Un interesante artículo de Paul Krugman que, apoyándose en la anécdota del lanzamiento del nuevo iPhone 5, describe cómo sólo desde políticas keynesianas de estímulo de demanda podremos salir de "ésta".
El artículo también está hoy disponible en español en el diario El País.
Are you,
or is someone you know, a gadget freak? If so, you doubtless know that
Wednesday was iPhone 5 day, the day Apple unveiled its latest way for people to
avoid actually speaking to or even looking at whoever they’re with.
So is the new phone as insanely great as Apple says? Hey, I’ll
leave stuff likethat to David Pogue. What I’m interested in,
instead, are suggestions that the unveiling of the iPhone 5 might provide a
significant boost to the U.S. economy, adding measurably to economic growth
over the next quarter or two.
Do you find this plausible? If so, I have news for you: you are,
whether you know it or not, a Keynesian — and you have implicitly accepted the
case that the government should spend more, not less, in a depressed economy.
Before
I get there, let’s talk about where the buzz is coming from.
A recent research note from JPMorgan
argued that the new iPhone might add between a quarter- and a half-percentage
point to G.D.P. growth in the last quarter of 2012. How so? First, the report
argued that Apple was likely to sell a lot of phones in a short period of time.
Second, it noted that although iPhones are manufactured overseas, most of the
price you pay when you buy one is domestic value-added — retailing and
wholesaling, advertising and profits — all of which counts as part of G.D.P.
Finally, it took some plausible guesses about the price of each phone and the
number of phones sold, and used those guesses to make an estimate of the impact
on G.D.P.
It’s all
pretty straightforward. But the implications are wider than most people
realize.
The
crucial thing to understand here is that these likely short-run benefits from
the new phone have almost nothing to do with how good it is — with how much it
improves the quality of buyers’ lives or their productivity. Such effects will
kick in only over the longer run. Instead, the reason JPMorgan believes that
the iPhone 5 will boost the economy right away is simply that it will induce
people to spend more.
And to
believe that more spending will provide an economic boost, you have to believe
— as you should — that demand, not supply, is what’s holding the economy back.
We don’t have high unemployment because Americans don’t want to work, and we
don’t have high unemployment because workers lack the right skills. Instead,
willing and able workers can’t find jobs because employers can’t sell enough to
justify hiring them. And the solution is to find some way to increase overall
spending so that the nation can get back to work.
So where
can more spending come from? Businesses are sitting on lots of cash but, for
the most part, have seen little reason to do a lot of investment. Why expand
your capacity when you don’t have enough sales to make full use of the capacity
you already have? And because businesses aren’t spending a lot, incomes are
low, so consumer demand is low, which perpetuates those low sales.
Yet
depressions do end, eventually, even without government policies to get the
economy out of this trap. Why? Long ago, John Maynard Keynes suggested that the answer was
“use, decay, and obsolescence”: even in a depressed economy, at some point
businesses will start replacing equipment, either because the stuff they have
has worn out, or because much better stuff has come along; and, once they start
doing that, the economy perks up. Sure enough, that’s what Apple is doing. It’s
bringing on the obsolescence. Good.
But why
suffer through years of depressed output and high unemployment while waiting
for enough obsolescence to accumulate? Why not have the government step in and
spend more, say on education and infrastructure, to help the economy through
its rough patch? Don’t say that the government can’t add to total spending, or
that government spending can’t create jobs. If you believe that the iPhone 5
can give the economy a lift, you’ve already conceded both that the total amount
of spending in the economy isn’t a fixed number and that more spending is what
we need. And there’s no reason this spending has to be private.
Yet far
from using public spending to support the economy in its time of trouble, our
political system — driven by a combination of ideology, exaggerated deficit
fears and Republican obstructionism — has moved to make the depression worse.
Yes, unemployment benefits and food stamps are up, because so many more people
are in need; but government employment has plunged, as has public investment.
Now,
despite all this, we will eventually recover. Over time there will be more
equipment that needs replacing, more iPhone-like innovations that boost
spending, and, in the long run, we will exit this economic trap. But, as Keynes
famously pointed out in another context, in the long run we are all dead. To
borrow a phrase from myself, why not end this depression now?
