Mushtaq Khan рассказывает очень много про свой фреймворк political settlement как разновидность институциональной экономики (institutional economics) тут.
В целом, мне его теория кажется state-of-the-art “макро” экономикой, а конкретнее, экономикой институтов, под которыми понимаются не только top-down госинституты (включая рынок), но и другие разнообразные сети горизонтального (политического, социального, и даже этического) влияния агентов друг на друга, такие как сети социальных и родственных связей (кланы), профсоюзы, религиозные организации, политические движения, communities of practice, профессиональные и индустриальные организации и объединения, международные агенства и организации, и т. д.
Ключевые понятия и мысли:
История конкретной экономики/общества важна
Это указание на то, что экономика/общество (или сообщество) имеет память/его состояние неэргодично. Active Inference это увязывает с моделированием общества (сообщества) как агента с убеждениями/beliefs, которые не так-то просто изменить. То есть, направление причинной стрелки/создания не однонаправленное, от индивидуальных агентов к обществу и структурам/институтам в нем, а двунаправленное. Khan говорит про это так:
To say that all structures are created by individuals, and therefore if the structure of society in India is different from the one in the United States, then we have to look at the individual incentives that created those structures, I think is a non-starter. It confuses the path dependence of history and the complexity of how structures are built up. Individuals today in India may not have any capacity of changing that structure to look like the one in the U.S. or Norway, not because they have some information deficit or anything like that, but because a structure itself has a reality and a meaning which affects the way individuals behave.
Правила/policy работают, когда есть система горизонтальных взаимных проверок (checks and balances)
Это bottom-up подход. В абстрактных терминах, это указание на то, что “экологическая ниша”/ecological niche/salience landscape/affordance landscape/ландшафт аффордансов агента определяется другими агентами на том же системном уровне (peers), и надсистемами на один уровень выше: теми самыми “сетями влияния” и организациями. В терминах Michael Levin, это о выстраивании multiscale competence architecture/MCA (она же – иерархичные quantum reference frames/QRFs по Филдсу, как они показали в этой статье).
Сами правила становятся нужны только достаточно организационно сложным организациям. Поэтому надо сначала пройти все пути развития снизу вверх, чтобы организации и экономика усложнились до той степени, чтобы им понадобились правила.
Эта идея прямо противоречит господствующему среди экономических и политических говорящих голов и экспертов из междунароных организаций типа МВФ нарративу, что надо установить “антикоррупционную триаду”: прозрачность (transparency, например, полный отказ от кеша), ответственность за действия (accountability, включая независимые суды), и наказание (строгие законы), чтобы побороть коррупцию “и вот тогда пойдет экономический рост”.
Льготы и заемы на развитие (экспортной индустрии) работают, когда у организаций нет сетей влияния
Эта идея интересно контрастирует с предыдущей.
Mushtaq Khan: […] the real difference was the nature of Japanese colonialism in breaking up many horizontal political networks in Korea. And that was because Japanese colonialism was a very aggressive and oppressive form of colonialism. It didn’t rule through intermediate classes in its colonies, it ruled directly, and it ruled through great force and great viciousness, which is why you will not find any Korean today or any Chinese today who has a good word to say about Japanese colonialism, because it was very rough.
Mushtaq Khan: One consequence of that was that those horizontal networks — which businesses have with politics and other groups and unions and so on — were actually decimated in South Korea. So, the business groups that emerged in the post-Japanese period did not have the networks to protect their rents, did not have the connections with politics. So, now in the 1960s Park Chung-hee comes on and he starts trying things which are, in a sense, quite obvious. We can’t produce these things, so why don’t we give some export subsidies? Why don’t we give some protection? Why don’t we give them some low-cost loans from the publicly owned banks? Things which every developing country has tried. It’s not rocket science. It’s obvious, you can’t produce these things, your productivity is low, let’s help our businesses.
Mushtaq Khan: The difference was not that the South Koreans had innovated something called industrial policy. Everybody and their dog was trying it at that time. In fact, the South Koreans learned a lot from Pakistan, which also had a military government at that time and was doing exactly the same things: export subsidies, import protection, low-cost loans to large business houses, et cetera. […] Why don’t we share these rents and prevent anyone from taking it away? The South Koreans couldn’t do that, because these companies were not connected to the banks, to the politicians, and so on. And therefore, when the state gave these subsidies and they said to them, “You have to achieve these export targets,” there was no way they could protect their rents if they failed to achieve the targets.
Mushtaq Khan: These companies were quite happy to give kickbacks, by the way, to Park Chung-hee, to the top leaders. We know this now because there’s a lot of evidence about the corruption in the system at that time, just as we know the corruption in the Chinese system in the 1980s, when it was growing rapidly. The difference is this, if you’re Park Chung-hee and you know this company is not meeting its export target, but is willing to give me a kickback from my subsidy, do I want that, or do I want to give this subsidy to a company which will meet the export target and therefore will make lots of profits and therefore will be able to give me a kickback which is much bigger? Again, it’s not rocket science. If you’re Park Chung-hee you will say, “This is a failed company, it’s just giving me back some of my own money as a kickback. Why should I take that? I’ll close it down and I’ll shift that subsidy, that protection, to some other company.”
Если продолжать биологические аналогии (Левин же биолог), то описанное выше напоминает мне процесс метаморфоза/metamorphosis: сложно изменить сложившуюся систему через одни стимулы/incentives, она находится в слишком глубокой потенциальной яме/potential well, ее свободная энергия/free energy слишком низка.
“Австрийский” взгляд на ренту/rent
Mushtaq Khan: I really like their framework, although I disagree with it in important respects, and we have actually worked together. In their book called In The Shadow of Violence… My collaborator at SOAS Pallavi Roy and I have articles where we try to show how the political settlements framework that we use is actually not very dissimilar to the limited access order framework, but there are also important differences. The common feature is that we are both looking at the social orders of developing countries as organic things, which are in some sense in an equilibrium. It’s not a pathology, it’s not a disease that they don’t have good governance. It’s not some evil corrupt people who are driving that, and if we got rid of them everything would be fine. It’s a structural, systemic design feature of how these societies are put together, with a lot of informality and a lot of rents.
Mushtaq Khan: I think this is a common thing. And just like in the limited access order, the political settlement says something quite similar, which is that the distribution of rents has to be roughly proportionate to the distribution of power, otherwise the system goes into disequilibrium and then it adjusts back to some kind of equilibrium. So what’s the difference? The difference is that my approach puts a lot more emphasis on economic organizational capabilities and how they develop. It’s not just about violence potential, but it’s also about productivity potential. And I think that one limitation of their framework, as I see it, is that they don’t actually look very much at this interdependence between political power and economic capabilities. Economic capabilities develop in their model, but through some process that is not clearly specified.
Mushtaq Khan: Whereas for me, even more important than your violence potential is your productivity potential, your capabilities of producing, and where they come from. And those two are always interacting, right? That’s one difference. And I think that the process through which policies that are not aligned with the distribution of power are blocked is not always through the threat of violence, although that’s a good metaphor. Ultimately if things break down you have violence, which is often broken down by lots of prior steps, which are far from violence. It could just be, “I’m not going to follow these rules. I’m just going to violate them, and let’s see what you can do with it.” And if so many people are violating, you can’t do anything, even though they’re far from threatening violence. Or “I will push you and try and remove you from power. And this removing you from power might be a nonviolent process.”
Mushtaq Khan: It’s a whole load of oppositional tactics, which do not necessarily reduce to violence. But it’s to do with organizational capabilities. And your organizational capabilities might be political, and you might have very strong organizational capabilities and networks which block things. And then that’s your way of getting rents. Or your organizational capabilities might be productive, in which case you want to actually use that to produce things, and make money doing it that way. This is one big difference in a broader understanding of capabilities, beyond just violence potential. But I think violence potential in extremists is an important capability as well, but it’s not the only one.
Mushtaq Khan: The other difference is that, in their framework, the rents that are generated to keep the glue that keeps violence from emerging are created by limiting access, right? Hence the term ‘limited access order.’ They’re still thinking very much like neoclassical economists, where rents are created by restricting markets and creating monopolies. And in my view, we have a much more expansive understanding of rents. Rents are not just based on limiting access to markets. Rents are based on all types of policies that generate resources that would not have existed without the policy. Some rents can actually open up markets, like these learning rents. And the rents which attract investment are rents which actually are opening up markets which didn’t exist before. And so if you are only thinking of rents as extra incomes created by restrictions, you have a real tough time explaining the political reality of developing countries. Because actually, if you look at a typical developing country, it’s relatively very easy to set up organizations, including informal organizations.
Критика: “статичная” терминология в описании макро-структуры/состояния экономики/общества
Это чувствуется в самом термине “political settlement”, а также в том, что Khan не гнушается термина “эквилибриум” (см. выделенное предложение в начале длинной цитаты в предыдущем разделе). По теории Active Inference, правильнее рассматривать non-equilibrium steady states/NESS экономики/общества.
Сходу я не заметил, чтобы это приводило к каким-то неправильным выводам в теории: наоборот, она вся про развитие/development. Но как минимум терминологически “political settlement/equilibrium” может сбивать с толку, особенно “неподготовленные умы”.
