O keynesianismo militar e cientifico do antikeynesiano Ronald Reagan - Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Thomas J. Sugrue

Today's selection -- from These United States: A Nation in the Making 1890 to Present by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue.
 
Though he famously stated the "government is the problem" in his first inaugural speech, President Ronald Reagan presided over one of the largest escalations of government spending in U.S. history and gave an enormous boost to technology research in the process. Government spending under Reagan gave an indispensable boost to the rise of high tech centers such as Route 128 corridor outside Boston, the Research Triangle in North Caro­lina, and the semiconductor center of Austin, Texas. In fact, by the end of the 1980s, 40 percent of all research and development in the computing industry was federally funded and university computer science programs received 83 percent of their funding from the U.S. government:

"Reagan began by significantly increasing defense spending, one of the pri­orities in his first budget. It rose from 5.3 to 6.4 percent of the gross domes­tic product between 1981 and 1989. The administration channeled funds into constructing expensive new bombers, including research for a high-tech 'stealth' bomber that would evade conventional radar. Reagan also autho­rized the deployment of 572 new intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Western Europe, within easy striking distance of the Soviet Union. ...

"In early 1983 the Reagan administration's relations with the Soviets were icier than ever, and the president escalated the war of words. He con­tinued to assert that the USSR was on the brink of military supremacy, despite mounting evidence that the Soviet regime was weak and unpopular, its military technologies inferior, and its economy in crisis. In a speech before the National Association of Evangelicals in March, Reagan spoke of 'sin and evil in the world' and pointed to the Soviet Union as an 'evil empire.' He denounced the nuclear freeze as 'a very dangerous fraud.'

"That same month, Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), calling for the creation of a space 'shield' of X-rays and lasers to protect the United States from incoming nuclear missiles. ... Budget hawks argued chat SDI would be an expensive boondoggle, costing as much as a trillion dollars. But Reagan did not let it go. The program would survive until the early 1990s, when the Bush administration and Congress dramatically cut funding for the program to balance the federal budget.

"The Clinton admin­istration would dismantle it in 1993. One of the unintended consequences of the arms buildup was that it stimulated a boom in research and development and military technology. Suburban Boston, Silicon Valley, and Los Angeles were flush with federal dollars, pulling them out of the economic slump sooner than most of the rest of the country. Federal spending also launched a high-tech economy. Universities introduced student-accessible computer centers in the early 1980s, the personal computer went from a novelty item to a mass-produced necessity in less than ten years, and microchips transformed everyday elec­tronics. The number of jobs for electrical engineers and computer scien­tists skyrocketed. By the early 1990s, local area networks and the Internet began connecting computers into what would be later named the World Wide Web.

"The rise and success of American high-tech industries did not result from tax cuts and deregulation. In fact, no American industries relied more on government spending than did computing, electrical engineering, and communications equipment. ... Between 1982 and 1988, federal research and develop­ment spending nearly doubled. By the decade's end, 40 percent of all research and development in the computing industry was federally funded; nearly half of communications technology research -- including the systems that were the basis of the Internet -- came from the federal government. Government programs also bankrolled university laboratories, computer science, and electrical engineering. In 1985 alone, computer science pro­grams received 83 percent of their funds from the federal government."

These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present
Author: Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Copyright 2015 by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue
Pages 556-558

Teoria Geral de Keynes faz 80 anos - Robert Skidelsky (e minha avaliacao: PRA)

Skidelsky é o biógrafo de Keynes e autor de muitas outras obras nessa área, inclusive de um dos livros que eu reputo a melhor explicação sobre o fracasso do socialismo no século: The Road From Serfdom, uma evidente alusão ao The Road to Serfdom de Hayek.
Não concordo com ele, por uma razão muito simples: Keynes não fez uma "teoria geral", e sim uma teoria particular ao momento de crise vivido pelas economias de mercado devido à excessiva intervenção dos governos na economia, inclusive e principalmente no que se refere à criação de inflação e de desemprego, pela imposição do monopólio sobre as moedas e de muitas regras afetando os mercados laborais (políticos sempre querem fazer bondades com os recursos alheios).
Não partilho da ideia de que mercados produzem desequilíbrios e que eles não são capazes de corrigir a si próprios. Mercados SEMPRE se corrigem a si próprios, mesmo em detrimento dos agentes que interviram com pouca informação, com propósitos especulativos, ou "corretivos", como pretendem os governos. Os mercados simplesmente refletem o comportamento de pessoas, e as bolhas são SEMPRE corrigidas por uma destruição de riqueza artificial, ainda que alguns venham a perder ativos nesse processo.
A pretensão de pretender corrigir "desequilíbrios", ou "falhas de mercado" é justamente o fator que impede os mercados de se autocorrigirem.
O keynesianismo é uma pretensão fatal, no sentido hayekiano da palavra, embora combine com a arrogância dos "engenheiros sociais", que estão sempre querendo construir um "mundo melhor", como aprendizes de feiticeiro. Costuma dar errado.
Em qualquer hipótese, cabe ler Skidelsky.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Keynes’s General Theory At 80

by Robert Skidelsky on 26 February 2016 @RSkidelsky

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Project Syndicate

Robert Skidelsky lecturing on Keynes (photo: Screenshot YouTube)

In 1935, John Maynard Keynes wrote to George Bernard Shaw: “I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory which will largely revolutionize – not, I suppose, at once but in the course of the next ten years – the way the world thinks about its economic problems.” And, indeed, Keynes’s magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in February 1936, transformed economics and economic policymaking. Eighty years later, does Keynes’s theory still hold up?

Two elements of Keynes’s legacy seem secure. First, Keynes invented macroeconomics – the theory of output as a whole. He called his theory “general” to distinguish it from the pre-Keynesian theory, which assumed a unique level of output – full employment.

In showing how economics could remain stuck in an “underemployment” equilibrium, Keynes challenged the central idea of the orthodox economics of his day: that markets for all commodities, including labor, are simultaneously cleared by prices. And his challenge implied a new dimension to policymaking: Governments may need to run deficits to maintain full employment.

The aggregate equations that underpin Keynes’s “general theory” still populate economics textbooks and shape macroeconomic policy. Even those who insist that market economies gravitate toward full employment are forced to argue their case within the framework that Keynes created. Central bankers adjust interest rates to secure a balance between total demand and supply, because, thanks to Keynes, it is known that equilibrium might not occur automatically.

Keynes’s second major legacy is the notion that governments can and should prevent depressions. Widespread acceptance of this view can be seen in the difference between the strong policy response to the collapse of 2008-2009 and the passive reaction to the Great Depression of 1929-1932. As the Nobel laureate Robert Lucas, an opponent of Keynes, admitted in 2008: “I guess everyone is a Keynesian in a foxhole.”

Having said this, Keynes’s theory of “underemployment” equilibrium is no longer accepted by most economists and policymakers. The global financial crisis of 2008 bears this out. The collapse discredited the more extreme version of the optimally self-adjusting economy; but it did not restore the prestige of the Keynesian approach.

To be sure, Keynesian measures halted the global economy’s downward slide. But they also saddled governments with large deficits, which soon came to be viewed as an obstacle to recovery – the opposite of what Keynes taught. With unemployment still high, governments returned to pre-Keynesian orthodoxy, cutting spending to reduce their deficits – and undercutting economic recovery in the process.

There are three main reasons for this regression. First, the belief in the labor-market-clearing power of prices in a capitalist economy was never wholly overturned. So most economists came to view persistent unemployment as an extraordinary circumstance that arises only when things go terribly wrong, certainly not the normal state of market economies. The rejection of Keynes’ notion of radical uncertainty lay at the heart of this reversion to pre-Keynesian thinking.

Second, post-war Keynesian “demand-management” policies, credited with having produced the long post-1945 boom, ran into inflationary trouble at the end of the 1960s. Alert to a worsening tradeoff between inflation and unemployment, Keynesian policymakers tried to sustain the boom through incomes policy – controlling wage costs by concluding national agreements with trade unions.

Income policy was tried in many countries from the 1960s to the end of the 1970s. At best, there were temporary successes, but the policies always broke down. Milton Friedman provided a reason that jibed with growing disenchantment with wage and price controls, and that reasserted the pre-Keynesian view of how market economies work. Inflation, Friedman said, resulted from attempts by Keynesian governments to force down unemployment below its “natural” rate. The key to regaining stable prices was to abandon the full-employment commitment, emasculate the trade unions, and deregulate the financial system.

And so the old orthodoxy was reborn. The full-employment target was replaced by an inflation target, and unemployment was left to find its “natural” rate, whatever that was. It was with this defective navigational equipment that politicians sailed full steam ahead into the icebergs of 2008.

The final reason for Keynesianism’s fall from grace was the rightward ideological shift that began with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and US President Ronald Reagan. The shift was due less to rejection of Keynesian policy than to hostility toward the enlarged state that emerged after World War II. Keynesian fiscal policy was caught in the crossfire, with many on the right condemning it as a manifestation of “excessive” government intervention in the economy.

Two final reflections suggest a renewed, if more modest, role for Keynesian economics. An even bigger shock to the pre-2008 orthodoxy than the collapse itself was the revelation of the corrupt power of the financial system and the extent to which post-crash governments had allowed their policies to be scripted by the bankers. To control financial markets in the interests of full employment and social justice lies squarely in the Keynesian tradition.

Second, for new generations of students, Keynes’s relevance may lie less in his specific remedies for unemployment than in his criticism of his profession for modeling on the basis of unreal assumptions. Students of economics eager to escape from the skeletal world of optimizing agents into one of fully-rounded humans, set in their histories, cultures, and institutions will find Keynes’s economics inherently sympathetic. That is why I expect Keynes to be a living presence 20 years from now, on the centenary of the General Theory, and well beyond.

© Project Syndicate