Apakah ini akan menjadi kesalahan pertama Obama ?
Apakah ekonom Indonesia (cq Amerikan boy/girls) masih akan ngekor juga ?
apa yang disebut keynesian itu ?
bisa dilihat di
http://video.google.es/videoplay?docid=-8675432343935159747
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http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9931
Barack Obama's Keynesian Mistake
by Ike Brannon and Chris Edwards
Ike Brannon is former Senior Advisor at the U.S. Treasury. Chris Edwards
is Director of Tax Policy Studies at the Cato Institute.
Added to cato.org on January 29, 2009
Federal policymakers are moving ahead with a huge $800-billion stimulus
plan to return the U.S. economy to growth. Will it work? Decades of
macroeconomic research suggest that it won't. Indeed, the revival of
old-fashioned Keynesianism to fight the recession seems to stem more from
political expediency than modern economic theory or historical experience.
The idea of using fiscal policy to boost the economy during a downturn was
championed by John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s. Keynes argued that market
economies can get stuck in a deep rut and that only large infusions of
government stimulus can revive growth. He posited that high unemployment
in the Great Depression was due to "sticky wages" and other market
problems that prevented the return of full-employment equilibrium.
Interestingly, Keynes did not offer any evidence that sticky wages were a
serious problem, and later research indicated that wages actually fell
substantially during the 1930s. Instead, one needs to look at a range of
government interventions to explain why the downturn lasted so long.
Ike Brannon is former Senior Advisor at the U.S. Treasury. Chris Edwards
is Director of Tax Policy Studies at the Cato Institute.
More by Chris Edwards
Despite the flaws in Keynes' analysis, his prescription of fiscal stimulus
to increase aggregate demand during recessions became widely accepted.
Governments came to believe that by manipulating spending or temporary tax
breaks they could scientifically manage the economy and smooth out
business cycles. Many economists thought that there was a trade-off
between inflation and unemployment that could be exploited by skilled
policymakers. If unemployment was rising, the government could stimulate
aggregate demand to reduce it, but with the side-effect of somewhat higher
inflation.
Keynesians thought that fiscal stimulus would work by counteracting the
problem of sticky wages. Workers would be fooled into accepting lower real
wages as price levels rose. Rising nominal wages would spur added work
efforts and increased hiring by businesses. However, later analysis
revealed that the government can't routinely fool private markets, because
people have foresight and they are generally rational. Keynes erred in
ignoring the actual microeconomic behaviour of individuals and businesses.
The dominance of Keynesianism ended in the 1970s. Government spending and
deficits ballooned, but the result was higher inflation, not lower
unemployment. These events, and the rise in monetarism led by Milton
Friedman, ended the belief in an unemployment-inflation trade-off.
Keynesianism was flawed and its prescription of active fiscal intervention
was misguided. Indeed, Friedman's research showed that the Great
Depression was caused by a failure of government monetary policy, not a
failure of private markets, as Keynes had claimed.
Even if a government stimulus were a good idea, policymakers probably
wouldn't implement it the way Keynesian theory would suggest. To fix a
downturn, policymakers would need to recognize the problem early and then
enact a counter-cyclical strategy quickly and efficiently. But U.S.
history reveals that past stimulus actions have been too ill-timed or
ill-suited to have actually helped. Further, many policymakers are driven
by motives at odds with the Keynesian assumption that they will diligently
pursue the public interest.
The end of simplistic Keynesianism in the 1970s created a void in
macroeconomics that was filled by "rational expectations" theory developed
by John Muth, Robert Lucas, Thomas Sargent, Robert Barro and others. By
the 1980s, old-fashioned Keynesian was dead, at least among the new
leaders of macroeconomics.
Rational expectations theorists held that people make reasoned economic
decisions based on their expectations of the future. They cannot be
systematically fooled by the government into taking actions that leave
them worse off. For example, people know that a Keynesian-style stimulus
might lead to higher inflation, and so they will adjust their behaviour
accordingly, which has the effect of nullifying the stimulus plan. A
spending stimulus will put the government further into debt, but it will
not increase real output or income on a sustained basis.
It is difficult to find a macroeconomics textbook these days that
discusses Keynesian fiscal stimulus as a policy tool without serious
flaws, which is why the current $800-billion proposal has taken many
macroeconomists by surprise. John Cochrane of the University of Chicago
recently noted that the idea of fiscal stimulus is "taught only for its
fallacies" in university courses these days. Thomas Sargent of New York
University noted that "the calculations that I have seen supporting the
stimulus package are back-of-the-envelope ones that ignore what we have
learned in the last 60 years of macroeconomic research."
It is true that Keynesian theory has been updated in recent decades, and
it now incorporates ideas from newer schools of thought. But the Obama
administration's claim that its stimulus package will create up to four
million jobs is outlandish. Certainly, many top macroeconomists are
critical of the plan including Harvard University's Greg Mankiw and
Stanford University's John Taylor, who have been leaders in reworking the
Keynesian model. Taylor noted that "the theory that a short-run government
spending stimulus will jump-start the economy is based on old-fashioned,
largely static Keynesian theories."
One result of the rational expectations revolution has been that many
economists have changed their focus from studying how to manipulate
short-run business cycles to researching the causes of long-run growth. It
is on long-run growth that economists can provide the most useful advice
to policymakers, on issues such as tax reform, regulation and trade.
While many economists have turned their attention to long-run growth,
politicians unfortunately have shorter time horizons. They often combine
little knowledge of economics with a large appetite for providing quick
fixes to crises and recessions. Their demand for solutions is often
matched by the supply of dubious proposals by overeager economists. Many
prominent economists pushed for the passage of the $170-billion stimulus
act in early 2008, but that stimulus turned out to be a flop. The lesson
is that politicians should be more skeptical of economists claiming to
know how to solve recessions with various grand schemes. Economists know
much more about the factors that generate long-run growth, and that should
be the main policy focus for government reform efforts.
The current stimulus plan would impose a large debt burden on young
Americans, but would do little, if anything, to help the economy grow.
Indeed, it could have similar effects as New Deal programs, which Milton
Friedman concluded "hampered recovery from the contraction, prolonged and
added to unemployment and set the stage for ever more intrusive and costly
government." A precedent will be created with this plan, and policymakers
need to decide whether they want to continue mortgaging the future or
letting the economy adjust and return to growth by itself, as it has
always done in the past.
Unfortunately, President Obama has proposed no long-run fiscal reforms,
and like his predecessor seems to have a short-run Keynesian outlook. The
tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 were generally sold as temporary stimulus
measures and President Bush hailed the 2008 tax rebates as providing a
"booster shot" for the economy. It is not clear whether Keynesian beliefs
or political factors are the main driver for the $800-billion stimulus
plan. But as Harvard University's Robert Barro noted in disapproval of the
stimulus plan, just because the economy is in crisis, it does "not
invalidate everything we have learned about macroeconomics since 1936."
"free to speak my mind anywhere "
--
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kasih sayang dan manfaat untuk seisi alam, demi kebahagiaan dunia dan akhirat.
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