Não concordo com ele, por uma razão muito simples: Keynes não fez uma "teoria geral", e sim uma teoria particular ao momento de crise vivido pelas economias de mercado devido à excessiva intervenção dos governos na economia, inclusive e principalmente no que se refere à criação de inflação e de desemprego, pela imposição do monopólio sobre as moedas e de muitas regras afetando os mercados laborais (políticos sempre querem fazer bondades com os recursos alheios).
Não partilho da ideia de que mercados produzem desequilíbrios e que eles não são capazes de corrigir a si próprios. Mercados SEMPRE se corrigem a si próprios, mesmo em detrimento dos agentes que interviram com pouca informação, com propósitos especulativos, ou "corretivos", como pretendem os governos. Os mercados simplesmente refletem o comportamento de pessoas, e as bolhas são SEMPRE corrigidas por uma destruição de riqueza artificial, ainda que alguns venham a perder ativos nesse processo.
A pretensão de pretender corrigir "desequilíbrios", ou "falhas de mercado" é justamente o fator que impede os mercados de se autocorrigirem.
O keynesianismo é uma pretensão fatal, no sentido hayekiano da palavra, embora combine com a arrogância dos "engenheiros sociais", que estão sempre querendo construir um "mundo melhor", como aprendizes de feiticeiro. Costuma dar errado.
Em qualquer hipótese, cabe ler Skidelsky.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Keynes’s General Theory At 80
Robert Skidelsky lecturing on Keynes (photo: Screenshot YouTube)
In 1935, John Maynard
Keynes wrote to George Bernard Shaw: “I believe myself to be writing a
book on economic theory which will largely revolutionize – not, I
suppose, at once but in the course of the next ten years – the way the
world thinks about its economic problems.” And, indeed, Keynes’s magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,
published in February 1936, transformed economics and economic
policymaking. Eighty years later, does Keynes’s theory still hold up?
Two elements of
Keynes’s legacy seem secure. First, Keynes invented macroeconomics – the
theory of output as a whole. He called his theory “general” to
distinguish it from the pre-Keynesian theory, which assumed a unique
level of output – full employment.
In showing how
economics could remain stuck in an “underemployment” equilibrium, Keynes
challenged the central idea of the orthodox economics of his day: that
markets for all commodities, including labor, are simultaneously cleared
by prices. And his challenge implied a new dimension to policymaking:
Governments may need to run deficits to maintain full employment.
The aggregate
equations that underpin Keynes’s “general theory” still populate
economics textbooks and shape macroeconomic policy. Even those who
insist that market economies gravitate toward full employment are forced
to argue their case within the framework that Keynes created. Central
bankers adjust interest rates to secure a balance between total demand
and supply, because, thanks to Keynes, it is known that equilibrium
might not occur automatically.
Keynes’s second major
legacy is the notion that governments can and should prevent
depressions. Widespread acceptance of this view can be seen in the
difference between the strong policy response to the collapse of
2008-2009 and the passive reaction to the Great Depression of 1929-1932.
As the Nobel laureate Robert Lucas, an opponent of Keynes, admitted in
2008: “I guess everyone is a Keynesian in a foxhole.”
Having said this,
Keynes’s theory of “underemployment” equilibrium is no longer accepted
by most economists and policymakers. The global financial crisis of 2008
bears this out. The collapse discredited the more extreme version of
the optimally self-adjusting economy; but it did not restore the
prestige of the Keynesian approach.
To be sure, Keynesian
measures halted the global economy’s downward slide. But they also
saddled governments with large deficits, which soon came to be viewed as
an obstacle to recovery – the opposite of what Keynes taught. With
unemployment still high, governments returned to pre-Keynesian
orthodoxy, cutting spending to reduce their deficits – and undercutting
economic recovery in the process.
There are three main
reasons for this regression. First, the belief in the
labor-market-clearing power of prices in a capitalist economy was never
wholly overturned. So most economists came to view persistent
unemployment as an extraordinary circumstance that arises only when
things go terribly wrong, certainly not the normal state of market
economies. The rejection of Keynes’ notion of radical uncertainty lay at
the heart of this reversion to pre-Keynesian thinking.
Second, post-war
Keynesian “demand-management” policies, credited with having produced
the long post-1945 boom, ran into inflationary trouble at the end of the
1960s. Alert to a worsening tradeoff between inflation and
unemployment, Keynesian policymakers tried to sustain the boom through
incomes policy – controlling wage costs by concluding national
agreements with trade unions.
Income policy was
tried in many countries from the 1960s to the end of the 1970s. At best,
there were temporary successes, but the policies always broke down. Milton Friedman provided
a reason that jibed with growing disenchantment with wage and price
controls, and that reasserted the pre-Keynesian view of how market
economies work. Inflation, Friedman said, resulted from attempts by
Keynesian governments to force down unemployment below its “natural”
rate. The key to regaining stable prices was to abandon the
full-employment commitment, emasculate the trade unions, and deregulate
the financial system.
And so the old
orthodoxy was reborn. The full-employment target was replaced by an
inflation target, and unemployment was left to find its “natural” rate,
whatever that was. It was with this defective navigational equipment
that politicians sailed full steam ahead into the icebergs of 2008.
The final reason for
Keynesianism’s fall from grace was the rightward ideological shift that
began with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and US President
Ronald Reagan. The shift was due less to rejection of Keynesian policy
than to hostility toward the enlarged state that emerged after World War
II. Keynesian fiscal policy was caught in the crossfire, with many on
the right condemning it as a manifestation of “excessive” government
intervention in the economy.
Two final reflections
suggest a renewed, if more modest, role for Keynesian economics. An
even bigger shock to the pre-2008 orthodoxy than the collapse itself was
the revelation of the corrupt power of the financial system and the
extent to which post-crash governments had allowed their policies to be
scripted by the bankers. To control financial markets in the interests
of full employment and social justice lies squarely in the Keynesian
tradition.
Second, for new
generations of students, Keynes’s relevance may lie less in his specific
remedies for unemployment than in his criticism of his profession for
modeling on the basis of unreal assumptions. Students of economics eager
to escape from the skeletal world of optimizing agents into one of
fully-rounded humans, set in their histories, cultures, and institutions
will find Keynes’s economics inherently sympathetic. That is why I
expect Keynes to be a living presence 20 years from now, on the
centenary of the General Theory, and well beyond.
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