Saturday, October 17, 2009

Progressives may be losing the battle

At the beginning, I thought that the financial crisis would open the door for new policy debates and a new "progressive consensus". More expansionary macro-policies and the debate on the health reform in the US would open the door for a return to a social-democratic understanding of distributional rules. It turns out that I could not be more wrong!!!! In the next few days, we have seen:

a. A return to bonuses in Wall Street ($700,000 per Goldman employee!) with no apologies for it.

b. An accent on stability and prudence after the crisis (somehow we can imagine who is paying for it).

On top of that, a column in today FT defends the need to let the consumer make decisions in the health sector.

Have we lost a historical opportunity to change things?

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