Call it the authoritarian advantage.
The notion gets tossed around all the time in macroeconomic discussions. In difficult economic times, non-democratic countries have an advantage. They can make fast decisions by fiat, steering their economies as they see fit. In democracies, of course, things are messier and slower.
Of course, no one here is advocating dictatorship, economic or otherwise. The freer the economy and the citizen the better. But it is worth noting in these troubling times, America is following an expected pattern in which so-called economic and business elites believe in certain paths to economic improvement and growing numbers of voting citizens think otherwise.
Call it a populist backlash.
Example one is the bank bailout. Lots of people now call TARP (Troubled Asset Relief Program) some variant on the best program that also managed to be the most hated. Many people understand that letting the financial system collapse in 2008-09 would have meant greater disaster for everyone, but having voted for bank bailouts is now no badge of honor for politicians seeking re-election.
Trade is another one. It wasn’t long ago there was a pretty broad coalition in the U.S. that believed the freer the trade, the better. The U.S. would benefit because from agriculture to banking services to manufacturing equipment, we had some useful things to sell the world.
Sure, many unions and other advocates of manufacturing workers, whose jobs could easily be shipped abroad, stood long opposed to freer trade, but they now have lots of company. It’s understandable that when jobs get scarce people want to build walls around the jobs that remain, but such policies, especially if widely adopted by nations, will hurt everyone.
The U.S. Federal Reserve is expected to embark on another round of quantitative easing to help spur the stuck-in-the-mud economy. The essential increased printing of money to buy Treasury securities will hurt the value of the dollar, but the Fed believes a stronger level of inflation and even higher inflation expectations are needed to get people and businesses spending again, eventually increasing employment and keeping the scary deflation monster at bay.
But the notion of higher inflation, especially engineered by a central bank, likely won’t sit well with many people. In a recent issue of The New Yorker magazine, James Surowiecki cited a 1996 study by the well-known Yale economist, Robert Shiller, that showed “sizable majorities” of people globally are dead set against inflation, even in a trade-off for higher employment.
That might well be a reasonable stance, because once ignited inflation and its expectations are tough to tame. Also, the Treasury bond buying plans bythe Fed might simply not work. At least Fed officials don’t have to worry about getting re-elected.
People in Congress do, and that’s why it’s a pretty sure bet there won’t be another big round of fiscal stimulus coming, absent an economic disaster. Too much worry about the giant federal deficits already created.
Even though, abstractly at least, the case could be made the Fed’s efforts would have a better chance of success if there was a stimulative assist from fiscal policy, leaving the essential and extraordinarily diffiicult deficit reduction issue for another day.
