soziologie und gesellschaftliche entwicklung (35 mb) - ISF München

is clearer. Actually, also rational expectations are "natural": once the
market is defined as the monetarists do, these expectations have to be
rational, otherwise the market would not be natural. Moreover, the relevant
model needs "an additional sociological condition which entails perceived
and actual unanimity of beliefs across all agents in the model" (Frydman
and Phelps, 1983). In fact, testing statistically the REH has been found
a prohibitive task: "the assumption of optimal use of the available Information
cannot be tested independently of an assumption about the available
Information" (Buiter, 1980). In the end, the result of all this is entirely
paradoxical. Crises, Stagnation, social misery do not really exist. If they
are present, it can only be the result of State interference with what would
otherwise be a natural Optimum equilibrium. But why isn't the State as
"natural" as other agents? Why shouldn't there be "natural" institutions? 4
Only by removing the social aspects of reality, monetarists can build their
own specific "natural"-neutral world.
b) The neo-keynesians
Much of this thinking is a reaction to the neo-keynesian school that had
developed an Interpretation of economic phenomena which, utilising some
of Keynes' ideas, focused the attention on the labor market, represented
by the well-known Phillips curve (Phillips 1958, Lipsey 1960, Samuelson
and Solow 1960) . This is a relationship which makes money wages dependent
inversely on unemployment; as money wages are considered the
main source of inflation (cost-push inflation), that relationship was used
to explain it: when unemployment decreases, money wages increase, and
prices with them. Public policy, therefore, consists in determining the
acceptable level of the couple inflation — unemployment. This construction
was destroyed by the long period of Stagflation following the break between
the dollar and gold (1968-71) and the oil crises (1973 to 1980) -
as is well known, high unemployment went hand in hand with high inflation.
Monetarists have objected to this hypothesis, because it is built on the
basis of money-illusion: as workers are not fools (and bear rational expectations),
they will reckon their wages in real terms; if increases in money
wages bring about inflation, and no increase in real wages, they will either
settle for wage indexation or stop contracting for higher money wages.
Thus, the Phillips curve does not exist, there is no trade-off between
unemployment and inflation, and the latter is never due to private economic
agents, but to public policy, which increases money supply in order
to fight unemployment (which, as we have seen, according to monetarists
does not really exist).
There is little doubt that the social vision of neo-keynesians was (and
is) füll of deficiencies. Thus, to suppose that public policies do not engender
Lutz (1984): Soziologie und gesellschaftliche Entwicklung.
URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-100776