Posts tagged Scott Sumner

Re: Sumner on the Neoliberal Revolution

Quoting Scott Sumner:

It doesn’t matter whether Chile grew faster or slower after 1973, what matters is that after 1973 Chile became the most successful economy in Latin America.

I’m sure that economy was successful for somebody. For example, there was tremendous growth in the electrical services sector.

John V:

You can’t possibly agree with part of what Pinochet did without the other parts!

Sumner wasn’t talking about “part of what Pinochet did.” He made a global statement about the Chilean economy as a whole.

I think that if it were prominent industrialists who were being left in ditches with their faces hacked off, instead of unionists, Sumner might be more hesitant to call that a “successful economy,” or to treat what happened as progress in the direction of economic liberalism. Comparative GDP figures notwithstanding.

Will:

That a wide variety of governments under a wide variety of political circumstances all implemented similar pro-market reforms in the last few decades of the 20th century is a point that is relentlessly ignored by those … who want to say these reforms were everywhere put in place in defiance of popular opinion.

That, or they believe in a theory of politics which holds that decision-makers in a wide variety of governments in a wide variety of political circumstances are operating within an incentive structure which isn’t always closely aligned with enacting policies that reflect “popular opinion.”

Which may be a good thing or a bad thing, in any particular case. Popular opinion is sometimes right and sometimes wrong. But I do think that public choice economics has something to say about arguments which make a naive inference from the behavior of governments to conclusions about the majority opinion of their alleged constituents.