term to refer to something more vast and expansive. That headline is really his definition of ‘Neoliberalism’–it is the word he uses to refer to ‘the ideology at the root of all our problems,’ a general name for Everything Bad. The vague generality of that fuzzes up the diagnostic usefulness of Monbiot’s essay. It’s like a doctor saying, ‘You’re unwell.’ That may be true enough, but it’s not particularly helpful.

Back in the ’90s, ownership of the term ‘Neoliberal’ was in many ways a tug of war between proponents of laissez-faire capitalism and, well, just plain liberals. Liberals embraced the term as a way of avoiding the negative connotations of being called liberals. And laissez-faire capitalists sought to claim the term as a way of avoiding the negative connotations of admitting that they were laissez-faire capitalists. My sense is the LFCs probably won that battle. (That’s bad news for many of the liberals who tried to claim the term ‘Neoliberal’ in the late 20th century, because they’re now stuck with a label retroactively defined by their primary opponents and critics.)… Now… the word is contested in pretty much the opposite way…. It used to be laissez-faire capitalist ‘Neoliberals’ attacking liberals because, in their view, anything short of pure free-market ideology was indistinguishable from a ‘statist model.’ Now those same liberals are accused of being ‘Neoliberals’ by those who say that anything short of statist models is indistinguishable from laissez-faire capitalism. Neither of those accusations strikes me as helpful.

And but so, my point here actually is this: You should read the 1977 original edition of Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger and not the later editions in which the publisher sought to appease that book’s “Neoliberal” critics by revising the policy discussions in its final section.

And also too: Share your cookies.

The benefits of free trade: Time to fly my neoliberal freak flag high!

Posted on by Brad DeLong

I think Paul Krugman is wrong today on international trade. For we find him in “plague on both your houses” mode. On the one hand:

Paul Krugman: Trade and Tribulation and A Protectionist Moment?: “Protectionists almost always exaggerate the adverse effects of trade liberalization…

…Globalization is only one of several factors behind rising income inequality, and trade agreements are, in turn, only one factor in globalization. Trade deficits have been an important cause of the decline in U.S. manufacturing employment since 2000, but that decline began much earlier. And even our trade deficits are mainly a result of factors other than trade policy, like a strong dollar buoyed by global capital looking for a safe haven.

And yes, Mr. Sanders is demagoguing the issue…. If Sanders were to make it to the White House, he would find it very hard to do anything much about globalization…. The moment he looked into actually tearing up existing trade agreements the diplomatic, foreign-policy costs would be overwhelmingly obvious. In this, as in many other things, Sanders currently benefits from the luxury of irresponsibility….

But on the other hand:

That said… the elite case for ever-freer trade, the one that the public hears, is largely a scam…. [The] claims [are] that trade is an engine of job creation, that trade agreements will have big payoffs in terms of economic growth and that they are good for everyone. Yet… the models… used by real experts say… agreements that lead to more trade neither create nor destroy jobs… make countries more efficient and richer, but that the numbers aren’t huge….

False claims of inevitability, scare tactics (protectionism causes depressions!), vastly exaggerated claims for the benefits of trade liberalization and the costs of protection, hand-waving away the large distributional effects that are what standard models actually predict…. A back-of-the-envelope on the gains from hyperglobalization — only part of which can be attributed to policy — that is less than 5 percent of world GDP over a generation…. Furthermore, as Mark Kleiman sagely observes, the conventional case for trade liberalization relies on the assertion that the government could redistribute income to ensure that everyone wins—but we now have an ideology utterly opposed to such redistribution in full control of one party…. So the elite case for ever-freer trade is largely a scam, which voters probably sense even if they don’t know exactly what form it’s taking….

And, Paul summing up:

Why, then, did we ever pursue these agreements?… Foreign policy: Global trade agreements from the 1940s to the 1980s were used to bind democratic nations together during the Cold War, Nafta was used to reward and encourage Mexican reformers, and so on. And anyone ragging on about those past deals, like Mr. Trump or Mr. Sanders, should be asked what, exactly, he proposes doing now.… The most a progressive can responsibly call for, I’d argue, is a standstill on further deals, or at least a presumption that proposed deals are guilty unless proved innocent.

The hard question to deal with here is the Trans-Pacific Partnership…. I consider myself a soft opponent: It’s not the devil’s work, but I really wish President Obama hadn’t gone there…. Politicians should be honest and realistic about trade, rather than taking cheap shots. Striking poses is easy; figuring out what we can and should do is a lot harder. But you know, that’s a would-be president’s job…. [But] he case for more trade agreements—including TPP, which hasn’t happened yet—is very, very weak. And if a progressive makes it to the White House, she should devote no political capital whatsoever to such things.

So I guess it is time to say “I think Paul Krugman is wrong here!” and fly my neoliberal freak flag high…

On the analytics, the standard HOV models do indeed produce gains from trade by sorting production in countries to the industries in which they have comparative advantages. That leads to very large shifts in incomes toward those who owned the factors of production used intensively in the industries of comparative advantage: Big winners and big losers within a nation, with relatively small net gains.

But the map is not the territory. The model is not the reality. An older increasing-returns tradition sees productivity depend on the division of labor, the division of labor depends on the extent of the market, and free-trade greatly widens the market. Such factors can plausibly quadruple The Knick gains from trade over those from HOV models alone, and so create many more winners.

Moreover, looking around the world we see a world in which income differentials across high civilizations were twofold three centuries ago and are tenfold today. The biggest factor in global economics behind the some twentyfold or more explosion of Global North productivity over the past three centuries has been the failure of the rest of the globe to keep pace with the Global North. And what are the best ways to diffuse Global North technology to the rest of the world? Free trade: both to maximize economic contact and opportunities for learning and imitation, and to make possible the export-led growth and industrialization strategy that is the royal and indeed the only reliable road to anything like convergence.

So I figure that, all in all, not 5% but more like 30% of net global prosperity–and considerable reduction in cross-national inequality–is due to globalization. That is a very big number indeed. But, remember, even the 5% number cited by Krugman is a big deal: $4 trillion a year, and perhaps $130 trillion in present value.

As for the TPP, the real trade liberalization parts are small net goods. The economic question is whether the dispute-resolution and intellectual-property protection pieces are net goods. And on that issue I am agnostic leaning negative. The political question is: Since this is a Republican priority, why is Obama supporting it without requiring Republican support for a sensible Democratic priority as a quid pro quo?

That said, let me wholeheartedly endorse what Paul (and Mark) say here:

as Mark Kleiman sagely observes, the conventional case for trade liberalization relies on the assertion that the government could redistribute income to ensure that everyone wins—but we now have an ideology utterly opposed to such redistribution in full control of one party…. So the elite case for ever-freer trade is largely a scam, which voters probably sense even if they don’t know exactly what form it’s taking….