What Drives Progress: The State or the Market?

What Drives Progress: The State or the Market? by Ethan Yang for American Institute for Economic Research

The famous American author, Mark Twain once said, “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”

A little over a hundred years ago President Woodrow Wilson kicked off a drastic expansion of government power and scope with the general assumption that the state can scientifically plan society. President Franklin Roosevelt greatly expanded on this idea with more government programs that promised to solve all sorts of societal ills and bring a level of centralized progress that the market couldn’t provide. This sparked caution and critique from those who favored market-based mechanisms advocated by economists such as Ludwig Von Mises.

Those like AIER argued that the market was far superior to the state in organizing society. This is the story of humanity, a struggle between the individual and the state. Those who believe in statism and those who believe in liberty.

Some thought that the free marketeers won the intellectual argument against the Keynesian statists in the 1970s. This is when stagflation completely upended the assumption that inflation and unemployment are always inversely related. It turned out that simply using expansionary monetary policy to drive economic growth was not as good of an idea as people thought. Post World War Two, Keynesian and big-state thinkers more generally braced for economic turmoil as spending dropped and people returned from war. The exact opposite happened as we learned again that the state does not drive economic growth. In the latter half of the 20th century, sweeping market reforms brought prosperity to countries all around the world. Another blow to the idea of state-run industry.

In 2013 Dr. Mariana Mazzucato, a leading economist of the Keynesian persuasion, published The Entrepreneurial State, which makes the case that the public sector can do far more than it is currently doing. That the private sector necessarily needs generous guidance and intervention from the state and in many cases is equal if not superior to the market in generating efficient and innovative services to society.

Well, here we go again.

Mazzucato and her allies posit that society can be so much better if we ditched market-based principles and delegated more responsibility to the state. Think people like Senator Elizabeth Warren.

This is why it is so necessary that economic heavyweights Dr. Deirdre McCloskey and Dr. Alberto Mingardi teamed up to write The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State. In a perfect world, one should read Mazzucato’s work as well, but doing so is not necessary to understand this book. The book can surely stand its own as the debate between the market and the state is a timeless conversation. The book also serves as an outstanding work of economic history and elaborates on many relevant economic topics, making it well worth anyone’s time, not just those closely following this debate.

The Idea of the Entrepreneurial State

The authors quote Mazzucato when they note that she remarked,

“Mainstream policy conceptions and prescriptions” are “normative postulations for a permanent state planning for more markets, mainly organizing ‘deregulation cum privatization’ rather than deliberate sets of conditional recommendations based on pondering alternatives and paths.”

Essentially this suggests that mainstream economic thought is dominated by ideas put forth by those like Milton Friedman who advocate for more privatization and deregulation to create growth. Mazzucato believes that this is unpredictable and suboptimal. Rather we should allow experts to ponder better alternatives with a scientific level of precision. Mazzucato likes to reference government programs like DARPAand The Manhattan Project as examples that the government can be very innovative.

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