By Jared Bernstein, The Atlantic
How a stubborn misreading of classical economists — combined with a hyper-partisan Republican Party — haunts the U.S. economy
REUTERS/CHRIS KEANE
The story of where we are is a story of the destructive ideas that guided us here. Bad ideas about how capitalism works–ideas that fail to describe how economies actually function–have combined with conservative politics to promote policies that stifle growth, redistribute what growth there is upward, skew our fiscal outlook, and handcuff our policy process.
Adam Smith and J.S. Mill never held this view. Of course, it’s true that Smith’s brilliant insight was that unfettered price signals coordinate individuals’ actions in markets in ways that deliver optimal outcomes. But he and later thinkers never let that distract them from the fact that, left to their own devices, markets would underinvest in public goods, pollute the environment, and generate unacceptably high levels of inequality and poverty. While there are contemporary macroeconomists that still teach their students that market bubbles are impossible, these early thinkers were intimately familiar with credit bubbles and did not for a second believe financial markets could self-regulate. (John Cassidy’s book, When Markets Fail, is essential reading on these points.)
We are like travelers who have followed a road map to a destination that promised bliss but instead delivered stagnation and joblessness to many and political dysfunction to all. The economic geography behind that roadmap is a misreading of the original mapmakers–the founders of free markets–which eventually morphed into the deeply damaging belief that markets never fail and always self-correct; and therefore, government actions can only distort otherwise self-correcting markets.
Keep reading here: The Tyranny of Zombie Economics in America – Jared Bernstein – Business – The Atlantic.
