Nobels that aren't, but someday could be

Willem Buiter in the Financial Times reports on Kornai's soft budget constraint as it applies to bailouts and the financial crisis

In a post a few days ago, (After subverting bank insolvency, our leaders are now about to make a mess of liquidity) , I argued that hard budget constraints were the defining characteristic of a well-functioning market economy. Many/most of the advanced industrial countries were weakening or even undermining the capacity of their financial sectors to intermediate efficiently by permitting a softening of the budget constraints of banks and other financial institutions that were deemed systemically important and/or were too politically connected to fail. I noted that the concept of the soft budget constraint (SBC) came from professor János Kornai, a great economist and a Nobel prize winner (the overlap is by no means perfect - there are type I and type II errors).

I'm rather sure that Kornai has not received a Nobel. I love his work on the soft budget constraint and I would love a world in which his kind of work (like Ostrom's), rather than the latest refinements of statistical techniques, gets Nobels in Economics. Hopefully we're moving to such a world. But we're not there yet.

Kornai gives some rather nice cautionary notes about bailouts.

One strong concern expressed more than once in discussions on the present financial crisis has been this: the interventions by the state are smuggling a bit of socialism into the capitalist economy. This is the side of the debate to which I would like to contribute, as a research economist who has spent several decades examining the socialist system from inside. My subject here is not the post-socialist region, but the rest of the world-though I look upon it with the eyes of one who has himself experienced socialism at first hand.

Back in 1968, when attempts began in my native Hungary to implant “market socialism” into the socialist economic system, the heads of state-owned enterprises were urged to increase their profits. Managers were to do well if their enterprises made money, as they would receive a share of the profits. But there was little cause for concern if the enterprise made a loss and fell into debt: in almost every such case, some kind of rescue operation was mounted. For instance, there might be a bailout funded out of the state budget, or the state-owned bank might extend extra credit, without much hope of the loan being repaid. Losses and debts were unpleasant, of course, but they were not a life-or-death matter for an enterprise.

Managers, based on their experience of repeated rescue operations, could more or less bank on their enterprise surviving. Despite all the stress on the profit motive, the incentive remained fairly weak in reality. Why bother too much about cost-cutting or innovating if there was no threat of insolvency? The financial situation of the enterprise did not place a real constraint on its spending, its borrowing or its expansion. This was the state of affairs that I called at that time a “soft budget constraint” (SBC).
...
Capitalism developed gradually out of the pre-capitalist social environment, by an organic process of growth. As capitalist forms came to dominate the economy, so the influence of business on politics increased. Socialism, on the other hand, did not seep gradually into the fabric of society in Tsarist Russia or post-World War Two China. The communist party became capable under specific historical conditions of seizing political power, taking control of the machinery of state, and then imposing the socialist economic system on society by state force. Every means was used, including merciless repression. The developmental process of the socialist system, unlike that of capitalism, began in the political quarter, not the economic.

However many bailouts there may be, however much the budget constraint may soften, there is no danger of socialism returning in that sense - which is the most important point. It is meaningless to raise that spectre in the United States, Western Europe or other developed countries, where democracy has sent down deep roots. There may be times when public discontent is stronger and more widespread than in other calmer and more prosperous periods. But only incorrigible revolutionists given to hoodwinking themselves believe such discontent can overthrow the foundations of the system. That prediction indicates a failure to understand the history of the communist system.

In other words, Hayek's mechanism in Road to Serfdom is wrong. Read the whole thing...