Capitalism After Covid Conversations with 21 Economists Capitalism After Covid Conversations with 21 Economists CEPR PRESS
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Daron Acemog˘lu Pol Antràs Philippe Aghion Oriana Bandiera Agnès Bénassy-Quéré Markus Brunnermeier Wendy Carlin John Cochrane Jesús Fernández-Villaverde Michael Greenstone Atif Mian Michael Pettis Carol Propper Lucrezia Reichlin Dani Rodrik Esteban Rossi-Hansberg Raffaella Sadun Fiona Scott Morton Stefanie Stantcheva Nicholas Stern John Van Reenen Luis Garicano Capitalism after Covid Conversations with 21 Economists Capitalism after Covid Conversations with 21 Economists CEPR PRESS Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street London, EC1V 0DX UK Tel: +44 (0)20 7183 8801 Email: [email protected] Web: www.cepr.org ISBN: 978-1-912179-45-9 Copyright © CEPR Press, 2021. CEPR, which takes no institutional positions on economic policy matters, is delighted to provide a platform for an exchange of views on this topic. Capitalism after Covid Conversations with 21 Economists Luis Garicano CENTRE FOR ECONOMIC POLICY RESEARCH (CEPR) The Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) is a network of over 1,500 research economists based mostly in European universities. The Centre’s goal is twofold: to promote world-class research, and to get the policy-relevant results into the hands of key decision-makers. CEPR’s guiding principle is ‘Research excellence with policy relevance’. A registered charity since it was founded in 1983, CEPR is independent of all public and private interest groups. It takes no institutional stand on economic policy matters and its core funding comes from its Institutional Members and sales of publications. Because it draws on such a large network of researchers, its output reflects a broad spectrum of individual viewpoints as well as perspectives drawn from civil society. CEPR research may include views on policy, but the Trustees of the Centre do not give prior review to its publications. The opinions expressed in this report are those of the authors and not those of CEPR. Chair of the Board Sir Charlie Bean Founder and Honorary President Richard Portes President Beatrice Weder di Mauro Vice Presidents Maristella Botticini Ugo Panizza Philippe Martin Hélène Rey Chief Executive Officer Tessa Ogden Contents Preface vii Introduction 1 Debt sustainability Markus Brunnermeier: Let’s compare the central bank to a race car 11 John Cochrane: Throwing money down ratholes 17 Jesús Fernández-Villaverde: Economists and the pandemic 23 Agnès Bénassy-Quéré: How to design a recovery plan 29 Tackling inequality Oriana Bandiera: Overcoming poverty barriers 39 Stefanie Stantcheva: Taxes and social economics 45 Esteban Rossi-Hansberg: Will working from home kill cities? 53 Atif Mian: The savings glut of the rich 59 A more balanced globalisation Dani Rodrik: Globalisation after the Washington Consensus 69 Pol Antràs: Is globalisation slowing down? 75 Michael Pettis: Trade wars are class wars 83 Containing the new leviathan Daron Acemog˘lu: The Great Divergence 93 Wendy Carlin: The Third Pole 99 Lucrezia Reichlin: Democratising economic policy 107 Carol Propper: Targets and terror 111 Raffaella Sadun: Management for the recovery 117 Promoting innovation and curbing the power of digital giants Philippe Aghion: Is ‘cutthroat’ capitalism more innovative? 127 John Van Reenen: The Lost Einsteins 133 Fiona Scott Morton: What should we do about big tech? 141 Combatting global warming Nicholas Stern: Zero-emissions growth 149 Michael Greenstone: The real enemy here is carbon 157 Luis Garicano Luis Garicano is a CEPR Research Fellow and a Professor of Economics at IE Business School (currently on leave). Now he is a Member of the European Parliament, where he is the economic spokesman for Renew Europe. Before entering elective politics, he was a full Professor at the London School of Economics and at the University of Chicago, from where he recevied his PhD. His academic work focuses on the future of work, the relationship between technology and inequality, and economic growth. At the same time, he has carried out significant research and has made several proposals in the area of European financial integration. As a Member of the European Parliament, during the pandemic he led the development and negotiations on NextGenerationEU (the European recovery plan), and he is now a Member of the Parliament’s Working Group on the Recovery and Resilience Facility. Preface This book is a carefully edited transcription of a series of interviews with top economists on the future of capitalism that I conducted between March 2020 and February 2021 Vii and which appeared on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. I have edited the original transcripts to remove any outdated references (eliminating, for instance, issues such as the arrival date of vaccines or the timing of economic recovery), as well as for brevity, clarity and style, always with the explicit consent and feedback from my guests. This book illustrates that, beyond the hot controversies over debt and inflation that often dominate the public debate, economists have a lot to say (and to agree on) on how to make our economies work better in the aftermath of the pandemic: on global value chains, on the future of work and location, on how to fight poverty, on the economics of digital platforms and what to do to constrain their power, on the structural factors behind the long-term drop in interest rates and the ‘savings glut’, on the economics of climate change, and so on. Their research has a lot to add to the understanding of policymakers and of all citizens of what makes for good and bad policy. I hope that this book will succeed at conveying their insights. I thank all the economists who agreed to participate in the interviews and their transcription. As an economist who now works (provisionally!) as a politician, I knew there was a lot for policymakers to learn from the very top active researchers in the profession. I hope you, the reader, will feel likewise. Of course, there were many other economists with whom I would have loved to talk. I must apologise to David Autor – we recorded a fantastic interview with him which, due to technical difficulties, was lost and we were not able to publish. The project started in the darkest moments of the pandemic and finishes when we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. We started with the objective of helping European policymakers make more informed decisions in those uncertain times. To accomplish that aim, I had the hardest working and most enthusiastic team in the European Parliament. This group of young people includes Abel Sánchez, Gabriel Betancor, María Fayos, Diego Viudez and, especially, Pablo Balsinde, who kept this project going for 30 weeks through his hard work and enthusiasm and did the heavy lifting in editing each interview for this book. The full videos of the interviews are available on my web page at https://luisgaricano.eu/ videos/. These are generally around three times the length of the edited transcripts, and include all of the interviews we conducted. I hope you enjoy reading the interviews as much as I enjoyed conducting them. Introduction The economic policy debate during this crisis was more constructive than in the aftermath 1 of the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–08. Whereas in the last crisis economists took sides in the austerity–stimulus battle, this time around economists converged rapidly on “whatever it takes”. An example of this consensus are the two eBooks that CEPR/ VoxEU published in the first two months of the pandemic, which served to inform the debate on the economic policy response (Baldwin and Weder di Mauro, 2020a, 2020b). The download numbers were enormous.1 INTRODUCTION Partly because of the intellectual consensus, the policy response was powerful everywhere and significantly cushioned the impact of the lockdowns on the population and on the business sector. The immediate challenge now, in the aftermath of the pandemic, concerns the sustainability of the enormous debt accumulated by all countries in the short span of one year. The debate and uncertainty surrounding the risk posed by this debt overhang are to be expected because, as Markus Brunnermeier explains, such high levels of debt generate paths with multiple equilibria – we can remain in the low rates and sustainable debt service equilibrium, or jump to an equilibrium with high rates and financial instability. The equilibrium in each country depends partly on the institutional relationships between governments, central banks and financial systems – fiscal dominance and financial dominance being two key threats. John Cochrane emphasises that the key is not the level of the debt-to-GDP ratio, but whether a country’s plan for paying down the debt is credible. Since there is no threshold past which a debt crisis is automatically triggered, crises tend to happen suddenly, when a government stops being credible. As Cochrane points out, all it takes (as Greece’s euro crisis experience shows) is an accounting scandal. Moreover, once policymakers believe the budget constraint is not binding, the temptation to simply shovel money at problems is irresistible, further undermining credibility and increasing the chances of a sudden crisis. This is particularly the case, as Jesús Fernández-Villaverde points out, in the current context of political polarisation. Debt repayment will be less credible in countries with deep and growing ideological divisions. On the other hand, the pandemic might have created incentives for new forms of work that could enable for the extension of people’s working lives, easing the pressure on national budgets. 1 Of our guests, Lucrezia Reichlin and Agnès Bénassy-Quéré, as well at myself, were amongst the early economists who argued on VoxEU for the establishment of a new ESM covid line, as well as a European Recovery Initiative (Bénassy- Quéré et al. 2020a, 2020b, Garicano 2020). Also on VoxEU, Francessco Giavazzi and Guido Tabellini first proposed the idea of using perpetual bonds to finance an ambitious recovery package in late March 2020 (Giavazzi and Tabellini 2020), and a few days later Guy Verhofstadt and I proposed how it could be implemented within the Union budget and financed by new own resources (Garicano and Verhofstadt 2020).