Brad DeLong (Berkeley) je v “razmisleku glede makroekonomije“, ki ga bo predstavil na IMF konferenci, nekatere šokiral z dvema ključnima predlogoma: (1) da se mora v severni Ameriki javni sektor povečati, in (2) da bo javni dolg v 21. stoletju nujno precej višji od tistega v 20. stoletju. Slednje pa predvsem zaradi povečane vloge države.

Paul Krugman je DeLongovo idejo nadaljeval,in sicer predvsem iz vidika, da je povečanje vloge države nujno tam, kjer država stvari (iz vidika agregatne blaginje) ureja bolje kot trg: izobraževanje, zdravstvo in pokojninski sistem. Problem je namreč v tem, ker prihodnost posameznikov temelji na njihovih odločitvah iz preteklosti, pri tem pa so posamezniki izjemno slabi pri sprejemanju pravih (zanje dobrih) odločitev. Kadar imajo posamezniki možnost, da sami izbirajo, koliko bodo varčevali za pokojnino, je rezultat zanje običajno manj optimalen od obveznega pokojninskega zavarovanja itd. Podobno velja glede obveznega šolstva in obveznega zdravstvenega zavarovanja.

Iz tega vidika je zato paternalizem države ključen za večjo blaginjo posameznikov. Ali drugače rečeno, da lahko obseg enakih možnosti za vse (več liberalizma) razširimo na večji krog ljudi, potrebujemo več paternalizma države. To pa je izjava, ob kateri bodo vulgarni libertarci skočili v zrak.

Več o tem v petek.

He also suggests — or at least that’s how I read him — the common thread among these activities that makes the government a better provider than the market; namely, they all involve individuals making very-long-term decisions. Your decision to stay in school or go out and work will shape your lifetime career; your ability to afford medical treatment or food and rent at age 75 has a lot to do with decisions you made when that stage of life was decades ahead, and impossible to imagine.

Now, the fact is that people make decisions like these badly. Bad choices in education are the norm where choice is free; voluntary, self-invested retirement savings are a disaster. Human beings just don’t handle the very long run well — call it hyperbolic discounting, call it bounded rationality, whatever, our brains are designed to cope with the ancestral savannah and not late-stage capitalist finance.

When you say things like this, libertarians tend to retort that if people mess up on such decisions, it’s their own fault. But the usual argument for free markets is that they lead to good results — not that they would lead to good results if people were more virtuous than they are, so we should rely on them despite the bad results they yield in practice. And the truth is that paternalism in these areas has led to pretty good results — mandatory K-12 education, Social Security, and Medicare make our lives more productive as well as more secure.

Vir: Paul Krugman