O artigo argumenta que o que é considerado política keynesiana hoje é largamente uma distorção. Elabora sobre políticas de "garantia de emprego", não de cavar e depois tapar buracos, mas de empregar a um "salário mínimo" em atividades que beneficiem à população. Conforme a economia melhora, estas pessoas abandonariam esse emprego estatal e voltariam para posições de maior renda na iniciativa privada. Isso controlaria a inflação sem acarretar nos custos com desemprego.
Achei curioso em algum momento falar em
redistribuição da demanda, em vez de "renda". Redistribuição de renda parece só um clichê de "justiça social", mas "distribuição de demanda" soa algo muito mais focado em economia em si, não no aspecto moral.
Acho que tem alguma similaridade com "renda mínima" defendida por Suplicy e Hayek, só que acrescido de empregar os beneficiados em algo proveitoso.
http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_649.pdf
Fiscal Policy Effectiveness: Lessons from the Great Recession
by Pavlina R. Tcherneva
Levy Economics Institute of Bard College
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Unfortunately, what is considered to be Keynesian policy today is largely a misinterpretation of the Keynesian prescriptions, which largely stems from a fundamental misidentification of Keynes’s theory of effective demand with the theory of aggregate demand (Tcherneva 2011). In the General Theory, Keynes carefully articulated that employment determination depended not on the volume of aggregate demand but on the point of effective demand which was very hard to stabilize and fix at full employment. [...]
Keynes also stressed that both consumption and investment are determined by certain subjective and independent factors, such as the marginal propensity to consume (mpc), the marginal efficiency of capital (mec), and the marginal efficiency of money (mem), that are not under the direct control of government policy. Thus, to bring the economy to its full employment equilibrium, he argued, government action was required, but not in the form of indiscriminate government spending. This is because boosting aggregate demand alone does not change the independent factors quickly enough in recessions to generate strong job growth. [...]
In other words when liquidity preference is high, “people want the moon” (Keynes 1964 [1936]: 231) and it is thus unclear how large an injection through aggregate demand is needed to induce the private sector to stop hoarding net financial assets and start vigorous consumption and investment. But even when economic activity is buoyant, firms find it unprofitable to hire all who are ready, willing,and able to work. The liquidity preference of some private agents dictates that it is more profitable to invest their savings in money form than in production.
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By contrast, in expansions, boosting aggregate demand does not create full employment even when the economy is strong because it will produce an incrementally smaller employment-creation effect the closer the economy gets to full employment. This is because part of the increase in aggregate demand is captured by price increases and not entirely by employment increases. In other words, even when the mpc or mec are very high, the structure of the economy ensures that priming the pump simply produces inflationary pressures in certain overheating sectors where the mpc is high, thus producing more unequal income distribution.
This is because, as Keynes cautioned in the General Theory, when “the increase in demand is directed to products with a relatively low elasticity of employment, a larger proportion of it will go to swell the incomes of entrepreneurs and a smaller proportion to swell the incomes of wage earners and other price cost factors” (Keynes 1964 [1936]: 287). This kind of inflationary and income distribution distortions prompt policymakers to abandon aggregate demand policies and leave the economy below full employment or at, what they have subsequently dubbed, the “natural rate” of unemployment.
[...] It is well-known that Keynes considered attempts to reduce the supply price of output by lowering wages to be counterproductive: because employers will likely be unable to sell the additional output, even if it could be produced at lower cost, they will reduce overall employment in the face of falling demand from falling incomes. Thus, Keynes considered reducing wages to be a“method [that] is socially disastrous in the process and socially unjust in the result” (Keynes1981: 426).
[...] Because expectations, liquidity preference, and portfolio decisions are subjective and beyond the direct control of policy, Keynes did not believe that policy should attempt to try and stabilize them in order to generate full employment. Instead, for Keynes, the only way to fix the point of effective demand at full employment was for the government to target the unemployed directly.There is considerable evidence to suggest that Keynes had in mind a public policy that would make an unconditional job offer in the public sector to all individuals who are willing and able to work but unable to find private employment (Tcherneva 2011). This job offer would be available to the jobless both in recessions and in expansions. It would be a long-term program for attaining and maintaining true full employment.
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Finally, this approach has a direct method for dealing with structural unemployment, which is generally neglected by traditional aggregate demand management policies (indeed, many economists consider structural unemployment to be part of the “natural unemployment” rate). By contrast, the direct job-creation approach would target its employment efforts to regions that may have experienced massive job losses due to restructuring and to individuals who may be deemed unemployable by those private industries that are employing. [...]
Secondly, the goal of this program is to provide decent jobs to its participants. These are jobs that use the available idle resources to meet some unfilled need in the community and which establish a basic but decent wage-benefit package as a standard for the economy as a whole.These jobs do not compete with private sector pay, but simply set a universal floor to wages in the public and private sectors. They do not compete with private sector output either, as they are jobs that provide public goods and services, which the private sector does not supply.
Thirdly, job support to the poor and unemployed is a more effective stabilization method than providing income alone. This is because this policy would maintain and enhance human capital and would simultaneously increase both aggregate demand and aggregate supply. By contrast, income support for the unemployed and the poor is a policy that leaves many willing and able to work individuals in idleness and (often) for long periods of time—it is a policy that wastes human potential.
Fourth, this is a policy that does not rely on boosting aggregate demand to produce full employment. Even in severe recessions, when a great fiscal push is needed, this push must nevertheless be targeted. Today, for example, we need both more and better distributed demand—that is, more spending that is targeted to hiring the unemployed. Once a program of this kind is in place, not more demand, but better distributed demand, will be required to maintain full employment over the long run. Keynes himself argued during the buoyant interwar period that “we are in more need today of a rightly distributed demand than of a greater aggregate demand” (Skidelsky 2001: 21). As the economy expands and public sector workers find employment in the private sector, such a program will shrink and full employment will be consistent with lower public sector demand.
Fifth, the first aim of this program is to provide jobs for all, but once the unemployed have been hired, “there can be only one object in the economy, namely to substitute some other,better, and wiser piece of expenditure” for individual projects (Keynes 1982: 146), i.e., to redesign those public works to address the specific challenges of specific communities as the need arises. Thus, contrary to common myth, Keynes did not advocate the creation of useless project for the sake of job creation but strongly advocated a carefully planned long-term full employment program—a program that was flexible, spontaneous, and experimental enough to accommodate any new unemployment that might quickly develop, but that was also carefully thought out and designed to address the key strategic objectives of a nation, while maintaining full employment over the long run.
Sixth, such a program could be executed through public or semi public bodies. Job creation is done by the community as a whole, including both the private and public sectors. But as Keynes pointed out, it really wasn’t the business of the private sector to guarantee full employment “any more than it is their business to provide for the unemployed by private charity” (Keynes 1982: 151). It was the responsibility of the public sector to figure out how to employ those who were left behind. And employing them could be done in cooperation with the private sector in public-private partnerships that would manage this long-term program. Seventh, this very policy would have the exact same income, cash-flow, and balance sheet effects that traditional aggregate demand management has, except that spending by the program would be targeted directly to households.
It is a genuine bottom-up approach to economic recovery. It is a program that stabilizes the incomes and purchasing power of individuals at the bottom of the income distribution that trickles up and stabilizes the rest of economic activity. Strong and stable demand means strong and stable profit expectations. A program that stabilizes employment and purchasing power is a program that stabilizes cash flows and earnings. Stable incomes through employment also mean stable repayments of debts and greater overall balance sheet stability.
Finally, Keynes firmly objected to using unemployment as an inflation-fighting measure.If inflationary pressures developed near full employment, the public sector should retard new projects where possible and redirect its job creation efforts to particularly distressed areas in the periphery of economic activity. But by no means should it discontinue public works, because that is precisely the time when “private enterprise is stopping from overcapacity and is therefore not in a position to expand” (Keynes 1982: 150). Inflation, for Keynes, was to be addressed through various programs that would either defer payments or encourage thrift, but would not slash jobs.
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The question of useful projects is perhaps the most frequently evoked. One way to answer this question is to note that even in the wealthiest and most prosperous nations one can always find rural or urban regions that are continually plagued by poverty and unemployment. In the case of the United States, there are whole cities and states which have suffered from deindustrialization or natural disasters and have seen little new economic activity to replace long-gone industry (think of Detroit or New Orleans). The revitalization of inner cities and rural areas alone will take years of strong job creation and dedicated work in order to rebuild those communities. The unemployed themselves will deliver that revitalization through a public employment program similar to the New Deal of the 1930s.
But wealthier communities too have unfilled needs and unemployed individuals who can fulfill them. These may include upgrades to infrastructure, the construction of more public spaces, and the provision of public services. In the United States, many public programs and government services have been underfunded and understaffed for decades—at least since Nixon’s devolution of federal government programs. A once-strong public education system is on the brink of collapse, environmental standards have been eroded, the public health system is unfit to meet the needs of the US population—these are the challenges that can be met by fully utilizing labor resources. There are jobs to be done at every level of government and there are unemployed individuals with different levels of skill sand education to do them.
The examples provided here primarily include the regular maintenance and operation of public service jobs for which the government is already responsible. Other such examples would include an ongoing program of reforestation, water purification, and soil erosion improvements, which will provide steady but flexible public sector employment for many semi skilled and unskilled workers over the long run. The wholesale upgrade of US roads, rails,levies, and bridges can also be accomplished with a bold program of direct job creation. At the same time, child- and elderly-care services are wholly inadequate in this country. Homeless shelters are bursting at the seams and a staggering 12 percent of Americans rely on food banks for food assistance (Hunger Report 2010). There are many jobs to be done and there are many unemployed people to do them.But the government can also undertake novel strategic initiatives that can be accomplished expediently only through a big-push policy of public works. The comprehensive weatherization of all public buildings and the complete transformation of current energy production grids to ones relying on alternative energy require the kind of massive infrastructure investment that only government can undertake. There are many more useful jobs one could create if the will to implement such a program was there.
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Tópico: Keynesianismo - O Tópico (Lida 4283 vezes)