Paul Sweeney is today’s contributor to the Irish Times series: you can read his article here.
There is much in his article that would be commonly accepted across the economics profession. However, I discuss below a few points of potential disagreement.
His article seems to suggest that those who advocate cuts in public sector pay are necessarily against the elimination of tax breaks for businesses, farmers, property development etc . Rather, I would think most of those who have written on public sector pay would also agree with the elimination of most of these subsidies (see, for example, my own paper.)
He also argues that our low-ish international ranking in earnings means that labour costs are not a major problem. However, it is important to make a distinction between ‘movements along the labour demand curve’ and ‘shifts in the labour demand curve’. If we can boost productivity, we can raise wages and employment at the same time through an outward shift in labour demand. Everyone is in favour of this, of course. However, boosting productivity growth is complex and is really a medium-term process (few instantly effective policies).
However, at the current level of productivity, we can still raise employment by accepting a wage cut (a movement along the labour demand curve). At a time of sharply rising unemployment, this seems like a sensible approach.
The article suggests that the economic model must “shift rapidly from Boston to Berlin: from the Anglo “shareholder value” system, to the European “stakeholder” model“. It is certainly true that the crisis should lead to a deep and critical re-assessment of how we should regulate the banking sector and, more generally, the appropriate extent of government regulation across the economy. However, the recession is now getting to be as deep in Europe as in the United States, even if the origin was American-made. The appropriate analytical framework also needs to be wider than ‘US v Europe’ in view of the rising share of world output that is generated by the emerging markets.
Finally, the article refers to ‘conservative economists’. I am not sure exactly what he means by that term, but I doubt that the political preferences of academic economists can be easily inferred from their views on topics such as public sector pay. It is possible to analytically conclude that public sector pay cuts would be a good idea for the overall economy, while holding a very diverse range of views concerning the appropriate level of redistribution in society and other dimensions that differentiate ‘conservatives’ from others.
In similar vein, the article suggests that a neoclassical approach to economics requires a belief in ‘efficient markets’. This is at odds with the evolution of the profession, with much of the last two decades devoted to using neoclassical economics to analyse market failures (very long list of contributors).