”People do not necessarily move to the best jobs”

GDP中心主義に喝！ https://t.co/bg6XJpMk8h

— suzuky (@suzuky) June 4, 2020

Duflo and Banerjee contend that, in reality, people do not necessarily move to the best jobs, or invest in the most productive businesses; nor is there any evidence they work less in response to higher taxes. They care about many things — health, self-respect, clean air — more than they do about maximising per capita GDP, an elusive goal that may no longer be the right priority for policymakers in the developed world.

As Duflo says: “The advantage of thinking more broadly like that for politicians is that they cannot change GDP anyway, but those things actually can be changed with carefully done policies.” For her, the priorities in the US would include much more generous support for workers displaced by trade — modelled on the GI Bill programmes that support military veterans — and a huge investment in early-years education, to create high-status jobs “that no robot is ever going to come to take”.

Duflo believes that an excessive faith in financial incentives is one of the big things mainstream economics got wrong. “You can see the long shadow of that misconception in our thinking on trade, in our thinking on taxation . . . in our thinking on social programmes.”

生産性を最大化することより健康や自尊心、きれいな空気などといったことの方を人は大事にするのであって、金で人が釣れると思いこんでいるとすれば、それは大間違いだ、と。