The great crisis of 2008 and the difficulties encountered by a part of the Western world (in particular by Europe) in finding the right way to overcome it demonstrate once again that the market economy is highly unstable, it does not spontaneously tend towards full employment factors of production and that non-optimal balances can indeed be consolidated in the system. Economics scholars, as Queen Elizabeth candidly underlined several years ago, were unable to foresee the crisis and are now unable to indicate effective recipes for overcoming it.
Hence the return of interest in Keynes, his method of investigation and his recipes. At a time when the ideas of monetarist orthodoxy show that they can no longer explain the concrete functioning of the economy, we see Keynes as the man who courageously challenged the established orthodoxies then dominant, conceiving a new and grandiose "General Theory" capable of explain the reasons for the non-functioning of the classical theories and thus giving a convincing theoretical basis to new recipes of economic policy.
Giorgio La Malfa wanted to re-propose the ideas of the great English economist (John Maynard Keynes - Feltrinelli) in an agile booklet which on the one hand captures the need to thoroughly rethink the foundations of economic theory following the example of what Keynes had done around 80 years ago, and on the other it proposes an explicit political intent which is to contribute to the redefinition of the theories and programs of a new and modern left.
The story of human events and the profound meaning of Keynesian "discoveries" is truly fascinating. La Malfa takes us on a journey into the world of research, where – as in a physics laboratory – we try to discover the secrets of nature, the immutable laws that regulate its functioning. But unlike the exact sciences, economics does not allow laboratory experiments because it operates within social bodies conditioned by a thousand different influences (historical, cultural, institutional) and where top-down experiments can cause enormous drama.
The examples of the mistakes of the rulers are endless: just think of the sanctions imposed on Germany after the First World War (which Keynes himself harshly stigmatized) or Mao's Great Leap Forward which caused 30 million deaths. But what matters is that too often rulers are slaves to the ideas of "dead economists" and that it is precisely ideas that govern the world and that therefore, in a moment of bewilderment, the search for new paradigms capable of explaining the functioning of economic and social phenomena.
Keynes surpassed the old scheme of classical economists by placing aggregate demand at the center of the system from which the level of productive activity derives. He explained that there is an investment multiplier, that money influences not only prices but also production and introduced the importance of expectations in consumption and investment choices. In certain circumstances, Keynes concluded, since the system does not spontaneously tend to saturate all the factors of production, a public intervention may be appropriate which uses idle savings and stimulates investment and therefore the development of the economy.
Over time, public intervention, which Keynes himself had indicated with great caution, became increasingly intrusive, causing a crowding out of private activities and putting individual freedom at risk. The inflation of the XNUMXs led to the eclipse of Keynesian theories and the monetarism of the Chicago school, albeit largely contaminated by many of Keynes's statements, made a comeback.
It was necessary to define a new balance between three fundamental needs of modern societies: efficiency, justice and freedom. The political problem of humanity – as Keynes himself writes – has always been that of combining these three great objectives in a dynamic balance. At the present moment, re-reading Keynes is therefore of extreme interest not only for the history of thought, but also for drawing inspiration from his nonconformist but rigorous method, for identifying solutions suited to the times.
Which, as La Malfa himself says, cannot be those of the time, based on infrastructural interventions of an anti-cyclical nature, or on a renaissance of public industry and perhaps not even on a deficit-spending policy that does not take into account the constraints of the markets of capital that we have liberalized to get out of the cage that had kept us prisoners within the narrow national borders for too long.
Keynes does not offer a ready-to-use toolbox. The attempt to define what he means today to be on the left with attention to unemployment, poverty and inequality does not seem very convincing. La Malfa argues that those who choose this attitude are therefore in favor of change and innovation while the liberal right would be in favor of conservation.
But the reality of the facts does not seem to confirm this statement. It really doesn't seem that Fassina and the comrades of the new left-left are innovators either from a social point of view or from an economic point of view. It's hard to believe that in an already super-indebted country like Italy, a little more deficit to give pensions to expatriates" or to renew the public employment contract can stimulate our economy and get it back on the path of development and therefore of 'occupation.
Union rigidities and statism (even through local public companies) do not seem suitable tools to unblock the country to give the right aid to the unemployed, the poor and generally those left behind. State intrusiveness and public spending are parts of the problem and not the solution. After the tragic failures of socialism, the left is looking for a new ideal inspiration and a wealth of concrete proposals capable of offering a convincing perspective to current societies struggling in uncertainty.
But taking from Keynes the indication of a recovery of the role of the State declined according to the old methods does not seem an idea capable of arousing new hopes. Indeed it seems destined to become yet another source of dangerous illusions.
