Mercados vs regulación

Un extracto de una reseña de Will Wilkinson del libro de Dan Ariely Irrational Economics, que he encontrado ahora:

Even more flabbergasting is the end of Mr Ariely's chapter on the distinction between market incentives and social norms. (E.g., don't offer to pay your mother for dinner; sometimes you can get people to do more by not paying them, etc.) Here Mr Ariely comes across as something like an anti-economist. After suggesting that we could get armed customs agents to wreak more violent havoc on drug traffickers by puffing them up with "honor" (no kidding), Mr Ariely goes on to posit that the problem with education in America is that it is too bound up in the market mentality! The solution is... more hope?

Instead of focusing the attention of the teachers, parents, and kids on test scores, salaries, and competition, it might be better to instill in all of us a sense of purpose, mission, and pride and education.

Oh! Well, thanks for that. But how will this come to pass? In an earlier passage he says, "That would take some inspirational leadership, but it could be done."

I think we can take either of two lessons away from this: (1) President Barack Obama, with his astonishing power to instill "purpose, mission, and pride" in the general populace, can extract us from what once naively seemed like intractable misalignments of interests. (2) Once you've demolished the law of demand, and then the power of market incentives, policy analysis is reduced to useless exhortations to inspirational leadership.

Todavía no me he leído el libro, pero no me sorprenden ni las ideas de Ariely, ni los comentarios de Wilkinson. Este creo que es una repetición más del debate que estamos teniendo recientemente sobre mercados vs regulación. Y como en otras muchas ocasiones, creo que estoy en medio: los mercados tienen fallos, que hay que corregir. Pero esa corrección no puede estar basada sólo en grandes intenciones por parte del gobierno, o incluso en normas mal fijadas. Entre ambos términos deben aparecer siempre los incentivos, económicos o no (y aquí doy cancha a los behavioral economists), que hacen que la gente llegue a ese sentido de misión y a ese cambio de comportamiento. Porque las grandes palabras valen para algo, pero no para todo, y si no véanse los ejemplos de electricidad verde o temas similares.