Για να
ξεφύγουμε λίγο από τα στενά δικά μας, θα αναδημοσιεύσω σήμερα ένα σχόλιο του
γνωστού μας Paul Krugman.
Ξεκινώντας
από το γεγονός ότι με το πέρασμα των χρόνων είναι απαραίτητο να αλλάξει και η
χρήση πόρων για τις σύγχρονες επιχειρήσεις, προσπαθεί να καταλήξει σε κάποιο
συμπέρασμα, για την οικονομική πολιτική που πρέπει πλέον να ακολουθήσουν αυτές.
Χρησιμοποιεί
μάλιστα και παράδειγμα από το γνωστό cartoon Dilbert, με το οποίο ξεκινάω αυτή
την αναδημοσίευση.
How Are These Times Different?
Ah, Paris! You walk for miles and
miles — it’s still, after all these years, a spectacularly beautiful city. Then
you have as traditional a meal as possible at an old-fashioned bistro, washed
down with lots of wine.
And you feel like hell the next
morning. Blogging may be a bit limited.
But I’m still thinking about the
conference I was just at, and my own reactions. It was a business-y affair, and
like all the economics/business conferences I’ve attended, it was full of
speakers declaring that everything is different, nothing you learned from the
past is relevant, and so on. Hey, I understand — people attend such conferences
in large part to get shaken out of their routines, and don’t want curmudgeons
telling them that there’s nothing new under the sun.
So I’m kind of an outlier, since
when it comes to macro issues I am pretty much a curmudgeon, someone who thinks
that the similarities between our time and the 90s in Japan or the 30s
everywhere are a lot more important than the differences. But obviously things
do change over the decades. And this morning I find myself wondering, how are
these times different?
Not, as I’ve argued, because of
globalization. But there is at least one important respect in which the 21st-century
economy is different in a way that ought to have a significant effect on
macroeconomics: the much larger role of rents on intangible assets. This isn’t
an original insight, but I haven’t been finding systematic analyses of the
point.
What do I mean by the role of rents?
Consider the changing identity of the most valuable company in America. For a
long time, it was GM, then Exxon, then IBM. These were companies with huge
visible production activities: GM had more than 400,000 employees, which was amazing
when you consider that the overall national work force was much smaller than
the one we have today, Exxon had oil refineries. IBM was an information
technology company, but it still had many of the attributes of an old-style
manufacturing giant, with many factories and a large, well-paid work force.
But now it’s Apple, which has hardly
any employees and does hardly any manufacturing. The company tries, through
fairly desperate PR efforts, to claim that it is indirectly responsible for
lots of US jobs, but never mind. The reality is that the company is basically
built around technology, design, and a brand identity.
There was an old Dilbert in which
the pointy-haired boss explained that the company had discovered that despite
its slogan, people weren’t its most important asset — money was, and people
only came in at #8 or something. (Σημ.Π.Σ.: #9, λέει στο σκίτσο, no big deal) Actually, in Apple’s case market position is
its most important asset.
There are a couple of obvious
implications from this change in the nature of corporate success. One is that
profits are no longer anything remotely resembling a “natural” aspect of the
economy; they’re very much an artifact of antitrust policy or the lack thereof,
intellectual property policy, etc. Another is that a lot of what we consider
output is “produced” at low or zero marginal cost.
So
in some respects these times are different. How does this change things for
economic policy? I’m
thinking, I’m thinking. First, more coffee.
