Solow och Korpi om orsakerna till hög arbetslöshet efter "de gyllene åren"

"Now I want to speak about the unspeakable: I am almost tempted to suggest that women and young people leave the room. The subject is one that, if it is mentioned at all in polite company, is grouped with witchcraft, drunkenness, and the abuse of children, things that we know are there but that are best denied. It is possible that one source of continued high unemployment in Europe is that the domestic demand for goods and services, and therefore for labor, has been forced to unnecessarily and unhealthily low levels."

Robert M. Solow, “Unemployment in the United States and in Europe: A Contrast
and the Reasons,” CESifo working paper, no. 231, 2000

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Walter Korpi fortsätter "into the unspeakable":

”As naturally as we talk about the weather, we can discuss moral hazards among the unemployed, self-seeking politicians, and public bureaucrats as well as rent-seeking unions and insiders, but to introduce a political class-related element in the analysis of unemployment is likely to be seen as a
faux pas. For good reasons, when doing so, Robert Solow introduced his talk in the following way:

Now I want to speak about the unspeakable: I am almost tempted to suggest that women and young people leave the room. The subject is one that, if it is mentioned at all in polite company, is grouped with witchcraft, drunkenness, and the abuse of children, things that we know are there but that are best denied. It is possible that one source of continued high unemployment in Europe is that the domestic demand for goods and services, and therefore for labor, has been forced to unnecessarily and unhealthily lowle vels.

Solow called into question the widely accepted view that labor market rigidities and distortions can explain the return of mass unemployment in Europe and pointed to important Keynesian elements for this return. By arguing that we have to consider politics and distributive conflicts among major interest groups, among them employers and employees, as factors significant for long-term variations in
unemployment and for differences among countries, this article takes a further step into the unspeakable.”

Walter Korpi, "The Great Trough in Unemployment", Politics and Society, 2002

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En av den ekonomiska nyliberalismens centrala texter är OECD:s Jobs Study från 1994. Oavsett om den nyliberala perioden är över eller inte är det klart att åren efter murens fall var en historisk höjdpunkt i nyliberal ideologi. Och bortom mer teoretiska texter av Friedman, Nozick, Hayek et al och retoriker och politiker som Reagan och Thatcher så finns det också ett och annat mer praktiskt dokument som står som ett monument för nyliberalismen. OECD:s Jobs Study från 1994 är antagligen det främsta av dessa; i en svensk kontext är Lindbeckkommissionens rapport förmodligen #1. (I senare Jobs Studies har OECD mildrat sin nyliberala inställning.)

Walter Korpi citerar i en briljant 64-sidig tidskriftsartikel en ironisk LSE-arbetsmarknadsekonom Alan Manning om 1994 års Jobs Study:

“In what probably is the major official policy analysis of the 1990s, the OECD Jobs Study came to the conclusion that in a number of member countries, improvements of unemployment entitlements have generated major increases in unemployment levels, however, with time lags varying from six to seventeen years. Thus, for example, this report concludes, ‘Entitlements rose in Sweden in 1974 and in Switzerland in 1977 with major rises in unemployment in 1991 in both cases.’ In one of the very rare critical comments by economists on this piece of writing, Manning describes such causal interpretations as ‘absurd. In fact, one could write a very similar paragraph relating performance in the Eurovision Song Contest to unemployment. Sweden won in 1991 (as well as in 1974) and Switzerland in 1988, so this alternative hypothesis would seem better able to explain the rise in unemployment in 1991 in both cases.”

Alan Manning, “Comment on B. Holmlund, ‘Unemployment Insurance in Theory
and Practice,’” Scandinavian Journal of Economics 100, no. 1 (1998): 143-45. Citerad i Walter Korpi, "The Great Trough in Unemployement", Politics and Society, 2002.

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Korpis Kalecki-Rehn-hypotes:

"We can now formulate what can be called the Kalecki-Rehn hypothesis: The high unemployment rates after 1973 partly reflect attempts by business and conservative interests to reshape relations of power and patterns of distribution prevailing during the full employment era into more favorable ones from their point of view. Instead of being the major problem, unemployment thus comes to be seen as a solution to other problems now considered more serious."

Walter Korpi, "The Great Trough in Unemployment: A Long-Term View of Unemployment, Inflation, Strikes, and the Profit/Wage Ratio", Politics and Society nr 3 2002, s 397

- omvändningen i makt visar sig också i en U-formad kurva för profit/löne-ration av BNP under åren 1960-1998: under 1960- och 70-talen minskar profitandelen, och från och med 1980 ökar den igen. (för de flesta OECD-länder som Korpi studerat, inte för USA.)

Korpi går vidare med att kritisera det neoklassiska perspektivet på den ökade arbetslösheten i OECD-länderna sedan ca 1980 för att vara begränsat/inskränkt:

"In this article, I have approached the radical changes in the political economies in the Western countries during the past century with a focus on the role of distributive conflict as reflected in long-term changes in levels of unemployment, a focus that opens up newperspectives on these changes. In the analysis, I have contrasted an economic supply-and-demand framework keyed to market dysfunctioning with a power-sensitive approach focusing on long-term positive sum conflicts among differently endowed actors and interest groups. Often characterized by elegance in mathematical modeling, analyses in the neoclassical supply-and-demand mold have concentrated on the return of mass unemployment after 1973, viewing labor market distortions and rigidities hindering wages to adjust to market-clearing levels as central causes. Although in manyways valuable, these studies must be seen as partial.
Important limitations are that they have come to largely neglect the element of distributive conflict in the relationship between the parties on the labor market, give scant attention to the role of power differences in this relationship, approach the labor market as any other market, and do not consider the longer time perspective.”

(Korpi 2002, s 408f)