September 23, 2016
Fareed Zakaria used his Washington Post column to tell readers that there are no simple solutions, it’s just too complicated. The point is that the gods have condemned us to suffer slow growth and rising inequality. In addition to making the absurd point that we should be worried because people are having fewer kids (just imagine, the robots will take all the jobs and we won’t have any workers) Zakaria tells us that nothing seems to work.
“Facing these forces [globalization, an aging workforce, and technology], leaders have no easy path to restore growth and revive their countries. Deep, radical reforms are unpopular and in this climate do not seem to lead to roaring growth. Ireland, Portugal and Mexico have all enacted broad market reforms, and yet, growth has not come booming back. Japan has spent hundreds of billions on stimulus plans and yet it is just muddling along. Thus, even the leaders who come to office with strong public approval and much promise find themselves trapped by the same forces. Very quickly their approval ratings begin to drop and new populist anger grows. Italy’s reformist prime minister, Matteo Renzi, has seen his numbers fall below 30 percent. The populist Greek leader, Alexis Tsipras, is down to 19 percent.”
Well, that seems to cover the bases, right? Except that there is a lot to show for the stimulus in Japan (which could be far more aggressive, since the country has negative long-term interest rates and is still facing near zero inflation). Since Abe took over at the end of 2012 the employment-to-population ratio in Japan has risen by 2.5 percentage points. This would be the equivalent of adding 6.2 million jobs in excess of the endogenous growth in the population in the United States. By contrast, the employment-to-population ratio has risen by just 1.1 percentage point in the United States over this period, in spite of the strong job growth of the last three years.
This might help to explain why Mr. Abe’s approval rating is at 60 percent, a marked contrast with the rating of other leaders on Zakaria’s list. One can debate whether or not Keynesian-style stimulus is simple, but the world looks much less complicated if we talk about the real world honestly and not ignore facts that contradict our message.
I will have much more to say countering the Zakaria/mainstream establishment line in my forthcoming book, Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer, coming soon to a website near you.
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