Nova acordo com a troika enfraquece sindicatos?

Parece que há um novo acordo com a troika, que à primeira vista, irá enfraquecer os sindicatos.

O que me parece que se trata:

Actualmente, quando, digamos, o Sindicato dos Polidores de Vidros e a Associação das Empresas de Vidraria assinam um acordo de trabalho, esse acordo apenas se aplica aos trabalhadores associados no sindicato e às empresas associadas na associação - os trabalhadores não sindicalizados não são abrangidos pelo acordo, nem os que trabalham em empresas que não pertencem à associação patronal. P.ex., há uns anos, quando os hospitais EPE fizerem um acordo com vários sindicatos, parte do meu trabalho foi andar a tirar listagens de trabalhadores sindicalizados para saber a quais aplicar o acordo.

No entanto, o governo, depois do acordo ser assinado, tem a possibilidade de recorrer a uma coisa chamada "portaria de extensão", determinando que o acordo se aplica a toda a gente.

Ora, ao que consta a troika quer e o governo aceitou limitar drasticamente o recurso futuro às portarias de extensão, o que muita gente considera um golpe na contratação colectiva.

Mas interrogo-me se isso não poderá vir a ser um [alguém me invente uma metáfora oposta a "presente envenenado"!] para o movimento sindical. Sim, vai diminuir a importância legal dos sindicatos, já que os acordos que estes negociam vão se aplicar a menos trabalhadores; mas pode vir a aumentar a sua importÂncia social, já que, se os ACTs se passarem a aplicar mesmo só aos sindicalizados, os trabalhadores passam a ter um incentivo para se sindicalizarem (bem, também não me admirava nada que as empresas decidam unilateralmente aplicar o ACT a toda a gente, em vez da trabalhaira de ter 2 ou 3 regimes laborais a funcionar ao mesmo tempo).

Quanto aos trabalhadores das empresas não-filiadas em associações patronais, os sindicatos, em vez de estarem à espera da portaria, podem sempre tentar negociar directamente com elas; na verdade, até é expectável que um empresa individual seja um parceiro negocial mais fraco que uma associação patronal. E assim os trabalhadores das empresas não-associadas também têm um incentivo para se sindicalizarem (ao contrário do sistema actual, em que, quer se mobilizem ou não, acabam sempre - isto, "sempre" se o governo emitir a tal portaria - por beneficiar do ACT).

Resumindo - talvez o fim das "portarias de extensão" reduza um pouco os problemas de free-rider com que os sindicatos se deparam.

Tema para reflexão

O estado da UE que já está a entrar em bancarrota não está no euro.

O resultado das injecções de liquidez na economia?

Afinal, se calhar que o mega-empréstimo que o BCE fez aos bancos na semana passada, em vez de servir para "conceder crédito à economia", ou mesmo (como hipoteses mais conspiratórias sugeriam) para financiar indirectamente os Estados, está apenas a regressar ao BCE sob a forma de depósitos:

Os depósitos a um dia dos bancos da zona euro no Banco Central Europeu (BCE) atingiram um novo recorde no valor de 452.000 milhões de euros, assinalando o segundo máximo histórico consecutivo, anunciou hoje o banco emissor europeu.


A desconfiança entre as instituições financeiras da zona euro aumentou "drasticamente" nas últimas semanas devido às incertezas que pairam no sector, apesar de o BCE só remunerar estas aplicações à taxa de 0,25%, inferior à taxa de referência do banco emissor, que está nos 1%

Note-se que provavelmente este avalanche de depósitos no BCE não será exactamente o dinheiro que o BCE emprestou na semana passada (é pouco provável que os bancos que pediram emprestado a 1% o fossem depositar a 0,25%). No entanto, em termos líquidos (o BCE a emprestar dinheiro a uns mas outros a depositarem no BCE) o dinheiro parece estar a regressar à origem, em vez de ficar na economia.

jj

O povo inventado

The real 'invented' people, por MJ Rosenberg (Al Jazeera):

It is hard to believe that anyone who defends Israel's legitimacy as a state would buy into former Speaker Newt Gingrich's argument that Palestine is an "invented nation".

The singular triumph of the Zionist movement is that it invented a state and a people - Israel and the Israelis - from scratch. The first Hebrew-speaking child in 1900 years, Ittamar Ben-Avi, was not born until 1882. His father, the brilliant linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, created a modern language for him to speak by improvising from the language of the Bible.

Um comentário meu - é notável como os defensores de Israel frequentemente usam argumentos se pensarem nas implicações da sua aplicação a Israel; exemplos: "os Palestinianos são um povo inventado" (e os Israelitas?); "eles não são refugiados, a maior parte já estão fora há 2 ou mais gerações" (e a "Lei do Retorno" israelita, que permite o "retorno" de pessoas que estão fora há séculos ou milénios?), etc.

"Não tenho que subsidiar médicos..."

Numa entrevista ao Diário Económico, a gestora da Espírito Santo Saúde, Isabel Vaz, confrontada com os elevados salários pagos num hospital concessionado ao ESS, respondeu:

Primeiro ponto: o hospital de Loures é público. Todos os médicos que vêm trabalhar para Loures vêm fazer serviço público. Segundo, nós comprometemo-nos com o Estado a fazer mais barato do que aquilo que o Estado consegue fazer. Não consigo perceber o que as pessoas querem dizer com propostas irrecusáveis. Estamos a pagar aquilo que no nosso país, com o contracto que temos, nos é permitido. Temos uma grande vantagem em relação aos nossos colegas, é que Loures é um hospital de raiz e como tal estamos a escolher as equipas. Ou seja, não tenho que subsidiar médicos, enfermeiros, auxiliares, que não querem trabalhar, e que não contribuem para o sucesso das organizações.

Nos comentários, as opiniões dividiram-se, com uns a dizer "finalmente alguém que tem a coragem de dizer que os médicos são uns privilegiados" e outros "mas quem é esta menina para vir insultar milhares de profissionais"; curiosamente, parece-me que ninguém aborda o ponto principal - é que a resposta dela é completamente contraditório com a questão colocada: na verdade, a existência de hospitais privados (ou pior, de hospitais públicos com gestão privada) a pagar valores astronómicos é uma das razões que permite que no serviço público haja funcionários com uma baixa relação produção/remuneração, já que se forem "apertados" podem sempre ameaçar ir trabalhar para o privado.

Aprofundando a questão, talvez possamos considerar que a pior coisa que aconteceu às finanças do SNS foi os hospitais públicos (incluindo os hospitais públicos de gestão privada) terem passado a ter autonomia negocial, o que permite aos médicos dizer "se não me dão tanto, vou trabalhar para o outro hospital" (enquanto antes, quanto se recebia pela tabela da função pública, não havia esse problema - os hospitais do SNS eram obrigados a funcionar como um "cartel" e os profissionais tinham que se sujeitar a esse salário).

Papers académicos e propriedade intelectual

Intellectual-property rights: academic papers, por PaulB:

I wrote earlier that I'm opposed to intellectual property rights wherever plausible alternatives exits. I'll start my review of the alternatives with perhaps the easiest case: academic papers.
My relevant experience is all in science and finance: conceivably things work differently in the humanities. In the fields I know about, which are overwhelmingly the ones that matter to the vast majority of the population, the way that journals work is that authors submit papers for publication, the editor asks experts in the field to review the paper, the reviewers make recommendations for changes and for or against publication, the authors are invited to make any changes the editor thinks advisable, and the editor eventually publishes the paper or rejects it. The journal, which has contributed the least to this process, ends up with the copyright to the paper: the author and reviewers work for notional fees or none.

I wrote earlier that I'm opposed to intellectual property rights wherever plausible alternatives exits. I'll start my review of the alternatives with perhaps the easiest case: academic papers.

My relevant experience is all in science and finance: conceivably things work differently in the humanities. In the fields I know about, which are overwhelmingly the ones that matter to the vast majority of the population, the way that journals work is that authors submit papers for publication, the editor asks experts in the field to review the paper, the reviewers make recommendations for changes and for or against publication, the authors are invited to make any changes the editor thinks advisable, and the editor eventually publishes the paper or rejects it. The journal, which has contributed the least to this process, ends up with the copyright to the paper: the author and reviewers work for notional fees or none.

Copyright is therefore no incentive for the production of academic papers. Its only function is to provide incentives for journals to carry out a filtering process by which readers get an indication of which papers are worth reading, and funding bodies get an indication of whose research is worth funding. Since there are too many papers to read, and too many researchers to fund, both these filters are valuable.

In practice, authors often circulate their papers to peers before submitting them for publication, both as a courtesy to anyone whose work they cite, and in the hope of getting helpful feedback. Also,they often make a version of the paper freely available on their personal websites - this is worth knowing if a paper you want to consult is hidden behind an expensive paywall. I suppose that journals disapprove of this practice, but think it prudent not to draw attention to it by objecting publicly.

The alternative is simple: authors, as they do now, should consult whomsoever they wish until they think their paper ready for general release. Then they should publish them on websites dedicated to the purpose. arXiv does this already for some of the geekier fields. Here's an outline of how it works, and here are some comments by its founder on its implications for academic publishing. Here are some thoughts on its disadvantages: none of them seem to me to be fundamental to the question of copyright. Interestingly, there is no suggestion that prestigious journals in Physics have been unable to operate without exclusive publication rights.

It may be that copyright restrictions are necessary in most cases to make it worthwhile to operate pre-publication peer review: here are some comments by Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ, on how small a loss it would be to do without.

I submit that medical research in particular would benefit from free publication along the lines of arXiv. That would get results out quicker, make them easier to consult online, and encourage publication of negative trial results.

If filtering mechanisms are required, something along the lines of Amazon's book-review system would be possible. The user should have the option to apply weightings to the reviewers, favouring for example ones with high academic titles, or ones whose views, positive and negative, he shares regarding other specified papers.

Let's abolish copyright on academic papers now. I predict that a few prestigious journals will survive, and the rest will be more than adequately replaced by free on-line publishing.

Acerca disso, ver também George Monbiot e Razib Khan.

Primavera cantonesa?

Whither the Guangdong Spring?, por Adrienne Mong and Bo Gu (Behind the Wall - NBC News):

HAIMEN, Guangdong Province—It wouldn’t have been fair or accurate to call it a China Spring, but for a moment it was worth wondering: Was this the beginning of a Guangdong Spring?

Since September, residents in a fishing village called Wukan, in the southern coastal province of Guangdong, had been protesting against their local government over, specifically, illegal land grabs and, more generally, corruption. This was a town where one man had held sway as the Communist Party chief for four decades.

The situation grew explosive two weekends ago when one of the protest organizers died in police custody, triggering a widespread and cohesive revolt that saw thousands of people run the local officials and police out of town—the first time the Communist Party appeared to have lost total control.

The authorities responded by laying siege on Wukan, preventing food and other supplies from reaching the 20,000-strong population, and censoring all mention of the latest developments in Chinese media or the Internet. In turn, the residents welcomed foreign and Hong Kong journalists to cover their plight.

Negotiations between the two sides kicked into high gear even as the situation escalated. The villagers threatened to march to government offices of a nearby town unless their demands were met, potentially pitting them against thousands of riot and paramilitary police deployed along the main road leading in and out of Wukan.

In the end, cooler tempers prevailed amidst government compromises, but just as the Wukan standoff appeared to ease, reports of more protests nearby surfaced on Tuesday on the Internet. (...)

At least three other pockets of unrest had flared up in districts of a large city near Wukan: two of the groups were protesting similar examples of illegal land seizures and a third—the largest outbreak of demonstrations—was over government plans to build a coal-fired power plant in Haimen. (...)

Protests are not unusual in China. In fact, according to the most recent official statistics, 2009 saw more than 90,000 “mass incidents,” as the Chinese government calls protests, across the country. Land grabs and pollution concerns are among the top grievances.
Although the protests in Wukan and Haimen appear unrelated, it seemed a remarkable coincidence that two demonstrations adopting similar tactics would spring up all within several dozen miles of one another.

Situação dos protestos na China

En Wukan, as autoridades municipais terão feito concessões à população da aldeia:

Summary of concessions put forward by Shanwei Party Secretary:

1. Promise not to send military police into the village

2. Promise to have the case handled by Shanwei municipal government, rather than by the township government. If villagers are still not happy with this arrangement, they can request for provincial government to send a supervisory team.

3. A decision has finally been made with regard to land use by Fengtian Livestock. The government will officially retake the land and will compensate those whose land have been acquired.

4. Villagers will not be pursued for their aggressive actions.

5. Mr Zhu from Wukan will be appointed Branch Secretary for the village's party committee.

Summary of villagers' demands that have not been met in the Party Secretary's proposal:

1. He makes no promise of returning the body of village representatve Xue Jinbo.

2. He does not mention whether the legal status of the "Temporary Board of Representatives" elected by the villagers will be rectified.

3. He only promised that most villagers will not be pursued for their actions. He fails to guarantee that no one will be pursued.

Entretanto, surgem notícias (ainda sem confirmação credível) de um protesto em Haimen (a 150 Kms de Wukan), contra a construção de uma central eléctrica - parece que o problema é que Heimen é uma terra de pescadores e a poluição da central eléctrica vai afectar o peixe e o camarão.

Adenda: já há confirmação credível

A nova ordem húngara

Hungary’s Constitutional Revolution, por Kim Lane Scheppele (publicado no blog de Paul Krugman):

(...)  In a free and fair election last spring in Hungary, the center-right political party, Fidesz, got 53% of the vote. This translated into 68% of the seats in the parliament under Hungary’s current disproportionate election law. With this supermajority, Fidesz won the power to change the constitution. They have used this power in the most extreme way at every turn, amending the constitution ten times in their first year in office and then enacting a wholly new constitution that will take effect on January 1, 2012.

This constitutional activity has transformed the legal landscape to remove checks on the power of the government and put virtually all power into the hands of the current governing party for the foreseeable future.

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China - uma bolha para rebentar?

Will China Break?, por Paul Krugman:

Consider the following picture: Recent growth has relied on a huge construction boom fueled by surging real estate prices, and exhibiting all the classic signs of a bubble. There was rapid growth in credit — with much of that growth taking place not through traditional banking but rather through unregulated “shadow banking” neither subject to government supervision nor backed by government guarantees. Now the bubble is bursting — and there are real reasons to fear financial and economic crisis.


Am I describing Japan at the end of the 1980s? Or am I describing America in 2007? I could be. But right now I’m talking about China, which is emerging as another danger spot in a world economy that really, really doesn’t need this right now.

EUA discutem nova lei anti-pirataria (variante ocidental, não somali)

[Al-Jazeera]

Lentes ideológicas para ver a rebelião de Wukan, China

Um aspecto interessante da revolta de Wukan (em que a população, em protesto contra a entrega das suas terras a promotores imobiliários, expulsou a policia e as autoridades locais) é que tanto socialistas como liberais a podem facilmente encaixar numa das suas narrativas.

Um socialista pode facilmente ver um caso de acumulação primitiva de capital, em que a classe capitalista nascente constrói o seu poder apossando-se das terras (mais ou menos comunitárias) utilizadas pelos camponses  - uma espécie de enclosures do século XXI (diga-se que, pelo que conheço da lei imobiliária chinesa, provavelmente o que temos aqui é uma passagem de "terras públicas concessionadas a agricultores privados" para "terras públicas concessionados a imobiliárias privadas" - ou seja, não poderemos falar de "privatização").

Já um liberal pode facilmente ver aqui um caso de "pequenos proprietários resistem à expropriação", como neste artigo do El Mundo (embora, exactamente pelas mesmas razões que acho que não podemos falar em "privatização", também não podemos falar de "expropriação").

Individualismo e colectivismo

Sobre os os projectos colaborativos na Internet, Kevin Carson escreve:

The Web is not “collective” in the traditional sense of the term–i.e., as it was understood in the days before networked organization, when “collective” action could be taken only through large institutions representing some collective of human beings and coordinated by a hierarchy, in which each individual’s freedom of initiative was limited by the coordination of a central authority.

It is stigmergic, which synthesizes the highest development of both the collective and individualism. It maximizes the efficiency of collective action by removing the transaction costs of voluntary cooperation. But at the same time, it is entirely a sum total of free individual actions, taken by individuals on their own initiative and without anyone else’s permission. The sum total effect is created by individuals coordinating their own unconstrained actions with the common goal as they understand it.

(...)

So stigmergy is the highest realization of both individualism and collectivism, without either diminishing or qualifying the other in any way.”

E um texto de há 90 anos atrás, uma passagem da "Carta aberta ao camarada Lenine", de Herman Gorter (em resposta a "O Esquerdismo, Doença Infantil do Comunismo"), também sobre o tema da relação entre individualismo e colectivismo (não no contexto da internet, mas no contexto dos "Conselhos Operários" - a que ele chama "organizações industriais"):

The industrial unions and workshop organisations, and the Workers’ Unions that are based on them and formed from them, why are they such excellent weapons for the revolution in Western Europe, the best weapons even together with the Communist Party? Because the workers act for themselves, infinitely more so than they did in the old Trade Unions, because now they control their leaders, and thereby the entire leadership, and because they have the supervision of the industrial organisation, and thereby of the entire union.

Every trade, every workshop is one whole, where the workers elect their representatives. The industrial organisations have been divided according to economic districts. Representatives have been appointed for the districts. And the districts in turn elect the general board for the entire State.

All the industrial organisations together, no matter to what trade they belong, constitute the one Workers’ Union.

This, as we see, is an organisation altogether directed towards the revolution.

If an interval of comparatively peaceful fighting should follow, this organisation might moreover be easily adapted. The industrial organisations would only have to be combined, according to the industries, within the compass of the Workers’ Unions.

 It is obvious. Here the workers, every worker, has power, for in his workshop he elects his own delegates, and through them he has direct control over the district and State bodies. There is strong centralisation, but not too strong. The individual and the industrial organisation has great power. He can dismiss or replace his delegates at any time, and compel them to replace the higher positions at the shortest notice. This is individualism, but not too much of it. For the central corporations, the districts and government councils have great power. The individual and the central board have just that amount of power, which this present period, in which the revolution breaks out, requires and allows.

Marx writes that under capitalism the citizen is an abstraction, a cipher, as compared to the State. It is the same in the Trade Unions. The bureaucracy, the entire system of the organisation plane ever so far above, and are altogether out of the reach of the worker. He cannot reach them. He is a cipher as compared to them, an abstraction. For them he is not even the man in the workshop. He is not a living, willing, struggling being. If in the old Trade Unions you replace the bureaucracy by other persons, you will see that before long these also have the same character; that they stand high, unattainably high above the masses, and are in no way in touch with them. Ninety-nine out of every hundred will be tyrants, and will stand on the side of the bourgeoisie. It is the very nature of the organisation that makes them so.

Your tactics strive to leave the Trade Unions as they are, “down below,” and only to give them other leaders somewhat more of the Left trend, is therefore purely a change “up above.” And the Trade Unions remain in the power of leaders. And these, once spoilt, everything is as of old, or at the very best, a slight improvement in the layers up above. No, not even if you yourself, or we ourselves, were the leaders, we would not consent to this. For we wish to enable the masses themselves to become more intelligent, more courageous, self-acting, more elevated in all things. We want the masses themselves to make the revolution. For only thus the revolution can triumph here in Western Europe. And to this end the old Trade Unions must be destroyed.

How utterly different it is in the industrial unions. Here it is the worker himself who decides about tactics, trend, and struggle, and who intervenes if the “leaders” do not act as he wants them to. The factory, the workshop, being at the same time the organisation, he stands continually in the fight himself.
In so far as it is possible under capitalism, he is the maker and the guide of his own fate, and as this is the case with every one of them, THE MASS IS THE MAKER AND LEADER OF ITS OWN FIGHT.

More, infinitely more so, than was ever possible in the old Trade Unions, reformist as well as syndicalist.

The industrial unions and workers’ unions that make the individuals themselves, and consequently the masses themselves, the direct fighters, those that really wage the war, are for that very reason the best weapons for the revolution, the weapons we need here in Western Europe, if ever we shall be able without help to overthrow the most powerful capitalism of the world.

Como os iranianos capturaram o avião-robot dos EUA

Exclusive: Iran hijacked US drone, says Iranian engineer (Christian Science Monitor):

Iran guided the CIA's "lost" stealth drone to an intact landing inside hostile territory by exploiting a navigational weakness long-known to the US military, according to an Iranian engineer now working on the captured drone's systems inside Iran.


(...)

"The GPS navigation is the weakest point," the Iranian engineer told the Monitor, giving the most detailed description yet published of Iran's "electronic ambush" of the highly classified US drone. "By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain."


The “spoofing” technique that the Iranians used – which took into account precise landing altitudes, as well as latitudinal and longitudinal data – made the drone “land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications” from the US control center, says the engineer.

(...)

Now this engineer’s account of how Iran took over one of America’s most sophisticated drones suggests Tehran has found a way to hit back. The techniques were developed from reverse-engineering several less sophisticated American drones captured or shot down in recent years, the engineer says, and by taking advantage of weak, easily manipulated GPS signals, which calculate location and speed from multiple satellites.


RECOMMENDED: Downed US drone: How Iran caught the 'beast'

Western military experts and a number of published papers on GPS spoofing indicate that the scenario described by the Iranian engineer is plausible.

"Even modern combat-grade GPS [is] very susceptible” to manipulation, says former US Navy electronic warfare specialist Robert Densmore, adding that it is “certainly possible” to recalibrate the GPS on a drone so that it flies on a different course. “I wouldn't say it's easy, but the technology is there.”

In 2009, Iran-backed Shiite militants in Iraq were found to have downloaded live, unencrypted video streams from American Predator drones with inexpensive, off-the-shelf software. But Iran’s apparent ability now to actually take control of a drone is far more significant.

O "PIIG" que já tinha saído da crise já regressou ao clube

Depois de ter saído da crise no Verão de 2010, e de novo no Verão de 2011, a Irlanda volta a cair nela (cá para mim deve haver algum problema no ajuste sazonal dos dados do PIB irlandês, que sai sempre da crise no principio de Verão e regressa quando saíem as estatístricas seguintes).

[Post publicado no Vias de Facto; podem comentar lá]

Reabilitando os economistas?

Arnold Kling: "In fact, if the U.S. financial crisis was a black eye for the economics profession because few economists predicted it, then the euro crisis should be...well, whatever is the opposite of a black eye...because many economists predicted it."

O "National Defense Authorization Act"

Are Americans in Line for Gitmo?, por Ray McGovern (AntiWar.com), sobre as disposições contidas no "NDAA":

Ambiguous but alarming new wording tucked into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and just passed by the Senate is reminiscent of the “extraordinary measures” introduced by the Nazis after they took power in 1933.

And the relative lack of reaction so far calls to mind the oddly calm indifference with which most Germans watched the erosion of the rights that had been guaranteed by their own constitution. As one German writer observed, “With sheepish submissiveness we watched it unfold, as if from a box at the theater.”

The writer was Sebastian Haffner (real name Raimund Pretzel), a young German lawyer worried at what he saw in 1933 in Berlin but helpless to stop it since, as he put it, the German people “collectively and limply collapsed, yielded, and capitulated.” (...)


The Senate bill, in effect, revokes an 1878 law known as the Posse Comitatus Act, which banned the Army from domestic law enforcement after the military had been used — and often abused — in that role during Reconstruction. Ever since then, that law has been taken very seriously — until now. Military officers have had their careers brought to an abrupt halt by involving federal military assets in purely civilian criminal matters.

But that was before 9/11 and the mantra “9/11 changed everything.” In this case of the Senate-passed NDAA — more than a decade after the terror attacks and even as U.S. intelligence agencies say al-Qaeda is on the brink of defeat — Congress continues to carve away constitutional and legal protections in the name of fighting “terrorism.” (...)

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"Ordem sem coacção" em Wukan

Parte do relato do jornalista Tom Lassater no Twitter sobre Wukan (localidade chinesea de 20.000 habitantes de onde a população há dias expulsou a polícia e os lideres locais do PC):

Os sindicatos e a legislação

Unions vs. Legislation, por Chris Dillow:

[U]nion bargaining strength is a better way of raising wages than legislation. This is because minimum wage laws are inflexible. They apply both to cash-rich firms that could raise wages without cutting jobs and investment, and to firms on the margin of profitability that would close down if labour costs rose. (Yes, the left exaggerates the prevalence of the former just as the right exaggerates that of the latter.) Living wage laws can’t distinguish between these cases. But union bargaining can. Strong trades unions, then, are better able than laws to raise wages without job loss.

The same is true for other forms of labour regulation: health and safety, working time and suchlike. Union bargaining can protect workers more flexibly than “one size fits all” laws. It can distinguish between cases where regulation would be too costly and where it wouldn’t.

In this sense, legislation and unions are alternatives. It is no accident that the UK introduced  minimum wage laws in 1999, after trades unions were weakened, and that this weakness has been followed by more “red tape“ on firms.

A paper by Philippe Aghion and colleagues formalizes this. They point out that there is a negative correlation between union strength and minimum wage laws. Scandinavian countries have traditionally had strong unions but little wage legislation, whilst Greece, France and Spain have weaker unions but tighter minimum wages. And which countries have usually had the healthier labour markets?

As surpresas de Robin Hanson

Há uns  tempos, o economista Robin Hanson declarava-se surpreendido com algumas coisas:

1. I exist at all; the vast majority of possible things do not exist.
2. I am alive; the vast majority of real things are dead.
3. I have a brain; the vast majority of living things have none.
4. I am a mammal; the vast majority of brains aren’t.
5. I am a human; the vast majority of mammals aren’t.
6. I am richer than the vast majority who have ever lived.
7. I am alive earlier than the vast majority of human-like folks who will ever live.
8. I am richer and smarter than most humans alive today.
9. I write a popular blog, and unusually interesting articles.

Podemos deixar de lado o facto que a parte do "smarter" no ponto 8 é impossível de provar (seria preciso fazer testes de QI à maioria da humanidade para saber se Hanson é mais inteligente que a maioria das pessoas - mas é bastante provável que o seja, nem que seja porque aproximadamente 49,99999999% da população mundial é composta por pessoas mais inteligentes que a maioria). O ponto 7 é uma pura especulação (esperemos que ele esteja certo)

De qualquer forma, grande parte das as interrogações de Hanson poderiam ser subscritas pela maior parte dos leitores, que são esmagadoramente humanos, vivos (a menos que contemos os circuitos dos computadores e da internet como "leitores"), ricos (à escala da humanidade actual, e ainda mais se comparados com todos os humanos que há existiram) e vários até têm blogs. Com tantas coisas que poderíamos ser, porque é que fomos calhar mesmo neste grupo ultra-minoritário (e priviligiado)?

Mas acho que grande parte do mistério se explica se pensarmos em "atómos" em vez de em "indivíduos". Ou seja, sem em vez de nos perguntarmos "porque é que Robin Hanson é um ser vivo, com cérebro, mamífero e ainda por cima um humano?", perguntarmos "porque é que os átomos que compôem Robin Hanson estão integrados num ser vivo, com cérebro, mamífero e ainda por cima um humano?"; e aí a resposta é clara - os tais átomos passam a maior parte do tempo em seres inanimados, e só muito ocasionalmente integram um organismo humano; ou seja, não há nenhuma anormalidade estatística no facto de, neste momento, os átomos de Hanson integrarem o organismo de Hanson - cada átomo passa um fracção ínfima da sua existência integrado no "complexo cristalino conhecido como Robin Hanson", provavelmente não mais do que seria de esperar pelas leis das probabilidades.

O que se passa é que só nos breves instantes em que integram seres humanos é que esses átomos têm (ou dão origem a) algo a que podemos chamar "auto-reflexão sobre si"*, pelo que, nesses momentos (se lhes der para pensar nisso), ficam surpreendidos por serem uma pessoa em vez de, por exemplo, feldspato. No fundo é como alguém estar 99% do tempo inconsciente e, no pouco tempo em que está consciente, pensar "é curioso; eu sei que estou o tempo quase sempre inconsciente - mas quase todas as minhas recordações são de quando estou consciente; como explicar este fenómeno?").

Pelo menos as "surpresas" 1-5 podem ser explicadas assim; as 6 e 8 podem ser explicadas pelas pessoas ricas e inteligentes terem mais tempo e propensão a gastar tempo pensando nisso (ou seja, quando os átomos aterram numa pessoa inteligente e razoavelmente abastada podem se pôr a pensar "com tanta pobreza que há por aí, com sorte eu tive em ser eu"; se aterrarem numa pessoa pobre ou pouco inteligente, têm mais que fazer do que esse género de estatísticas mentais); a 9 pela sua expectável correlação com 6 e 8.