Brad DeLong se había sumado a Paul Krugman en su crítica a la teoría austriaca del ciclo económico. Bob Murphy escribe una excelente réplica en la página del Mises Institute. Copio un fragmento en el que contesta a la pregunta de Krugman y DeLong de la entrada anterior ("¿por qué en el boom no genera desempleo?"):
During the boom, workers are drawn into the expanding sectors by the promise of higher wages. They aren't forced into the expanding sectors by getting let go from their original position; instead they voluntarily leave. (...) In contrast, after the bust a bunch of workers are suddenly out of a job. All the remaining options for them are less desirable than their previous position — if they weren't, the workers already would have moved into the other sectors. So unemployment rises in the aggregate, because there are workers who are searching for a new position, hoping that if they prolong their job search, they will have to endure a smaller pay cut compared to their boom-time status.
Krugman can call this a Keynesian story if he wants, but the Austrian version recognizes two important things that the aggregate-demand story overlooks. First, the Austrians understand the crucial role of capital consumption during the boom period. Most people really do feel wealthier during the boom period, because their consumption rises and they falsely believe that this prodigality in the present will have no long-term consequences. The Keynesian model can't capture the fact that during the boom period, society "eats the seed corn" through malinvestment.
Related to this point, the second thing that the Keynesians overlook is that the problem of "sticky wages" — which keeps the labor market from clearing because workers are reluctant to accept pay cuts — isn't some aberration of the market economy. As Arnold Kling tries to explain in his "recalculation" explanation, after the bust the economy cannot simply go back to its preboom configuration. The underlying fundamentals have changed through the passage of time and because of the mistakes of the boom period. It takes time and genuine search for laid-off workers to figure out where they belong in the new economy.
