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Date: | Fri Mar 31 17:18:37 2006 |
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Ric is right about the relevance of growth literature to this discussion.
Any country, rich or poor, where the marginal product of capital is below
the sum of the rate of depreciation and the population growth rate has
over-accumulated capital and is "dynamically inefficient". Diamond's 1965
AER article shows that this is possible in a competitive economy under
laissez-faire--no "frictions" other than finite lives are necesssary. A
dynamically inefficient economy can be Pareto-improved by drawing off
"productive saving" into unproductive forms--fiat money, perpetually
rolled-over government debt, pay-as-you-go social security--reducing the
capital stock and raising steady-state consumption. This possibility is
the long-run analogue of the Keynesian "paradox of thrift": the economy
really is over-saving, although it is not at all an aggregate demand
problem--it's a missing markets problem due to the "friction" of finite
lives (in the long run we're all dead and the unborn aren't around to
trade today!). The remedies sound pretty Keynesian, too.
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