Stimulans

Često se u kontekstu ekonomske politike pominje "stimulans", što je termin Kejnzijanske doktrine i podrazumeva korišćenje mera fiskalne i monetarne politike da bi se podstakao rast ekonomije (npr. niskim kamatnim stopama centralne banke, rastom javne potrošnje itd) . Ipak, da bi bilo jasnije šta to u suštini podrazumeva, sledi kraća priča iz teksta koji je Richard Rumelt napisao za Fortune magazin na ovu temu:

In the mid-1960s, when I was in college, one of my best friends dropped out. An indifferent student, Paul had a girlfriend and wanted to get on with life, so he went to a school for big-rig truckers. When I saw Paul again after two years, I was shocked. His eyes were sunken and shadowed and his body had gone to fat. Yet he smiled and proudly pointed out an award on his wall announcing that he was the "Driver of the Year."

"How did you get that?" I asked. Paul dug into his pocket and pulled out a clear envelope holding a number of large black torpedo-shaped pills.

"These are west coast turnarounds," he explained. "They let you drive from New York to San Francisco, turn around, and come back without stopping."

I spouted the usual cautions about what he was doing.

Six months later, Paul's girlfriend called me because she couldn't wake him up. I arrived at their apartment at the same time as Andy, one of Paul's truck driver colleagues. Paul sputtered awake when Andy poured water on his face. Then, Andy offered Paul some strong coffee because he "needed a stimulant."

A chemical stimulant provides a temporary speed up, a boost that must be paid for later. Notwithstanding Paul's award for "Driver of the Year," taking stimulants is not a path to long-term productivity. Andy's diagnosis that Paul needed "a stimulant" was dead wrong. Paul had been living on stimulants for so long that his body could no longer respond to them. Paul needed to recover and get back to normal.

Like its chemical analog, an economic stimulus is a temporary jolt aimed at helping the economy over a rough patch, with the cost of the jolt paid for out of normal-times incomes. Unfortunately, like Paul, the U.S. has been taking economic stimuli every quarter for a decade, pretending that a sequence of temporary jolts is the same thing as economic growth. But true per-capita economic growth is the outcome of productivity-increasing innovation. You cannot engineer true economic growth by fiddling with fiscal or monetary policy or by financing excess consumption with shaky loans.

U istom tekstu se nalazi i pregled mera koje su u ovom kontekstu sprovedene u SAD tokom poslednjih 10 godina i njihovih efekata.