recensione di Antonio Polito al nuovo libro di Franco Debenedetti

Esce il saggio «Scegliere i vincitori, salvare i perdenti» (Marsilio). Teoria, prassi e sperperi dello Stato imprenditore in un’analisi critica di Franco Debenedetti

«Anche nelle maggiori ristrettezze, i denari del pubblico si trovano sempre, per impiegarli a sproposito». Alessandro Manzoni conosceva così bene il nostro carattere nazionale (tendiamo facilmente a dimenticare che il denaro pubblico è nostro), da meritarsi la citazione d’apertura nel nuovo libro di Franco Debenedetti, vera e propria biografia di un’idea (anzi, di «un’insana idea», come è definita nel sottotitolo). L’idea è quella della «politica industriale», e cioè di una «politica in cui l’attività industriale è svolta più o meno direttamente dal potere pubblico», che ha percorso la storia d’Italia da Giolitti a Renzi, e che ancora oggi resta popolare sia nel senso comune di molti italiani sia nella prassi di tanti politici. La convinzione insomma che tocchi allo Stato Scegliere i vincitori, salvare i perdenti della competizione economica (come nel titolo del volume in libreria da oggi, m per Marsilio).

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Scegliere i vincitori, salvare i perdenti.
L’insana idea della politica industriale
di Franco Debenedetti
2016, Marsilio

Protezionismo, autarchia, keynesismo, programmazione, strategie, italianità: tutte variazioni su uno stesso tema, l’idea che lo Stato, per governare l’economia, debba intervenire e sappia farlo imboccando le strade giuste.
È la politica industriale: lo Stato si sostituisce al mercato e sceglie i vincitori della gara concorrenziale. Salvo poi, quando l’«insana idea» non ha successo, dover correre ai ripari salvando i perdenti.

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Il libro del neo ministro

“La crisi greca non è un caso speciale, non deriva dall’incapacità di fare riforme strutturali: rappresenta la crisi del progetto neoliberista”. Apre così il “Crogiuolo della Resistenza”, scritto, insieme a Christos Laskos, da Euclide Tsakalokis, il ministro che ha sostituito Varoufakis. Non è un instant book, è del 2012. Non è un pamphlet, è l’analisi di economisti colti ricca di tabelle e grafici, è il programma di marxisti rigorosi convinti dell’inevitabile fine della “sintesi neoliberista” su cui è costruita l’Europa. Mostra come dietro negoziazioni erratiche e comportamenti stravaganti, ci sia, preparata da anni, una strategia economica che va oltre il momento, propositi politici che vanno aldilà della Grecia.

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Presentazione del libro
Popolari addio?
Il futuro dopo l’abolizione del voto capitario.
di Franco Debenedetti e Gianfranco Fabi
2015, Guerini e Associati

20 Maggio 2015 – ore 18.00
Centro Studi Americani e Formiche – Via M. Caetani 31 – Roma

Ne parlano con gli autori:
Michele Arnese – Direttore formiche.net
Lodovico Festa – Giornalista e direttore della collana Si Si No No

Modera:
Paolo Messa

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by Robert Rosenkranz

The economist’s book caused a sensation last year, but now he says the redistributionists drew the wrong conclusions.

‘Capital in the 21st Century,” a dense economic tome written by French economist Thomas Piketty, became a publishing sensation last spring when Harvard University Press released its English translation. The book quickly climbed to the top of best-seller lists, and more than 1.5 million copies are now in circulation in several languages.

The book’s central proposition, that inequality in capitalist societies will inevitably grow, can be summed up with a simple equation: r>g. That is, the return on capital (r) outpaces the growth rate of the economy (g) over time, leading inexorably to the dominance of inherited wealth. Progressives such as Princeton economist Paul Krugman seized on Mr. Piketty’s thesis to justify policies they have long wanted—namely, very high taxes on the wealthy.

Now in an extraordinary about-face, Mr. Piketty has backtracked, undermining the policy prescriptions many have based on his conclusions. In “About Capital in the 21st Century,” slated for May publication in the American Economic Review but already available online, Mr. Piketty writes that far too much has been read into his thesis.

Though his formula helps explain extreme and persistent wealth inequality before World War I, Mr. Piketty maintains, it doesn’t say much about the past 100 years. “I do not view r>g as the only or even the primary tool for considering changes in income and wealth in the 20th century,” he writes, “or for forecasting the path of inequality in the 21st century.”

Instead, Mr. Piketty argues in his new paper that political shocks, institutional changes and economic development played a major role in inequality in the past and will likely do so in the future.

When he narrows his focus to what he calls “labor income inequality”—the difference in compensation between front-line workers and CEOs—Mr. Piketty consigns his famous formula to irrelevance. “In addition, I certainly do not believe that r>g is a useful tool for the discussion of rising inequality of labor income: other mechanisms and policies are much more relevant here, e.g. supply and demand of skills and education.” He correctly distinguishes between income and wealth, and he takes a long historic perspective: “Wealth inequality is currently much less extreme than a century ago.”

All of this takes the wind out of enraptured progressives’ interpretation of Mr. Piketty’s book, which embraced the r>g formulation as relevant to debates playing out in Congress. Writing in the New York Review of Books last May, for example, Mr. Krugman lauded the book as a “magnificent, sweeping meditation on inequality.” He wrote that Mr. Piketty has proven that “we haven’t just gone back to nineteenth-century levels of income inequality, we’re also on a path back to ‘patrimonial capitalism,’ in which the commanding heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties.”

The r>g formulation always struck me as unconvincing. First, Mr. Piketty’s definition of r as including “profits, dividends, interest, rents, and other income from capital” conflates returns on real business activity (profits) with returns on financial assets (dividends and interest).

Second, it ignores the basic rule of economics that when supply of capital increases faster than demand, the yield on capital falls. For instance, since the great recession, the money supply has grown far more rapidly than the real economy, driving down interest rates. Returns on government bonds, the least risky asset, are now close to zero before inflation and negative 1% to 2% after inflation. In today’s low-return environment, with the headwinds of income and estate taxes, it becomes a Herculean task to build and transmit intergenerational wealth.

Many mainstream economists had reservations about Mr. Piketty’s views even before he began walking them back. Consider the working paper issued by the National Bureau of Economic Research in December. Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, respectively, find Mr. Piketty’s theory too simplistic. “We argue that general economic laws are unhelpful as a guide to understand the past or predict the future,” the paper’s abstract reads, “because they ignore the central role of political and economic institutions, as well as the endogenous evolution of technology, in shaping the distribution of resources in society.”

The Initiative on Global Markets at the University of Chicago asked economists in October whether they agreed or disagreed with the following statement: “The most powerful force pushing towards greater wealth inequality in the U.S. since the 1970s is the gap between the after-tax return on capital and the economic growth rate.” Of 36 economists who responded, only one agreed.

Other critics have questioned the trove of statistical data Mr. Piketty assembled to chart trends in income and wealth in the U.S., U.K., France and Sweden over the past century. Are such diverse data comparable, and have the adjustments that Mr. Piketty introduced to make them comparable distorted the final picture?

After an extensive review, Chris Giles, the economics editor of the Financial Times, concluded in May last year that “Two of Capital in the 21st Century’s central findings—that wealth inequality has begun to rise over the past 30 years and that the U.S. obviously has a more unequal distribution of wealth than Europe—no longer seem to hold.”

Mr. Piketty is willing to stand up and say that the material in his book does not support all the uses to which it has been put, that “Capital in the 21st Century” is primarily a work of history. That is certainly admirable. Now it is time for those who cry that we are heading into a new gilded age to follow his lead.

Recensione di
The end of normal
James Galbraith
Simon & Schuster, pagg. 304

Siamo vissuti nella cultura della crescita: desiderabile, dovuta e perpetua, normale, appunto. Ruolo dei governi è promuoverla, moderando i cicli economici: le recessioni saranno seguite da riprese, l’economia ritornerà al trend di lungo periodo, l’output potenziale. Non era così per gli economisti dell’epoca vittoriana: per loro, scrive James Galbraith, «il fine ultimo non era la crescita economica ma l’investimento o l’accumulazione di capitale».

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