Ronald Reagan told the following anecdote.
He was on May 1 in Moscow standing next to Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Soviet Union (USSR) and general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR until 1982. Both were reviewing during the parade in front of none other than Lenin Mausoleum.
All the military might of the Soviet Union on Red Square and no less than in front of the president of the United States.
Reagan observed that the battalions of elite troops circulated first as they were explained to him.
They were imposing soldiers, all six feet tall and marching with Olympic synchronization.
Phalanxes of latest model cannons and tanks soon arrived.
Then nuclear missiles.
Finally a line of six or seven civilians, all of them disheveled, poorly dressed and out of place.
At that, an advisor approached Brezhnev.
He made a gesture of not understanding who they were and asking for forgiveness.
“Comrade Secretary, my apologies, I don't know who these people are or how they got into our parade
,” Reagan later learned he told the Secretary General.
“Don't worry, comrade,
” Brezhnev replied.
I am responsable.
They are our economists and you cannot imagine the damage they can do.”
Reagan confirmed there and then his distrust of economists, mainly those who represented interference with the market like those in the Kremlin.
“They are the ones who push the buttons.”
In fact, the American believed that the way the Soviet Union could fall in the future would be by increasing the weight of the State.
The political-economic relationship around a president has almost always been
tense
.
There is an example in the US and another at the local level.
When Franklin Roosevelt met in the United States with John Maynard Keynes, the famous English economist, the American president said that he had seemed to him
“more of a mathematician than a political economist”
and that he did not understand that
“there is a practical limit to what the Government can do
. ”
“For me, I would throw a grenade here
,” Jaime Durán Barba said half in grace and half seriously before a presentation of Mauricio Macri's economic plan—made by his economists—at NH Diagonal Norte, as portrayed by Hernán Iglesias. Illa in her campaign diary Cambiemos.
It was in 2015. The Ecuadorian said that a dramatic economic plan “generates a huge quilombo” and was against abrupt corrections in energy rates.
With that diagnosis, Macri's government started his government by embracing
a gradual correction of the fiscal deficit that he had inherited from Cristina Kirchner
.
The former president, years later, wrote in his memoirs that he regretted not having made a greater adjustment from the start.
More here today and continuing with the Argentine case, former President Kirchner confirmed this week that adjustment policies often destabilize governments.
“Political forces, at different stages, obtained their own strength that infused them with founding air;
they could not finish their mandates
when they failed to give society the quality of life it demands
. ”
Economists sometimes expose a president as Brezhnev implied.
Reagan knew it.
Cristina exaggerates it.
And Milei?
The current Argentine president, when talking about the economy, cited in several interventions the concept of Walrasian general equilibrium, showing the interdependence of all variables and markets.
Of course, in practice this may not work.
Former Minister of Economy Juan Sourrouille once said that without the existence or uniqueness of general equilibrium positions – something that the general equilibrium approach presupposes – everything that economists know falls apart.
“So there we economists
do not have the solidity that people who do not know us assume.
And at the same time,
we have solidity in areas that people do not imagine
, that they cannot imagine, that are from our training
. "
Milei, without knowing it, agrees with this from the former minister when he responded to Cristina Kirchner this week as follows:
“The economy is not an exact science;
The fact that we use mathematics does not give it credence to be considered an exact science.
If you stop emitting, sooner or later you are going to exterminate inflation.
As much as Cristina Kirchner may not like it, inflation is always a monetary phenomenon
that is generated because of the excessive supply of money
. ”
William McChesney Martin, a chairman of the Federal Reserve in the 1950s, used to say:
“We have 50 econometricians working at the Reserve.
They are all located underground and there are reasons for being there: they ask good questions,
but they are in the basement because they do not know their own limitations
and they have a greater sense of confidence in their analyzes than I think is necessary
.
History, and their enthusiasms, demonstrate it.