Continuando a série "Sobre os economistas e a crise", mais alguns apontamentos. A questão da responsabilidade dos economistas quanto a ter sido possível prevenir a crise, ou talvez, de modo mais preciso, ter sido possível prevê-la, continua a ser discutida, felizmente, e bem, por economistas, e bem, também, por alguns (poucos) não economistas - é o caso do primeiro articulista citado abaixo.
"A more focused criticism would, in my opinion, be more effective. The Queen was asking about the failure to foresee the financial collapse of last September, rather than about the health of modern economics in the large.
That failure was I think due in significant part to a concept of rationality that exaggerates the amount of information that people have about the future, even experts, and to a disregard of economic factors that don't lend themselves to expression in mathematical models, or are intractable to formal analysis. The efficient markets theory, when understood not as teaching merely that markets are hard to beat even for experts and therefore passive management of a diversified portfolio of assets is likely to outperform a strategy of picking underpriced stocks or other securities to buy and overpriced ones to sell, but as demonstrating that asset prices are always an adequate gauge of value--that there are not asset "bubbles"--blinded most economists to the housing bubble of the early 2000s and the stock market bubble that expanded with it.
In modeling the business cycle, economists not only ignored, because difficult to accommodate in their mathematical models, vital institutional detail (such as the rise of the "shadow banking industry," which is what mainly collapsed last September)--often indeed ignoring money itself, on the ground that it doesn't really affect the "real" (that is, the nonfinancial) economy.
They also ignored key concepts in Keynes's analysis of the business cycle, such as hoarding and uncertainty and business confidence ("animal spirits") and worker resistance to nominal (as distinct from real) wage reductions in depressions.
Lessons of economic history were ignored, too, leading to a belief that there would never be another depression, let alone a collapse of the banking industry. Even when the collapse occurred, in September, many macroeconomists denied that it would lead to anything worse than a mild recession; the measures that the government has taken to recover from what has turned into a depression owe little to post-Keynesian economic thinking; and the economists cannot agree on what further, if anything, should be done, and which of the government's recovery measures has worked or will work."
"The widely believed proposition that this financial crisis was “a tsunami that no-one saw coming”, and that could not have been predicted, has been given the lie to by an excellent survey of economic models by Dirk Bezemer, a Professor of Economics at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands [...]
How come? Because standard “neoclassical” economic models assume that the financial system is like lubricating oil in an engine—it enables the “real economy” to work smoothly, but has no driving effect—and that the real economy is a miracle machine that always returns to a state of steady growth, and never generates any pollution—like a car engine that, once you take your foot off the accelerator or brake, always returns to a steady 3,000 revs per minute, and simply pumps pure water into the atmosphere.
The common elements in the models developed by the Gang of Eleven that Bezemer identified are that they see finance as more akin to petrol than oil—without it, your “real economy” engine revs not at 3,000 rpm, but zero—which can contain large doses of impurities as well as hydrocarbons. The engine itself is seen as a rather more typical gas-guzzler that pumps not merely water and carbon dioxide, but sometimes unhealthy amounts of carbon monoxide as well"
"Do the US and Europe risk repeating Japan’s lost decade? This column warns that if the US or European financial clean-ups falter, they will be vulnerable to recurring financial crises. It argues that macroeconomic models should not treat finance as an innocuous veil and calls for a new approach that places financial intermediaries at the centre of its models."
"After feeling like I overstated the case, I invited Barkley Rosser (or anyone else) to respond to my claim that "heterodox economists did not do a better job of "calling" the recent crashes and crises than did mainstream or conventional economists." I don't think the list below of people who called the crisis is particularly well defined, e.g. how do you leave off people like Raghuram Rajan, should Krugman be on it, and so forth, and the definition of what it means to have called it can be questioned. But I was the one who first invoked the list (I got it from Steven Keen's site), and I agree that the list as formulated is slanted toward non-conventional economists. I also agree with Barkley's response to my invitation to respond: [...]"
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