Widdowson zur Wirtschaft im Allgemeinen
Geschrieben von Andreas am 02. Oktober 2003 17:41:15:
Als Antwort auf: Re: schade, .. geschrieben von Napoleon am 02. Oktober 2003 16:23:19:
Wiederum sehr innovative und unkonventionelle Ansichen, insbesondere im letzten Abschnitt.
Besides this, it is highly probable that the business cycle is an inevitable characteristic of a vigorous economy. Mathematicians are discovering that random fluctuations are inherent in complex dynamic systems - of which an economy is one instance. For example it has been argued that the stop-go of traffic jams - which we find so annoying - is essential to their being used at maximum capacity. Increase the traffic density and the cars would come to a permanent grinding halt, reducing overall traffic flow. Decrease the traffic density and cars would move without interruption, but again the overall traffic flow would be reduced. Any initiatives to eliminate traffic jams would probably increase the maximum capacity at which they occurred, but would not prevent them from happening.
Nevertheless, governments in the 20th century have developed the view that it is their role to manage the nation's economic activity. Economic organisation, as we know, is created by entrepreneurship. And this is a multi-faceted activity involving spotting opportunities and having the nerve and initiative, as well as the resources and willingness to work hard, to do something about them. Whether and how entrepreneurship is manifested depends on complexities of human motivation that are far from being understood. Governments, however, adopt a very simplistic view of this complicated, human-intensive situation. They apply to it the neat Newtonian paradigm of a clockwork universe and not the messy one of thos complex, headstrong creatures called human beings. In effect, they regard the economy as a machine. Thus, we hear of economies slowing down or overheating, and of governments touching the brakes, and so on. Yet these are simply metaphors which have little relation to the realities of entrepreneurship and innovation.
Of course, simple models of complex systems can be useful. In physics, a simple equation of just five variables explains the behaviour of a gas consisting of some billion billion billion molecules. However, as we saw in Chapter 11, the science of human behaviour is in a very rudimentary state. And economics, apparently the most advanced, nevertheless appears flawed on close examination. Certainly, the evidence is that the current simplified view of the economy as a machine does not work, because governments regularly fail to achieve their stated economic aims. In 1987, for example, the European Community devised a 'co-operative growth strategy' for the continent, in which the 1992 single market was the central element. However, 1993 was actually marked by a severe recession and average growth over the next three years was 1.5% against a planned 3%. Similarly, the G7 (now G8) meetings of the heads of the leading industrial economies have manifestly failed in their aim to stabilise the world economy, as they have taken place against a backdrop of major recessions, wild currency fluctuations, and rising unemployment.
There has been a ten-fold increase in the number of economists employed by the British civil service, since 1964. Yet it is difficult to say exactly what they have done for the economy. Their forecasts for the economy are invariably in error, invalidating the policies that are based on them. In 1984, The Economist asked groups of dustmen, students, company directors, and finance ministers to make ten-year forecasts for such economic variables as the dollar-pound exchange rate and the price of oil. In 1994, they announced that the dustmen had come joint top with the company directors, while the finance ministers had come bottom. This does not show that dustmen have any special insight. It merely shows the nominal experts are guessing like everybody else. After all, economists still cannot agree on something like the causes of the Great Depression, seventy years after the event. It should be scarcely surprising that they do not have any real idea of what will happen next year.
Associated with this is a well-established fetishism that the economy's problems, whatever they are, need bitter medicine to be sorted out. We need to cut things back and accept unemployment, at least for a while, so that things can get back on track. We may associate this particularly with the Thatcher era, but Denis Healey was already saying it in the mid-70s, and in the 90s, John Major was telling us that 'if it isn't hurting, it isn't working' - a piece of mindless dogma. It is seldom clear what all the suffering is supposed to achieve - except some future paradise that somehow never seems to arrive. At any rate, when people were being made unemployed in their tens of thousands from Britain's steel and coal industries during the 1980s, due to an artificially high currency and high interest rates, this was presented as shaking out the overcapacity of the decades. Yet this is an absurdity. The third world could have had a use for all that coal and steel that we stopped producing. The real problem was not overcapacity, but a lack of entrepreneurship - people's failure to organise us and the third world into loops of organisation whereby they received our coal and steel in exchange for something that we wanted. Thus, for most of the 20th century, manufacturing interests and people's lives have been consistently sacrificed to abstract but frankly erroneous doctrine and the strength of the pound. And, in fact, efforts to maintain the pound - against all economic sense - have simply led to a massive transfer of funds from taxpayers to non-productive, non-entrepreneurial speculators.