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Questo articolo è stato pubblicato il 25 agosto 2012 alle ore 16:56.

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That austerity is a counterproductive economic policy in a situation of economic recession can be seen, rightly, as a "Keynesian critique." Keynes did argue - and argued persuasively - that to cut public expenditure when an economy has unused productive capacity thanks to deficiency of effective demand would tend to have the effect of slowing down the economy further and increase - rather than decrease - unemployment. Keynes certainly deserves much credit for making that rather basic point clear even to policy makers, irrespective of their politics, and he also provided what I would call a sketch of a "theory" - I won't go further than that - of explaining how all this can be nicely captured within a general understanding of economic interdependences between different activities (emphasizing in particular the fact that someone's expenditure is another person's income). I am certainly supportive of that Keynesian argument, and to the extent that Paul Krugman has made an excellent contribution in developing and propagating that important perspective in questioning the on-going policy of massive austerity in Europe, I am strongly appreciative of his work as well.

The Keynesian perspective remains important, and yet, I would argue, that the unsuitability of the policy of austerity is only partly so for Keynesian reasons. Where we have to go well beyond Keynes is in asking what public expenditure is for - other than for just strengthening effective demand, no matter what its content. As it happens, European resistance to savage cuts in public services and to indiscriminate austerity is not only not based on - at least not primarily based on - Keynesian reasoning, but more importantly, this resistance is making a constructive point about the importance of public services that is of great economic as well as political interest in Europe. There is a central issue of social justice involved here - that of reducing rather than enhancing injustice (the form that the theory of justice inescapably has to take, as I have argued in my book The Idea of Justice). The public services are valued for what they actually provide to the people, especially vulnerable people, and this is something for which Europe had fought. Savage cuts in these services undermine what had emerged as a social commitment in Europe at the end of the Second World War, and which led to the birth of the welfare state and the national health services in a period of rapid social change in that continent, setting a great example of public responsibility from which the rest of the world - stretching from East Asia to Latin America - would learn.

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