Harvard professor Dani Rodrik -- perhaps the finest political economist of my generation -- recently said on his blog that a colleague has been declaring the past three decades "the Age of Milton Friedman."
According to this view, the coming to power of former US president Ronald Reagan, former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (
Friedman adhered throughout his life to five basic principles: strongly anti-inflationary monetary policy; a government that understood that it was the people's agent and not a dispenser of favors and benefits; a government that kept its nose out of people's economic business; a government that kept its nose out of people's private lives; and an enthusiastic and optimistic belief in what free discussion and political democracy could do to convince people to adopt principles one through four.
MEASURING UP?
Measured against these principles, Reagan failed on numbers two and four and adopted the first one only by default -- former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker's anti-inflation policy in the 1980s dismayed many of Reagan's close aides. Thatcher failed on number four.
And Deng, while a vast improvement over his predecessors -- former Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev and former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東) -- failed on all five, with the possible exception of number three. We do not know what Deng's desired set of economic arrangements for a system of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" was, and, in all likelihood, he did not know, either.
But I say yes in part to the "Age of Friedman" proposition, because only Friedman's set of principles self-confidently proposed both to explain the world and to tell us how to change it.
Still, I would build up a counterbalancing set of principles, because I believe that Friedman's principles do not, ultimately, deliver what they promise.
My principles would start from the observation that market economies and free and democratic societies are built on a very old foundation of human sociability, communication and interdependence. That foundation had a hard enough time functioning when human societies had 60 members -- eight orders of magnitude less than today's 6 billion.
So my principles would then be developed from Karl Polanyi's old observation that the logic of market exchange puts considerable pressure on that underlying foundation. The market for labor compels people to move to where they earn the most, at the price of potentially creating strangers in strange lands. The market for consumer goods makes human status rankings the result of market forces rather than social norms and views about justice.
This critique of the market is, of course, one-sided. After all, other arrangements for allocating labor appear to involve more domination and alienation than the labor market, which offers opportunities, not constraints.
Similarly, "social norms" and "views about distributive justice" usually turn out to favor whomever has the biggest spear or can convince others that obedience to the powerful is obedience to God. Market arrangements have a larger meritocratic component than the alternatives, and they encourage positive-sum entrepreneurship, making it easier to do well by doing good.
Nevertheless, the distribution of economic welfare produced by the market economy does not fit anyone's conception of the just or the best. Rightly or wrongly, we have more confidence in the correctness and appropriateness of political decisions made by democratically elected representatives than of decisions implicitly made as the unanticipated consequences of market processes.
We also believe that government should play a powerful role in managing the market to avoid large depressions, redistributing income to produce higher social welfare, and preventing pointless industrial structuring produced by the fads and fashions that sweep the minds of financiers.
AFTER THE WAR
Indeed, there is a conservative argument for social-democratic principles. Post-World War II social democracy produced the wealthiest and most just societies the world has ever seen. You can complain that redistribution and industrial policy were economically inefficient, but not that they were unpopular. It seems a safe bet that the stable politics of the post-war era owe a great deal to the coexistence of rapidly growing, dynamic market economies and social-democratic policies.
Friedman would say that, given the the world in 1975, a move in the direction of his principles was a big improvement. When I think of former US president Jimmy Carter's energy policy, Arthur Scargill at the head of the British mineworkers' union and Mao's Cultural Revolution, I have a hard time disagreeing with Friedman about the world in the mid-1970s.
But there I would draw the line: While movement in Friedman's direction was by and large positive over the past generation, the gains to be had from further movement in that direction are far less certain.
J. Bradford DeLong is professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley and a former assistant US Treasury secretary.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
An outrageous dismissal of the exemplary Taiwanese fight against COVID-19 has been perpetrated by the EU. There is no excuse. I presume that everyone who reads the Taipei Times knows that the EU has excluded Taiwan from its so-called “safe list,” which permits citizens unhindered travel to and from the countries of the EU. As the EU does not feel that it needs to explain the character of this exclusive list, perhaps we should examine it ourselves in some detail. There are 14 nations on the list that have been chosen as safe countries of origin and safe countries of destination for
Filmmakers in Taiwan used to struggle when it came to telling a story that could resonate internationally. Things started to change when the 2017 drama series The Teenage Psychic (通靈少女), a collaboration between HBO Asia and Taiwanese Public Television Service (PTS), became a huge hit not just locally, but also internationally. The coming-of-age story was adapted from the 2013 PTS-produced short film The Busy Young Psychic (神算). Entirely filmed in Taiwan, the Mandarin-language series even made it on HBO’s streaming platforms in the US. It is proof that a well-told Taiwanese story can absolutely win the hearts and minds of hard-to-please
Drugged with sedatives, handcuffed and wearing a bright orange prison tunic, British fraud investigator and former journalist Peter Humphrey was escorted by warders into an interrogation room filled with reporters, locked inside a steel cage and fastened to a metal “tiger chair.” Humphrey recalls: “I was completely surrounded by officers, dazed, manacled and with cameras pointing at me through the bars. I was fighting for my life like a caged animal. It was horrifying.” Footage from the interrogation was later artfully edited to give the appearance of a confession and broadcast on Chinese state media. While this might sound like an
The US House of Representatives on July 1 passed by unanimous consent a bipartisan bill that would penalize Chinese officials who implement Beijing’s new national security legislation in Hong Kong, as well as banks that do business with them. The following day, the US Senate unanimously passed the bill, which was later sent to the White House, where it awaits US President Donald Trump’s signature. The bill does not spell out what the sanctions would look like and Trump has yet to sign it into law, but Reuters on Thursday last week reported that five major Chinese state lenders are considering
RSS