扯下了全球化画皮作懒驴打滚赤膊上阵的泼皮无赖
-
诺贝尔经济奖得主克鲁曼（
Paul Krugman）
李良书简
07/16/2020_03
以推广自由经济全球化（
Globalization
）的功绩得到了
2008
年诺贝尔经济奖的保罗克鲁曼（
Paul Krugman
），近来似乎突然如遭雷击以致脑洞大开，一反之前得以光宗耀祖并尽情地用“蠢材”的字眼来凌迟反对者的金字招牌，回过头来同样的用“蠢材”来揶揄自己；无论如何，克鲁曼应该把这个诺贝尔经济奖的头衔退回，才是真汉子！
过去这个好像是中国的朋友并被特色改开派的傻蛋们捧上了天的克鲁曼，今日一变而为中国的最坏敌人，这种转变，北京那批胡搞经济自由化几十年的特色伙计们大概抓破了脑袋也想不到的。后附这篇由外交政策（Foreign Policy）杂志在去年10月22日刊出的“Economists on the Run“，真真假假地道出了克鲁曼的自白，大家看了之后，剩下的就是“信不信由你”了！
之所以此刻提出这篇不迟不早的文字，无非是想彰显美国以及西方各国目前纷纷的对中国动刀子的原由，文的武的都汹涌出台；不只是美国特朗普跟反动派共和党，或反动文痞如纳瓦罗（Peter Navarro），走狗如彭比奥（Mike Pompeo）等等的一时精神错乱这么简单而已，更希望北京城中南海里那批仍然在做着夫妻或小三梦的混球们能够彻底的梦醒过来，不要拖着全体中国人民一起下水。
关键在于（仍然是唯物辩证以一破万），如果今天以美国为首的西方国家没有失去主导世界经济，那种我为刀俎人为鱼肉可能已经不再的觉悟，老大美国未来几十年仍然是世界的第一经济体，这个克鲁曼一定仍旧会天天抱着赖以发迹的全球化（Globalization） 这个词微笑地安然入睡，绝不会以今日之我来咬昨日之我。
“帝国主义之亡我之心不死“，什么自由主义如克鲁曼也好，反动派如纳瓦罗也罢，无非都是”养，套，杀“过程中的烟花而已。惨烈的是，生米已成熟饭，中国过去几十年来被特色们这么一搞，”骑全球化“难下，难道中国只有”把脖子伸出“和”与尔偕亡“的两中选一吗？呜呼哀哉！
Economists on the Run
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/22/economists-globalization-trade-paul-krugman-china/
“Paul
Krugman and other mainstream trade experts are now admitting that they
were wrong about globalization: It hurt American workers far more than
they thought it would.“
Foreign Policy
By Michael Hirsh
October 22, 2019
Paul Krugman has never
suffered fools gladly. The Nobel Prize-winning economist rose to international fame—and a coveted space on the New York Times
op-ed page—by lacerating his intellectual opponents in the most
withering way. In a series of books and articles beginning in the 1990s,
Krugman branded just about everybody who questioned the rapid pace of
globalization a fool who didn’t understand economics very well. “Silly”
was a word Krugman used a lot to describe pundits who raised fears of
economic competition from other nations, especially China. Don’t worry
about it, he said: Free trade will have only minor impact on your
prosperity.
Now Krugman has come out and admitted, offhandedly, that his own
understanding of economics has been seriously deficient as well. In a
recent essay
titled “What Economists (Including Me) Got Wrong About Globalization,”
adapted from a forthcoming book on inequality, Krugman writes that he
and other mainstream economists “missed a crucial part of the story” in
failing to realize that globalization would lead to “hyperglobalization”
and huge economic and social upheaval, particularly of the industrial
middle class in America. And many of these working-class communities
have been hit hard by Chinese competition, which economists made a
“major mistake” in underestimating, Krugman says.
It was quite a “whoops” moment, considering all the ruined American
communities and displaced millions of workers we’ve seen in the interim.
And a newly humbled Krugman must consider an even more disturbing idea:
Did he and other mainstream economists help put a protectionist
populist, Donald Trump, in the White House with a lot of bad advice
about free markets?
To be fair, Krugman has been forthright in recent years in
second-guessing his earlier assertions about the effects of open trade.
He has also become a leading and sometimes harsh critic of his own
profession, especially in the aftermath of the financial crisis and
Great Recession, when he declared that much of the past 30 years of
macroeconomics was “spectacularly useless at best, and positively
harmful at worst.” He admirably held the Obama administration to account
for its timid financial and economic reforms. He even had some kind
things to say about proto-progressives such as Robert Reich, the former
Clinton administration labor secretary who worried about global
competition and sought better protections and retraining for American
workers, and whom Krugman had once dismissed to me—back in his lacerating days in the ’90s—as an “offensive figure, a brilliant coiner of one-liners but not a serious thinker.”
“I’m glad he’s finally seen the light on trade,” Reich told me in an
email. Krugman, in another email, wrote: “I regret having said that
about Reich, but if he foresaw hyperglobalization or the localized
effects of the China shock, that’s news to me.”
Yet it has taken an awful long time for economists to admit that their
profession has been far too sure of itself—or, as a penitent Krugman put
it himself in a 2009 article in the New York Times Magazine,
that “economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in
impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.” As the journalist Binyamin
Appelbaum writes in his book, The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society,
economists came to dominate policymaking in Washington in a way they
never had before and, starting in the late 1960s, seriously misled the
nation, helping to disrupt and divide it socially with a false sense of
scientific certainty about the wonders of free markets. The economists
pushed efficiency at all costs at the expense of social welfare and
“subsumed the interests of Americans as producers to the interests of
Americans as consumers, trading well-paid jobs for low-cost
electronics.”
David Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) whose documentation of the surprising effects of China’s rapid
rise on the U.S. labor market is cited by Krugman in his essay, gives
the Times columnist a lot of credit for admitting error. “How
rare is that?!” Autor wrote via email. He said he doesn’t blame Krugman
or other defenders of “the prior consensus” for making faulty
predictions about trade. “I honestly think that getting this one right ex ante
would have been akin to accurately forecasting the date, time and
location of an earthquake.” The bigger problem was the pro-free trade
zeitgeist, Autor said. “I think that the received wisdom inhibited
economists from closely evaluating the evidence of what was underway. …
One could say that there was something of a guild orthodoxy: The key
dictum was that policymakers should be told that trade was good for
everyone in all places and times.”
Dani Rodrik, a Harvard University economist who in 1997 published a then-heretical book called Has Globalization Gone Too Far?
, said last week that he wrote it precisely because he believed that
“the profession was so blasé about globalization.” Now his views are
mainstream, and Rodrik is president-elect of the International Economic
Association. But the economists have barely begun to clean up the mess
they left behind, as a recent conference on inequality at the Peterson
Institute for International Economics in Washington, organized by Rodrik
and former International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief economist Olivier
Blanchard, made clear. And now in some ways it’s too late because, as
Rodrik says, it’s not even possible to have a reasonable discussion
under Trump. The U.S. president has effectively discarded modern
economics, reembraced crude protectionism, and, like the mercantilists
of the pre-Adam Smith era, appears to see trade as a zero-sum game in
which surpluses are in effect profits and deficits are losses. His
ignorance of basic economics “is without parallel among modern American
presidents,” Appelbaum writes in The Economists’ Hour.
Yet Trump has been able to launch an unprecedented trade war, exploiting
the public’s mistrust and fear of China, thanks in part to the
economists’ early misreadings—specifically of how swiftly China’s
economic surge would displace so many U.S. industrial jobs. As Krugman
now acknowledges, “manufacturing employment fell off a cliff after 2000,
and this decline corresponded to a sharp increase” in the U.S. trade
deficit, especially with China. Those numbers, in turn, have tended to
lend credence to Trump’s mercantilist notions, no matter how spurious.
“One of the most perverse effects of Trump was that it completely erased
any reasonable discussion” about how to address trade, inequality, and
the right degree of protection for workers, Rodrik said. And this, too,
is a downstream effect of the bad advice economists delivered about free
trade going back to the ’90s.
Or as MIT’s Autor put it: “Ultimately this policy boosterism blinded
policymakers to the potentially grave consequences of trade shocks and
likely lulled us into underpreparing for these shocks (e.g., we had a
paltry safety net and retraining policies on hand). It led us somewhat
blithely into a non-negligible policy disaster (AKA the China Shock) and
provoked a public backlash that has rendered free trade toxic in the
U.S. policy debate. There’s an irony for you: trade boosterism has
ultimately hurt the cause of free trade.”
Asked whether the mistakes made by him and other economists helped lead
to the rise of Trump, Krugman responded: “We’re still debating this, but
as far as I can tell Trump’s trade policy isn’t resonating with many
people, even his blue-collar base. So it’s kind of hard to blame trade
analysts for the phenomenon.”
Others would disagree.
Part of the problem is that, back in the ’90s, when the post-Cold War
consensus was just emerging, economists tended to take a simplistic
either-or view of trade—either you were a free trader or a
protectionist—and forced people to choose sides. Krugman was one of
them, adopting by and large the free trade position, which was ironic
considering that his Nobel-winning work in economics was far more
nuanced than his books and columns (and actually helped lay the
intellectual foundations for smart strategic trade policy).
Yet there were others in the policy debates—such as Rodrik, Reich, and
Laura D’Andrea Tyson, who led former President Bill Clinton’s Council of
Economic Advisers—who were far more worried about rapid globalization.
They dared to question the pro-free trade consensus or at least, in
Tyson’s case, to push for government-led industrial policy that would
sharpen American competitiveness at a time when, after the Cold War,
many newly liberalized nations were piling into the global economy at a
great rate. This idea also was anathema to Krugman.
“Dani was way ahead of his time,” Autor said. “He was worried not about
sudden shocks per se but about the way that globalization hemmed in the
policy options of open economies (options for financing social
insurance, taxing increasingly mobile capital, etc). That was and is a
deep point. … Meanwhile, Laura Tyson was advocating forward-looking
industrial policy at a time when industrial policy was the Voldemort of
policy tools.” Those who have studied Krugman’s work closely, like
Autor, say that of course he understood that just the right kind of
industrial policy could help build competitive sectors. But Autor added:
“I suspect that economists feared that stating these points aloud to
policymakers would be like handing a loaded weapon to a impetuous
child.”
Krugman maintains that his new mea culpa “was a fairly narrow one” about
how trade would affect lower-wage workers and exacerbate inequality.
That is true. But after the Cold War ended, the debate over trade
(Krugman’s Nobel-winning specialty) became a proxy for a larger
intellectual struggle over free markets versus government intervention.
And Krugman played a major part in attacking what he saw as economic
ignorance by “strategic traders” who argued that U.S. jobs and wages
might be seriously affected by competition from cheap labor in the
developing world. When William Greider, the former Washington Post journalist, warned in a deeply reported book called One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism that
developing nations were gearing up for major industrial competition
that would mean “[s]ome sectors of Americans are triumphant and other
sectors are devastated,” Krugman called
it a “thoroughly silly book.” When Michael Lind, another prominent
public intellectual, suggested (accurately) that U.S. productivity
growth might not be enough to offset “the global sweatshop economy,”
Krugman declared Lind to be ignorant of economic “facts” and said that
“one should not expect someone who does not work in the field to be able
to get it right without some guidance.” Krugman was no less kind to
fellow economists who dared to question the free trade consensus. When
Tyson was chosen to head Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers in 1993,
Krugman said she lacked the “necessary analytical skills.”
It was all just bad economics, Krugman said. Don’t worry so much about
what all the other countries are up to; things will even out thanks to
neoclassical concepts such as comparative advantage, which allows all
nations to benefit from open trade. Indeed, those who advocated anything
resembling government interference in markets and “fair trade” (more
tariffs, unemployment insurance, and worker protections) over “free
trade” were usually branded protectionists and excluded from the debate.
Clinton, reveling in his reputation as the “globalization” president,
barely held a meeting on the fate of the industrially displaced. When
his old Rhodes Scholar pal from the University of Oxford, Labor
Secretary Reich, openly advocated reinvestment in education, training,
and infrastructure at a time when Clinton was keen on deficit-cutting,
Reich was also edged out of the conversation and, eventually, the
administration.
Some ex-Clintonites such as Gene Sperling, the former head of the
National Economic Council, argue that the debate was never so stark.
“Clinton cared about the middle class,” he told me. And had the
Democrats continued in power, they would have worked much harder to
bring China into compliance with trade norms, for example by enforcing
“anti-surge” protections—required of China as part of its World Trade
Organization membership negotiated by Clinton in 1999—against the
dumping of huge amounts of cheap product that undercut U.S. jobs,
Sperling said. “People think that the only difference with Al Gore [in
the 2000 presidential election] was the Iraq War, but another huge
difference would have been that Gore would have gone way beyond anything
[George W.] Bush did to protect manufacturing,” Sperling said. (A new book by the former Washington Post economics reporter Paul Blustein, Schism: China, America, and the Fracturing of the Global Trading System,
also concludes that the Bush administration let China get away with far
too much, including artificially devaluing its currency to boost
exports—which led ultimately to Trump’s claim that China had committed
“rape” of the U.S. economy.)
Other former Krugman victims
still blame him
for his misjudgments and are not so assuaged by his penitence. “This is
not bad as mea culpas go, but if you read through to the end, Krugman
persists with the oversimplified dichotomy of free trade versus
protectionism, ignoring such successful hybrids as East Asian
neo-mercantilism,” said Robert Kuttner, the co-editor of the American Prospect
and a much-cited progressive thinker. “This is all the more bizarre
because the young Krugman came to prominence demonstrating that
[national] competitive advantage could be created, something that any
non-economist student of economic history could have told him.”
Krugman, in his defense, has always believed in protections for the
middle class, including better health care and education (his old Times
blog was titled “The Conscience of a Liberal”), and he says now that
just because he has admitted errors on trade doesn’t mean he ever
endorsed the so-called Washington Consensus—the neoliberal (that is,
pro-free trade) view that regularly came down on the side of fiscal
discipline, rapid privatization, and deregulation. “I guess the point is
that conceding that we got some things wrong doesn’t mean that every
critic was right; it depends on what they said, and as far as I know
almost nobody foresaw the massive rise in trade or focused at all on
localized regional impacts,” Krugman told me.
But there were deeper conceptual problems with the pro-globalization
consensus as well. Another Nobel-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, who
like Rodrik warned back in the ’90s of the disruptive effects of too
rapid lowering of trade and capital barriers, told me that the problem
with “standard neoclassical analysis” was that it “never paid any
attention to adjustment. Labor market adjustment miraculously happened
costlessly.” Like Tyson and Reich, Stiglitz, who served as a chair of
Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, was an outlier at the time,
seeking (but failing) to slow the pace of international capital flows.
He also argued that “typically jobs were destroyed far faster than new
jobs were created.”
Krugman, in his essay, admits that the economists like him in favor of
the ’90s consensus behind free trade—who thought that the effects on
labor would be minimal—“didn’t turn much to analytic methods that focus
on workers in particular industries and communities, which would have
given a better picture of short-run trends. This was, I now believe, a
major mistake—one in which I shared a hand.”
But there were plenty who did pay attention to how the old verities
about open trade and comparative advantage were no longer as telling,
displaced by new trends such as global supply chains, which shifted huge
numbers of jobs overseas and took out whole communities. Krugman
himself eventually concluded in a 2008 academic paper
that because of these supercomplex supply chains, “the changing nature
of world trade has outpaced economists’ ability to engage in secure
quantitative analysis.”
As Stiglitz put it to Foreign Policy
: “Obviously, the costs [of globalization] would be borne by particular
communities, particular places—and manufacturing had located [to] places
where wages were low, suggesting that these were places where
adjustment costs were likely large.” And it’s increasingly clear the
detrimental effects may not be merely short-term trends. The swift
opening up of trade with developing countries, combined with investment
agreements, has “dramatically changed workers’ bargaining power (an
effect reinforced by weakening unions and other changes in labor
legislation and regulation).”
That in turn has forced the rethinking of another major dimension of
traditional economics. Economists once believed that low unemployment
led to inflation, but today that relationship, called the standard
Phillips curve, has broken down, the Economist wrote
in a recent cover story. The main loser, again, is the American worker.
Whereas economists used to believe that workers, during boom times,
could drive up their compensation (thus leading to inflation), the
emerging economic wisdom now suggests something different: After a
quarter century in which multinationals have turned the whole globe into
their economic turf (while workers usually have to stay in their home
countries), globalized capital—manifesting itself as multinational
supply chains—has the upper hand over domestic labor.
Hence, economists themselves are surprised at how quickly the mainstream
of their profession has moved leftward—as many of them found at 2019’s
conference on inequality. And when it comes to 2020 U.S. election
politics, the profession is much more with progressives like Elizabeth
Warren and Bernie Sanders, some of the participants said, than the
centrist Joe Biden—open to radical solutions that give back bargaining
power to labor (for example, Warren’s proposal to give workers a large
place on corporate boards). “I came here as a French socialist, and now I
find I’m in the center,” joked former IMF chief economist Blanchard.
And this may be the ultimate downstream effect of all those misreadings
dating back to the ’90s. “People,” Tyson remarked, “missed how fast
things could change.”
Michael Hirsh is a senior correspondent and deputy news editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter:
@michaelphirsh.
