9486 in the collection
Competitiveness
Reader Comment: Face it - it's lost and gone. The American Empire is at an end and is being looted by the wealthy. The "competitiveness" meme is just another way of the government saying "You're on your own."
by Paul Krugman
Sigh. So it appears that President Obama is going to make "competitiveness" his main economic theme. To be fair, he could (and may well) do worse. But this is hackneyed stuff, and involves a fundamental misconception about the nature of our economic problems.
It's OK to talk about competitiveness when you’re specifically asking whether a country's exports and import-competing industries have low enough costs to sell stuff in competition with rivals in other countries; measures of relative costs and prices are, in fact, commonly -- and unobjectionably -- referred to as competitiveness indicators.
But the idea that broader economic performance is about being better than other countries at something or other -- that a companycountry is like a corporation –is just wrong. I wrote about this at length a long time ago, and everything I said then still holds true.*
The hopeful interpretation of Obama's embrace of the idea that he’s the CEO of America Inc. is that it might help fend off right-wing attacks on government action as a whole, helping him sell the need for public investment of various kinds. On the other hand, as Robert Reich says, this could all too easily turn into a validation of the claim that what's good for corporations is good for America, which is even less true now than it used to be.
All in all, it's kind of sad. And the less said about Jeffrey Immelt's vacuous op-ed, the better.
*Side note: the usual suspects are going to look at the opening of this piece and say “Ha! Krugman used to think that unemployment benefits cause unemployment! He used to be down on Europe!” So, two points: UI can raise the unemployment rate at which inflation begins to rise — but that’s not our problem now; and over the 17 years since that article was published, a number of European countries have undertaken reforms that substantially improved their job performance.
— Paul Krugman
New York Times
2011-01-23
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/competitiveness/
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