I slutet av 1970-talet kom med Robert Lucas, Edward Prescott och ett par andra unga ekonomer en av de stora idéerna i nationalekonomins moderna historia: idén om mikrogrundvalar för de makroekonomiska modellerna, mikrogrundvalar som skulle bygga på en neoklassisk idé om en rationell, egennyttig homo economicus. När Prescott år 2005 fick Nobelpriset i nationalekonomi för sina bidrag till denna forskning så beskrev han vad som hände på 1970-talet som "a revolution in macroeconomics, a transformation in methodology that has reshaped how we conduct our science." Det handlar om konsekvens, att makromodellerna ska vara förenliga med mikro-antaganden om rationella, informerade agenter, och om en revolution mot den keynesianska nationalekonomin. Det blev en revolution, kallad nyklassisk, eftersom Lucas, Prescott et consortes vann stöd för sina tankar om mikroekonomiska grundvalar för makromodeller, och en ny generation av makromodeller (nyklassiska, eftersom de gick tillbaka till klassiska makrodrag från före Keynes tid) togs fram som svar på detta: i DSGE-modellerna en förening av vissa keynesianska idéer (sticky prices, ofrivillig arbetslöshet) och nyklassiska principer. [1]
Statsvetaren Rune Møller Stahl, då verksam vid Copenhagen Business School, diskuterar i en mycket intressant artikel från 2021 denna nyklassiska revolution ur ett idéhistoriskt perspektiv. Han tar framför allt inspiration från två stora idéhistoriker: Cambridgeskolans grundare Quentin Skinner (f. 1940), och Sussexskolans pionjär Ellen Meiksins Wood (1942-2016). Skinner uppmuntrar forskare att fokusera på texters kontext:
"Inspired by Wittgenstein’s notion of language games and Austin’s theory of speech acts, Skinner sees texts as essentially a form of intentional act, that is, as purposeful interventions in debates. Authors of texts and theories do not just describe the world; they are always doing something to the world with their works (Skinner 2002, p. 128). To understand the meaning of political texts and their beliefs, it is necessary to understand the polemical contexts in which they operate (Skinner 1969, 2002)." (s. 409)Här är alltså den intellektuella kontexten central, begreppen som används och som man kämpar om, men också i någon mån den bredare sociala kontexten. Meiksins Wood vill i polemik med Skinner fästa än större vikt på det sociala och det politiska; hon förespråkar en "social history of political thought". Utifrån Skinner och Meiksins Wood föreslår Møller Stahl att man ska se förändringar inom nationalekonomin -- en disciplin som alltid förändrats i nära samband med politiska förändringar, säger han [2] -- inom tre kontexter: den retoriska, den politiska, och den sociala. Detta illustreras i diagrammet som jag klistrat in ovan. [3]
Møller Stahl ser rationella förväntningar-revolutionens ursprung i Milton Friedmans tal till American Economic Association, i egenskap av dess ordförande, 1968. Friedman attackerade i detta tal idén om en förutsägbar trade-off mellan inflation och arbetslöshet (Phillipskurvan) och den följande idén att politiker kan välja en nivå på arbetslösheten med en fast relaterad nivå på inflationen, eller vice versa. Grundvalen för Friedmans kritik var idén att ekonomins aktörer är rationella och bildar förväntningar om framtiden utifrån vad som händer idag och hände igår: om politikerna väljer en policy som kommer öka inflationen imorgon, så kommer marknadens aktörer kunna ta hänsyn till det och anpassar sitt beteende på ett sätt som sätter politikernas antagande om relationen inflation--arbetslöshet ur spel. Robert Lucas, Edward Prescott och andra tog dessa idéer vidare:
"The underlying ideas of the rational expectation models were focused on the investment decisions of firms and households under conditions of uncertainty, as formulated in an early form by Lucas and Prescott in their 1971 article investments under uncertainty (Lucas and Prescott 1971). A common denominator of these theories was the notion that government action, however well-meant and benign, is doomed to fail because of the anticipations of the rational actors of markets. The adaptive expectation of these actors would automatically price the long-term fiscal and monetary consequences of current government policies into their current investment decisions. As a consequence, the discretionary policy scope of governments and parliaments had to be restricted in favour of policy rules. Lucas and Sargent in their 1979 article After Keynesian Macroeconomics formulated this as ‘the need to think of policy as the choice of stable rules of the game, well understood by economic agents’ and further added that ‘policies (…), such as monetary instability and deficit financing, have the capacity only to disrupt’ (Lucas and Sargent 1979, p. 15)." (s. 411)
Lucas såg keynesianska idéer om animal spirits som bristande i stringens (un-rigorous). Istället menade han (1972, 1976) att marknadsaktörer förstod t ex att underskottsfinansierade statliga utlägg idag måste kompenseras av högre skatter imorgon, så att dessa utlägg inte kunde ha några stimulerande effekter på ekonomin, eftersom rationella aktörer kommer spara för att ha råd med de högre skatterna om några år. Kydland och Prescott (1977) gjorde ett lika viktigt bidrag till den nyklassiska nationalekonomin:
"Another important development of the NCM project was the ‘Time inconsistency model’ developed by Kydland and Prescott (1977). This model involved studying policy making, such as monetary or tax policy, as a series of sequential policy choices by policymakers. Here, the ability of policy makers to revise earlier decision meant that government faced a ‘credibility constraint’ when dealing with private economic actors with rational expectation. The problem, they argued, was that the investment decisions of market actors, in line with Lucas, were shaped by the expectation of future government policies (Kydland and Prescott 1977, p. 474). This means that attempts at countercyclical policy, even if they made sense in the short term, would be detrimental in the long run, as market actors would adapt to expectations of future inflation or taxation, and thus lower their current investment. The way out of the bind of time-inconsistency is to make credible commitments to keep monetaryKydland och Prescotts idéer blev grundläggande för 1990-talets stora ekonomisk-politiska skifte till oberoende centralbanker, en av de viktigaste reformerna under hela denna epok, och åberopades direkt som inspiration för EU:s anti-majoritära institutioner (ref Majone 1996).
policies stable in the long run." (s. 413)
Møller Stahl analyserar de nyklassiska idéerna, som tillsammans utgjorde eller gjordes till en intellektuell revolution inom nationalekonomin, genom de tre analysnivåerna från figur 1: retorisk kontext, politisk kontext och social kontext. Den centrala slutsatsen är:
"The main point of this reinterpretation is to point out that the target of the critique of the NCM theorist was not, as is often assumed, a rollback of the state from the economy. Rather, the aim was to remove the specific democratic influences on economic policy that posed a threat to the confidence of investors in future profits, and thus to the health of the capitalist economy. In the short term, the democratic influence is deemed problematic in this literature because it produces a chaotic, unpredictable element that excludes the sort of stable, credible commitment that is necessary to induce investments. In the long term, the consequence of general suffrage is constantly increasing public spending." (s. 418)Han ser alltså den nyklassiska revolutionen i ljuset av 1970-talets legitimitetskris -- analyserad av Streeck, Habermas och andra: "The interpretation of the neoclassical liberals was that the crisis of macroeconomic policy of the 1970s was a contradiction between the needs of investors and the aims of the voting public." (s. 418)
referens
Rune Møller Stahl (2021) "From Depoliticisation to Dedemocratisation: Revisiting the Neoliberal Turn in Macroeconomics", New Political Economy, 26:3.
fotnoter
[1] Så här beskriver Møller Stahl de nyklassiska modellernas genomslag: "The programme in itself, with methodological strictures and propositions such as the complete renunciation of fiscal policy by governments, was never adopted by the macroeconomic community. Nevertheless, Lucas and colleagues have had a profound impact on the implementation of macroeconomic theory and practice in the period since (Backhouse 2005, 2010, Fine and Milonakis 2009b, Offer and Söderberg 2016) insitituting what Oxford economist Simon Wren-Lewis describes as ‘microfoundations hegemony’ (Wren-Lewis 2018)." (s. 407) Om de nyklassiska modellernas ställning på 2010-talet se också artikeln av Helgadottir och Ban. Längre ner i sin artikel beskriver RMS också läget så här: "Through concepts such as sticky wages and market failures, the New Keynesians adapted the new dominant neoclassical framework, but allowed for a limited use of the traditional instruments of Keynesian demand management (Eatwell and Milgate 2011, p. 59). On the enduring influence of Lucas’ brand of rational expectations, Offer lays out how, of the new theories introduced in the 1970s, 'rational expectation was the most insulated from falsification, the most empirically empty and in terms of adoption by economists, by far the most successful. This doctrine continues to be influential in macroeconomics and is practiced across ideological divides by Chicago market fundamentalists and by liberal-minded neo-Keynesians. (Offer and Söderberg 2016, p. 25)' These theories provided critical delegitimisation for the policies of full employment that had charac-
terised the postwar Keynesian paradigm at a time when they were under attack from several sides."
[2] "Despite these protestations, probably no other discipline of social science has developed in such a tight correlation with policy trends (Backhouse 2005, 2010); no other discipline has had public prestige and influence associated with economics (Fourcade et al. 2014); few other disciplines have experienced the same sort of acknowledgement from outside forces through constructions such as the ‘Nobel prize’ in economics, or from the investment of private money in think tanks and university chairs (Blyth 2002, Mayer 2016)." (s. 408)
[3] Mer specifikt säger han: "In his article ‘The politics of economic management in the 1990s’, Burnham (1999) describes
depoliticisation as a specific attitude towards economic governance. Here, he describes the process of transition, from the politicised management of the postwar period, where the weight was on discretion-based management and the direct steering of the economy, to the depoliticised management of the 1990s, where the emphasis was on rule-based management, and ‘rule through
market mechanisms’." (s. 410)
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