Read on Twitter
It was a pleasure to debate on this @ForumNewEconomy panel with @jakob_eu @Kalestky @pisaniferry Nora and Anna. I made the following points in my opening remarks: https://twitter.com/ForumNewEconomy/status/1310954440996925441
1) German Ordoliberalism, while there is much to criticize (and much to like) about it, is not the monster that many make it out to be, simply because it was not nearly influential enough to actually be a monster: (i) its academic impact on German economics was and is limited.
And rapidly dwindling. (i) its policy impact was minor. Whenever German politicians wanted to do something they did it whether it had ordoliberal blessing or not. Of course, that didn't prevent them in Sunday speeches to praise ordoliberal Economics. Phony praise.
2) For the European left to claim that German ordoliberalism is so far away from international and in particular US consensus is entirely due to a selective perception of those European leftist economists. If you think that US economics consists only of
Harvard, MIT and Berkeley, you are just showing your ignorance. Chicago economics has much closer policy positions to Freiburg. Bottom line: US economics is a highly diverse thing.
3) While it is good that we have now more diversity and plurality in German economic debates that take international macroeconomics for example more seriously and while it is no longer dominated by public finance and public choice, I fear what we have arrived at right now is that
we now have two networks that basically yell at each other in the media and social media. So we have replaced a monadic dogmatism with a dyadic dogmatism. And it is truly frightening what one can hear from the new second dogmatic pillar:
1) Greening of monetary policy in a rejection of democratic principles. 2) No intertemporal budget constraints anymore. 3) Incentives and political economy irrelevant. 4) Distribution, no longer about the size of the pie. 5) Moral judgment about private consumption behavior. Etc.
What is suffering: pragmatic, evidence-based economic policy debate. We saw this in the acrimony over the short-time worker program which was led largely without any empirical evidence on both sides.
Reason: we have a massive lack of economic data for economic policy making; and this has been politically sanctioned because many politicians just don't want to know (there is some light at the end of the tunnel, though, because there are many good guys in the admin as well).
4) Two other things that worry me: (i) still too few women in the economic policy debate, although the ones we have are great: @MonikaSchnitzer @GrimmVeronika @almutballeer @D_Langenmayr (ii) the extreme radicalization of formerly conservative, acceptable and accepted economists.
When you have the former general secretary of the @SVR_Wirtschaft musing about how the Corona-App will lead to "conservatives" being sent to re-education camps, you know that some people have lost it. But they have an audience. Dangerous.
