This year, ex-Chancellor Helmut Kohl narrowly missed out on the Nobel Peace Prize, which, according to the prevailing do-gooder doctrine, he undoubtedly deserved for his role in the annexation of the former GDR to the FRG. Not even Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was shortlisted for his efforts to bring stability to the Middle East. For political reasons, a Chinese dissident had to serve this time. The furor over this has somewhat eclipsed another delicacy of the Nobel Committee, namely the award in the field of economics. This most political of all Nobel Prizes is usually awarded to those who have achieved an intellectual feat for the noble purpose of putting humanity even more under the thumb of capitalism. In 2010, the two Americans Peter Diamond and Dale Mortensen, and a Briton, Christopher Pissarides, were awarded in this spirit.
At first glance, the research of this year’s award winners seems to be in a fairly neutral field. Their topic is so-called search costs. This is a rather banal everyday phenomenon: buyers and sellers often need a lot of time to find the right goods or the right buyer; and time, as is well known, is money in this best of all worlds. However, these search costs are ignored in economic models. The economists now being honored conclude that the automatism of supply and demand does not always work, and that government assistance could potentially reduce search costs. Dandy Keynesianism, then, as the statist left loves it. The Oslo Committee also seems to have given neoliberalism the boot.
Things become a bit clearer when you learn that the fabulous problem of search costs is supposedly most important in labor markets. Scientists have shown, they claim, that unemployment is not only (!) caused by wages that are too high, but also by the unemployed taking too long to look for a job or having expectations that are “too high.” In plain language: Wage reductions through the free play of supply and demand on the markets for the commodity labor power are not enough; additional state coercive measures are needed to prevent the unemployed from causing high search costs with their “demanding attitude.” And since they can only be happy if they can finally call a lousy cheap job their own, this is of course in the very best interest of those concerned. And all of this is apparently “scientifically” proven.
No wonder the Handelsblatt blurts out that the work of this year’s Nobel laureates laid “the intellectual foundation” for the “strategy of incentives and demands,” i.e. also for Hartz IV. Unfortunately, the practitioner and namesake of the application of these findings, Peter Hartz, was not among the honorees. But he may yet become the “laureate of the hearts” as soon as it is recognized that he actually gave neoliberalism the boot with his reform. The “invisible hand” of the market is not enough to discipline wage earners; the “visible hand” of the labor administration must also strike. The well-known U.S. Keynesian Paul Krugman has described his prize-winning colleagues as “incredibly deep thinkers,” which makes clear once and for all what we can expect from crisis Keynesianism.
Originally published in Neues Deutschland on 10/15/2010
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