President Harry Truman said: “
Give me an economist with no hands. All my economists say “'On one hand' and then 'on the other hand'.”
It was clear. The president of the United States between 1945 and 1953 wanted decisions, not discussions, and much less between economists because he had other issues, surely more important to resolve, as can be seen from the Netflix documentary series Tipping Point: The Bomb and the Cold War, a narrative of the war confrontation between Washington and its enemies in the postwar period.
There is no doubt that economists are often a double-edged sword for a president, like bombs. Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Soviet Union (USSR), joked that the economists of the Moscow Politburo could cause more damage than his army's missiles.
Some of all this emerges from the recent book
The Art of Climbing (and Going Down) the Mountain (Ed. Siglo XXI)
, by Marcos Peña, former Chief of Staff of Mauricio Macri, and which could well be summarized as the personal-political via crucis. , according to Saint Mark. Marcos is the author of one of the books of the New Testament according to the Christian tradition and Peña himself recognizes that religion (Catholic-Christian) was one of the lifelines he turned to to seek family recognition as the youngest of 5 brothers and a catechist mother
The other lifeline, says Peña, was politics. First in his house, then a legislator at the age of 26, general secretary of the City of Buenos Aires and head of the Cabinet of Ministers.
The art of going up and down the mountain is a journey through both stages. More, in a tone of personal search (sometimes with a tone of self-reproach) and less, of memories as the politicians who passed through that place sometimes tend to 'vomit'. An example of this is Arthur Schlesinger, special advisor to John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and his book
100 Days of Him
, about his time in the White House. Could this be Peña's push to talk, yes, perhaps about more specific issues?
There is no doubt that he crossed them both on the way up and down and has more things in his backpack.
Perhaps unlike Macri's books in which he spoke about his management, Peña does not explicitly mention economists, although he does mention guidelines that fit them: in short, if there was something that abounded in his cabinet and with whom Peña dealt, they were the economists. In fact, he was the person who
was in the center of attention for having leaned forward and made the decision to change the inflation goals of the BCRA
in that famous conference on December 28, 2017 in which the ministers Nicolás Dujovne were with him. and Luis Caputo, and the head of the monetary authority, Federico Sturzenegger. The order had been lowered for the BCRA, and, as Truman says,
it was time for decisions and no more debate.
In the mountains, when you ascend with a guide, the orders are executed by the person in charge and the client or the team must respect, because not only the journey but life is at stake. In 'Marcopeñismo' the communication channels are not a space for deliberation. And everyone must be aware that no one is right, because trying to prove that something like this has been reached—even worse, acting accordingly—
can mean “losing connection” with others
.
“It is worth thinking if sometimes this idea of communicating only rational arguments does not also have a seasoning of madness and dissociation.”
This has a lot to do with economists and the way they use to approach, with the best intentions, the problems that a president faces,
although many times it seems that they collide with myopia
, as can be seen from Peña's book.
“Generational differences, something that I underestimated, cause partial realities to occur. Each age group communicates differently [...] Nobody is completely right because each of these partial realities exists and that makes it more difficult to organize the debate and agree on what is happening.”
For economists this can be frustrating.
If Truman prayed for a one-armed economist, imagine Macri
who atomized the conduct of economic policy and at first organized a Ministry of Economy deprived of control of areas over which it should set rules (one case was Energy and subsidies).
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.
“There, we economists do not have the solidity that people who do not know us assume. At the same time, we have solidity in areas that people do not imagine, that they cannot imagine, that are from our training.”
Peña says that he arrived at the base camp in 2015. In 2016-2017 he walked to the summit. He arrived and “everything exploded.” He went down until 2019. The dates coincide with what happened with the economy.
The crisis invaded his life. Maybe he needed, like Truman, a one-armed economist up there on the mountain.