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Economics

民粹主义的悖论

May 31, 2019 Simon Johnson

华盛顿特区一战胜民粹主义需要正视一个基本现实:糟糕的经济政策不再必然导致政府失去权力。事实上，不负责任的民粹主义者现在完全有可能通过做出更疯狂、更不可能实现的承诺，并造成更大的经济损失，以增加他们再次当选的机会。

我们是如何走到这一步的？我们能够采取什么措施尽快摆脱它？

近几十年来，包括自动化、贸易和金融危机等强大的结构型经济因素，让许多人感到自己受制于左右两派控制经济的人士的忽视或不公正对待。然而，当反建制的民粹主义者上台后，他们会推行一系列政策，带来不确定性，并抑制投资。投资减少意味着经济增长放缓，良好就业机会的减少。

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Simon Johnson

Writing for PS since 2007
159 Commentaries

Simon Johnson, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, is a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and a co-chair of the COVID-19 Policy Alliance. He is the co-author (with Jonathan Gruber) of Jump-Starting America: How Breakthrough Science Can Revive Economic Growth and the American Dream and the co-author (with James Kwak) of 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and The Next Financial Meltdown.

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Brexit Baby Jun 4, 2019

What professional thinkers don't grasp is that populism isn't about the results. It's about the principle. The "how" matters; who is in control matters. The boiler plate policies designed to appease populists by producing results miss the point. On some level, everyone knows the super-wealthy are corrupt and take advantage of their wealth to buttress their relative position at the expense of regular people. Pragmatic arguments about economic measures don't mean anything in the face of injustice.

No political peace is possible while the most salient and undeniable category of the wealthy, billionaires, run free, re-directing politicians to meet spending needs by focusing them on increasing taxes on one-, ten-, hundred-thousandaires. and low millionaires. The victims of billionaire scheming are mostly retirees from the middle class who managed to scrounge enough money over 40 years to live comfortably a little while before they die. Until a wealth tax is installed on billionaires - a significant tax, one that hurts - and people see that it is being enforced, the agitation will only increase.
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Gary Borg Jun 3, 2019

By any measure, we haven't had free trade with China. China has forced the transfer of US technologies -- most of them developed with taxpayer dollars -- to their companies. And we've offshored jobs that could have remained in the US to China. Also, tariffs were a necessary element in building US industry beginning in the 19th century. Read the history.
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Robert Wolff Jun 2, 2019

Nice tutorial, much like what is coming out all over the American Press these days. It is descriptive and comes to the correct conclusion, that liberal democracy is not only on the defensive, but losing politically worldwide.

But it fails, like most similar articles, to predict what replaces liberal democracy in its aftermath.
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E Aghdasi May 31, 2019

"When you've got a big hammer, everything looks like a nail."

So it is with economists examining the issue of populism and modern challenges to liberal democracy. Even the good ones -- and I consider Simon Johnson one of the great ones -- seem to fall into this trap.

The idea of concentrating research and technology in under-served, rural parts of America sounds sensible to me. But I don't see the evidence that it will help turn the residents of those parts of the country in a less populist direction. (I'm not saying it won't have that effect, I'm just saying it's far from clear... Thought maybe I need to read your book.) The passage of the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") in the US should serve as a warning. Millions more got on health insurance as a result -- including in rural areas or those especially hurt by the secular decline in manufacturing -- and yet we still ended up with a President intent on repealing that particular law. In essence, you delivered to voters something that they said they wanted and cared about (healthcare) and it didn't matter.

The point is, the origins of the populist resurgence may have very little to do with economics at all, and may have more to do with (just spitballing here) cultural changes, immigration, the rise of social media, and the liberalization of political speech rules (which allows money to be spent more freely towards manipulating the political narrative). The solution to the problem, thus, might have to be something that has equally little to do with economic outcomes or policy.
- Robert Wolff Jun 2, 2019
  
  I perceive you are trying to propose a more reasonable system, with less conflict and more agreeable conclusions regarding who should pay, and who should be payed for.
  
  Populism, in Southwest Asia (SWA), North Africa (Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Mali, and other African Nations) supports the economic advancement of the "Middle Class" in those nations, just as it does in America.
  
  If the "Average Economist" cannot succeed in in Africa, it cannot succeed in America, Europe, China or Russia.
  
  Those who want jobs that gain them economic advantage in all of the above, are in a common bund that deserve to rise together, in all nationalistic cultures.
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民粹主义的悖论

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