Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Is Capitalism Too Productive?

1997; Council on Foreign Relations; Volume: 76; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/20048201

2327-7793

Paúl Krugman,

Political Economy and Marxism

The great majority of those who voted for Lionel Jospins Socialists in the French elections earlier this year were surely voting against, not for: they were protesting high unemployment and the aloof austerity of Alain Juppe's conservative government, not endorsing the specifics of the opposition's program. Nonetheless, Jospin's elevation to prime minister is a remarkable event. Sooner than anyone might have expected, a radical economic doctrine has emerged from obscurity to become, in principle at least, the official ideology of a major advanced nations government. Let me give that economic doctrine a name, and call it global glut. It may be summarized as the view that capitalism is too productive for its own good?that thanks to rapid technological progress and the spread of industrialization to newly emerging economies, the ability to do work has expanded faster than the amount of work to be done.1 In its milder forms, the global glut doctrine involves the belief that policies should aim at increasing demand rather than supply; thus its American advocates have opposed efforts to eliminate the budget deficit or increase national savings, claiming that such efforts will ac tually reduce the economy's growth. In its more extreme forms, the doctrine calls for outright reductions in the economy's capacity, in particular through work-sharing schemes that reduce the length of the workweek. And it was this extreme form that was a central