анонимный вопрос

The triumphant march of Keynesianism across the globe is based on simple trickery. The Great Depression was declared a failure of the free market, rather than a failure of state regulation, and a set of state regulation tools was proposed to counteract such phenomena. From the very beginning, Keynesian theory was criticized by the Austrian and neoclassical schools, and throughout the entire time it dominated, no convincing answers to this criticism were provided.

Why did the Keynesians defeat the Austrians? Because the governments themselves acted as the arbiters in the dispute over which economic policy governments should pursue. This violates the fundamental legal principle “No one should be a judge in their own cause,” and it is no surprise that governments with grim regularity preferred those teachings that offered to grant them more significant powers, rather than those that proposed, on the contrary, full deregulation of the economy.

Fortunately, in democratic countries, some feedback remains between the government and the voters, and when stagflation occurred in the seventies—directly contradicting Keynesian theory—the monetarists, with their less clumsy methods, took the place of the Keynesians in the courts of the sovereigns. Countries with dominant Marxism were not so lucky; there, Marx’s teaching was declared omnipotent by virtue of its correctness; in other words, the feedback between theory and reality was absent.

I had to make this historical excursion to make it clear immediately: the success of Keynesianism is based not on logical justifications of the theory’s correctness, but on the fact that its implementation brought direct benefits to those implementing it.

Now I will touch upon the Keynesian proofs directly: after all, even if factual considerations did not match the public justifications, the Keynesians still had to provide some justifications.

At the heart of any theory lies a certain model of reality. Keynes refused to consider models of interaction between agents and focused instead on models of relationships between abstract entities such as aggregate demand, aggregate supply, total employment, the general price level, gross product, the velocity of money, and so on.

Thus, the model of a crisis according to Keynes looks like a system with positive feedback: the lower the demand, the lower the production, the higher the unemployment, the lower the demand. Within the framework of such a simple model, everything is logically flawless. Keynes’s conclusion: the government must stimulate demand through public works, regardless of what they are—even digging holes and filling them back in—and this will allow an exit from the vicious circle. It is evident that such a theory is perfectly suited for propaganda purposes: first, you frighten them properly, and then you promise to save them if they buy your miracle cure for the problem.

In general, the resulting model is completely counterintuitive: a crisis is caused by the overproduction of goods (according to the AES, it is caused by the overproduction of money, and when there are many goods, that is actually great, which fully corresponds to the worldview of any average person); the chief evil in the economy is savings (according to the AES, it is precisely savings that allow for the implementation of increasingly indirect production chains, which ensures economic growth); the best way to fight crises is the destruction of savings and the squandering of resources. Why the implementation of such madness is a sure path to ruin at the level of an individual household, but somehow magically saves the economy once the state begins such a practice for the entire country at once, the Keynesians did not explain. There is a complete logical gap between micro- and macroeconomics for them; they are two entirely unrelated disciplines.

Modern Keynesianism has mutated greatly compared to the original theory, merged in ecstasy with monetarism, and formed a single mainstream current that continues to create increasingly sophisticated models for various areas of life. If Keynes began by promoting the very necessity of state regulation of the economy, now the necessity of state regulation is no longer questioned, and economists are having a field day, infinitely refining specific ways to do it in the most sophisticated manner.