February 10, 2025 • 39 mins
The Trump administration has come into office with big ambitions to lower the size of the US deficit. So far, a number of small items have been identified as possible waste. But to meaningfully bend the curve on spending, there's widespread agreement that we'd have to look at things like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and defense. This is hard stuff to cut and it's something that governments around the world have long struggled with. How do you pull back on a prior commitment that your constituency has come to expect? In this episode of the podcast, we speak with Firtz Bartel, an assistant professor of international affairs at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M. He is also the author of the recent book The Triumph of Broken Promises, which examines the simultaneous economic crisis in the US, UK, and Soviet Union during the 1970s, and how each country was forced economically to essentially "break promises." We talk about what it takes politically to maintain domestic credibility for any government while undergoing such wrenching choices, and why some systems are better suited for it than others.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast.
I'm Joe Wisenthal.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
And I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Tracy, spending cuts in the air these days.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
You could say that it's a vibe shift. It's a
vibe Yeah.
Speaker 4 (00:33):
Sure.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
So under the Trump administration, obviously there is a stated
ambition to reduce spending and make the government more efficient overall.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Yeah, Scott Besten, I think he has something the three
three three plan part of it. I think he wants
three percent growth, three percent more oil production, and then
three percent deficit. And I think deficits are around six
percent currently, which is really high by historic standards, especially
because we're at what four point one percent unemployment. Usually,
(01:06):
when the economy is running this hot or this tight,
you don't expect to see deficits this large at in
rates as high as they are. There does seem to
be this impulse for better or worse, and other people
can be the judge of that to cut spending. But
on the other hand, it's very difficult.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Wait, why do you say that, Because early in my
career there was the Eurozone cross and I think there
was some austerity imposed in places like Greece ultimately, so
why do you say it's difficult?
Speaker 2 (01:35):
So, actually, there's two things here, and I think there's
really apt and I think this is a fascinating question
in its own right, which is, why is it that
in two thousand and nine twenty ten, in the aftermath
of the Great Financial Crisis, when we had widespread unemployment,
why was the appetite for austerity so high then at
a time when there was so little aggregate demand, And
(01:56):
now at a time when you know, obviously inflation has
been running hot and so forth, why does it seem
more difficult? That in itself is a fascinating question. But
I guess what I would say to answer your question specifically,
is that anytime people talk about cuts, there is not
a ton of discretionary spending in the US government budget.
There's the entitlement, social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and then there's defense,
(02:23):
which there's usually not much political appetite to cut, and
then when you have left over, it's hard to move
the dial. And so the theory is that if you
actually want to move the dial on spending and deficits,
you have to like cut into some areas you have
to break promises perhaps that you've made to various constituencies
like senior right.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
Ultimately you're inflicting pain on someone, and at least in
democratic governments, because it's all about a numbers game. It's
all about getting votes. That would be a bad thing.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Well, we have to then talk about how do the
stars align if you actually want to meaningfully cut spending,
how does that actually happen. How do democratically elected government
sort of build the political capacity to inflict pain perhaps
on groups that obviously have some stature. We really do
(03:15):
have the perfect guest. We are going to be speaking
with Fritz Bartel. He is an assistant professor of International
Affairs at the Bush School at Texas A and M.
And he is the author of the book came out
in twenty twenty two, The Triumph of Broken Promises, the
End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism,
And it's kind of about exactly this topic, how governments
(03:36):
break promises. So, Professor Bartel, thank you so much for
coming on odd LATS.
Speaker 4 (03:40):
Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Your book is really interesting because you talk about this
sort of resource constraints and spending constraints in the US,
the UK, and the Soviet Union. All of it was
sort of building up to a head in the late
nineteen seventies early eighties. Before reading your book, that hadn't
clicked to me that all the different economies were sort
of facing the same stresses at the same time. What
(04:05):
was going on that suddenly around the world governments felt
this impulse like we have to cut we have to
constrain ourselves.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
Yeah, So, I guess the short answer is that the
kind of post World War two economic boom had run
aground in the nineteen seventies. Obviously, there was the kind
of birth of stagflation. There was a decline in productivity
growth across Western economies, the Soviet economy, and the Eastern
Bloc more generally, the Communist Block had run into the
(04:34):
end of their growth model. Kind of this hyper industrialization
growth model had started to produce fewer and fewer results.
So in both the Eastern Bloc, the Communist world, and
the West, the growth model, one largely based on kind
of industrialization, certainly based on cheap energy resources, had started
to run aground roughly at similar kind of moments in
(04:58):
the early nineteen seventies, and then these crises that kind
of came to define the nineteen seventies, the energy shock
of nineteen seventy three again in nineteen seventy nine. The
monetary confusion and shocks of the nineteen seventies also spurred
a great deal of inflation and crisis across the world.
And so in both East and West, the societies had
(05:21):
largely concluded that they did not have the resources to
meet the commitments that they previously had made to their constituencies,
or at least that's how it became framed and understood.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
So you mentioned commitments, What exactly were the commitments or
the promises that different governments had made to their citizens,
Because you know, I think about America and obviously in
the nineteen fifties nineteen sixties there was the American dream
of a nice house in the suburbs and a car
and two point four children or whatever it was. And
(05:54):
then in the East, I think there was a promise
of economic growth. Maybe the emphasis was more on equality
of economic growth versus just pure economic growth.
Speaker 4 (06:08):
Yeah. So I think, as I defined in the book,
this kind of politics of making promises took different shapes
in the West and the East. The West had more
abundance from the start, and certainly creating abundance was at
the core of what democratic capitalism was all about, but
it wasn't particularly because the West was in this Cold War.
You couldn't just be about creating abundance. There had to
(06:29):
be some sense of limiting inequality at the very least,
and so Western states, not universally and not necessarily with
all of their conviction, but they supported labor unions to
a much greater degree than they would subsequently, they created
broad welfare states that invested in cradle to grave type
(06:51):
of state intervention. They largely secured for at least large
segments of their population income security, security, full employee. Even
the commitment to full employment was a kind of post
war novelty that governments could actually make credible. And in
the East it took something, you know, it was a
slightly different shape, but there were similar kinds of promises
(07:12):
made that your workday would get shorter, your even intergenerational
upward mobility would increase, you had access to housing. All
of these always very incompletely fulfilled, but they were kind
of making progress incredibly in the eyes of their populations,
making more progress towards a future of both material abundance
(07:33):
and some form of equality, not full on equality, certainly
much more in communists or state social societies, equality was
held in higher regard, but also very much in the West.
You kind of couldn't come out just as fully comfortable
with the levels of inequality that we've reached by today's standards.
So this search for both abundance and some measure of
(07:55):
equality was there in both the West and the East.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
You know, it's funny, Like, obviously I think today we
think of the Soviet Union's economic model as sort of
having been a basket case and a disaster, But for
many years they were actually they were growing, their industrializing,
They had rapid growth, something that I hadn't realized until
I read your book. And maybe we're skipping ahead a
little bit here in the story, but even like in
(08:21):
Western financial markets, there was sort of an obsession with
like Eastern Bloc debt, Like it was an exciting trade
to lend to some of the communist countries in the East,
and like financial analysts were like really excited about these investments.
Speaker 4 (08:37):
Yeah, and I don't know that we can really pin
that necessarily on their growth processure per se, But Western
bankers definitely believed that the communist world had a nice
recipe for making secure loans. So if things were to
come to a crisis, it was believed that authoritarianism was
going to be very good imposing these kinds of cuts
at imposing discipline and breaking promises. And in the background
(09:01):
the Soviet economy itself, in the background of a country
like Poland or Hungary or East Germany, the Soviet economy
was sitting there, as they literally called it, an umbrella,
an economic and financial umbrella over the rest of the
Eastern Bloc, where if any of these countries ran into
financial difficulties, it was assumed that the Soviet Union would
kind of come to their financial rescue, would bail them
(09:23):
out and in the end pay off their debts. And
it turned out that that wasn't the case by the
nineteen eighties, but in the nineteen seventies in particular, that
was a very popular view in the Western financial press.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Explain how we got from the nineteen seventies where Russia,
you know, is kind of impressive at least to Western
investors and analysts, to the nineteen eighties where it's unable
to do what it had promised to some of its allies.
Speaker 4 (09:49):
Yeah, so you know, it's largely a story of oil
and natural gas kind of coming into the nineteen seventies,
the Soviet Union has found significant oil reserves in and
western Siberia. It's started to develop those reserves over the
course of the nineteen sixties, and by the nineteen seventies
it's coming online, so to speak, as an energy superpower.
(10:12):
At the same time that world markets are creating multiple
crises that send the price of oil and natural gas
through the roof, and so throughout the nineteen seventies it
looks like the Soviet Union, and in fact it does
have all of this energy wealth at its disposal. And
then the nineteen eighties come and the kind of fortunes reversed. So,
(10:32):
you know, when prices go up, people start to look
for more supply. They find energy in places like the
North Sea. They start to develop much more energy supply.
Western countries have done not a great job, but they've
done something to create more energy of fission economies, and
so the forces of supply and demands start to send
the price of oil in the nineteen eighties on a
(10:54):
downward trend, pinpointed by a couple of particular moments like
nineteen eighty five, where it really significantly collapses, and the
Soviet Union itself finds that it's much more difficult to
produce the growth in its energy sector that it had
produced in the nineteen sixties in the nineteen seventies, and
so these two forces, a kind of plateau in production
(11:16):
and the collapse in price, all of a sudden leave
the Soviet Bloc as a whole looking much less economically
powerful by the even the middle of the nineteen eighties
than it was, let's say, in the late nineteen seventies.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
When we were talking about the intro and you sort
of alluded to it when you were talking about the
Umbrella and this belief in the West that well, you know,
the Soviet Union is authoritarian, essentially planned economy. They don't
have to pander to voters, and therefore one might think
that that's a more politically conducive environment for cutting spending
(11:53):
or making difficult decisions. I'm curious the answer why that
didn't turn out to be the case. Yes, as part
of the story is that, well, maybe the promises to
their own citizens could be taken for granted, that these
other satellite countries East Germany, Poland, et cetera. They have
no obligation to stick with the Eastern Bloc if they're
(12:16):
not getting that support anymore from the Soviet Union. But
why don't you sort of explain why that authoritarian ease
didn't end up working out.
Speaker 4 (12:26):
Yeah, so it kind of corresponding to this belief in
the West that authoritarians would be good at breaking promises,
those same people and many others believe that democracies would
be very bad at breaking promises, because, as you mentioned,
the intro would seem to make sense that if you're
trying to get elected, it's just not in your interest
to try to break promises to your own citizens. The
(12:48):
turn of the nineteen eighties, both events in the United
States and Great Britain and events in the Eastern Bloc
suggest that this might not be true, and in fact,
democratic elections and the kind of legitimacy that it bestows
on governments, at least that it did bestow in the past,
we can talk about whether or not that's still true.
In the nineteen eighties, it turned out that democracy and
(13:09):
competitive elections provided a sense of legitimacy that made the
let's say, the sales pitch of breaking promises more credible
in the eyes of Western populations than it turned out
to be in communist societies. So the specific case that
I think is probably most illustrative is Poland in the
(13:30):
early nineteen eighties. People will probably know, or if they're
old enough, remember the Polish labor union Solidarity, it's famous leader,
Left Bowensa. It's born in the summer of nineteen eighty
precisely because the Polish government tries to increase consumer prices
basically which in communist societies was one of the foundational
(13:50):
promises that had been made to the population, we will
keep your basic basket of goods the price of those
goods very stable. They try to increase the in order
to repay their debts, partially in order to solve some
of their financial problems, and people openly revolt because they
don't trust that their government, that the state's socialist state,
(14:12):
is essentially telling them the truth that you need to
go to the people to break these promises to get
some sacrifice from them in order to repay debts. That's
not a credible and legitimate claiming in the eyes of
Polish society. In contrast, when someone like Paul Volker in
the United States says essentially that the United States needs
(14:33):
to go through a very painful recession in order to
fix the problem of inflation that had come to define
the United States over the course of the nineteen seventies.
Lots of people are unhappy about that. He gets death threats,
there's protests, he's on the cover of Time magazine. He's
kind of public enemy number one in a sense. But
(14:54):
it does not result in a kind of full blown
revolt against the system as it did in the Eastern Bloc.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
And so the.
Speaker 4 (15:01):
Legitimacy that democracy itself bestowed on Western States turns out
to be the mechanism, I think, by which they were
able to break promises to their people, whereas in the
Eastern Bloc authoritarianism proved to be very weak at this
task because the only thing people had come to expect
from their government, they didn't have any political role in it.
(15:22):
The only thing they'd come to expect was some kind
of material improvement year over year, meager though it was,
and that was lacking in the Eastern Bloc.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
Can you say more about this, maybe in the context
of Ronald Reagan, because I think that would be a
good example of I guess the role of free elections
and competition between political candidates in basically letting the population,
like let some of their frustration out right. It's kind
of like, Okay, the current politicians have failed to keep
(16:09):
their promise, and so we are willing to try anything,
even if it means short term pain in order to
get what we want again.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
Yeah, So Reagan is a kind of quintessential figure for
this turn. He's not a political outsider necessarily, certainly on
the level of Trump in the nineteen seventies, but he
does come to DC wins the nineteen eighty election with
a distinctly different message. Right. He famously says in his
inaugural a dress in nineteen eighty one, government is not
(16:42):
the solution to the problem. It is the problem. And
that kind of message, which is already one that is
then conducive to breaking promises because it's redefined the state
as the problem itself. The popular mandate that he has
by winning the nineteen eighty election, in turn, gives him,
(17:04):
I guess the term would be more political capital and
certainly more receptivity even from his enemies or from his
political enemies to accept the policies that he then enacts.
So I think that's one of the key factors is, yes,
he has certain people who agree with many people who
agree with him, but even those who disagree with him
(17:25):
work within the bounds of the system where they accept. Again,
this is where it gets a little different in the
recent years. They accept the outcome of the election right,
and they view the process itself by which this was
decided as legitimate. And so he's not particularly successful, and
he and his team are not particularly successful in cutting spending,
(17:46):
in particular in breaking promises. Much more of that in
the US case comes from the federal Reserve. But he
dramatically alters the rhetorical landscape of the United States, and
does so by bringing this movement from outside Washington, DC
and redefining what the kind of terms of the debate
will be. In the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
You make a compelling argument that at least, you know
forty something years ago that something about the democratic system
was more conducive to cutting spending. But a you know,
a lot of the sort of austerity that was imposed
in the US came more from the FED rather than
actual spending cuts. And of course we know that deficits
(18:30):
actually widened quite a bit, so it sort of relied
on the fact that we sort of have this sort
of outside of government undemocratic enforcer in the form of
the Federal Reserve. But then also the UK example, which,
as your book lays out, you know, there was fights
with the coal miners and maybe you can explain that,
(18:50):
but it like, ultimately what allowed Margaret Thatcher to have
the political capital to cut was the Falkland Islands War
in nineteen eighty two, which gave her a burst and popularity, which, okay,
maybe that allowed for some breaking promises, but sort of
a I don't know, dirus x mockin like does not
sound like a great triumph of like, oh, this is
(19:13):
the democratic process working smoothly with the mandate.
Speaker 4 (19:17):
No, and I don't think it's ever a let's say,
clean and easy process. And Reagan was one of those
elected I guess with that most in his mandate. Thatcher
another one, And even those who were elected with spending
cuts as part of their mandate found it a very
difficult thing to actually enact. So in Thatcher's case, yes,
(19:38):
cutting spending is an important part of what she does.
They also have a whole series of state owned industries
that they're trying to either close down or privatize, and
the coal miners of Great Britain are the ones who
ultimately try to fight back against this, and Thatcher, I argue,
I think, partially because of the kind of legitimacy that
democracy bestows upon her, doesn't end up with British society
(20:02):
in full revolt against her.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Right.
Speaker 4 (20:05):
So I compare in the book the course of the
minor strike in Great Britain versus the course of solidarity
in Poland. Solidarity starts as a strike among workers and
builds out into a kind of society wide revolt against
the state socialist system, whereas the miners in the UK,
for a series of contingent but also I think structural reasons,
(20:27):
they are unable to form a broader coalition that would
ultimately thwart Thatcher's action, and so the strike fails. Ultimately,
the coal industry in the UK declines throughout the nineteen eighties,
and I think it is the kind of democratic system,
the legitimacy of the system itself, that allows this process
(20:47):
to unfold. So, for instance, Thatcher in this period is
a very divisive figure. Her approval ratings are something in
the range of forty five percent, But the police who
are kind of carrying out her actions and doing the
actual work to break up the minor strike have an
approval rating somewhere in the ninety two to ninety three
(21:07):
percent rank. So the state itself is deemed to be legitimate,
even if the politician who is enacting these policies is
still a highly divisive figure. And that's the kind of
deep legitimacy that democratic states had in this period and
that state socialist countries did not have, I think is
(21:29):
what ultimately produced the break or allowed the process of
breaking promises to go ahead in the United States and
the Western world more broadly.
Speaker 3 (21:39):
The sort of distinction between politics and the economy.
Speaker 4 (21:43):
I guess, well, that's a whole nother yes, I mean,
that's another way by which states, particularly capitalist states, have
found ways to break promises, is to shift responsibility for
social and economic outcomes from the government itself to the market. Right. So,
even processes of privatization, although technically a change in ownership,
(22:04):
were also the kind of consequences of those were often
downsizing unemployment, things like that. Right, So you've shifted responsibility
over to the marketplace. Over to this realm called the economy,
and then the negative social consequences that stem from that
process of privatization appear to be the product of the market.
(22:26):
They appear to be the product of the economy rather
than a political decision itself. And so that distinction, Yeah,
the politics versus economy distinction is a fundamentally important one
for how and why capitalist societies work.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
So Gorbachev has a famous quote. I think it's something
like politics always follows the economy, not vice versa. And
you actually you mentioned that in your book, but I'd
be curious to get your take about the relationship between
politics and the economy and which one has the most
influence on the other.
Speaker 4 (23:01):
Yeah. So I've wrestled with this for quite a long
time as I was writing this book, and I don't
think I have a categorical answer. I think it can
be different things in different moments. Generally speaking, I do
think that political economy, the economic forces of our world
of the late twentieth century, did provide let's say, windows
(23:21):
of opening windows of possibility and also closed other possibilities
in the realm of politics. So if you take something
like supply side economics in the United States on its
face in terms of whether or not it actually could
have succeeded on its own terms. The idea that you
cut taxes, you'll un leash economic growth and it will
(23:43):
essentially pay for itself. That idea has continuously been disproven,
and yet it continues to exist in US political discourse,
largely because the United States has been able to borrow
more money than anyone from the nineteen eighties onwards thought possible.
And so I think political ideas and political formations, political movements,
(24:06):
their life span and their popularity and then their moments
of coming to an end, do kind of have an
economic underpinning that makes them possible or not?
Speaker 2 (24:16):
You know, I'm curious this book came out I think
twenty twenty two, during the peak of the recent inflation wave.
When you wrote it, I mean, I imagine you know, this
is years and years of research in your career, but
how much were you thinking about the present day. And
I recognize you keep sort of hinting at well, maybe
democratic governments in the West don't have the same perceived
(24:39):
legitimacy to do unpopular things, or to do things at all.
But I'm curious, like, as you were writing, how much
you were thinking about, like this is a lesson for
contemporary times.
Speaker 4 (24:51):
Yeah, it was part of it, certainly as the book
came out. So when did the FED start hiking? That
you two would probably know better was.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
That the first was in March twenty twenty two.
Speaker 4 (25:02):
Yeah, so it was about to come out. And I
think had that happened much more as I was writing
it and researching it, I think the book may have
taken a different shape. Basically, it took on a new
kind of resonance as the book was about to come out.
As I was crafting it, it wasn't so much. I
guess the present day analogy, the present day comparison I
(25:26):
was making was how the United States was able to
exist with a system of political economy that didn't seem
to me to be sustainable in the sense of everything
I had thought I learned about economics, and I was
not a PhD in economics or anything, but four decades
of current accounts deficits and budget deficits many times had
(25:47):
been it had been predicted that this type of system,
this type of arrangement, could not go on and would
one day come to an end. And yet all of
those predictions have continuously been pushed back or been to
this point come to fruition. And so I was trying
to find the origins in one way of at least
for the part about the United States in the book,
(26:07):
trying to find the origins of where that political economic
arrangement came from. And it turned out to have its
origins at least I think in the early nineteen eighties,
with the combination of Vulgar and Reagan. So yeah, I
didn't go in search of a kind of recipe of
how do you go about breaking promises, because I ultimately
don't think the contemporary world is one where more of
(26:31):
breaking promises is a solution to anything, but more how
the United States as a political economic system arrived at
the arrangement that it has had for the past four decades.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
This reminds me, actually, I wanted to ask you about
the actual research ss of writing a book like this,
because I read on the back that you did a
bunch of new archival research. What was that like? What
did you find?
Speaker 4 (27:08):
Well? It was fascinating at every turn. So I started
in Washington, d C. I went to spend a year
in East German archives, which I think are the best
kind of archives you can have because there's no more
state left to defendance in secrets. And then spent a
summer in Russia as well, before the war in Ukraine,
or at least the twenty twenty two next step of
(27:30):
the war in Ukraine. So at every turn right, I
started with a view of the Cold War. I began
this project once I learned that when the Berlin Wall
came down, the East Block was ninety billion dollars in
debt to the West, and that didn't make any sense
to me. It didn't seem to accord with our understanding
of what the Cold War was, at least from an
economic point of view, where these two sides were supposed
(27:51):
to be relatively independent of each other. And then once
you get into the archives, whether it's in DC at
the IMF, whether it's in Berlin at the East German Archives,
or in Moscow, there was an entire story there of
officials on both sides of the Aaron Curtain. I don't
think the word is too strong. Literally obsessed with questions
(28:13):
of international finance and energy, and questions of how do
you go about legitimizing austerity or breaking promises to your
own population, and so it was an exhilarating experience at
least or a historically minded person like me to find
this story in archives all over North America and Europe
(28:34):
at least.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Going back to the Soviet Union for a second. So
obviously we could do one hundred episodes of the podcast
and never arrive at a definitive answer of why the
Soviet Union collapsed, and everyone has their various theories. The
Berlin Wall comes down in nineteen eighty nine, what promises
did the Soviet Union ultimately have to break and how
(28:56):
did those go down? What were the specific sort of
decisions made out of Moscow, to the satellites, to the
domestic citizenry that they actually had to bite the bullet,
and how did that contribute to the ultimate collapse of
the whole project.
Speaker 4 (29:09):
So the international promise, I think promise is one word
for it, but in a sense that they're kind of
dictating to their paternal allies, but certainly promising to the socialists,
the state socialists in their allied countries that they will
come to their defense. Right, So if there's ever a
kind of domestic revolt or a movement for domestic reform,
(29:32):
this had happened in nineteen fifty three, in nineteen fifty six,
the Prague Spring in nineteen sixty eight, almost to a
certain degree in Poland in nineteen eighty and eighty one,
the Soviet Union was always standing there in the background,
either literally intervening militarily or threatening to intervene to in
their frame of reference, save state socialism, save socialism from
(29:56):
its capitalist enemy. That kind of gets encased in the
idea of the Brezhnev doctrine, named after Lenid Brezhnev, that
the Soviet Union will always intervene to save its allies
from domestic unrest or counter revolution. That promise gets broken
in the late nineteen eighties, as Gorbachev and many many
others beyond him end up viewing their imperial relationship as
(30:21):
a bad economic deal. So they're subsidizing their satellites in
all kinds of ways, but particularly with low cost energy,
and they're not getting, in their view, anything in return,
or certainly not getting a fair deal in that alliance relationship.
And so he eventually says, essentially, you handle your own problems,
will handle our problems. I placed that moment in nineteen
(30:43):
eighty six, and within a couple of years of course
they're testing the limits, and in nineteen eighty nine the
Iron curtain comes down in the Berlin Wall collapses. Domestically
the Soviet economy, at least, there's a kind of Soviet
social contract that the state will provide, right, in exchange
for your political silence, the state will provide you with
(31:03):
low cost consumer basics, job security. Right, there's no unemployment
in the society, at least no official unemployment, so you're
going to get kind of a lower level but certainly
socioeconomic security in exchange for your political silence. And that
he too, also through Paristroika, tries to start to break
(31:25):
those promises, introduce more market mechanisms, even eventually coming to
the idea that there would need to be unemployment and
more job in security in Soviet society.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
I know your book stops with the end of the
Soviet Union, but can you maybe give us a little
bit of color on how the market opening played out
among people? And I'm thinking specifically about price increases. Right,
So the social contract for such a long time is
as you said, You'll have subsidized energy and low cost
(31:57):
basic goods and a job. And then suddenly all of
that becomes a very uncertain what happened and what was
the sort of response from society.
Speaker 4 (32:07):
So it plays out slightly differently in each place, of course,
but the place like Poland, for instance, very quickly introduces
shock therapy, as it was even called by its proponents
in the fall of nineteen eighty nine. Essentially, the question
on everyone's mind was if we see that there's this
they hoped very short period maybe six eight months, maybe
(32:29):
a year of economic difficulty that we have to go
through as we enter into the market, then we might
as well get it done as quickly as we can.
That was the shock therapist's message. It was also they
were fully aware that this was going to be extremely unpopular.
Breaking promises is never popular, so again, better to do
(32:49):
it quickly. While everyone is kind of in this euphoric
moment of having defeated communism or moved past their communist systems,
we should use this time time to do as much
economic transformation as we possibly can. And so in many
of these countries there are periods of wrenching economic change,
(33:11):
dramatic price increases, Unemployment goes up at a slower rate
than people had been anticipating, largely because companies kind of
take their employees' livelihoods. Luckily much more heart than standard
market models had been predicting, so there was not as
much unemployment as people anticipated, but still a great deal,
(33:31):
a great deal of industrial restructuring, de industrialization, things like that.
And the question, a much broader question that I think
is something for open for historical research, is how that
all of that process could have been done much more productively.
Let's say that maybe some promises had to be broken
(33:51):
in some kind of way, right, I think there is
something about industrial restructuring that is going to be painful,
and if you think that entering the global market is
ultimately a good thing on some kind of terms, there
may be some kind of broken promise within that. But
how to do it in a way that is most humane,
(34:13):
most pro growth because economic growth often didn't appear in
these places for quite a long time. I think that's
something that we'll need to focus on as historians for
quite a long time to see where the better routes
may have been passed over.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
Fritz Bartel, fascinating conversation, very timely. Thank you so much
for coming on outlaws.
Speaker 4 (34:33):
Thanks so much so, Tracy.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
My takeaway is that cutting spending breaking promises is extremely hard,
and even if you have very popular, incredibly talented politicians,
you still might have a hard time. I'm doing it.
But maybe sometimes if the government enjoys a high degree
of public credibility across the aisle, maybe sometimes it's possible
(35:09):
without destroying society.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
Public credibility and I guess ironically democracy.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
Yeah, at least in that specific period of time.
Speaker 3 (35:17):
But I do think this is sort of like it's
a funny one because we're used to thinking of humans
as very short termist. Yeah, and yet you know, people
are voting for short term pain in order to have
longer term gains. But I think there's still an element
of short termism at play in the sense that, like
it's a pendulum swinging, right, So like you go from
(35:40):
one candidate or one system that failed to deliver what
you wanted, and then you just swing to the other
one in the hopes that they're able to do it.
And again, in the US, at least there's only two systems,
so you get that pendulum swinging quite a lot.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
I don't know listening to that conversation. Again, I don't
have an opinion on what the government the optimal size
of government spending or the optimal size of the deficit.
It's hard for me to imagine a meaningful change in
the spending or deficit trajectory under the current political environment
in the US. You Know, what I thought was that
(36:15):
maybe one of the most interesting points this idea that
when Margaret Thatcher, she didn't have high approval rating, but
the police that ultimately had to sort of carry out
actions against the coal miners, they had very high approval rating.
So this idea that like, the politician may not be popular,
but the state apparatus still enjoys a lot of credibility.
(36:38):
And this distinction between the politician and the state apparatus,
a distinction that didn't exist in the Soviet Union, that
that was really the key to at least making it
so that once the thing has been carried out, it
doesn't like destroy society.
Speaker 3 (36:51):
Yeah, I think this is exactly it. So in communist systems,
the state is mixed with efecte yes, right, like, including
the economy, so you don't get that political economic distinction,
whereas in the West that exists. It's a useful thing
for politicians to blame and you know, manipulate to their
(37:12):
own ends.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
I guess the question. We know that the politics is
very divisive in this country. I also worry that like this,
you know, the state itself and the legitimacy of like
government is coming under fire. So some difficult challenges if
we if we're going to go down that path.
Speaker 3 (37:29):
Yeah, shall we leave it there?
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Let's leave it there.
Speaker 3 (37:31):
This has been another episode of the Oud Thoughts podcast.
I'm Tracy Halloway. You can follow me at Tracy Halloway.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart.
Follow our guest Fritz Bartel, He's at Fritz Underscore Bartel
and check out his book, The Triumph of Broken Promises.
Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen armand dash Ol
Bennett and Dashbot and kill Brooks at Kilbrooks. From our
odd Laws content, go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots.
We have transcripts, a blog in a newsletter and you
(38:00):
can chat about all of these topics twenty four to
seven in our discord Discord dot gg slash od lots.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
And if you enjoy odd Lots, if you like it,
when we talk about historical examples of government's cutting costs.
Then please leave us a positive review on your favorite
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All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel
(38:26):
on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for
listening
Speaker 1 (39:00):
And
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast.
I'm Joe Wisenthal.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
And I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Tracy, spending cuts in the air these days.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
You could say that it's a vibe shift. It's a
vibe Yeah.
Speaker 4 (00:33):
Sure.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
So under the Trump administration, obviously there is a stated
ambition to reduce spending and make the government more efficient overall.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Yeah, Scott Besten, I think he has something the three
three three plan part of it. I think he wants
three percent growth, three percent more oil production, and then
three percent deficit. And I think deficits are around six
percent currently, which is really high by historic standards, especially
because we're at what four point one percent unemployment. Usually,
(01:06):
when the economy is running this hot or this tight,
you don't expect to see deficits this large at in
rates as high as they are. There does seem to
be this impulse for better or worse, and other people
can be the judge of that to cut spending. But
on the other hand, it's very difficult.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Wait, why do you say that, Because early in my
career there was the Eurozone cross and I think there
was some austerity imposed in places like Greece ultimately, so
why do you say it's difficult?
Speaker 2 (01:35):
So, actually, there's two things here, and I think there's
really apt and I think this is a fascinating question
in its own right, which is, why is it that
in two thousand and nine twenty ten, in the aftermath
of the Great Financial Crisis, when we had widespread unemployment,
why was the appetite for austerity so high then at
a time when there was so little aggregate demand, And
(01:56):
now at a time when you know, obviously inflation has
been running hot and so forth, why does it seem
more difficult? That in itself is a fascinating question. But
I guess what I would say to answer your question specifically,
is that anytime people talk about cuts, there is not
a ton of discretionary spending in the US government budget.
There's the entitlement, social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and then there's defense,
(02:23):
which there's usually not much political appetite to cut, and
then when you have left over, it's hard to move
the dial. And so the theory is that if you
actually want to move the dial on spending and deficits,
you have to like cut into some areas you have
to break promises perhaps that you've made to various constituencies
like senior right.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
Ultimately you're inflicting pain on someone, and at least in
democratic governments, because it's all about a numbers game. It's
all about getting votes. That would be a bad thing.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Well, we have to then talk about how do the
stars align if you actually want to meaningfully cut spending,
how does that actually happen. How do democratically elected government
sort of build the political capacity to inflict pain perhaps
on groups that obviously have some stature. We really do
(03:15):
have the perfect guest. We are going to be speaking
with Fritz Bartel. He is an assistant professor of International
Affairs at the Bush School at Texas A and M.
And he is the author of the book came out
in twenty twenty two, The Triumph of Broken Promises, the
End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism,
And it's kind of about exactly this topic, how governments
(03:36):
break promises. So, Professor Bartel, thank you so much for
coming on odd LATS.
Speaker 4 (03:40):
Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
Your book is really interesting because you talk about this
sort of resource constraints and spending constraints in the US,
the UK, and the Soviet Union. All of it was
sort of building up to a head in the late
nineteen seventies early eighties. Before reading your book, that hadn't
clicked to me that all the different economies were sort
of facing the same stresses at the same time. What
(04:05):
was going on that suddenly around the world governments felt
this impulse like we have to cut we have to
constrain ourselves.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
Yeah, So, I guess the short answer is that the
kind of post World War two economic boom had run
aground in the nineteen seventies. Obviously, there was the kind
of birth of stagflation. There was a decline in productivity
growth across Western economies, the Soviet economy, and the Eastern
Bloc more generally, the Communist Block had run into the
(04:34):
end of their growth model. Kind of this hyper industrialization
growth model had started to produce fewer and fewer results.
So in both the Eastern Bloc, the Communist world, and
the West, the growth model, one largely based on kind
of industrialization, certainly based on cheap energy resources, had started
to run aground roughly at similar kind of moments in
(04:58):
the early nineteen seventies, and then these crises that kind
of came to define the nineteen seventies, the energy shock
of nineteen seventy three again in nineteen seventy nine. The
monetary confusion and shocks of the nineteen seventies also spurred
a great deal of inflation and crisis across the world.
And so in both East and West, the societies had
(05:21):
largely concluded that they did not have the resources to
meet the commitments that they previously had made to their constituencies,
or at least that's how it became framed and understood.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
So you mentioned commitments, What exactly were the commitments or
the promises that different governments had made to their citizens,
Because you know, I think about America and obviously in
the nineteen fifties nineteen sixties there was the American dream
of a nice house in the suburbs and a car
and two point four children or whatever it was. And
(05:54):
then in the East, I think there was a promise
of economic growth. Maybe the emphasis was more on equality
of economic growth versus just pure economic growth.
Speaker 4 (06:08):
Yeah. So I think, as I defined in the book,
this kind of politics of making promises took different shapes
in the West and the East. The West had more
abundance from the start, and certainly creating abundance was at
the core of what democratic capitalism was all about, but
it wasn't particularly because the West was in this Cold War.
You couldn't just be about creating abundance. There had to
(06:29):
be some sense of limiting inequality at the very least,
and so Western states, not universally and not necessarily with
all of their conviction, but they supported labor unions to
a much greater degree than they would subsequently, they created
broad welfare states that invested in cradle to grave type
(06:51):
of state intervention. They largely secured for at least large
segments of their population income security, security, full employee. Even
the commitment to full employment was a kind of post
war novelty that governments could actually make credible. And in
the East it took something, you know, it was a
slightly different shape, but there were similar kinds of promises
(07:12):
made that your workday would get shorter, your even intergenerational
upward mobility would increase, you had access to housing. All
of these always very incompletely fulfilled, but they were kind
of making progress incredibly in the eyes of their populations,
making more progress towards a future of both material abundance
(07:33):
and some form of equality, not full on equality, certainly
much more in communists or state social societies, equality was
held in higher regard, but also very much in the West.
You kind of couldn't come out just as fully comfortable
with the levels of inequality that we've reached by today's standards.
So this search for both abundance and some measure of
(07:55):
equality was there in both the West and the East.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
You know, it's funny, Like, obviously I think today we
think of the Soviet Union's economic model as sort of
having been a basket case and a disaster, But for
many years they were actually they were growing, their industrializing,
They had rapid growth, something that I hadn't realized until
I read your book. And maybe we're skipping ahead a
little bit here in the story, but even like in
(08:21):
Western financial markets, there was sort of an obsession with
like Eastern Bloc debt, Like it was an exciting trade
to lend to some of the communist countries in the East,
and like financial analysts were like really excited about these investments.
Speaker 4 (08:37):
Yeah, and I don't know that we can really pin
that necessarily on their growth processure per se, But Western
bankers definitely believed that the communist world had a nice
recipe for making secure loans. So if things were to
come to a crisis, it was believed that authoritarianism was
going to be very good imposing these kinds of cuts
at imposing discipline and breaking promises. And in the background
(09:01):
the Soviet economy itself, in the background of a country
like Poland or Hungary or East Germany, the Soviet economy
was sitting there, as they literally called it, an umbrella,
an economic and financial umbrella over the rest of the
Eastern Bloc, where if any of these countries ran into
financial difficulties, it was assumed that the Soviet Union would
kind of come to their financial rescue, would bail them
(09:23):
out and in the end pay off their debts. And
it turned out that that wasn't the case by the
nineteen eighties, but in the nineteen seventies in particular, that
was a very popular view in the Western financial press.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
Explain how we got from the nineteen seventies where Russia,
you know, is kind of impressive at least to Western
investors and analysts, to the nineteen eighties where it's unable
to do what it had promised to some of its allies.
Speaker 4 (09:49):
Yeah, so you know, it's largely a story of oil
and natural gas kind of coming into the nineteen seventies,
the Soviet Union has found significant oil reserves in and
western Siberia. It's started to develop those reserves over the
course of the nineteen sixties, and by the nineteen seventies
it's coming online, so to speak, as an energy superpower.
(10:12):
At the same time that world markets are creating multiple
crises that send the price of oil and natural gas
through the roof, and so throughout the nineteen seventies it
looks like the Soviet Union, and in fact it does
have all of this energy wealth at its disposal. And
then the nineteen eighties come and the kind of fortunes reversed. So,
(10:32):
you know, when prices go up, people start to look
for more supply. They find energy in places like the
North Sea. They start to develop much more energy supply.
Western countries have done not a great job, but they've
done something to create more energy of fission economies, and
so the forces of supply and demands start to send
the price of oil in the nineteen eighties on a
(10:54):
downward trend, pinpointed by a couple of particular moments like
nineteen eighty five, where it really significantly collapses, and the
Soviet Union itself finds that it's much more difficult to
produce the growth in its energy sector that it had
produced in the nineteen sixties in the nineteen seventies, and
so these two forces, a kind of plateau in production
(11:16):
and the collapse in price, all of a sudden leave
the Soviet Bloc as a whole looking much less economically
powerful by the even the middle of the nineteen eighties
than it was, let's say, in the late nineteen seventies.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
When we were talking about the intro and you sort
of alluded to it when you were talking about the
Umbrella and this belief in the West that well, you know,
the Soviet Union is authoritarian, essentially planned economy. They don't
have to pander to voters, and therefore one might think
that that's a more politically conducive environment for cutting spending
(11:53):
or making difficult decisions. I'm curious the answer why that
didn't turn out to be the case. Yes, as part
of the story is that, well, maybe the promises to
their own citizens could be taken for granted, that these
other satellite countries East Germany, Poland, et cetera. They have
no obligation to stick with the Eastern Bloc if they're
(12:16):
not getting that support anymore from the Soviet Union. But
why don't you sort of explain why that authoritarian ease
didn't end up working out.
Speaker 4 (12:26):
Yeah, so it kind of corresponding to this belief in
the West that authoritarians would be good at breaking promises,
those same people and many others believe that democracies would
be very bad at breaking promises, because, as you mentioned,
the intro would seem to make sense that if you're
trying to get elected, it's just not in your interest
to try to break promises to your own citizens. The
(12:48):
turn of the nineteen eighties, both events in the United
States and Great Britain and events in the Eastern Bloc
suggest that this might not be true, and in fact,
democratic elections and the kind of legitimacy that it bestows
on governments, at least that it did bestow in the past,
we can talk about whether or not that's still true.
In the nineteen eighties, it turned out that democracy and
(13:09):
competitive elections provided a sense of legitimacy that made the
let's say, the sales pitch of breaking promises more credible
in the eyes of Western populations than it turned out
to be in communist societies. So the specific case that
I think is probably most illustrative is Poland in the
(13:30):
early nineteen eighties. People will probably know, or if they're
old enough, remember the Polish labor union Solidarity, it's famous leader,
Left Bowensa. It's born in the summer of nineteen eighty
precisely because the Polish government tries to increase consumer prices
basically which in communist societies was one of the foundational
(13:50):
promises that had been made to the population, we will
keep your basic basket of goods the price of those
goods very stable. They try to increase the in order
to repay their debts, partially in order to solve some
of their financial problems, and people openly revolt because they
don't trust that their government, that the state's socialist state,
(14:12):
is essentially telling them the truth that you need to
go to the people to break these promises to get
some sacrifice from them in order to repay debts. That's
not a credible and legitimate claiming in the eyes of
Polish society. In contrast, when someone like Paul Volker in
the United States says essentially that the United States needs
(14:33):
to go through a very painful recession in order to
fix the problem of inflation that had come to define
the United States over the course of the nineteen seventies.
Lots of people are unhappy about that. He gets death threats,
there's protests, he's on the cover of Time magazine. He's
kind of public enemy number one in a sense. But
(14:54):
it does not result in a kind of full blown
revolt against the system as it did in the Eastern Bloc.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
And so the.
Speaker 4 (15:01):
Legitimacy that democracy itself bestowed on Western States turns out
to be the mechanism, I think, by which they were
able to break promises to their people, whereas in the
Eastern Bloc authoritarianism proved to be very weak at this
task because the only thing people had come to expect
from their government, they didn't have any political role in it.
(15:22):
The only thing they'd come to expect was some kind
of material improvement year over year, meager though it was,
and that was lacking in the Eastern Bloc.
Speaker 3 (15:46):
Can you say more about this, maybe in the context
of Ronald Reagan, because I think that would be a
good example of I guess the role of free elections
and competition between political candidates in basically letting the population,
like let some of their frustration out right. It's kind
of like, Okay, the current politicians have failed to keep
(16:09):
their promise, and so we are willing to try anything,
even if it means short term pain in order to
get what we want again.
Speaker 4 (16:19):
Yeah, So Reagan is a kind of quintessential figure for
this turn. He's not a political outsider necessarily, certainly on
the level of Trump in the nineteen seventies, but he
does come to DC wins the nineteen eighty election with
a distinctly different message. Right. He famously says in his
inaugural a dress in nineteen eighty one, government is not
(16:42):
the solution to the problem. It is the problem. And
that kind of message, which is already one that is
then conducive to breaking promises because it's redefined the state
as the problem itself. The popular mandate that he has
by winning the nineteen eighty election, in turn, gives him,
(17:04):
I guess the term would be more political capital and
certainly more receptivity even from his enemies or from his
political enemies to accept the policies that he then enacts.
So I think that's one of the key factors is, yes,
he has certain people who agree with many people who
agree with him, but even those who disagree with him
(17:25):
work within the bounds of the system where they accept. Again,
this is where it gets a little different in the
recent years. They accept the outcome of the election right,
and they view the process itself by which this was
decided as legitimate. And so he's not particularly successful, and
he and his team are not particularly successful in cutting spending,
(17:46):
in particular in breaking promises. Much more of that in
the US case comes from the federal Reserve. But he
dramatically alters the rhetorical landscape of the United States, and
does so by bringing this movement from outside Washington, DC
and redefining what the kind of terms of the debate
will be. In the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
You make a compelling argument that at least, you know
forty something years ago that something about the democratic system
was more conducive to cutting spending. But a you know,
a lot of the sort of austerity that was imposed
in the US came more from the FED rather than
actual spending cuts. And of course we know that deficits
(18:30):
actually widened quite a bit, so it sort of relied
on the fact that we sort of have this sort
of outside of government undemocratic enforcer in the form of
the Federal Reserve. But then also the UK example, which,
as your book lays out, you know, there was fights
with the coal miners and maybe you can explain that,
(18:50):
but it like, ultimately what allowed Margaret Thatcher to have
the political capital to cut was the Falkland Islands War
in nineteen eighty two, which gave her a burst and popularity, which, okay,
maybe that allowed for some breaking promises, but sort of
a I don't know, dirus x mockin like does not
sound like a great triumph of like, oh, this is
(19:13):
the democratic process working smoothly with the mandate.
Speaker 4 (19:17):
No, and I don't think it's ever a let's say,
clean and easy process. And Reagan was one of those
elected I guess with that most in his mandate. Thatcher
another one, And even those who were elected with spending
cuts as part of their mandate found it a very
difficult thing to actually enact. So in Thatcher's case, yes,
(19:38):
cutting spending is an important part of what she does.
They also have a whole series of state owned industries
that they're trying to either close down or privatize, and
the coal miners of Great Britain are the ones who
ultimately try to fight back against this, and Thatcher, I argue,
I think, partially because of the kind of legitimacy that
democracy bestows upon her, doesn't end up with British society
(20:02):
in full revolt against her.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Right.
Speaker 4 (20:05):
So I compare in the book the course of the
minor strike in Great Britain versus the course of solidarity
in Poland. Solidarity starts as a strike among workers and
builds out into a kind of society wide revolt against
the state socialist system, whereas the miners in the UK,
for a series of contingent but also I think structural reasons,
(20:27):
they are unable to form a broader coalition that would
ultimately thwart Thatcher's action, and so the strike fails. Ultimately,
the coal industry in the UK declines throughout the nineteen eighties,
and I think it is the kind of democratic system,
the legitimacy of the system itself, that allows this process
(20:47):
to unfold. So, for instance, Thatcher in this period is
a very divisive figure. Her approval ratings are something in
the range of forty five percent, But the police who
are kind of carrying out her actions and doing the
actual work to break up the minor strike have an
approval rating somewhere in the ninety two to ninety three
(21:07):
percent rank. So the state itself is deemed to be legitimate,
even if the politician who is enacting these policies is
still a highly divisive figure. And that's the kind of
deep legitimacy that democratic states had in this period and
that state socialist countries did not have, I think is
(21:29):
what ultimately produced the break or allowed the process of
breaking promises to go ahead in the United States and
the Western world more broadly.
Speaker 3 (21:39):
The sort of distinction between politics and the economy.
Speaker 4 (21:43):
I guess, well, that's a whole nother yes, I mean,
that's another way by which states, particularly capitalist states, have
found ways to break promises, is to shift responsibility for
social and economic outcomes from the government itself to the market. Right. So,
even processes of privatization, although technically a change in ownership,
(22:04):
were also the kind of consequences of those were often
downsizing unemployment, things like that. Right, So you've shifted responsibility
over to the marketplace. Over to this realm called the economy,
and then the negative social consequences that stem from that
process of privatization appear to be the product of the market.
(22:26):
They appear to be the product of the economy rather
than a political decision itself. And so that distinction, Yeah,
the politics versus economy distinction is a fundamentally important one
for how and why capitalist societies work.
Speaker 3 (22:41):
So Gorbachev has a famous quote. I think it's something
like politics always follows the economy, not vice versa. And
you actually you mentioned that in your book, but I'd
be curious to get your take about the relationship between
politics and the economy and which one has the most
influence on the other.
Speaker 4 (23:01):
Yeah. So I've wrestled with this for quite a long
time as I was writing this book, and I don't
think I have a categorical answer. I think it can
be different things in different moments. Generally speaking, I do
think that political economy, the economic forces of our world
of the late twentieth century, did provide let's say, windows
(23:21):
of opening windows of possibility and also closed other possibilities
in the realm of politics. So if you take something
like supply side economics in the United States on its
face in terms of whether or not it actually could
have succeeded on its own terms. The idea that you
cut taxes, you'll un leash economic growth and it will
(23:43):
essentially pay for itself. That idea has continuously been disproven,
and yet it continues to exist in US political discourse,
largely because the United States has been able to borrow
more money than anyone from the nineteen eighties onwards thought possible.
And so I think political ideas and political formations, political movements,
(24:06):
their life span and their popularity and then their moments
of coming to an end, do kind of have an
economic underpinning that makes them possible or not?
Speaker 2 (24:16):
You know, I'm curious this book came out I think
twenty twenty two, during the peak of the recent inflation wave.
When you wrote it, I mean, I imagine you know, this
is years and years of research in your career, but
how much were you thinking about the present day. And
I recognize you keep sort of hinting at well, maybe
democratic governments in the West don't have the same perceived
(24:39):
legitimacy to do unpopular things, or to do things at all.
But I'm curious, like, as you were writing, how much
you were thinking about, like this is a lesson for
contemporary times.
Speaker 4 (24:51):
Yeah, it was part of it, certainly as the book
came out. So when did the FED start hiking? That
you two would probably know better was.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
That the first was in March twenty twenty two.
Speaker 4 (25:02):
Yeah, so it was about to come out. And I
think had that happened much more as I was writing
it and researching it, I think the book may have
taken a different shape. Basically, it took on a new
kind of resonance as the book was about to come out.
As I was crafting it, it wasn't so much. I
guess the present day analogy, the present day comparison I
(25:26):
was making was how the United States was able to
exist with a system of political economy that didn't seem
to me to be sustainable in the sense of everything
I had thought I learned about economics, and I was
not a PhD in economics or anything, but four decades
of current accounts deficits and budget deficits many times had
(25:47):
been it had been predicted that this type of system,
this type of arrangement, could not go on and would
one day come to an end. And yet all of
those predictions have continuously been pushed back or been to
this point come to fruition. And so I was trying
to find the origins in one way of at least
for the part about the United States in the book,
(26:07):
trying to find the origins of where that political economic
arrangement came from. And it turned out to have its
origins at least I think in the early nineteen eighties,
with the combination of Vulgar and Reagan. So yeah, I
didn't go in search of a kind of recipe of
how do you go about breaking promises, because I ultimately
don't think the contemporary world is one where more of
(26:31):
breaking promises is a solution to anything, but more how
the United States as a political economic system arrived at
the arrangement that it has had for the past four decades.
Speaker 3 (26:55):
This reminds me, actually, I wanted to ask you about
the actual research ss of writing a book like this,
because I read on the back that you did a
bunch of new archival research. What was that like? What
did you find?
Speaker 4 (27:08):
Well? It was fascinating at every turn. So I started
in Washington, d C. I went to spend a year
in East German archives, which I think are the best
kind of archives you can have because there's no more
state left to defendance in secrets. And then spent a
summer in Russia as well, before the war in Ukraine,
or at least the twenty twenty two next step of
(27:30):
the war in Ukraine. So at every turn right, I
started with a view of the Cold War. I began
this project once I learned that when the Berlin Wall
came down, the East Block was ninety billion dollars in
debt to the West, and that didn't make any sense
to me. It didn't seem to accord with our understanding
of what the Cold War was, at least from an
economic point of view, where these two sides were supposed
(27:51):
to be relatively independent of each other. And then once
you get into the archives, whether it's in DC at
the IMF, whether it's in Berlin at the East German Archives,
or in Moscow, there was an entire story there of
officials on both sides of the Aaron Curtain. I don't
think the word is too strong. Literally obsessed with questions
(28:13):
of international finance and energy, and questions of how do
you go about legitimizing austerity or breaking promises to your
own population, and so it was an exhilarating experience at
least or a historically minded person like me to find
this story in archives all over North America and Europe
(28:34):
at least.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Going back to the Soviet Union for a second. So
obviously we could do one hundred episodes of the podcast
and never arrive at a definitive answer of why the
Soviet Union collapsed, and everyone has their various theories. The
Berlin Wall comes down in nineteen eighty nine, what promises
did the Soviet Union ultimately have to break and how
(28:56):
did those go down? What were the specific sort of
decisions made out of Moscow, to the satellites, to the
domestic citizenry that they actually had to bite the bullet,
and how did that contribute to the ultimate collapse of
the whole project.
Speaker 4 (29:09):
So the international promise, I think promise is one word
for it, but in a sense that they're kind of
dictating to their paternal allies, but certainly promising to the socialists,
the state socialists in their allied countries that they will
come to their defense. Right, So if there's ever a
kind of domestic revolt or a movement for domestic reform,
(29:32):
this had happened in nineteen fifty three, in nineteen fifty six,
the Prague Spring in nineteen sixty eight, almost to a
certain degree in Poland in nineteen eighty and eighty one,
the Soviet Union was always standing there in the background,
either literally intervening militarily or threatening to intervene to in
their frame of reference, save state socialism, save socialism from
(29:56):
its capitalist enemy. That kind of gets encased in the
idea of the Brezhnev doctrine, named after Lenid Brezhnev, that
the Soviet Union will always intervene to save its allies
from domestic unrest or counter revolution. That promise gets broken
in the late nineteen eighties, as Gorbachev and many many
others beyond him end up viewing their imperial relationship as
(30:21):
a bad economic deal. So they're subsidizing their satellites in
all kinds of ways, but particularly with low cost energy,
and they're not getting, in their view, anything in return,
or certainly not getting a fair deal in that alliance relationship.
And so he eventually says, essentially, you handle your own problems,
will handle our problems. I placed that moment in nineteen
(30:43):
eighty six, and within a couple of years of course
they're testing the limits, and in nineteen eighty nine the
Iron curtain comes down in the Berlin Wall collapses. Domestically
the Soviet economy, at least, there's a kind of Soviet
social contract that the state will provide, right, in exchange
for your political silence, the state will provide you with
(31:03):
low cost consumer basics, job security. Right, there's no unemployment
in the society, at least no official unemployment, so you're
going to get kind of a lower level but certainly
socioeconomic security in exchange for your political silence. And that
he too, also through Paristroika, tries to start to break
(31:25):
those promises, introduce more market mechanisms, even eventually coming to
the idea that there would need to be unemployment and
more job in security in Soviet society.
Speaker 3 (31:37):
I know your book stops with the end of the
Soviet Union, but can you maybe give us a little
bit of color on how the market opening played out
among people? And I'm thinking specifically about price increases. Right,
So the social contract for such a long time is
as you said, You'll have subsidized energy and low cost
(31:57):
basic goods and a job. And then suddenly all of
that becomes a very uncertain what happened and what was
the sort of response from society.
Speaker 4 (32:07):
So it plays out slightly differently in each place, of course,
but the place like Poland, for instance, very quickly introduces
shock therapy, as it was even called by its proponents
in the fall of nineteen eighty nine. Essentially, the question
on everyone's mind was if we see that there's this
they hoped very short period maybe six eight months, maybe
(32:29):
a year of economic difficulty that we have to go
through as we enter into the market, then we might
as well get it done as quickly as we can.
That was the shock therapist's message. It was also they
were fully aware that this was going to be extremely unpopular.
Breaking promises is never popular, so again, better to do
(32:49):
it quickly. While everyone is kind of in this euphoric
moment of having defeated communism or moved past their communist systems,
we should use this time time to do as much
economic transformation as we possibly can. And so in many
of these countries there are periods of wrenching economic change,
(33:11):
dramatic price increases, Unemployment goes up at a slower rate
than people had been anticipating, largely because companies kind of
take their employees' livelihoods. Luckily much more heart than standard
market models had been predicting, so there was not as
much unemployment as people anticipated, but still a great deal,
(33:31):
a great deal of industrial restructuring, de industrialization, things like that.
And the question, a much broader question that I think
is something for open for historical research, is how that
all of that process could have been done much more productively.
Let's say that maybe some promises had to be broken
(33:51):
in some kind of way, right, I think there is
something about industrial restructuring that is going to be painful,
and if you think that entering the global market is
ultimately a good thing on some kind of terms, there
may be some kind of broken promise within that. But
how to do it in a way that is most humane,
(34:13):
most pro growth because economic growth often didn't appear in
these places for quite a long time. I think that's
something that we'll need to focus on as historians for
quite a long time to see where the better routes
may have been passed over.
Speaker 2 (34:28):
Fritz Bartel, fascinating conversation, very timely. Thank you so much
for coming on outlaws.
Speaker 4 (34:33):
Thanks so much so, Tracy.
Speaker 2 (34:48):
My takeaway is that cutting spending breaking promises is extremely hard,
and even if you have very popular, incredibly talented politicians,
you still might have a hard time. I'm doing it.
But maybe sometimes if the government enjoys a high degree
of public credibility across the aisle, maybe sometimes it's possible
(35:09):
without destroying society.
Speaker 3 (35:11):
Public credibility and I guess ironically democracy.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
Yeah, at least in that specific period of time.
Speaker 3 (35:17):
But I do think this is sort of like it's
a funny one because we're used to thinking of humans
as very short termist. Yeah, and yet you know, people
are voting for short term pain in order to have
longer term gains. But I think there's still an element
of short termism at play in the sense that, like
it's a pendulum swinging, right, So like you go from
(35:40):
one candidate or one system that failed to deliver what
you wanted, and then you just swing to the other
one in the hopes that they're able to do it.
And again, in the US, at least there's only two systems,
so you get that pendulum swinging quite a lot.
Speaker 2 (35:55):
I don't know listening to that conversation. Again, I don't
have an opinion on what the government the optimal size
of government spending or the optimal size of the deficit.
It's hard for me to imagine a meaningful change in
the spending or deficit trajectory under the current political environment
in the US. You Know, what I thought was that
(36:15):
maybe one of the most interesting points this idea that
when Margaret Thatcher, she didn't have high approval rating, but
the police that ultimately had to sort of carry out
actions against the coal miners, they had very high approval rating.
So this idea that like, the politician may not be popular,
but the state apparatus still enjoys a lot of credibility.
(36:38):
And this distinction between the politician and the state apparatus,
a distinction that didn't exist in the Soviet Union, that
that was really the key to at least making it
so that once the thing has been carried out, it
doesn't like destroy society.
Speaker 3 (36:51):
Yeah, I think this is exactly it. So in communist systems,
the state is mixed with efecte yes, right, like, including
the economy, so you don't get that political economic distinction,
whereas in the West that exists. It's a useful thing
for politicians to blame and you know, manipulate to their
(37:12):
own ends.
Speaker 2 (37:13):
I guess the question. We know that the politics is
very divisive in this country. I also worry that like this,
you know, the state itself and the legitimacy of like
government is coming under fire. So some difficult challenges if
we if we're going to go down that path.
Speaker 3 (37:29):
Yeah, shall we leave it there?
Speaker 2 (37:30):
Let's leave it there.
Speaker 3 (37:31):
This has been another episode of the Oud Thoughts podcast.
I'm Tracy Halloway. You can follow me at Tracy Halloway.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
And I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart.
Follow our guest Fritz Bartel, He's at Fritz Underscore Bartel
and check out his book, The Triumph of Broken Promises.
Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen armand dash Ol
Bennett and Dashbot and kill Brooks at Kilbrooks. From our
odd Laws content, go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots.
We have transcripts, a blog in a newsletter and you
(38:00):
can chat about all of these topics twenty four to
seven in our discord Discord dot gg slash od lots.
Speaker 3 (38:05):
And if you enjoy odd Lots, if you like it,
when we talk about historical examples of government's cutting costs.
Then please leave us a positive review on your favorite
podcast platform. And remember, if you are a Bloomberg subscriber,
you can listen to all of our episodes absolutely ad free.
All you need to do is find the Bloomberg channel
(38:26):
on Apple Podcasts and follow the instructions there. Thanks for
listening
Speaker 1 (39:00):
And
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Joe Weisenthal
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