Avhandling om privatiseringar i sjukvården

ABSTRACT

"This dissertation deals with the following question: In the past decades some of the countries most dedicated to the universal public welfare state have privatised many of their welfare service provisions. Why is this so? The dissertation takes a close look at privatisation policies in health care in Denmark, Sweden and England in order to figure out how and why the private health care sector has expanded rapidly in recent years. Health care services in Denmark, Sweden and England provide good examples of welfare state service privatisation because these three countries have spent decades building up universal public health care systems tnhat offer free and equal access to all citizens – and these programmes are very popular.
In this dissertation I find that the most common explanations for welfare state reform fail to explain these changes: Privatisation policies are not the result of partisan politics, instead they are supported by Social Democratic / Labour parties and in some cases the unions as well. Privatisation is not the result of pressures for fiscal retrenchment; in fact, public health care funding has increased in all three countries over the past decade. Neither is privatisation the straight forward result of new right wing ideas. Certainly, new ideas play a role in this change, but it is difficult to sustain the argument that ideas alone have been the cause of privatisation in these three health care systems. Finally, it has been debated whether privatisation is the result of pressure from EU legislation. This explanation does not hold either for the basic reason of timing. The policies leading to privatisation in Denmark, England and Sweden were all implemented before the European debate over health care services started.
Instead, I suggest that privatisation in health care in Denmark, Sweden and England
can best be understood as the product of policy makers puzzling over important policy problems (Heclo, 1972). I call this an adaptive process. In this analysis I show that privatisation is the result of several interconnected attempts to adapt health care systems to a changing context. By taking a long historical view of the changes in health care systems, it becomes evident that the changes towards privatisation do not occur overnight or as a result of a ‘punctuated equilibrium’. Rather, the increasing privatisation in health care is the accumulated effect of several small step policy changes, which, over time, result in rising levels of privatisation.
Some scholars have suggested that neo-liberal policies, such as privatisation of
service provision, will ultimately lead to the end of the welfare state. In this study, I come to a different conclusion. Rather than undermine the welfare state, privatisation in health care may help the welfare state survive. Privatisation can be seen as a way of adapting welfare state services to a changing political context."

Jeppe Olesen, "Welfare State Adaptation Privatisation of Health Care in Denmark, England and Sweden", avhandling, European University Institute, 2010 (abstract pdf)

Den aggressiva tautologin

Barthes

"Tautologin är alltid aggressiv."
Roland Barthes, Mytologier (1957)

Så här i valanalys- och S-kris-tider kommer jag osökt att tänka på ett gammalt uttalande av Roland Barthes.

Flash crash-artiklar

handelsmönster från Nanex

Kudos till Ordfront Magasin som i förra numret har en lång artikel av ekonomisk-historikern Daniel Berg om "the flash crash" och datoriseringen av börshandeln.

Daniel Berg, "Blixtkraschens tidsålder", Ordfront Magasin nr 5 2010. Berg inleder:

"Klockan är 14:45 på Wall Street den 6 maj 2010. Plötsligt faller New York- och Nasdaqbörserna med över nio procent på några minuter. Det ojämförligt största och snabbaste börsfallet någonsin i historien. 500 miljarder dollar går förlorade – mer än Sveriges samlade BNP. Men investerarna och mäklarna på Wall Street hinner inte kasta sig ut genom fönstren. Några minuter senare vänder kurvorna uppåt igen och större delen av jättefallet återhämtas.
Ingen vet ännu vad som orsakade »The Flash Crash«, blixtkraschen, trots en statlig amerikansk utredning. Men en sak vet vi: ingen människa hann blanda sig i. Kraschen skapades av de datorer som idag dominerar världens börshandel."

Nu har också Fokus uppmärksammat samma händelse:

Linda Eriksson, "Handeln som gungar vaggan", Fokus 19 oktober 2010. Eriksson:

"Börsen har genomgått en teknisk revolution i det tysta. Handel utförd av datorprogram styrda av avancerade algoritmer har ökat i rasande takt. I USA handlar det i dag om 50–60 procent av marknaden, i Sverige nästan 40 procent. Den dagliga genomsnittliga aktieomsättningen på New York-börsen ökade med 181 procent mellan 2005 och 2009, medan den tid som krävs för att handla sjönk till 650 mikrosekunder. Banker, fonder och andra finansiella institutioner tävlar mot varandra med sina respektive system. Börsens kohandlande på ett fysiskt marknadsgolv har ersatts av system som har gjort det möjligt att handla med ljusets hastighet. Och i »The Flash Crashs« bakvatten var det främst till dem misstankarna gick.

Fenomenet kallas för algohandel eller automatisk handel. Ytterligare ett steg är den högfrekventa handeln där tidsaspekten är viktig – otroligt många ordrar läggs på väldigt kort tid. Gemensamt är att människan bestämmer tid, pris och volym. Sedan tar algoritmen över och utför köp och försäljningar. Till grund för »beslutet« om en affär ligger insamling av data bland annat kring den mänskliga aktiviteten på börsen, affärsnyheter och bilddata. Till exempel skriver affärssajter numera sina nyhetsflashar med en på förhand bestämd struktur för att algoritmerna ska kunna läsa av dem.

En av de grundläggande anledningarna till »börsrobotarnas« framfart är den ökade hastigheten. Ofta handlar det om att hitta och utnyttja felprissättningar och tillfälliga avvikelser – så kallad arbitrage. När en obalans i marknaden uppstår måste man lägga bäst bud, sedan handlar det om att vara snabbast på att lägga budet. Ofta ligger vinsten endast på några ören, men det kompenseras av volymen – tusentals ordrar läggs eller dras tillbaka varje sekund. I dag är man nere på nanosekunder."

I december förra året länkade jag till en SvD-artikel om just datoriserad börshandel.

Tett om regleringar och slutsatser av "flash crash"
"Would it be possible to impose a speed limit on high-frequency trading?" Flash Crash den 6 maj inget unikum utan ett tecken på ett större fenomen. Olika förslag om hur man kan gynna mer långsiktiga investeringar på de extremt kortsiktiga investeringarnas/spekulationernas bekostnad. Se också Andrew Haldane, "Patience and finance" (pdf), Bank of England paper 9 september
Gillian Tett, "Real issue in high-frequency trading has been dodged", FT 10 sept 2010 s 24

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UPPDATERING 19 februari 2011
Efter "the flash crash" tillsattes en offentlig utredning med åtta akademiker och reglerare som utredare. Nu har deras rapport kommit. De föreslår bl a att high frequency traders, som står för 70 procent av marknadsvolymen, ska betala högre avgifter för snabb handel. De föreslår också regleringar av bankers användande av skiften av handel mellan bankers kunder. Förslagen är överlämnade till Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) och Commodity Futures Trading Commission för beslut. SEC införde också direkt efter flash crash nya regleringar på prov, inklusive "circuit breakers" som tillfälligt ska stoppa handel i individuella aktier i vissa lägen. Utredningen föreslår att dessa regler ska permanentas.
Telis Demos, "Flash crash report proposes extra 'provocative' reforms", FT 19-20 februari 2011
Telis Demos, "Quick View: Blown away by the flash crash report", FT 21 februari

UPPDATERING 18 mars 2011
FT rapporterade i förra veckan att det skett våldsamma, snabba prisfluktuationer på varor som kakao och råsocker i början av mars, vilket lett till att folk skyller på high-frequency trading companies för den ökade volatiliteten - just som i fallet med the flash crash.
Gregory Meyer, "High-speed commodities traders under crash scrutiny", FT 10 mars 2011

Uppdatering 10 oktober 2011
Donald MacKenzie, "How to Make Money in Microseconds", LRB 19 maj 2011

The Wall Street - vita huset-nexus: exemplet Summers

"Consider: As a rising economist at Harvard and at the World Bank, Summers argued for privatization and deregulation in many domains, including finance. Later, as deputy secretary of the treasury and then treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, he implemented those policies. Summers oversaw passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed Glass-Steagall, permitted the previously illegal merger that created Citigroup, and allowed further consolidation in the financial sector. He also successfully fought attempts by Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the Clinton administration, to regulate the financial derivatives that would cause so much damage in the housing bubble and the 2008 economic crisis. He then oversaw passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which banned all regulation of derivatives, including exempting them from state antigambling laws.

After Summers left the Clinton administration, his candidacy for president of Harvard was championed by his mentor Robert Rubin, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, who was his boss and predecessor as treasury secretary. Rubin, after leaving the Treasury Department—where he championed the law that made Citigroup's creation legal—became both vice chairman of Citigroup and a powerful member of Harvard's governing board.

Over the past decade, Summers continued to advocate financial deregulation, both as president of Harvard and as a University Professor after being forced out of the presidency. During this time, Summers became wealthy through consulting and speaking engagements with financial firms. Between 2001 and his entry into the Obama administration, he made more than $20-million from the financial-services industry. (His 2009 federal financial-disclosure form listed his net worth as $17-million to $39-million.)

Summers remained close to Rubin and to Alan Greenspan, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve. When other economists began warning of abuses and systemic risk in the financial system deriving from the environment that Summers, Greenspan, and Rubin had created, Summers mocked and dismissed those warnings. In 2005, at the annual Jackson Hole, Wyo., conference of the world's leading central bankers, the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Raghuram Rajan, presented a brilliant paper that constituted the first prominent warning of the coming crisis. Rajan pointed out that the structure of financial-sector compensation, in combination with complex financial products, gave bankers huge cash incentives to take risks with other people's money, while imposing no penalties for any subsequent losses. Rajan warned that this bonus culture rewarded bankers for actions that could destroy their own institutions, or even the entire system, and that this could generate a 'full-blown financial crisis' and a 'catastrophic meltdown.'

When Rajan finished speaking, Summers rose up from the audience and attacked him, calling him a 'Luddite,' dismissing his concerns, and warning that increased regulation would reduce the productivity of the financial sector. (Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, and Alan Greenspan were also in the audience.)"

Charles Ferguson, "Larry Summers and the Subversion of Economics", Chronicle of Higher Education, 3 oktober

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Mer ekonomdebatt - med Brad DeLong, Justin Fox med flera - om Summers som exempel på ekonomer, deras kopplingar och incitament: Felix Salmon, "Summers's incentives", 2 november.

DeLong kritiserar begreppet "intellectually captured" som beskrivning av Summers: "Neoliberal Economists Agonistes", 12 november.

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Raghuram Rajan intervjuas 2 nov av FT om hans policyförslag för att fixa ekonomin, och han förespråkar bland annat generösare arbetslöshets- och socialförsäkringar, och att "end the 'cognitive capture' of US government by the private financial sector, by recruiting talent from outside of Wall Street and Washington."
Andrew Hill, "The optimistic doomsayer", FT 2 november

UPPDATERING 18 mars 2011
FT konstaterar i förrgår sarkastiskt att vi fått ett nytt exempel på den "revolving door"-koppling mellan Washingtons reglerare och de branscher som reglerarna ska reglera, som Obama i retoriken motsatte sig innan han blev vald. Nu är det David Stevens som avgått från Federal Housing Administration och nu ska börja jobba som chef för lobbyistgruppen Mortgage Bankers Association.
Suzanne Kapner och Stephanie Kirchgaessner, "MBA recruits Obama official", FT 16 mars

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Uppdatering 30 november 2011
Bloomberg Markets Magazine publicerar nu hux flux resultatet av en intervju med en hedgefond-trader som berättar om ett möte mellan dåvarande finansminister Hank Paulson och tolv traders, varav fem hade arbetat för Goldman Sachs som Paulson varit VD för, 28 juli 2008, där Paulson enligt den intervjuade delade med sig av icke-offentlig information om vad regeringen skulle göra med Fannie Mae och Freddie Mac. Alltså i praktiken öppnade för en form av insider trading. Fannie och Freddies aktier föll till under $1 styck från nivåer på $14,13 för Fannie och $8,73 för Freddie den 28 juli, när staten tog över dem den 6 september. Bloomberg hävdar dock att det inte går att utreda huruvida de privilegierade handlarna som fick informationen av Paulson agerade utifrån den. En Chicagobaserad finansanalytiker säger i alla fall till Bloomberg: "What is this but crony capitalism? Most people have had their fill of it."
Richard Teitelbaum, "How Paulson Gave Hedge Funds Advance Word", Bloomberg 29 november 2011

Reuters-bloggaren Felix Salmon plockar upp Bloombergstoryn och drar stora växlar på den:

"I think [Paulson] was downright pathological in giving inside information to his old Wall Street buddies. And the crazy thing is that we have no idea how many of these meetings there were, or how long they went on for — the only way that we ever find out about them is when reporters like Sorkin or Bloomberg’s Richard Teitelbaum manage to find a source who was in the meeting and is willing to talk about what happened.

Given that it’s taken two years since the release of Sorkin’s book for the Eton Park meeting to be made public, it’s fair to assume that there were other meetings, too — possibly many others. Paulson was giving inside tips to Wall Street in general, and to Goldman types in particular: exactly the kind of behavior that 'Government Sachs' conspiracy theorists have been speculating about for years. Turns out, they were right."

Felix Salmon, "Hank Paulson's inside jobs", 29 november

Blocks "hidden developmental state" och Boeing

Är USA:s stat en ekonomiskt konsekvent laissez faire-stat, är ekonomin en av "fria marknader"? Nej, föga förvånande är den inte det. Hur kan man då konceptualisera USA:s typ av stat-ekonomi-relation? Ekonomisk-sociologen Fred Block talar om en "hidden developmental state in the United States": att USA-staten i stor skala styr och främjar den teknologiska utvecklingen och därmed hela den ekonomiska utvecklingen i landet. I Economist för några veckor sedan tog de upp att USA fällts av WTO för illegala (och dolda, ej uttalade) subsidier till flygplanstillverkaren Boeing -

"Airbus, Europe’s aircraft-making champion, has long had its nose in the subsidy trough. This week the World Trade Organisation (WTO) ruled that Boeing, its American rival, is also a guzzler of illegal handouts. More precisely, the WTO gave an interim verdict on a claim by the European Union and Airbus that Boeing received subsidies, mainly channelled through the Department of Defence and NASA, that violate global trading rules.

Not long ago, it was Airbus that was strapped to a seat in cattle class and being pelted with airline food. On June 30th the WTO ruled on an American complaint that Airbus received billions of euros in illegal subsidies that allowed it to snatch half the market for big passenger jets. It found that some government support to Airbus, in the form of repayable “launch aid”, was illegal. Boeing’s chairman, Jim McNerney, hailed “a landmark decision and a sweeping legal victory”.

This time Airbus is jubilant. A European source said “we could not have hoped for more.” The trade referee found that much of the $22 billion benefit Boeing enjoyed from tax breaks and defence and research contracts was also an illegal subsidy. Airbus has long complained that, whereas it repays the launch aid with interest, Boeing never has to pay back a cent. "

Economist, "Another nose in the trough", 18 september

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Jfr 2 december 08, "Marknadsekonomin som kontinuum"

NEK-efter-krisen-inlägget

John Kay om NEK

"The past two years have not enhanced the reputation of economists. Mostly they failed to point out fundamental weaknesses of financial markets and did not foresee the crisis, and now they disagree on appropriate policies and on the likely future course of events. Although more economic research has been done in the past 25 years than ever before, the economists whose names are most frequently referenced today, such as Hyman Minsky and John Maynard Keynes, are from earlier generations.

Since the 1970s economists have been engaged in a grand project. The project’s objective is that macroeconomics should have microeconomic foundations. In everyday language, that means that what we say about big policy issues – growth and inflation, boom and bust – should be grounded in the study of individual behaviour. Put like that, the project sounds obviously desirable, even essential. I confess I was long seduced by it.

Most economists would claim that the project has been a success. But the criteria are the self-referential criteria of modern academic life. The greatest compliment you can now pay an economic argument is to say it is rigorous. Today’s macroeconomic models are certainly that.

But policymakers and the public at large are, rightly, not interested in whether models are rigorous. They are interested in whether the models are useful and illuminating – and these rigorous models do not score well here.

Indeed, at an early stage of the project Robert Lucas, one of its principal architects, who received the Nobel prize for his contributions, developed what is known as the Lucas critique. He argued that ordinary standards of statistical validity should not be applied to the project’s predictions. According to his colleague Thomas Sargent, Lucas was concerned that such tests rejected 'too many really good models'."

John Kay, "How economics lost sight of the real world", Financial Times 21 april

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Lionel Barber om ekonomijournalisters ovilja att förstå finanskapitalismens risker

"The financial media are accused of mis­sing the global financial crisis. Asleep at the wheel. Head in the clouds. No cliché has been left unturned as reporters, commentators – yes, even editors – have been castigated for failing to warn an unsuspecting public of impending disaster. Do these charges add up? To paraphrase the killer question from the Watergate hearings: what did the press know and when did it know it?

First, by way of mitigation, journalists were not the only ones to fall down on the job. Political leaders were happy to break open the champagne at the credit party; many lingered long after the fizz had gone. Regulators in the US, UK and continental Europe all failed to identify and contain the risks building within the system. Many economists, too, fell short. Only a few – such as Nouriel Roubini, now celebrated as the thinking man’s prophet of doom – identified pieces of the puzzle, even if they failed to piece them together.

Why did financial journalists not pay more attention to these warnings? First, the financial crisis started as a highly technical story that took months to go mainstream. Its origins lie in the credit markets, coverage of which in most news organisations counted as a backwater. Most reporters working in this so-called “shadow banking system” found it hard to interest their superiors who controlled space and who were more interested in broadcasting the “good news” story of rising property prices and economic growth.

A second related problem with the credit derivatives story was that it took place in an over-the-counter market with little disclosure and very little day-to-day news. Inevitably, the temptation was – and still is – to run with the stories that are much less opaque such as public company earnings. Yet the big innovations and the big money came in the credit markets.

The second criticism is that the media were too interested in building up a good news story. The comedian Jon Stewart’s on-air demolition of the booster-turned-doomster Jim Cramer shows there is a case to answer. Mr Stewart went so far as to suggest that CNBC, which hosts Mr Cramer’s Mad Money show, overlooked market shenanigans as it was too close to its core community: Wall Street traders and investment bankers. Danny Schechter, writing in the British Journalism Review, is equally critical alleging that newspapers had no interest in pursuing scandals in mortgage lending for fear of alienating property advertisers.

Journalists routinely face tensions between relying on their sources and burning them with critical coverage. Think of the White House press corps, the British “lobby” press that covers parliament or sports journalists assigned to a team. The incentive to “go along” to “get along” is always present, in competition with a journalist’s instinct to speak truth to power.

In the final resort, there can be little debate that the financial media could have done a better job. In this spirit of self-criticism, I identify four weaknesses in the coverage.

First, financial journalists failed to grasp the significance of the failure to regulate over-the-counter derivatives that formed the bulk of counterparty risk in the explosion of credit following the dotcom bubble. Alan Greenspan was opposed to such regulation, but how many commentators took the former Fed chairman to task and warned of the risks? For the most part, journalists were too enamoured with the prevailing tide of deregulation.

Second, journalists, with a few notable exceptions, failed to understand the risks posed by the implicit state guarantees enjoyed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance giants. Here, we should tip our hats to the now much-maligned Mr Greenspan. He raised alarms early about the risks. Of course, it was hard for journalists to attack the ideal of broader home ownership in America, but that is no excuse.

Third, journalists failed to grasp the significance of the growth in off-balance sheet financing by the banks, its relationship with the pro-cyclical Basle II rules on capital ratios, and the overall concept of leverage. How many news organisations reported on the crucial Securities and Exchange Commission decision in 2004 to loosen its regulations on leverage? The explosive growth of structured investment vehicles at the height of the credit boom was also woefully under-reported.

Fourth, financial journalists were too slow to grasp that a crash in the banking system would have a profoundly damaging impact on the real economy. The same applies to regulators and economists. For too long, too many experts treated the financial sector and the wider economy as parallel universes. This was fundamentally wrong."

Lionel Barber, "A flawed first draft of history", Financial Times 21 april

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Economist om hur krisen förändrar läroböcker i nationalekonomi
Det har pratats mycket i den nuvarande krisen om hur nationalekonomin måste förändras och hur den misslyckats att analysera finanskapitalismens instabilitet osv (för en parodi på kraven på förutseende, se Mats Persson här.). Även om det såklart ligger mycket i kritiken så kan jag störa mig på hur yrvaken och konjunkturbunden den är (vilket ju antyder att den kommer vara bortblåst om två år när ekonomin tuffar på "som vanligt").

(Jfr 18 augusti 2008 "Ett annat perspektiv på och från nobelpristagare i ekonomi", 12 mars 2009 "Walrasiansk och post-walrasiansk NEK enligt Bowles", 16 maj 09 "Kontinuitetens estetik i NEK", 22 maj 09 "Så skulle man kunna undervisa NEK", 20 juli 09 "Stiglitz om realism och NEK", 26 nov 09 "Callinicos: läs FT".)

(Jfr Lars Calmfors i Ekonomisk Debatt nr 3 2010, "Vi [nationalekonomer] har visserligen inte varit så kassa som många ekonomhatare - och det finns ganska många - vill ha det till. Men enligt min mening finns det ändå skäl till viss självprövning.")

I alla fall, så hade Economist för några veckor sen om hur undergraduate-undervisning i makroekonomi förändras just nu av krisen.

"the crisis has also highlighted flaws in the existing macroeconomics curriculum. Greg Mankiw, a Harvard economist and the author of a bestselling textbook, points out that students can hardly be expected to make sense of the crisis if they know virtually nothing about things like the role of financial institutions. Yet if there is a 'financial system' in most introductory texts, Mr Blinder observes, it usually focuses on the demand and supply functions for money. 'The current curriculum fails to give students even imperfect answers' to their legitimate questions about recent economic events, he says.

Changes are coming. Mr Blinder is one of the authors of another popular undergraduate textbook, which he is now revising. In the process, he is having to think long and hard about how to balance the need for more detail about things like finance with the constraints under which introductory macroeconomic courses are taught. The new edition is likely to have a prominent place for the idea of leverage and how it contributed to the crisis. That is fairly simply explained. But some additional complexity will be unavoidable.

For instance, the convenient fiction of a model of the economy with a single interest rate was defensible as long as different rates moved in concert. This, Mr Blinder says, is no longer something that students can be told 'with a straight face'. Some discussion of the role of securitisation and systemic risk is essential, even if it feels like a lot of detail for beginners to grasp. Mr Blinder, with a nod to Albert Einstein, says that economists need to remember that things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Revised textbooks will soon find their way into bookshops. Charles Jones of Stanford University has put out an update of his textbook with two new chapters designed to help students think through the crisis, and is now working on incorporating these ideas into the body of the book. A new edition of Mr Mankiw’s book should be out in about a year. And Mr Blinder’s publishers aim to have his revised text on sale by June.

Courses in many leading universities are already being amended. Mr Laibson says he has chosen to teach his course without leaning on any standard texts. Francesco Giavazzi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is now devoting about two-fifths of the semester’s classes to talking about how things are different during a crisis, and how the effects of policy differ when the economy hits boundaries like zero interest rates. Discussion of the 'liquidity trap', in which standard easing of monetary policy may cease to have any effect, had fallen out of vogue in undergraduate courses but seems to be back with a vengeance. Asset-price bubbles are also gaining more prominence.

Will these changes in the way macroeconomics is taught really stick? The rewriting of widely used texts should ensure that some of the ideas that have helped explain the crisis become part of the future curriculum. Mr Jones says it will be instructive to compare the bestselling textbook in ten years’ time with the pre-crisis version of Mr Mankiw’s book. He thinks they will differ substantially.

Economist, "Revise and resubmit", 31 mars

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NEK-bashing i Guardian

"As a profession, economics not only has nothing to say about what caused the world to come to the brink of financial collapse last autumn, but also a supreme lack of interest in it. If, for example, you scroll down the list of papers scheduled for publication by the Review of Economic Studies, one of the prestigious UK journals, there is not the slightest sense that the world of general equilibrium and real business cycle models has been turned upside down in the past two years. There is, on the other hand a paper on "Generalised non-parametric deconvolution with an application to earnings dynamics", which includes the insight that "Monte Carlo simulations show good finite-sample performance, less so if distributions are skewed or ­leptokurtic". Got that? And that's just the abstract. The full article is even more fun – if you get your kicks from fantasy economics divorced from reality."

Larry Elliot, "It's a funny old game: where is the dream team of economists to tackle the slump?", Guardian 1 juni

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"Last year the former head of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, made a quite astonishing admission. Asked if his beliefs that free markets were an "unrivalled way to organise economies" had clouded his judgement and ability to prevent the financial crisis that tipped the global economy into recession, Greenspan responded that it might have, but it was now obvious that there was a "flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works". Finding this flaw had made him "distressed".

Greenspan's confession was seen by many for precisely what it was: a crisis of faith, the faith that unrestricted free markets would always act benevolently. It revealed what a few had been arguing for some time, that the character of neoliberal economics is essentially religious."

Alan Andrews, "Praying for a revolution in economics", Guardian 11 juli

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Nationalekonomisk självkritik och krisdiskussion

"Most mainstream macroeconomic theoretical innovations since the 1970s (the New Classical rational expectations revolution associated with such names as Robert E. Lucas Jr., Edward Prescott, Thomas Sargent, Robert Barro etc, and the New Keynesian theorizing of Michael Woodford and many others) have turned out to be self-referential, inward-looking distractions at best. Research tended to be motivated by the internal logic, intellectual sunk capital and aesthetic puzzles of established research programmes rather than by a powerful desire to understand how the economy works - let alone how the economy works during times of stress and financial instability. So the economics profession was caught unprepared when the crisis struck."

Willem Buiter, "The unfortunate uselessness of most ’state of the art’ academic monetary economics", VoxEU, 6 mars 2009
- kritiken av antagandet om kompletta marknader gjorde Joseph Stiglitz utförligt och intressant i sin postsocialismbok 1994

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"Why, for example, did China's decision to accumulate foreign reserves result in a mortgage lender in Ohio taking excessive risks? If your answer does not use elements from behavioral economics, agency theory, information economics, and international economics, among others, it is likely to remain seriously incomplete.

The fault lies not with economics, but with economists. The problem is that economists (and those who listen to them) became over-confident in their preferred models of the moment: markets are efficient, financial innovation transfers risk to those best able to bear it, self-regulation works best, and government intervention is ineffective and harmful.

They forgot that there were many other models that led in radically different directions. Hubris creates blind spots. If anything needs fixing, it is the sociology of the profession. The textbooks at least those used in advanced courses - are fine.

Non-economists tend to think of economics as a discipline that idolizes markets and a narrow concept of (allocative) efficiency. If the only economics course you take is the typical introductory survey, or if you are a journalist asking an economist for a quick opinion on a policy issue, that is indeed what you will encounter. But take a few more economics courses, or spend some time in advanced seminar rooms, and you will get a different picture.

Labor economists focus not only on how trade unions can distort markets, but also how, under certain conditions, they can enhance productivity. Trade economists study the implications of globalization on inequality within and across countries. Finance theorists have written reams on the consequences of the failure of the "efficient markets" hypothesis. Open-economy macroeconomists examine the instabilities of international finance. Advanced training in economics requires learning about market failures in detail, and about the myriad ways in which governments can help markets work better.

Macroeconomics may be the only applied field within economics in which more training puts greater distance between the specialist and the real world, owing to its reliance on highly unrealistic models that sacrifice relevance to technical rigor. Sadly, in view of today's needs, macroeconomists have made little progress on policy since John Maynard Keynes explained how economies could get stuck in unemployment due to deficient aggregate demand. Some, like Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman, would say that the field has actually regressed."

Dani Rodrik, "Blame the economists, not the economics", Guatemala Times 11 mars

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Akademiska papers om nationalekonomi efter krisen

Ricardo Caballero (MIT), "Macroeconomics after the Crisis: Time to Deal With the Pretense-to-Knowledge-Syndrome", september 2010

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UPPDATERING

Paul Krugman, "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?", NYT Magazine 1 september
John Cochrane, "How Did Paul Krugman Get It So Wrong?"

temanummer av Journal of Economic Perspectives, #4 2010: Macroeconomics after the Crisis.

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Uppdatering 17 april 2012
Den business school-baserade statsvetaren Jonathan Schleifers nya bok The Assumptions Economists Make (Harvard UP, 2012) verkar väldigt intressant.

"Q. You are sharply critical of the scientific pretensions of the economics field. You note, for example, that economists are fond of dressing up observations as “laws.” And you note that this kind of make-believe can have dangerous consequences. You write, “Economists have misappropriated the very word ‘equilibrium’ to describe a situation that is not an equilibrium, either in plain English or in engineering…. Continuing to speak of ‘equilibrium’ allowed them to fool themselves – and others – into thinking they had shown that perfect-market economies were stable.” But I am curious to know whether you see benefits to mimicking a scientific approach, particularly as you work in a field that calls itself political science.

A. Political science is not a science like physics. Whether it deserves to be called a science at all is a question I’ll evade here. But it is a systematic way of understanding events and maybe gaining some insight into the possible future. To argue a point in political science, you start by laying out competing theories about a situation, each in its most persuasive form. Then you ask what results each theory would be expected to produce and how they compare with actual events. The theory that does the best job is the strongest. I think economics might proceed along these lines, admitting competing models to explain situations and seriously asking which seems to do the better job.

Q. Economics textbooks are frequent targets of your critique. You describe them as full of misleading simplifications and barren of cautions, caveats and context. What books would you recommend to people seeking an introduction to economics?

A. Aside from self-promotion — “Assumptions” is the book I would have liked to read when I was trying to understand economics better, or anyway as close to that book as I could manage to write — I would recommend a few books and journals that do better at avoiding the problems you mention. “Maynard’s Revenge: The Collapse of Free Market Macroeconomics,” by Lance Taylor, with whom I studied, has a strong viewpoint but explains many competing orthodox and unorthodox models. It requires high school algebra, not more math than that, but some concepts will demand careful pondering.
“A Concise Guide to Macroeconomics: What Managers, Executives, and Students Need to Know,” by David A. Moss, a professor at Harvard Business School with whom I have occasionally co-authored cases, has hardly a model in it. It’s mainly a pragmatic guide to concepts like the balance of payments, the national accounts and the money supply, leaving the question of how to fit those concepts into models up to the reader. But it’s very useful as that kind of pragmatic guide.
For a more orthodox macro textbook, I liked Rudiger Dornbusch and Stanley Fischer, “Macroeconomics.” (I read an old edition, which would be fine — the latest costs a small fortune.) Just remember, everything they present is a model, not God’s truth! Sometimes they even admit it." 

Binyamin Appelbaum, "In Economics, You Are What You Model", NYT Economix 16 april

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Uppdatering 25 januari 2013
Economist om hur DSGE-modellerna förändras, och ett alternativ till dem:

"Their first task is to put banks into the models. Today’s mainstream macro models contain a small number of “representative agents”, such as a household, a non-financial business and the government, but no banks. They were omitted because macroeconomists thought of them as a simple “veil” between savers and borrowers, rather than profit-seeking firms that make loans opportunistically and may themselves affect the economy.
This perspective has changed, to put it mildly. Hyun Song Shin of Princeton University has shown that banks’ internal risk models make them take more and more risk as asset prices rise, for instance. Yale’s John Geanakoplos has long argued that small changes in the willingness of creditors to lend against a given asset can have large effects on that asset’s price. Easy lending terms allow speculators with little cash to bid up prices far above their fundamental value. If lenders become more conservative, these marginal buyers are forced out of the market, causing prices to tumble.
Realistically representing the financial sector would help solve the other big problem with mainstream macro models: that they are inherently stable unless disturbed from the outside. /.../"
Improving DSGE models is the obvious way to take the lessons of the crisis on board. But others exist too. “Agent-based modelling” tries to depict the transactions that might occur in an actual economy. These models are populated by millions of agents that gradually alter the economy as they interact with each other. The idea was developed in the 1990s when biologists wanted to study the behaviour of ant colonies and the flocking of birds. But modelling an entire economy did not become practical until recently because of the sheer number of calculations needed.
The evolutionary structure of agent-based models allows economists to study how bubbles and crises occur over time. For example, an increase in bank lending means more spending and therefore higher returns on existing investment, which in turn encourages further lending. But too much lending can prompt the central bank to raise rates if inflation starts to accelerate. Higher borrowing costs could lead to a wave of defaults and even to a crisis if too much debt was taken on during the boom.
The EURACE project, an initiative by a consortium of European research bodies, has produced a sophisticated agent-based model of the EU’s economy that scholars have used to model everything from labour-market liberalisation to the effects of quantitative easing. In Australia Steve Keen, an economist, and Russell Standish, a computational scientist, are developing a software package that would allow anyone to create and play with models of the economy that incorporate some of these new ideas. Called “Minsky”—after Hyman Minsky, an American economist celebrated for his work on boom-and-bust financial cycles—it places the banking system at the centre of the economy.
A long road lies ahead, however. “Nobody has got something so convincing that the mainstream has to put up its hands and surrender,” says Paul Ormerod, a British economist.

Economist, "Economics after the crisis: New model army", 17 januari
M.C.K., "A brief history of macro: how we got here", Economist Free Exchange 21 januari

Simon Wren-Lewis har ett bra inlägg där han argumenterar mot idén att makroekonomin utvecklas i "revolutioner" som orsakas av yttre faktorer/ekonomiska kriser. Han menar att debatten mellan monetarister och keynesianer hade hållt på ett bra tag innan 70-talet och att metodologi och ideologi är lika viktiga faktorer som ekonomiska kriser. Han skriver om den nyklassiska revolutionen:

"In methodological terms it was a counter revolution, trying to take macroeconomics away from the econometricians, and bring it back to something microeconomists could understand. Of course it could point to policy in the 1970s as justification, but I doubt that was the driving force. I also think it is difficult to fully understand the New Classical revolution, and the development of RBC models, without adding in some ideology.

Does this have anything to tell us about how macroeconomics will respond to the Great Recession? I think it does. If you bought the ‘responding to the last crisis’ narrative, you would expect to see some sea change, akin to Keynesian economics or the New Classical revolution. I suspect you would be disappointed. While I see plenty of financial frictions being added to DSGE models, I do not see any significant body of macroeconomists wanting to ply their trade in a radically different way. " 

Simon Wren-Lewis, "Misinterpreting the history of macroeconomic thought", 24 januari 2013

The Economists artikel från 2011 om heterodoxa teoriers uppsving är intressant. Den lyfter fram tre skolor: österrikarna, MMT, och "market monetarism".

"The neo-chartalists are not the only people telling governments mired in the aftermath of the global financial crisis that they could make things better if they would shed old inhibitions. “Market monetarists” favour more audacity in the monetary realm. Tight money caused America's Great Recession, they argue, and easy money can end it. They do not think the federal government can or should rescue the economy, because they believe the Federal Reserve can.

The “Austrian” school of economics, which traces its roots to 19th-century Vienna, is more sternly pre-Freudian: more inhibition, not less, is its prescription. Its adherents believe that part of the economy's suffering is necessary, an inevitable consequence of past excesses. They do not think the Federal Reserve can rescue the economy. They seek instead to rescue the economy from the Fed. /.../

Mr Sumner's blog not only revealed his market monetarism to the world at large (“I cannot go anywhere in the world of economics…without hearing his name,” says Mr Cowen). It also drew together like-minded economists, many of them at small schools some distance from the centre of the economic universe, who did not realise there were other people thinking the same way they did. They had no institutional home, no critical mass. The blogs provided one. Lars Christensen, an economist at a Danish bank who came up with the name “market monetarism”, says it is the first economic school of thought to be born in the blogosphere, with post, counter-post and comment threads replacing the intramural exchanges of more established venues.

This invisible college of bloggers focuses first on the level of spending on American products: America's domestic output, valued at the prices people pay for it. This is what economists call “nominal” GDP (NGDP), as opposed to “real” GDP, which strips out the effects of inflation. They think the central bank should promise to keep NGDP on a steady upward path, rising at, say, 5% a year. Such growth might come about because more stuff is bought (“real” growth) or because prices are higher (inflation). Mr Sumner's disinhibition is to encourage the Fed not to care which of the two is doing more of the work. "

The Economist, "Marginal revolutionaries", 31 december 2011