Caitlin Zaloom
The New York Review
 |
| Ilustração de The Heads of State |
Revisado:
The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism
por Clara E. Mattei
University of Chicago Press, 452 pp., US$ 30,00; US$ 22,50 (impresso)
Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in US Public Policy
por Elizabeth Popp Berman
Princeton University Press, 329 pp., US$ 24,95 (impresso)
Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality
por Angus Deaton
Princeton University Press, 271 pp., US$ 17,95 (impresso)Em um discurso de campanha presidencial de 1968 na Universidade do Kansas, Robert F. Kennedy alertou que uma dependência excessiva da economia levou os políticos americanos a entender mal os fatos fundamentais sobre seu país. Embora a economia americana possa parecer forte com base nas estatísticas monitoradas pelos economistas — a taxa de desemprego estava então abaixo de 4% — havia muita coisa que eles deixaram passar, disse ele. Quando os economistas consideraram o estado dos EUA, eles contaram como sinais positivos os lucros da propaganda de cigarros, a administração de prisões, a expansão de moradias suburbanas e a destruição de florestas, que geraram riquezas para alguns e deixaram muitos outros doentes, enjaulados, alienados ou desamparados. Milhões de americanos viviam em lares que não podiam pagar nem mesmo uma dieta minimamente adequada e sofriam de desnutrição.
Economistas eram formuladores de políticas e conselheiros influentes em todo o governo, inclusive na Casa Branca. Em 1946, o Congresso estabeleceu o Conselho de Consultores Econômicos (CEA), um grupo de economistas abrigados no gabinete executivo do presidente, e seu poder aumentou no final da década de 1960. O pequeno tamanho do CEA — algumas dezenas de economistas, estatísticos e equipe de apoio — desmente seu mandato expansivo, que é sintetizar informações de milhares de outros economistas governamentais em conselhos sobre política federal que seu presidente pode entregar ao presidente.
As recomendações do CEA têm sido notavelmente consistentes ao longo dos anos: de acordo com um relatório, os CEAs democratas e republicanos têm fornecido orientação semelhante até três quartos do tempo. Começando na década de 1970, por exemplo, o CEA foi um grande apoiador da desregulamentação em energia, transporte e telecomunicações, entre outras indústrias. O CEA tem sido "quase sempre a favor da concorrência", observou Joseph Stiglitz, um dos presidentes do CEA do presidente Clinton, em um discurso de fim de mandato. “Sempre falamos sobre incentivos e sempre promovemos mercados e mecanismos de quase mercado, como leilões e opções.” Como essas políticas poderiam ampliar as disparidades em riqueza e poder não era uma grande preocupação.
No final dos anos 1960 e início dos anos 1970, um grupo de senadores democratas, incluindo Walter Mondale e Eugene McCarthy, levantou críticas semelhantes. Mondale propôs a criação de um Conselho de Consultores Sociais, uma assembleia de diversos cientistas sociais dedicados à justiça ambiental, econômica e racial — um ideal de “saúde social”. Esta era uma peça central do Full Opportunity and National Goals and Priorities Act de Mondale, que exigiria que o gabinete do presidente avaliasse se os americanos de todas as origens tinham acesso igual à saúde, educação, moradia e artes e humanidades. O Senado aprovou o ato duas vezes, em 1970 e 1972, mas nunca chegou ao plenário da Câmara.
Economistas eram formuladores de políticas e conselheiros influentes em todo o governo, inclusive na Casa Branca. Em 1946, o Congresso estabeleceu o Conselho de Consultores Econômicos (CEA), um grupo de economistas abrigados no gabinete executivo do presidente, e seu poder aumentou no final da década de 1960. O pequeno tamanho do CEA — algumas dezenas de economistas, estatísticos e equipe de apoio — desmente seu mandato expansivo, que é sintetizar informações de milhares de outros economistas governamentais em conselhos sobre política federal que seu presidente pode entregar ao presidente.
As recomendações do CEA têm sido notavelmente consistentes ao longo dos anos: de acordo com um relatório, os CEAs democratas e republicanos têm fornecido orientação semelhante até três quartos do tempo. Começando na década de 1970, por exemplo, o CEA foi um grande apoiador da desregulamentação em energia, transporte e telecomunicações, entre outras indústrias. O CEA tem sido "quase sempre a favor da concorrência", observou Joseph Stiglitz, um dos presidentes do CEA do presidente Clinton, em um discurso de fim de mandato. “Sempre falamos sobre incentivos e sempre promovemos mercados e mecanismos de quase mercado, como leilões e opções.” Como essas políticas poderiam ampliar as disparidades em riqueza e poder não era uma grande preocupação.
No final dos anos 1960 e início dos anos 1970, um grupo de senadores democratas, incluindo Walter Mondale e Eugene McCarthy, levantou críticas semelhantes. Mondale propôs a criação de um Conselho de Consultores Sociais, uma assembleia de diversos cientistas sociais dedicados à justiça ambiental, econômica e racial — um ideal de “saúde social”. Esta era uma peça central do Full Opportunity and National Goals and Priorities Act de Mondale, que exigiria que o gabinete do presidente avaliasse se os americanos de todas as origens tinham acesso igual à saúde, educação, moradia e artes e humanidades. O Senado aprovou o ato duas vezes, em 1970 e 1972, mas nunca chegou ao plenário da Câmara.
A necessidade de a saúde social ser medida e incluída na tomada de decisões tornou-se ainda mais clara no século XXI. Quando Mondale fez sua proposta, as condições de vida dos americanos estavam melhorando lentamente, mas de forma constante, e a expectativa de vida estava aumentando. Mas por volta de 2000, havia alguns sinais de que o progresso estava estagnando, especialmente entre certos grupos. Desde então, mais e mais americanos brancos de meia-idade, especialmente aqueles sem um diploma universitário de quatro anos, estão morrendo de suicídio ou causas relacionadas a substâncias — mais de 150.000 somente em 2017, como argumentam os economistas Anne Case e Angus Deaton em seu livro de 2020 Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Eles também fornecem uma explicação clara: a "economia deixou de servir às pessoas comuns e passou a servir às empresas, seus gerentes e seus proprietários".
Em seu novo livro, Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explores the Land of Inequality, Deaton, ganhador do Nobel e ex-presidente da American Economics Association, critica os fundamentos intelectuais desse arranjo. Ele argumenta que os economistas dos EUA, muitas vezes inspirados pela veneração do mercado do departamento de economia da Universidade de Chicago, raramente se concentraram nos abismos que dividem os americanos. Nesse pensamento, ele escreve, a eficiência das políticas "é a única coisa que conta", e a desigualdade é "natural". Como ele observa, tais argumentos são frequentemente feitos por aqueles economistas que desfrutaram de poder significativo na política, como Glen Hubbard, ex-presidente do CEA sob George W. Bush, que acreditava que a assistência médica deveria funcionar como um mercado de consumo e "dar às pessoas uma maneira de lucrar financeiramente" por permanecerem bem; se eles não conseguem evitar doenças completamente, os doentes devem ser recompensados por escolher médicos e testes baratos. Na visão de Deaton, as políticas favorecidas por Hubbard — e as agora familiares contas de poupança para assistência médica que Bush sancionou — "penalizaram" os doentes "por sua própria saúde precária".
Ainda assim, Deaton gostaria que os leitores se concentrassem nos contraexemplos. Seu livro celebra os contrários amantes de dados cujas medições desafiam o entendimento dominante. Entre eles estão Thomas Piketty e Emmanuel Saez, cujo trabalho foi essencial para documentar a explosão agora tida como certa da desigualdade de renda e riqueza em países ricos. Piketty explica que tal dominação requer uma classe de pensadores que justifiquem o arranjo, uma interpretação a que ele chega aplicando insights da sociologia e da história. Quando chega a hora de Deaton atribuir a culpa pela desigualdade, no entanto, ele aponta para fora em vez de para sua própria disciplina, argumentando que o conselho dos economistas é frequentemente desconsiderado. Ele toma o sistema de assistência médica notavelmente ineficiente e prejudicial dos Estados Unidos como seu principal exemplo. Algumas soluções racionais dos economistas, como um sistema de pagador único ou opção de seguro público, beneficiariam a saúde e as finanças dos americanos, mas os economistas possuem "pouco poder... em comparação com políticos e lobistas do setor de saúde".
Em Deaths of Despair, Case e Deaton expressam apreço pelos "não economistas" que aprimoraram seu trabalho com seus estudos sobre história, cultura e política que podem levar as pessoas ao desânimo. As mortes que eles documentam decorrem não apenas de danos econômicos, mas também das crises de significado que se seguem. Sociólogos, antropólogos e historiadores há muito estudam o que acontece com as pessoas quando perdem seus empregos ou outras formas de comunidade, embora esses cientistas sociais sejam convidados apenas ocasionalmente para aconselhar o governo. Deaton relembra a colaboração entre uma ampla variedade de pensadores que era comum em seus primeiros anos na Inglaterra:
Quando me tornei economista em Cambridge, cinquenta anos atrás, filósofos conversavam com economistas, e a economia da desigualdade, da justiça e do bem-estar era discutida, ensinada e levada a sério.
Quando ele veio para os Estados Unidos, ele ficou surpreso ao descobrir que seu interesse em equidade era considerado "antiprofissionalismo": como criar um sistema tributário progressivo que "protegesse os orçamentos dos menos favorecidos", por exemplo, era considerado "um problema social totalmente desinteressante". Ele nunca realmente pergunta por que nos EUA hoje os economistas são excepcionalmente capazes de exercer tal influência sobre o estado, enquanto filósofos, outros acadêmicos ou cidadãos comuns que poderiam dar ao Congresso uma noção de suas próprias experiências e qualidade de vida não são.
Perhaps economics won out not by triumphing intellectually but by serving those who already possessed wealth and authority. This is the thesis of Clara Mattei’s The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism. Mattei is a professor of economics with misgivings about the ways her discipline has enforced owners’ control. Even its detractors, she thinks, have overlooked just how profoundly economists’ views have defended and entrenched elite interests.
Aiding the powerful is not incidental to the dismal science, Mattei argues. The field consolidated its influence early on by strengthening its alliances with politicians and business owners. Mattei focuses on the explosive years around World War I and on two nations—Britain and Italy—because, on the surface, they seem so politically divergent in this period. The first was a market-oriented liberal democracy; the second was careening into fascism. Even so, Mattei finds that they took strikingly similar approaches to suppressing working-class revolt and imposing control over their citizens’ labor.
The decades before the war were marked by extreme income inequality and the expansion of brutal factory work, with only minimal protections for women and children and none for men. World War I, which heaved tens of millions of working men onto battlefields across continents and eventually left more than 20 million dead and maimed, tore apart any remaining faith in the fairness of laissez-faire capitalism. In May 1917 near Glasgow, 200,000 metalworkers struck for more than three weeks, occupying the city’s streets. At the end of that summer employees walked out of factories across Turin, then looted stores and claimed control of entire districts. Others fought with pens and megaphones for social programs that would soften the cruelty of low pay. On both the Continent and in Britain workers formed councils to sustain the strikes and protests. They saw nothing inevitable about exploitation.
Mattei argues that the principles of austerity were invented in large part to quash these upheavals. In order to wage the war, Britain and Italy had each borrowed enormous sums, making these governments highly motivated to stabilize their economies and increase investors’ confidence, which would keep the loans flowing. To do this, the British government bypassed democratic channels, pursuing their policies through the Treasury and the Bank of England. There, they deferred to economic experts, especially the economist Ralph Hawtrey, and fought inflation—which they blamed on the spending of “unruly” consumers (read: workers)—by throttling the buying power of all but the wealthiest. They also placed every social support on the chopping block—even a bread subsidy that helped British citizens keep food on the table—while levying taxes that disproportionately took from those who could least spare it.
In Italy, Parliament slashed pensions, unemployment and disability insurance, and supports for veterans and their families. As in Britain, it enacted a host of economic policies that squeezed wages and forced workers back into factories on owners’ terms. For the finance minister Alberto de’ Stefani, a celebrated economist and prominent fascist, abandoning the vulnerable was essential for recovery. “I need to place on the national agenda the conscious renunciation of the rights gained by the crippled, the invalids, the soldiers,” he instructed lawmakers. “These renunciations constitute for our soul a sacred sacrifice: austerity.” Austerity required victims, just as the war had.
Mussolini granted De Stefani extraordinary powers. By eliminating even gestures toward democratic deliberation, the fascist government bulldozed a path for imposing unpopular policies. Authoritarian rule also did not pose a problem for international creditors like those at JP Morgan. If “a bloody dictatorship” was the vehicle for restoring “the crumbling pillars of capital accumulation,” the financiers would turn a blind eye, Mattei observes.
The political economist Mark Blyth has argued that, from its inception, austerity hasn’t lived up to its promise to create economic growth after short-term pain.* For Blyth and others, this means that austerity is a failure. Mattei thinks that assessment misses the point. Austerity was designed to discipline workers and defeat their demands by returning control over wages and employment to owners. She shows that under austerity regimes, the “rate of exploitation”—the share of GDP going to corporations and investors over workers—grew by almost a third in Britain and by more than half in Italy.
Aiding the powerful is not incidental to the dismal science, Mattei argues. The field consolidated its influence early on by strengthening its alliances with politicians and business owners. Mattei focuses on the explosive years around World War I and on two nations—Britain and Italy—because, on the surface, they seem so politically divergent in this period. The first was a market-oriented liberal democracy; the second was careening into fascism. Even so, Mattei finds that they took strikingly similar approaches to suppressing working-class revolt and imposing control over their citizens’ labor.
The decades before the war were marked by extreme income inequality and the expansion of brutal factory work, with only minimal protections for women and children and none for men. World War I, which heaved tens of millions of working men onto battlefields across continents and eventually left more than 20 million dead and maimed, tore apart any remaining faith in the fairness of laissez-faire capitalism. In May 1917 near Glasgow, 200,000 metalworkers struck for more than three weeks, occupying the city’s streets. At the end of that summer employees walked out of factories across Turin, then looted stores and claimed control of entire districts. Others fought with pens and megaphones for social programs that would soften the cruelty of low pay. On both the Continent and in Britain workers formed councils to sustain the strikes and protests. They saw nothing inevitable about exploitation.
Mattei argues that the principles of austerity were invented in large part to quash these upheavals. In order to wage the war, Britain and Italy had each borrowed enormous sums, making these governments highly motivated to stabilize their economies and increase investors’ confidence, which would keep the loans flowing. To do this, the British government bypassed democratic channels, pursuing their policies through the Treasury and the Bank of England. There, they deferred to economic experts, especially the economist Ralph Hawtrey, and fought inflation—which they blamed on the spending of “unruly” consumers (read: workers)—by throttling the buying power of all but the wealthiest. They also placed every social support on the chopping block—even a bread subsidy that helped British citizens keep food on the table—while levying taxes that disproportionately took from those who could least spare it.
In Italy, Parliament slashed pensions, unemployment and disability insurance, and supports for veterans and their families. As in Britain, it enacted a host of economic policies that squeezed wages and forced workers back into factories on owners’ terms. For the finance minister Alberto de’ Stefani, a celebrated economist and prominent fascist, abandoning the vulnerable was essential for recovery. “I need to place on the national agenda the conscious renunciation of the rights gained by the crippled, the invalids, the soldiers,” he instructed lawmakers. “These renunciations constitute for our soul a sacred sacrifice: austerity.” Austerity required victims, just as the war had.
Mussolini granted De Stefani extraordinary powers. By eliminating even gestures toward democratic deliberation, the fascist government bulldozed a path for imposing unpopular policies. Authoritarian rule also did not pose a problem for international creditors like those at JP Morgan. If “a bloody dictatorship” was the vehicle for restoring “the crumbling pillars of capital accumulation,” the financiers would turn a blind eye, Mattei observes.
The political economist Mark Blyth has argued that, from its inception, austerity hasn’t lived up to its promise to create economic growth after short-term pain.* For Blyth and others, this means that austerity is a failure. Mattei thinks that assessment misses the point. Austerity was designed to discipline workers and defeat their demands by returning control over wages and employment to owners. She shows that under austerity regimes, the “rate of exploitation”—the share of GDP going to corporations and investors over workers—grew by almost a third in Britain and by more than half in Italy.
Mattei’s early-twentieth-century economists argued that this economic order was the only one that could be successful because its social hierarchies resulted not from the decisions of men in conference rooms but from natural selection. “It seems obvious,” said Maffeo Pantaleoni, the main engineer of fascist austerity,
that the classes with lower incomes are significantly deficient in qualities with respect to others. So that this deficiency [deficienza] is the cause of the lower income and not the lower income the cause of the deficiency.
The lower classes, he claimed, made their scarce self-control clear in excessive spending on alcohol, “sweets, chocolate, and biscuits,” and various other “pleasures.” Mattei observes that across Britain and fascist Italy, economists agreed that business owners were, as Pantaleoni put it, “men of talent and personality whom selection makes into entrepreneurs.”
The opinions of the early twentieth century persist today, Mattei argues, in policy approaches that proceed under a mantle of disinterest and technical impartiality but rely on similar assumptions about the natural origin of social hierarchies and the inherent virtue of the successful. Deaton agrees that these beliefs persist within the discipline, now often disguised as faith in meritocracy. Like Mattei, Deaton warns that the difficulty in seeing beyond accepted hierarchies has political implications: meritocrats “come to believe that they know what is good for the less talented, that their technocratic skills replace the need for democracy.”
The opinions of the early twentieth century persist today, Mattei argues, in policy approaches that proceed under a mantle of disinterest and technical impartiality but rely on similar assumptions about the natural origin of social hierarchies and the inherent virtue of the successful. Deaton agrees that these beliefs persist within the discipline, now often disguised as faith in meritocracy. Like Mattei, Deaton warns that the difficulty in seeing beyond accepted hierarchies has political implications: meritocrats “come to believe that they know what is good for the less talented, that their technocratic skills replace the need for democracy.”
Economic power is difficult to perceive because it has become the very language of governance, the sociologist Elizabeth Popp Berman contends. Considering the US in the 1960s through the 1980s, her book Thinking Like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in US Public Policy focuses not on economists’ theories but on the much wider spread of an “economic style of reasoning.” This way of thinking assumes that social ills such as failing health systems, environmental hazards, and corporate concentration can be avoided or alleviated by increasing competition among producers, expanding choices for consumers, and nudging both groups with incentives. This rhetoric of market efficiency insulates economic policies from political debate, Berman argues, and avoids messy conversations about decisions that favor the interests of certain races, classes, and geographic areas over others.
How did economic efficiency become an “insider consensus”? During the mid-twentieth century, Berman argues, many policymakers valued goals beyond efficiency—for example, protecting small businesses because they stabilized civic life in small towns. But in the 1960s and 1970s, Democratic reformers such as Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Jimmy Carter decided to advance a “scientific” approach to governing, particularly around policies related to transportation, health care, poverty alleviation, and environmental protection. They sought experts to supply “neutral, technocratic answers” to questions about whether to break up large companies or to pursue a negative income tax. Objective analysts, they believed, could discover a correct way to govern that was divorced from particular interest groups and instead focused primarily on the costs of policies.
Washington’s demand for policy analysts hastened universities’ ongoing shift toward technical training and drove idealistic young people into schools that would develop their expertise. Policy schools and law schools were hiring economics Ph.D.s and adopting economic approaches where they’d never been applied before. Although professors may have conducted nuanced research themselves, they taught from textbooks that simplified economic ideas. Berman characterizes the basic quantitative analysis courses as “RAND lite,” referring to the defense operations research corporation that first became famous for its cold war military strategy but was soon known for promoting an economic approach to policy decisions. Policy and law school graduates trained in business-friendly economic thinking went on to staff governmental agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces antitrust law, and think tanks like the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, which steer legislators on policy choices and even draft bills.
Berman locates the power of economics in this gradual and widespread institutionalization. Through education and the creation of offices of economic policy analysis in Washington, the field’s foundational concept of efficiency came to be common sense among governing professionals across the political spectrum. “Any objective can be achieved in a more or less efficient manner,” Berman notes. “Who would advocate for inefficiency?”
Historians often place the rightward turn in American politics in the 1970s, when Republicans began to advocate a strict approach to government spending—fighting against the expansion of the national debt, for instance, by squeezing programs for poor and working-class people. That perspective takes Republicans too readily at their word, Berman argues; in fact, they tend to draw on economic knowledge when it suits them and ignore it when it doesn’t. Democrats, who have historically seen themselves as committed to equality, carry a quieter and perhaps more significant responsibility. They expedited the conservative shift by embracing economic reasoning—not instrumentally but as true believers. Take the fate of national health insurance. In 1970 Democratic senator Ted Kennedy proposed a Health Security Act, which would have made insurance available to all citizens with no additional costs, such as the co-pays we take for granted today. The New York Times reported at the time that
subtly but unmistakably, Americans from all strata of society and all economic classes are swinging over to the idea that good health care, like a good education, ought to be a fundamental right of citizenship.
President Nixon turned to the advocates of efficiency to parry Kennedy’s plan. They were, by then, easy to find across all federal agencies, including within the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. It is hardly a surprise that Nixon resisted a universal health program and instead proposed policies that tied medical care to work. But many in those offices had actually been hired by President Lyndon Johnson to administer antipoverty programs. It is both fascinating and disturbing that the technocrats who assisted Nixon had been chosen by an administration that championed the Great Society. Kennedy’s bill never made it out of committee.
Berman argues that President Jimmy Carter cemented this transformation. In the late 1970s plummeting American fortunes were a shock, but Carter’s response was patterned by entrenched experts. The president appointed Charles Schultze, LBJ’s former budget director, as chairman of his CEA, and Carter’s health care plans centered on Schultze’s directive to, in Berman’s words, “move beyond command-and-control regulation through the use of market-like incentives.” Schultze demanded federal agencies supply the CEA’s new arm, the Regulatory Analysis Review Group (RARG), with cost-effectiveness assessments of all policies expected to have an impact of $100 million or more. Agency leaders hated this process—which they called being “rarged”—for overriding their own expertise.
By the end of the 1970s the Washington policy establishment agreed that national health insurance would be a waste of money. The alternative was a reform of health care that turned to competition and co-pays to keep costs down. By the 1990s, Clinton’s Health Security Act—which shared only a title with Ted Kennedy’s previous efforts—“sought to make healthcare more cost-effective and promoted choice and competition so that it would function more effectively as a market.” Universal health care disappeared from political discussions, without acknowledgment.
How did economic efficiency become an “insider consensus”? During the mid-twentieth century, Berman argues, many policymakers valued goals beyond efficiency—for example, protecting small businesses because they stabilized civic life in small towns. But in the 1960s and 1970s, Democratic reformers such as Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Jimmy Carter decided to advance a “scientific” approach to governing, particularly around policies related to transportation, health care, poverty alleviation, and environmental protection. They sought experts to supply “neutral, technocratic answers” to questions about whether to break up large companies or to pursue a negative income tax. Objective analysts, they believed, could discover a correct way to govern that was divorced from particular interest groups and instead focused primarily on the costs of policies.
Washington’s demand for policy analysts hastened universities’ ongoing shift toward technical training and drove idealistic young people into schools that would develop their expertise. Policy schools and law schools were hiring economics Ph.D.s and adopting economic approaches where they’d never been applied before. Although professors may have conducted nuanced research themselves, they taught from textbooks that simplified economic ideas. Berman characterizes the basic quantitative analysis courses as “RAND lite,” referring to the defense operations research corporation that first became famous for its cold war military strategy but was soon known for promoting an economic approach to policy decisions. Policy and law school graduates trained in business-friendly economic thinking went on to staff governmental agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces antitrust law, and think tanks like the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, which steer legislators on policy choices and even draft bills.
Berman locates the power of economics in this gradual and widespread institutionalization. Through education and the creation of offices of economic policy analysis in Washington, the field’s foundational concept of efficiency came to be common sense among governing professionals across the political spectrum. “Any objective can be achieved in a more or less efficient manner,” Berman notes. “Who would advocate for inefficiency?”
Historians often place the rightward turn in American politics in the 1970s, when Republicans began to advocate a strict approach to government spending—fighting against the expansion of the national debt, for instance, by squeezing programs for poor and working-class people. That perspective takes Republicans too readily at their word, Berman argues; in fact, they tend to draw on economic knowledge when it suits them and ignore it when it doesn’t. Democrats, who have historically seen themselves as committed to equality, carry a quieter and perhaps more significant responsibility. They expedited the conservative shift by embracing economic reasoning—not instrumentally but as true believers. Take the fate of national health insurance. In 1970 Democratic senator Ted Kennedy proposed a Health Security Act, which would have made insurance available to all citizens with no additional costs, such as the co-pays we take for granted today. The New York Times reported at the time that
subtly but unmistakably, Americans from all strata of society and all economic classes are swinging over to the idea that good health care, like a good education, ought to be a fundamental right of citizenship.
President Nixon turned to the advocates of efficiency to parry Kennedy’s plan. They were, by then, easy to find across all federal agencies, including within the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. It is hardly a surprise that Nixon resisted a universal health program and instead proposed policies that tied medical care to work. But many in those offices had actually been hired by President Lyndon Johnson to administer antipoverty programs. It is both fascinating and disturbing that the technocrats who assisted Nixon had been chosen by an administration that championed the Great Society. Kennedy’s bill never made it out of committee.
Berman argues that President Jimmy Carter cemented this transformation. In the late 1970s plummeting American fortunes were a shock, but Carter’s response was patterned by entrenched experts. The president appointed Charles Schultze, LBJ’s former budget director, as chairman of his CEA, and Carter’s health care plans centered on Schultze’s directive to, in Berman’s words, “move beyond command-and-control regulation through the use of market-like incentives.” Schultze demanded federal agencies supply the CEA’s new arm, the Regulatory Analysis Review Group (RARG), with cost-effectiveness assessments of all policies expected to have an impact of $100 million or more. Agency leaders hated this process—which they called being “rarged”—for overriding their own expertise.
By the end of the 1970s the Washington policy establishment agreed that national health insurance would be a waste of money. The alternative was a reform of health care that turned to competition and co-pays to keep costs down. By the 1990s, Clinton’s Health Security Act—which shared only a title with Ted Kennedy’s previous efforts—“sought to make healthcare more cost-effective and promoted choice and competition so that it would function more effectively as a market.” Universal health care disappeared from political discussions, without acknowledgment.
Berman, como Mattei e Deaton, quer que os leitores questionem a aliança não declarada entre "aqueles que se beneficiam do status quo e aqueles cuja maneira de pensar sobre o mundo tende a defendê-lo". Veja a mudança climática. Por que os Estados Unidos demoraram tanto para agir? Desde a década de 1980, cientistas naturais independentes têm defendido ações urgentes e focadas para lidar com o aquecimento global. Economistas, em conluio com a indústria de combustíveis fósseis, frequentemente têm ficado no caminho. Em um relatório crítico da Academia Nacional de Ciências de 1983, Changing Climate: Report of the Carbon Dioxide Assessment Committee, um grupo de economistas proeminentes minou seus colegas nas ciências naturais ao enfatizar a dificuldade de fazer previsões sobre um mundo décadas no futuro. "Antecipar a mudança climática é uma nova arte", escreveu o economista ganhador do Prêmio Nobel Thomas Schelling. "Em nossa avaliação calma, podemos estar ignorando coisas que deveriam nos alarmar. Mas é difícil saber o que ainda parecerá alarmante daqui a 75 anos."
As políticas para lidar com a mudança climática também eram incertas; Os impostos sobre o carbono eram uma maneira promissora de deter os poluidores, mas seriam caros e difíceis de aplicar. De qualquer forma, o professor de economia de Yale William Nordhaus escreveu no mesmo relatório:
Se os efeitos colaterais imponderáveis na sociedade — nas costas e na agricultura, na vida em altas latitudes, na saúde humana e simplesmente o imprevisto — acabarão se mostrando mais custosos do que uma redução rigorosa dos gases de efeito estufa, não sabemos agora.
Com base nessas dúvidas, eles defenderam que os políticos "esperassem para ver". Que é precisamente o que aconteceu.
Quando os cidadãos e seus representantes se opõem à sabedoria econômica recebida, eles podem contar com serem rejeitados como ignorantes, irracionais ou tolos. Isso também pode acontecer com economistas que não se conformam. Deaton relembra os forcados erguidos contra os economistas David Card e Alan Krueger quando eles refutaram uma suposição econômica básica sobre o salário mínimo que beneficiou a indústria de fast-food. Durante décadas, economistas e empresários promoveram a ideia de que aumentá-lo custaria empregos aos trabalhadores de baixa renda, um argumento que justificava manter a remuneração baixa. (O salário mínimo federal atual, definido há quinze anos, é de US$ 7,25 por hora, uma taxa seguida por vinte estados.) No final da década de 1980, Card e Krueger compararam o número de empregos em fast-food na Pensilvânia e em Nova Jersey depois que esta última aumentou o salário mínimo. Eles descobriram que, na verdade, o aumento teve pouco ou nenhum efeito no número de empregos disponíveis para trabalhadores de baixa renda. Em vez de aceitar essa evidência, outros economistas insultaram Card e Krueger. Finis Welch, professor da Texas A&M, zombou deles por concluírem que "as leis da gravidade haviam sido revogadas". Escrevendo na Business Week, Paul Craig Roberts, economista e comentarista conservador, denunciou a American Economic Review — uma publicação importante na área — por se ajoelhar diante do "politicamente correto" ao publicar seu artigo. Até mesmo a associação com os autores atraiu ataques. Deaton relata (presume-se com base na experiência pessoal) que os colegas de Card e Krueger poderiam esperar ser tratados como se fossem "amigos e defensores de molestadores de crianças". "O que estava em jogo", conclui Deaton, era "a incorreção teórica das evidências".
Como, então, os governos podem ir além do que Mattei chama de "natureza repressiva da ciência econômica de hoje"? Isso pode já estar acontecendo, já que muitos dos conselheiros econômicos do presidente Biden misturam ideias herdadas sobre eficiência com um foco renovado na desigualdade. A resposta do governo à pandemia mostrou um compromisso de ir além da austeridade: de acordo com o Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a assistência financeira familiar no Plano de Resgate Americano (ARP) de Biden de 2021 foi construída com base no financiamento anterior da crise pandêmica para tirar mais pessoas da pobreza "do que qualquer outra legislação promulgada em mais de 50 anos". Ao aumentar a quantidade de auxílio disponível e o número de famílias elegíveis para ele, o ARP permitiu que as pessoas pagassem suas contas, comprassem mantimentos e cobrissem seus custos de moradia. Mas esse avanço não durou. O Congresso permitiu que a medida caducasse, jogando 3,7 milhões de crianças de volta à pobreza um ano depois. O ARP pode ter promovido uma visão do governo como um agente de bem-estar generalizado, mas não representou uma mudança política permanente.
Como Mattei escreve, a economia de hoje não é "inevitável" ou "o único e melhor mundo possível". Reconhecer os fundamentos não declarados das agendas políticas, como o domínio natural dos proprietários sobre os trabalhadores, ou o reinado aparentemente inatacável da eficiência, pode trazer o pensamento econômico de volta ao seu devido lugar entre intelectuais e especialistas cidadãos que devem, juntos, orientar o governo.
Caitlin Zaloom é professora de análise social e cultural na Universidade de Nova York e editora fundadora da Public Books. Seu livro mais recente é Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost. (Fevereiro de 2025)
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