soziologie und gesellschaftliche entwicklung (35 mb) - ISF München

sense that they can influence demand (welfare transfers), and a degree of
monopsony in the sense that they can influence supply (government welfare
financing). The result of all this is that füll employment will not be
assured, as — again following Keynes — there is no reason to suppose that
market forces (or autonomous social behaviour) produce necessarily füll
employment (or effectiveness). Two outcomes are then logically possible:
the first is that Government will find it ever more difficult to obtain fuller
employment by increasing welfare expenditure, if the market does not
produce füll employment by itself; the second is that the egalitarian motivations
behind welfare gradually change to charity motivations.
Society will soon find that welfare is economically and socially useless,
while the market is the real force that determines (less than füll) employment.
Neokeynesians sensed this, and thought that a policy to minimize
wages, compensated by welfare, could stimulate private investment — a
mediation which however lacks the power to oblige enterprises to accumulate,
and leaves to market forces the determination of investment and
employment. Monetarists, more radically, throw away welfare and recognize
the powers of the market ("natural" social behaviour; or the "natural"
development thereof). They negate any strength to the multiplier — not
only of welfare expenditures, but of all autonomous expenditures — thus
freeing the market from any links with public policy.
The Welfare State, so modified or reduced, opens up new vistas, not
particularly optimistic, for societal change. As it tends to become charity
on the one hand, and to reinforce the "efficiency" of public institutions
on the other, while leaving market forces free to operate and to create
stable long-term unemployment, somewhere in the social System a new
class division may appear. What we thought in the past were signs of social
progress — the development of mass movements based on voluntary aggregation
and formed outside the institutional set-up — may yet be interpreted
as a spontaneous adaptation of society to the liberation of market
forces, the disgregation of the welfare State, the reproduction of a divided
society, based on mass unemployment, crises and slow economic growth.
Economists, as intellectuals, have simply sensed this societal change —
and have used their tools to justify it. If saddened by our role, it is nevertheless
fascinating to see the mechanisms at work: wehave,infact, witnessed
the social creation of ideology. As an economist, I would welcome sociologists
interested in examining — in corpore — the sociology of ideology.
ANMERKUNGEN
1 Not all monetarists adhere to the rational expectation hypothesis (Frydman-Phelps,
1983); they fear that such hypothesis is "closer in spirit to a planned economy than
to a decentralized market, due to the relevant model" (q.v.).
2 Some reference to Smith, Ricardo, Malthus or Marx, due to the "natural" concepts;
Lutz (1984): Soziologie und gesellschaftliche Entwicklung.
URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-100776