A bússola eleitoral do Expresso

O Expresso e a SIC lançaram uma ferramenta, a "bússola eleitoral", que pretende ver qual é o partido político de que estamos mais próximos:

Muitas críticas têm sido levantadas a esse quadro, como a CDU ser mais "libertária-cosmopolita" que o Bloco de Esquerda, ou o PNR (de extrema-direita) estar ao centro.

Estive a tentar perceber porque é que a CDU aparece como mais "libertária-cosmopolita" que o BE; nas perguntas de "Sociedade", a única que poderia explicar essa diferença era a CDU "discordar" no ponto "Independentemente dos seus recursos, as famílias numerosas devem receber benefícios sociais e fiscais" e o BE "concordar totalmente"; mas porque é que os autores dizem que a CDU "discorda" e o BE concorda "totalmente"? Segundo eles a CDU discorda porque votou contra uma alteração ao código do Imposto sobre Veículos criando isenções para famílias numerosas (o BE votou contra na primeira votação e absteve-se na votação final) e as alterações ao IMI criando bonificações para as famílias numerosas (por mais voltas que dê ao site da Assembleia da República, não consigo descobrir quem votou contra e a favor disso, mas em muitas Assembleias Municipais o BE tem votado contra).

Já o BE "concorda" porque apresentou uma proposta para repor o abono de família para toda a gente, independentemente do rendimento - proposta essa que o PCP e o PEV votaram a favor.

Ou seja, não me parece que a diferença de posição entre o PCP/PEV e o BE na questão das famílias numerosas seja tão grande que faça sentido um "discordar completamente" e outro "concordar" (e mesmo a posição do BE sobre o abono de família parece-me mais uma defesa da universalidade dos serviços públicos - na linha "programas para pobres tendem a ser programas pobres" - do que propriamente uma defesa das famílias numerosas).

Também me parece discutível que o BE "discorde completamente" de que "Deve haver um alargamento das áreas em que a União Europeia define as políticas" - sim, realmente o BE no seu manifesto eleitoral para as europeias [pdf] fala em "desobediencia democrática à EU e suas imposições, recusando de forma intransigente, quaisquer perdas de soberania"; mas no mesmo documento também diz que "a UE deve passar a ter instrumentos próprios de gestão de dívida que representem um recurso dos Estados-membros, mas beneficiem dos custos de financiamento que um espaço como a União Europeia pode proporcionar" e que "[a] definição de mínimos europeus para a tributação de todos os rendimentos do capital (lucros, dividendos, etc.) é a única forma de travar a dinâmica da concorrência fiscal no espaço europeu".

De qualquer maneira tenho dúvidas que faça sentido juntar (como parece ter sido feito) juntar a atitude face à UE com a atitude em questões sociais numa única dimensão ("tradicionalista-nacionalista vs. libertária-cosmopolita"); em países como o Reino Unido e  nalguns da Europa de Leste há efetivamente uma forte ligação entre conservadorismo social e euroceticismo, que justifica juntar esses pontos numa única dimensão; mas em Portugal não sei se será o caso (talvez um gráfico tridimensional - com "europeísmo vs. euroceticismo" como a 3º dimensão - fizesse mais sentido; aliás, num inquérito semelhante acercas das eleições europeias foi esse o sistema usado).

Finalmente, a questão do PNR aparecer ao centro - creio que isso é um problema que resulta da filosofia original de gráficos como o "Political Compass" - que têm um eixo esquerda-direita (há volta da dicotomia estado social vs. liberalismo económico) e um eixo "libertário-autoritário" (largamente à volta das questões "fraturantes"); ora, como frequentemente os partidos de extrema-direita são contra o liberalismo económico, facilmente ficam ao centro (e por vezes mesmo à esquerda) nesses gráficos.

Ora, o problema desse arranjo gráfico (que divide a esquerda da direita pela economia e considera as questões sociais como transversais à divisão esquerda-direita) é que no mundo real das ideologias, tanto as questões económicas como as questões sociais são questões esquerda vs. direita; afinal, o que creio ser a questão esquerda-direita original (direita - o rei deve poder vetar definitivamente as leis aprovadas pelo parlamento; esquerda - o veto real apenas pode adiar a aprovação da lei) hoje em dia seria de certeza considerada uma questão social. Nesse aspeto, gráficos similares norte-americanos, como o de On the Issues ou o dos Advocates for Self-Government parecem-me melhores: os eixos do gráfico são basicamente os mesmos, mas o gráfico tem uma inclinação de uns 45º, de forma que tanto liberalismo económico como conservadorismo social vão para a direita. Aplicando isso ao gráfico do Expresso, teríamos:

É verdade que, mesmo assim, o gráfico continuaria a ter coisas talvez contra-intuitivas, como o Livre ficando o partido mais à esquerda (provavelmente devido ao seu europeísmo, que reforça a componente libertária-cosmopolita) - mas mesmo no gráfico anterior o Livre aparecia como um dos dois partidos/coligações mais à esquerda, junto com a CDU; mais estranho seria o MRPP ficar à direita do PS, mas de qualquer forma já era algo de estranho no gráfico original estar à direita da CDU, do Bloco e do Livre (os autores da "bússola" têm mesmo certeza que o MRPP "discorda totalmente" da reestruturação da dívida?? Só se for "discordar totalmente" no sentido de não quererem reestruturação mas repúdio puro e simples da dívida - mas essa posição é mais defender uma forma extrema de reestruturação do que verdadeiramente ser contra).

O apocalipse cultural que não aconteceu

The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t, por Steven Johnson (New York Times), via Tyler Cowen:

On July 11, 2000, in one of the more unlikely moments in the history of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Orrin Hatch handed the microphone to Metallica’s drummer, Lars Ulrich, to hear his thoughts on art in the age of digital reproduction. Ulrich’s primary concern was a new online service called Napster, which had debuted a little more than a year before. (...)

But in retrospect, we can also see Ulrich’s appearance as an intellectual milestone of sorts, in that he articulated a critique of the Internet-­era creative economy that became increasingly commonplace over time. ‘‘We typically employ a record producer, recording engineers, programmers, assistants and, occasionally, other musicians,’’ Ulrich told the Senate committee. ‘‘We rent time for months at recording studios, which are owned by small-­business men who have risked their own capital to buy, maintain and constantly upgrade very expensive equipment and facilities. Our record releases are supported by hundreds of record companies’ employees and provide programming for numerous radio and television stations. ... It’s clear, then, that if music is free for downloading, the music industry is not viable. All the jobs I just talked about will be lost, and the diverse voices of the artists will disappear.’’ (...)

The intersection between commerce, technology and culture has long been a place of anxiety and foreboding. Marxist critics in the 1940s denounced the assembly-line approach to filmmaking that Hollywood had pioneered; (...) in the ’90s, critics accused bookstore chains and Walmart of undermining the subtle curations of independent bookshops and record stores.

But starting with Ulrich’s testimony, a new complaint has taken center stage, one that flips those older objections on their heads. The problem with the culture industry is no longer its rapacious pursuit of consumer dollars. The problem with the culture industry is that it’s not profitable enough.(...) In the 15 years since, many artists and commentators have come to believe that Ulrich’s promised apocalypse is now upon us — that the digital economy, in which information not only wants to be free but for all practical purposes is free, ultimately means that ‘‘the diverse voices of the artists will disappear,’’ because musicians and writers and filmmakers can no longer make a living. (...)

The trouble with this argument is that it has been based largely on anecdote, on depressing stories about moderately successful bands that are still sharing an apartment or filmmakers who can’t get their pictures made because they refuse to pander to a teenage sensibility. (...)

What do these data sets have to tell us about musicians in particular? According to the O.E.S., in 1999 there were nearly 53,000 Americans who considered their primary occupation to be that of a musician, a music director or a composer; in 2014, more than 60,000 people were employed writing, singing or playing music. That’s a rise of 15 percent, compared with overall job-­market growth during that period of about 6 percent. The number of self-­employed musicians grew at an even faster rate: There were 45 percent more independent musicians in 2014 than in 2001. (Self-­employed writers, by contrast, grew by 20 percent over that period.)

Of course, Baudelaire would have filed his tax forms as self-­employed, too; that doesn’t mean he wasn’t also destitute. Could the surge in musicians be accompanied by a parallel expansion in the number of broke musicians? The income data suggests that this just isn’t true. According to the O.E.S., songwriters and music directors saw their average income rise by nearly 60 percent since 1999. The census version of the story, which includes self-­employed musicians, is less stellar: In 2012, musical groups and artists reported only 25 percent more in revenue than they did in 2002, which is basically treading water when you factor in inflation. And yet collectively, the figures seem to suggest that music, the creative field that has been most threatened by technological change, has become more
profitable in the post-­Napster era — not for the music industry, of course, but for musicians themselves. Somehow the turbulence of the last 15 years seems to have created an economy in which more people than ever are writing and performing songs for a living.

Porque a democracia egípcia não resultou?

Agora é politicamente correto zombar da "primavera árabe" (e das pessoas que em 2011 estavam entusiasmadas com a referida "primavera"), e dizer que era evidente que a democratização daqueles países iria abrir caminho aos islamitas e aos jihadistas.

Mas seria assim tão evidente?

Olhemos para os resultados das eleições presidenciais egípcias de 2012:

Primeira volta -

Mohamed Morsi (apoiado pela Irmandade Muçulmana) - 24,78%

Ahmed Shafik (conotado com o anterior regime) - 23,66%

Hamdeen Sabahi ("nasserista", apoiado pela oposição secular) - 20,72%

Segunda volta -

Morsi - 51,73%

Shafik - 48,27%

Olhando para estes resultados, não me parece que a vitória de Morsi fosse assim tão inevitável; em primeiro lugar, a sua margem de vitória na 2ª volta foi tão estreita que me parece que era perfeitamente possivel que ele tivesse perdido se a campanha tivesse corrida de forma ligeiramente diferente; em segundo lugar, mesmo na primeira volta não me parece que fosse impossível que tivesse sido Sabahi a passar à segunda volta, e Sabahi tinha condições para ser como Mário Soares em Portugal em 1986 (o candidato que se dizia que só tinha que passar à 2º volta para ganhar, com o apoio da esquerda contra Freitas, ou com o apoio do PS e da direita contra Zenha ou Pintassilgo) - se concorrese contra Morsi, poderia ter mais votos dos que Shafik teve (possivelmente teria à mesma os votos dos que votaram em Shafik, e mais de uns quantos que não votaram Shafik por o associarem a Mubarak), e contra Shafik, também poderia ter mais votos que Morsi (o mesmo raciocinio - teria à mesma o votos dos que votaram Morsi, e mais de alguns que não votaram Morsi por o associarem ao fundamentalismo islâmico).

Ou seja, bastava algumas coisas terem corrida de forma ligeiramente diferente para não ter sido eleito um presidente islamita, com o que isso implicou.

Mas suspeito que o grande problema foi mesmo terem optado pelo presidencialismo (o tal sistema que está mais que visto que só funciona nos EUA) - numa sociedade dividida em três blocos (islamitas, "mubarakistas" e oposição secular) ter um sistema que dá o poder supremo a uma (seja ela qual for) não é boa ideia.

A democracia norte-americana em crise?

American democracy is doomed, por Matthew Yglesias:

America's constitutional democracy is going to collapse.

Some day — not tomorrow, not next year, but probably sometime before runaway climate change forces us to seek a new life in outer-space colonies (...).

Very few people agree with me about this, of course. When I say it, people generally think that I'm kidding. America is the richest, most successful country on earth. The basic structure of its government has survived contested elections and Great Depressions and civil rights movements and world wars and terrorist attacks and global pandemics. (...)

But voiced in another register, my outlandish thesis is actually the conventional wisdom in the United States. Back when George W. Bush was president and I was working at a liberal magazine, there was a very serious discussion in an editorial meeting about the fact that the United States was now exhibiting 11 of the 13 telltale signs of a fascist dictatorship. The idea that Bush was shredding the Constitution and trampling on congressional prerogatives was commonplace. When Obama took office, the partisan valence of the complaints shifted, but their basic tenor didn't. Conservative pundits — not the craziest, zaniest ones on talk radio, but the most serious and well-regarded — compare Obama's immigration moves to the actions of a Latin-American military dictator. (...)

To understand the looming crisis in American politics, it's useful to think about Germany, Japan, Italy, and Austria. These are countries that were defeated by American military forces during the Second World War and given constitutions written by local leaders operating in close collaboration with occupation authorities. It's striking that even though the US Constitution is treated as a sacred text in America's political culture, we did not push any of these countries to adopt our basic framework of government.

This wasn't an oversight.

In a 1990 essay, the late Yale political scientist Juan Linz observed that "aside from the United States, only Chile has managed a century and a half of relatively undisturbed constitutional continuity under presidential government — but Chilean democracy broke down in the 1970s." (...)

Still, Linz offered several reasons why presidential systems are so prone to crisis. (...)

In a parliamentary system, deadlocks get resolved. A prime minister who lacks the backing of a parliamentary majority is replaced by a new one who has it. If no such majority can be found, a new election is held and the new parliament picks a leader. It can get a little messy for a period of weeks, but there's simply no possibility of a years-long spell in which the legislative and executive branches glare at each other unproductively.

But within a presidential system, gridlock leads to a constitutional trainwreck with no resolution. The United States's recent government shutdowns and executive action on immigration are small examples of the kind of dynamic that's led to coups and putsches abroad.

There was, of course, the American exception to the problems of the checks-and-balances system. Linz observed on this score: "The uniquely diffuse character of American political parties — which, ironically, exasperates many American political scientists and leads them to call for responsible, ideologically disciplined parties — has something to do with it."

For much of American history, in other words, US political parties have been relatively un-ideological and un-disciplined. They are named after vague ideas rather than specific ideologies, and neither presidents nor legislative leaders can compel back-bench members to vote with them. This has often been bemoaned (famously, a 1950 report by the American Political Science Association called for a more rigorous party system) as the source of problems. It's also, according to Linz, helped avert the kind of zero-sum conflicts that have torn other structurally similar democracies apart. But that diffuse party structure is also a thing of the past.

Uma crítica "liberal" à legalização judicial do "casamento gay" nos EUA

The Supreme Court made the right call on marriage equality — but they did it the wrong way, por Andrew Koppelman:

The Supreme Court’s ruling Friday that the Constitution protects same-sex marriage was great news. The party pooper was the remarkably weak reasoning by which the Court got there. Reading the four dissents poke holes in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s opinion for the Court, I kept thinking, “Yeah, that’s fair,” even though on the bottom line the Court clearly got it right. All of Kennedy’s worst traits — the ponderous self-importance, the leaps of logic, the worship of state power — were on display. For a decision this important, the Court should have been able to do better.

The decision relied on the doctrine of “substantive due process” — the idea that some liberties, not enumerated in the Constitution, are so important that government can’t take them away. “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach,” Kennedy’s first sentence declared, “a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity.” Justice Antonin Scalia complains that this sentence resembles “the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.” Questions immediately arise. All laws restrict liberty. How does a court decide which “specific rights” are thereby protected? What are the boundaries of the “lawful realm”? Courts, Kennedy responds, must “exercise reasoned judgment in identifying inter­ests of the person so fundamental that the State must accord them its respect.” He goes on to explain at length why marriage is so important.

Substantive due process, however, invites courts to invent new law out of nothing — to declare as constitutionally protected any conduct that they think is important. Opponents of the decision are already claiming that the Court was just making it up, on the basis of the judges’ personal preferences. This opinion supports that charge. Chief Justice John Roberts observed that Kennedy’s “driving themes are that marriage is desirable and [same-sex couples] desire it.” Scalia argues that the doctrine protects “those freedoms and entitlements that this Court really likes.”

[Via Reason]

O porquê das "professional partnerships"

Profit Sharing and the Role of Professional Partnerships, por Jonathan Levin and Steven Tadelis (versão aberta em PDF).

Modern economies exhibit a wide diversity of organizational forms: from closely held private firms to profit-sharing partnerships and cooperatives to investor-owned corporations. A fundamental economic problem is to understand the forces that lead to these different forms of organization and hence determine the structure of productive enterprise in the economy. One striking puzzle in this regard is the distribution of partnerships relative to corporations across industries. While the corporate form dominates across manufacturing, technology and many service industries, partnerships have been prominent in human-capital intensive professional services such as law, accounting, investment banking, management consulting, advertising, and medicine.

In this paper, we investigate an economic rationale for profit-sharing partnerships and their presence in the professional services. We take the defining feature of a partnership to be re-distribution of profits among the partners. Profit-sharing leads individuals to be particularly selective as to whom they take on as partners. This feature of partnerships assures clients of quality service. We show that as a result, if clients are concerned about quality and are in a relatively poor position to assess quality, then partnerships tend to be a preferable mode of organization relative to a profit-maximizing corporation.

Our model suggests that partnerships will emerge under some market conditions but
not others. In particular, the theory predicts that partnerships will emerge when human capital plays a central role in determining product quality and when clients are at a disadvantage relative to firms in assessing the ability of employees. In our view, these conditions aptly characterize the professional services, but are a much worse description of manufacturing or technology industries where partnerships are quite unusual.

Resumindo, a teoria dos autores é que certas empresas organizam-se como "professional partnerships" (isto é empresas em que em vez de uma distinção clássica entre "donos" e "empregados", os "donos" - partners - são também trabalhadores e o topo da carreira é ser aceite como partner; já agora, há alguma expressão portuguesa para esse tipo de empresas?), porque, supostamenete, uma "partnership" tenderá a ser mais exigente a recrutar partners do que uma empresa clássica a recrutar empregados (uma partnership só irá admitir um partner adicional se a sua produtivade marginal for superior ou no mínimo igual à produtividade média da empresa, enquanto uma empresa clássica contratará qualquer pessoa que tenha uma produtividade marginal maior que o salário), logo isso dará a esses empresas uma maior reputação de "qualidade" perante os clientes (assim, essas empresas tenderiam a dominar em sectores em que é dificil aos clientes avaliarem diretamente a qualidade do produto que a empresa fornece e portanto ligam muito à reputação da empresa).

Confesso que não me inclino muito para essa hipótese, mas é possível.

Já agora, será que além deste há mais algum paper sobre economia/gestão em que consigam falar ao mesmo tempo da evolução das formas de organização empresarial da Goldman Sachs e de um artigo dos anos 50 tentando formalizar o funcionamento de uma economia baseada na autogestão jugoslava?

Christopher Lasch, conservador e radical?

Why Read Christopher Lasch?, por Matthew Harwood, em The American Conservative:

Over the course of his life and work, Lasch, who was the son of progressive parents and was himself initially drawn to Marxism, grew more culturally conservative as he grew more and more tired with American society’s tendency to equate the good life with mere consumption and consumer choice. Both Democrats and Republicans, he believed, adhered to the “ideology of progress,” a belief system whereby, either through redistribution of wealth or economic growth, “economic abundance would eventually give everyone access to leisure, cultivation, refinement—advantages formerly restricted to the wealthy.” (...)

But Lasch’s conservatism was always idiosyncratic, fusing respect for the conservative traditions of working-class life also celebrated by Charles Murray—such as faith, family, and neighborhood—with a genuine desire for egalitarian democracy based on broad-based proprietorship. As a former Marxist, his analysis always held labor, particularly when self-directed or done voluntarily in cooperation with others, in high esteem because of the ethic of responsibility it produced. Work wasn’t, or shouldn’t be, just a means to put food on the table or a roof over your head. Rather it provided meaning, dignity, and moral instruction, something not found by repeating mind-numbing tasks over and over at someone else’s direction. (...)

Lasch understood the paradox that much of the modern American left and right find contradictory: property could be theft, particularly under capitalist property relations and wage labor, but it also meant freedom for small producers—such as farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers in the 19th century or what today have become small business owners and sole proprietorships—who were able to control the conditions under which they made their living. The rise of mass production for ever-expanding markets and with it the shift to salaried labor destroyed this radical yet deeply conservative outlook on life, turning skilled craftsmen who worked for themselves into interchangeable cogs in somebody else’s machine, both literally and figuratively. Workers understood this, noted Lasch, and reacted by “defending not just their economic interests but their crafts, families, and neighborhoods.” (...)

Revolting against the dehumanizing conditions of deskilled wage labor, yet understanding that large-scale factory production was here to stay, skilled craftsmen and owners of productive land exemplified by organization like the Knights of Labor and the Farmers’ Alliance envisioned a new society that resisted both state capitalism and state socialism. (...) With no sense of how history could have gone any other way, any pursuit of worker control today has been lost to history, smeared as communist rather than authentically American. (...)

[B]oth parties cling to different branches of what Lasch called the ideology of progress, redistribution on the left and “a rising tide lifts all boats” on the right. By contrast, Lasch’s vision of the good life is truly radical yet profoundly conservative; it harkens back to traditions now largely dormant in American life where those who worked for a living wanted to build local communities, in the words of 19th-century labor leader Robert MacFarlane, based upon the now forgotten American ideal of “small but universal ownership” of property, which was the “true foundation of a stable and firm republic.” In other words, independence rooted in both liberty and equality.

This producerist ideology, according to Lasch, “deserves a more attentive hearing, on its own terms, than it has usually received.” It holds the answer to the questions critics like Charles Murray raise—and reveals that too many libertarians and conventional conservatives are confused apologists for a system that produces everything they despise: authoritarianism, centralization, and widespread dependence.

Uma questão que me ocorre é se a "classe trabalhadora" defenderia tanto os valores da "faith, family, and neighborhood" como tudo isso - é dificil a um europeu dar opinião sobre autores norte-americanos, mas dá-me a ideia que na Europa tanto a "fé" como a "família" são valores mais de classe média do que da classe trabalhadora (nem que seja porque os filhos da classe média demoram mais a se tornarem independentes - os filhos da classe média assalariada porque demoram anos a tirar cursos superiores; os filhos da classe média de pequenos empresários porque acabam frequentemente a trabalhar com os pais); já a "vizinhança" sim, parece-me um valor tipico da classe trabalhadora (mas é capaz de haver aqui também uma questão de definição - muito provavelmente os autores em questão quando falam em "working class" estão a incluir também os pequenos empresários, que dá-me a ideia que tendem a ser mais socialmente conservadores do que os assalariados).

A substituição do trabalho por máquinas, de Marx a Stiglitz

The rule of robots in Stiglitz and Marx, por Branko Milanovic:

It is always instructive to speak to Joe Stiglitz. In a conversation in Paris which we had after his talk at the INET conference, he pointed out that the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor greater than 1 (which is often assumed by Piketty in his “Capital in the 21st century”), combined with technological progress which does not fall like manna from heaven but develops in response to the existing factor prices, would lead to an explosive process that would end only with capital owning the entire net income of a country. How?

Suppose that we have a given r (...) and a given wage (w). Suppose also that at this ratio of factor prices, it is profitable to invest in more capital-intensive processes (that is, they reduce unit cost of output). So capitalists will replace labor by capital and K/L and K/output ratios will both increase. Since elasticity of substitution between K and L is greater than 1, r will only slightly decrease while wage will only slightly increase. Although factor prices, being sticky, will not have budged much they would have moved ever slightly further in making capital intensive processes even more attractive. So there would be another round of increased capital investment, and again K/L and K/output will go up with only minimal effects on prices.


This will continue round after round until the entire output is produced practically only by using capital and perhaps just an infinitesimal quantity of labor. Both r and w will remain almost as they were at the beginning, but instead of (say) 100 machines and 100 workers, we will, at the end, have 100 robots and 1 worker. Almost all output will belong to the owners of capital. (...)


But, (...) I thought of something else. Isn’t this in some ways almost the reverse, and in some ways, very similar, to Marx’s process of increased “organic composition of capital” eventually leading to the euthanasia of a capitalist (to use Keynes’ term in a Marxist framework)? In Marx, the assumption is that more capital intensive processes are always more productive. So capitalists just tend to pile more and more capital and replace labor (very similarly to what we have seen they do in the Stiglitz example). This in Marxist framework means that there are fewer and fewer workers who obviously produce less (absolute) surplus value and this smaller surplus value over an increased mass of capital means that the rate of profit goes down.

The result is identical if we set this Marxist process in a neoclassical framework and assume that the elasticity of substitution is less than 1. Then, simply, r shoots down in every successive round of capital-intensive investments until it practically reaches zero. As Marx writes, every individual capitalist has an interest to invest in more capital-intensive processes in order to undersell other capitalists, but when they all do that, the rate of profits decreases for all. They thus work ultimately to drive themselves “out of business” (more exactly they drive themselves to a zero rate of profit).

What are the similarities and differences between the two outcomes? In both cases, labor will be replaced by capital to an extreme degree, so in both cases, production will be conducted mostly by robots. Employment will be negligible. In Marx, the ultimate equilibrium would be with r at almost zero, and wage (by assumption in Marx) at the subsistence—with of course a huge “reserve army of the unemployed”. In the Stiglitz case, capitalists will end up with an unchanged r and with pocketing the entire net product. In the Stiglitz equilibrium, that sole remaining worker will have a higher wage, but again, no one else would be employed.

Ainda sobre este tema - Revisitando a "quebra tendencial da taxa de lucro"

Quando anti-racistas usaram a bandeira confederada

When Anti-Racists Adopted the Confederate Battle Flag, por Jesse Walker:

This is my favorite picture of a Confederate flag:


That was the emblem of the Southern Student Organizing Committee, a New Left group founded in 1964. At a time when the activists most likely to be waving a Confederate banner were affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, SSOC decided to adopt—and adapt—the battle flag for the other side of the civil rights struggle. The group did most of its organizing among southern whites, and it went out of its way to draw on regional iconography (...)

But not everyone in the movement thought the emblem was a good idea. "Explaining to their white counterparts that the battleflag had only one meaning to them," Michel writes, several "black activists stressed that no matter how SSOC altered the flag's image, African Americans forever would see it as a symbol of racial oppression." SSOC was predominantly white, but it wanted to become the biracial alliance implied by those clasped hands. And so it dropped both the emblem and the name New Rebel at the end of 1964. (...)

By that time, SSOC wasn't the only New Left group playing with Confederate signifiers. The Young Patriots were a Chicago-based organization made up mostly of working-class whites who had migrated to the city from the Appalachians; the Patriots joined the Black Panthers and the Young Lords (a Panther-like Puerto Rican group) in an partnership called the Rainbow Coalition. (This was unrelated to Jesse Jackson's outfit, which was launched much later.) "In a decade when symbolism mattered like never before, most Left groups chose their radical dress code—whether the dignified suits of civil rights leaders or the sleek leather jackets of the Panthers—to consciously send a message," Amy Sonnie and James Tracy write in Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power. "For better or worse, the Patriots adopted the Confederate flag as a symbol of southern poor people's revolt against the owning class."

POUS falha primeira eleição?

O Expresso noticia que "Carmelinda [Pereira] pela primeira vez não vai a votos".

Na verdade já em 1991 não foram (se olharem para a coluna dos resultados de 1991, não encontram lá "POUS" - nem sequer "MUT", outro nome que o POUS usava ocasionalmente).

Porque é que eu sei (e me lembro d') isto? É que em 1991, com 18 anos, eu era um trotskista entusiasta e simpatizante do PSR; esta foi a primeira eleição (voltaria a acontecer em 1995) em que Francisco Louçã foi dado como eleito no principio do escrutínio, para horas depois a RTP, no fim da contagem dos votos, informar que afinal não o tinha sido. E lembro-me de nessa altura durante uns tempos ter achado que Louçã não tinha sido eleito por culpa da FER, que teria "roubado" votos aos PSR (que, com a estreita margem que ocorreu, teriam bastado para a eleição); ora, se o POUS tivesse concorrido, em principio eu não diria que a culpa tinha sido da FER, mas sim que teria sido da FER e do POUS, o que quer dizer que o POUS não tinha concorrido.

Subsídio implícito aos vendedores e fabricantes de armas

Martin Scorsese elimina armas reais cada vez que filma uma falsa

Gun Neutral é o nome da campanha criada por Carl McCrow para promover a redução de armas de fogo. O objetivo é que os cineastas que nela participem se comprometam destruir uma arma verdadeira por cada uma que apareça no seu filme.

Os limites à ascensão social (no Reino Unido)

Introducing the ‘class’ ceiling, por Sam Friedmane Sam Friedman:

There has long been a perception that Britain’s traditionally high-status occupations, such as law, medicine, and journalism, remain stubbornly elitist and research has continually shown that these occupations recruit disproportionately from the socially privileged and/or the privately educated.

Yet there is a danger of reducing social mobility to this one-dimensional issue of access. In particular it assumes that social mobility finishes at the point of occupational entry. But the reality is that while many working-class people may secure admission into elite occupations, they don’t necessarily go on to achieve the same levels of success as those from more privileged backgrounds. In a recent project, we have been investigating exactly this issue of social mobility within elite occupations.

In doing so, we have purposively borrowed the ‘glass ceiling’ concept developed by feminist scholars to explain the hidden barriers faced by women in the workplace. In a working paper recently published by LSE Sociology, we argue that it is also possible to identify a ‘class ceiling’ in Britain which is preventing the upwardly mobile from enjoying equivalent earnings to those from upper middle-class backgrounds. (...)

We are also able to look at individual elite occupations, where we find striking variations. At one end of the scale, engineering provides a notable exemplar of meritocracy, with negligible differences in pay regardless of social background. In contrast, our results reveal the arresting scale of disadvantage experienced by the children of the working classes in law, media, medicine and finance. The socially mobile (of any range) in finance have predicted earnings of £11,200 less per year than otherwise similar privileged colleagues, in media £9,440, law £8,830 and in medicine £5,050. This disadvantage also tends to increase the longer the range of mobility. In law, for example, the long-range upwardly mobile face a huge estimated annual pay gap of £19,700.

James Corbyn e o "Quantitative Easing para o povo"

People's QE and Corbyn’s QE, por Simon Wren-Lewis:

Politicians can be adept at co-opting attractive sounding terms to their own cause, even when they distort their meaning while doing so. (...)

Is Labour leadership contender Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘Peoples QE’ an example of the same thing? It is certainly true that the way that some macroeconomists, including myself, have used the term is different from Corbyn’s idea. For us Peoples QE is just another term for helicopter money. Helicopter money was a term first used by that well known radical Milton Friedman. It involves the central bank creating money, and distributing it directly to the people by some means. It is a sure fire way [1] for the central bank to boost demand: what economists sometimes call a money financed fiscal stimulus. (...)

The genesis of Corbyn’s QE seems rather different. Corbyn adviser Richard Murphy had previously suggested what he called a Green Infrastructure QE, which is that a “new [QE] programme should buy the new debt that will be issued in the form of bonds by the Green Investment Bank to fund sustainable energy, local authorities to pay for new houses, NHS trusts to build new hospitals and education authorities to build schools.” (...)

The main difference between helicopter money and Corbyn’s QE therefore seems to be where the money created by the central bank goes: to individuals in the form of a cheque from the central bank, or to financing investment projects. (...)

[However] suppose that a [National Investment Bank] is created, not on the back of QE but using more conventional forms of finance. (If the government wants to encourage it, just directly subsidise that finance with conventional borrowing. Don’t be put off doing so by deficit fetishism.) Suppose we also like the concept of helicopter money - not for now, but for the next time interest rates hit their lower bound and the central bank wants more stimulus. In those circumstances, it might well make sense for helicopter money to be used not only to send cheques to individuals, but also to bring forward investment financed by the NIB, or public sector investment financed directly by the state. If those investment projects could get off the ground quickly, and crucially would not have happened for some time otherwise, then what I have elsewhere described as ‘democratic helicopter money’ would make sense. [2] This is because investment that also boosts the supply side is likely to be a far more effective form of stimulus than cheques posted to individuals.

Um motivo para colonizar o espaço?

How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars, por Tim Urban (via Tyler Cowen):

Let’s imagine the Earth is a hard drive, and each species on Earth, including our own, is a Microsoft Excel document on the hard drive filled with trillions of rows of data. Using our shortened timescale, where 50 million years = one month, here’s what we know:

■Right now, it’s August of 2015
■The hard drive (i.e. the Earth) came into existence 7.5 years ago, in early 2008
■A year ago, in August of 2014, the hard drive was loaded up with Excel documents (i.e. the origin of animals). Since then, new Excel docs have been continually created and others have developed an error message and stopped opening (i.e gone extinct).
■Since August 2014, the hard drive has crashed five times—i.e. extinction events—in November 2014, in December 2014, in March 2015, April 2015, and July 2015. Each time the hard drive crashed, it rebooted a few hours later, but after rebooting, about 70% of the Excel docs were no longer there. Except the March 2015 crash, which erased 95% of the documents.
■Now it’s mid-August 2015, and the homo sapiens Excel doc was created about two hours ago.

Now—if you owned a hard drive with an extraordinarily important Excel doc on it, and you knew that the hard drive pretty reliably tended to crash every month or two, with the last crash happening five weeks ago—what’s the very obvious thing you’d do?

You’d copy the document onto a second hard drive.

Isto faz-me lembrar qualquer coisa

Ecuador's Dinero Electronico, por "Boz":

The Miami Herald has an interesting article on Ecuador’s dinero electronico, the government-backed official virtual currency to allow payments by cell phone. The currency is currently pegged to the US dollar, which is Ecuador's official currency.

As described in the article, there are two key risks. First, it is unclear if Ecuador's Central Bank will properly back the currency over the long term. Second, many people speculate that the government is attempting to create a parallel currency that would allow them to de-dollarize. If that is true, they are a long, long way from that goal (there is less than a million dollars of Ecuador's virtual currency in circulation), but that would change the day the government decides to pay its workers or its bills in virtual currency.

O projeto "ProSavana"

Camponeses do norte de Moçambique rejeitam ProSavana:

As populações que vivem ao longo da região onde deverá ser implementado o projeto agrícola ProSavana rejeitaram-no, alegando ser incompatível com a realidade das comunidades camponesas.

A versão zero do Plano Diretor para o Desenvolvimento Agrário do Corredor de Nacala, que esta semana foi apresentada e discutida num encontro entre o Governo e a Sociedade Cívil, trouxe informações divergentes.

As comunidades rurais e camponeses que estiveram presentes na apresentação do Plano diretor zero do ProSavana falaram da falta de clareza sobre os objetivos deste Projeto. Por exemplo, os camponeses do distrito de Malema e Monapo, que se localizam ao longo do Corredor de Nacala, referiram-se a alegada usurpação das suas terras.

Justina Wirriam disse que, o nome do ProSavana está a criar medo junto das comunidades na localidade de Mutuali, distrito de Malema e outros locais do Corredor de Nacala: "Em Mutuale estamos preocupados com o nome ProSavana. Ouvi dizer que as pessoas que foram falar no ProSavana são as mesmas que foram para Mutuale pela Agrimoz. E por causa da Agrimoz há famílias sem machambas e terras. E hoje também estou a ver as mesmas pessoas aqui."

[Isto é um artigo de maio, logo o "esta semana foi apresentada" deve ser interpretado em conformidade]

O Estado Islâmico e o petróleo

Face à ideia de Donald Trump de que a solução para combater o Estado Islâmico era tirar-lhes o petróleo, tem sido notado que o EI não depende muito do petróleo - em 2014, as receitas do EI terão sido 600 milhões de dólares de "impostos"/extorsão, 500 milhões roubados aos bancos iraquianos e 100 milhões da venda de petróleo.

Mas a verdade é que durante meses a "sabedoria convencional", propagandeada pela comunicação social, foi realmente que a grande fonte de receitas do EI seria o petróleo (sempre me custou a acreditar, até porque, ao contrário dos diamantes africanos e da cocaina colombiana, o petróleo nem é um produto que seja fácil de transportar e vender clandestinamente).

Que impacto?

Esta notícia do Económico ("Desvalorização do yuan poderá ter impacto nas exportações portuguesas para a China") consegue, durante mais de metade do artigo, discutir sobre se a desvalorização do yuan vai ter impacto sobre as exportações portuguesas, sem dizer qual a natureza do impacto (claro que em principio uma desvalorização da moeda chinesa prejudica as exportações para a China - como é referido a partir do 5º parágrafo, mas só quase no fim o artigo refere isso).

Hayek contra o "free banking"

Hayek and Free Banking, por George Selgin:

I owe a heckuva lot to Friedrich Hayek.  Had it not been for him, I might never have heard of "free banking," (...)

It was two pamphlets that Hayek published in the 1970s — first, Choice in Currency (1976) and then Denationalisation of Money  (1978) — that caused the scales to fall off of my eyes and of those of  some other economists, thereby encouraging us to reconsider the merits of  private and competitive currency systems.  That reconsideration in turn led to a revival of interest in former free banking episodes, including those of Scotland and Canada, which monetary economists had previously neglected or overlooked. (...)

Yet Hayek himself was no free banker.  For starters, his own vision of "choice in currency" had little if anything in common with historical free banking arrangements.  In those arrangements, banks dealt in established, precious-metal monetary units,  like the British pound and the American dollar, receiving deposits of metallic money, or claims to such, and offering in place their own readily-redeemable liabilities, including circulating banknotes.  In Hayek's scheme, in contrast, competing firms issue irredeemable paper notes, with each brand representing a distinct monetary unit.  Far from resembling ordinary commercial banks, Hayek's "banks" resemble so many modern central banks in that they issue a sort of "fiat" money.  But they differ from actual central banks in enjoying neither monopoly privileges nor the power to compel anyone to accept their products. (...)

But Hayek didn't merely differ from free bankers in proposing a form of currency competition distinct from free banking.  He expressly opposed  free banking.  Asked, during a 1945 radio interview, whether he considered the Federal Reserve System a step along "the road to serfdom," he unhesitatingly replied, "No.  That the monetary system must be under central control has never, to my mind, been denied by any sensible person."And although by the 1970s he had come to believe it both possible and desirable to have a currency stock consisting of the irredeemable paper of numerous private firms, he also continued to maintain that, so long as government authorities supplied a nation's standard money, private firms should not be able to issue circulating paper claims denominated and redeemable in that money.

A oposição de Hayek ao "free banking" (isto é, a haver notas do Banco Português de Investimento e do Novo Banco a dizerem ambas "50 euros", podendo ser ambas trocadas aos balcões do banco respetivo por euros emitidos pelo BCE) será uma peculiaridade dele? Ou será simplesmente uma variante da oposição dos austríacos à reserva bancária fraccional? Ainda sobre este assunto, Why Didn't Hayek Favor Laissez Faire in Banking?[PDF], por Lawrence White.



http://www.alt-m.org/2015/07/18/hayek-and-free-banking/

Bernie Sanders e a "Segunda Emenda" (II)

Bernie Sanders and Gun Rights: More Than Just Electoral Expediency, por Jesse Walker (Reason Hit and Run):

Bernie Sanders' uneven but real support for gun rights has puzzled a lot of pundits, who tend to describe the socialist senator's position on the issue as "to Clinton's right" and who tend to figure it's just a byproduct of getting elected in a rural state where guns are everywhere. Both of these theses are undermined by this passage in Michael Tracey's new story for The New Republic:

The [Liberty Union] party, while Sanders served on its executive committee, adopted a platform in 1972 that called for the "abolition of all laws which interfere with the Constitutional right of citizens to bear arms." This may suggest that Sanders's relatively permissive views on gun ownership, already the subject of much consternation among liberals, could be rooted in sincere principle—not simply in the practical realities of winning election in rural Vermont.

Given the Liberty Union Party's penchant for taking self-marginalizing radical stances, I think it's safe to suppose this plank was not mere electoral expediency. But it fit snugly with the New Left's general tendency to be far friendlier to gun rights than center-left liberals were. (...)

I have to confess a certain fondness for the '70s incarnation of Bernie Sanders. (...) [T]he Old, Weird Bernie Sanders was much more libertarian on social issues than he is now, calling for the abolition of compulsory schooling, the legalization of hard drugs, and an end to "all laws which attempt to impose a particular brand of morality or 'right' on people." He even opposed mandatory flouridation and helmet laws. Of course he was also more prone than the current Sanders to call for enormous expansions of the government's economic power.

Isto não costuma dar bom resultado

Grécia: Atenas impõe preços máximos para travar impacto de subida do IVA

Varoufakis explica o seu "plano B"

No Financial Times:

To address this problem, our simple idea was to allow the multilateral cancellation of arrears between the state and the private sector using the tax office’s existing payments platform. Taxpayers, whether individuals or organisations, would be able to create reserve accounts that would be credited with arrears owed to them by the state. They would then be able to transfer credits from their reserve account either to the state (in lieu of tax payments) or to any other reserve account.

Suppose, for example, Company A is owed €1m by the state and owes €30,000 to an employee plus another €500,000 to Company B, which provided it with goods and services. The employee and Company B also owe, respectively, €10,000 and €200,000 in taxes to the state. In this case the proposed system would allow for the immediate cancellation of at least €210,000 in arrears. Suddenly, an economy like Greece's would acquire important degrees of freedom within the existing European Monetary Union.

In a second phase of development, which we did not have the time to consider properly, the system would be made accessible through
smartphone apps and identity cards, guaranteeing that it would be widely adopted.

The envisaged payments system could be developed to create a substitute for fully functioning public debt markets, especially during a credit crunch such as the one that has afflicted Greece since 2010. Organisations or individuals could buy credits from the tax office online using their normal bank accounts, and add them to their reserve account. These credits could be used after, say, a year to pay future taxes at a discount (for example, 10 per cent).

As long as the total level of tax credits was capped, and fully transparent, the result would be a fiscally responsible increase in government liquidity and a quicker path back to the money markets.

Ainda o "Plano B" de Varoufakis

As notícias sobre o Plano B de Varoufakis parecem-me algo confusas, mas, pelo que já deu para perceber, parece-me que era simplesmente o plano que há meses se fala de o Estado grego emitir "promissórias" dizendo "vale 100 euros (pagáveis quando for possível)" e usá-las para pagar despesas (nomeadamente salários e pensões), com a diferença de que em vez de imprimir papelinhos, iria-se criar uma plataforma virtual em que cada número de contribuinte teria uma password e seria associado a uma espécie de conta-corrente que seria creditada quando o Estado grego fosse fazer pagamentos a alguém (podendo depois os utilizadores transferir "euros virtuais" de uns para os outros). Atendendo a que o emprego anterior de Varoufakis era gerir um mercado de trocas de itens virtuais entre jogos de computador ("troco uma chave para abrir uma masmorra no jogo A por uma vida adicional no jogo B"), talvez a ideia tenha vindo daí.

Creio que o que está a chamar mais a atenção para o caso é a parte do hacking - como o programa da autoridade tributária grego era gerido por técnicos da troika e não pelo ministério das finanças grego, para obter a lista dos números de contribuinte para introduzir na plataforma virtual foi necessário um amigo do Varoufakis perito em informática "hackear" o programa da autoridade tributária, o que dá um ar de thriller a isto (embora no fim a ideia fosse obter informação que, em circunstâncias normais, qualquer governo teria acesso - a lista dos NIFs).

Agora a questão era se se iria conseguir que o "euro virtual" fosse aceite pelos agentes económicos como um meio de pagamento equivalente ao verdadeiro euro - mantenho a minha teoria sobre isso: o euro virtual iria manter uma cotação aproximada a 1 euro real enquanto fossem criados menos euros virtuais (via despesa pública) do que o necessário para pagar impostos (se um euro real e um "euro virtual" fossem igualmente válidos para pagar um euro de dívidas fiscais, e houvesse menos "euros virtuais" em circulação do que dinheiro a pagar de impostos, a cotação euro real / "euro virtual" iria ser próxima do 1: se o euro real valesse muito mais que o "euro virtual", na altura de pagar os impostos toda a gente tentaria trocar euros reais por virtuais para pagar os impostos em "euros virtuais" - p.ex., se o "euro virtual" fosse valorizado em meio euro, quem tivesse 100 euros a pagar de impostos iria preferir trocar 50 euros reais por 100 euros virtuais e usá-los para pagar o imposto do que pagá-lo com 100 euros reais - , fazendo subir a cotação do "euro virtual").

Adenda 1: este artigo do Varoufakis parece confirmar que se tratava realmente a implementação em formato virtual do tal sistema das "promissórias"

Adenda 2: Parece haver muito mais noticias sobre isto com títulos estilo "Varoufakis pretendia piratear dados dos contribuintes" do que com títulos "Varoufakis pretendia criar moeda paralela virtual", o que indica que é mesmo a parte do "hacking" que está a chamar a atenção (aliás, suspeito que se não fosse a história do hacking a apimentar a coisa, o assunto mal teria aparecido nos jornais, já que o resto da notícia tem a ver com uma questão bastante técnica - a ideia de uma moeda paralela virtual - que a maior parte da imprensa nem acharia apelativa).
[Post publicado no Vias de Facto; podem comentar lá]

O "imperialismo" chinês no Equador

Ecuador, dependent on China, por "boz":

Today's NYT contains a lengthy and well researched article about China's presence in Ecuador, tying the issues within that one country to China's global expansion.(...)

A lot of these criticisms of China's global policies look like the criticisms academics like Rafael Correa have made of the US and Europe in the past.

O "plano B" de Varoufakis

Varoufakis reveals cloak and dagger 'Plan B' for Greece, awaits treason charge, por Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Esta descrição parece fazer mais sentido do que o confuso artigo do Ekathimerini.

Diplomacia económica

"Político do país A, durante o expediente, intercede junto de político do país B para conseguir negócios no país B para uma empresa do país A" - diplomacia económica (se correr bem, é motivo para o político do país A se autoglorificar em entrevistas, conferências de imprensa e campanhas eleitorais)

"Político do país A, nos seus tempos livres, intercede junto de político do país B para conseguir negócios no país B para uma empresa do país A" - tráfico de influências (motivo para a justiça de qualquer dos países lhe abrir um inquérito)

"Pós-capitalismo"?

The end of capitalism has begun, por Paul Mason

Interview: Paul Mason’s guide to a post-capitalist future (Prospect)

[W]e’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy. The biggest information product in the world – Wikipedia – is made by volunteers for free, abolishing the encyclopedia business and depriving the advertising industry of an estimated $3bn a year in revenue.

Almost unnoticed, in the niches and hollows of the market system, whole swaths of economic life are beginning to move to a different rhythm. Parallel currencies, time banks, cooperatives and self-managed spaces have proliferated, barely noticed by the economics profession, and often as a direct result of the shattering of the old structures in the post-2008 crisis.

You only find this new economy if you look hard for it. In Greece, when a grassroots NGO mapped the country’s food co-ops, alternative producers, parallel currencies and local exchange systems they found more than 70 substantive projects and hundreds of smaller initiatives ranging from squats to carpools to free kindergartens. To mainstream economics such things seem barely to qualify as economic activity – but that’s the point. They exist because they trade, however haltingly and inefficiently, in the currency of postcapitalism: free time, networked activity and free stuff. It seems a meagre and unofficial and even dangerous thing from which to craft an entire alternative to a global system, but so did money and credit in the age of Edward III.

Ucrânia: guerra civil dentro da guerra civil?

Condições para beneficiar de uma desvalorização monetária

Things you need to successfully devalue your way to prosperity, por Raja Korman:

1.A large tradeable sector.

2.Sizeable unutilized capacity in that tradeable sector.

3.Ideally, tradeable capacity focused on manufacturing, where gains in market share and employment from a weaker exchange rate can be immediate, rather than commodities (priced in USD).

4.Limited passthrough from a weaker exchange rate into higher input costs in said tradeable sector.

5.Limited foreign exchange asset-liability mismatches in your government, financial, corporate and household sectors.

6.A population that does not see exchange rate stability as a key nominal anchor that stabilizes inflation expectations.

7.If you have 1, 2, and 3 above, robust global demand conditions.

8.Not necessary, but enormously helpful–positive terms of trade shocks (one key to Latin and Russian current account performance after their late 90s floats was the impact of China on global commodity prices).

Aplicando ao caso grego - não se verificam os pontos 1, 5 e 6, mas talvez se verifiquem os pontos 3 (para o que interessa aqui - produtos cujo preço é na moeda local versus produtos cujo preço é em dólares - o turismo é similar à indústria; se houver uma diferença até será no sentido do preço em moeda local ser ainda mais relevantes para o turismo do que para a indústria), 4 (o sector turístico não tem grande consumo de matérias primas) e 7 (acho que a procura global por destinos turísiticos mediterrânicos não-muçulmanos está a aumentar); quantos aos pontos 2 e 8, não faço ideia (aliás, nem percebo muito bem o que o ponto 8 quer dizer).

Anarco-sindicalismo: o musical

[Via Jesse Waker]

A Grécia deveria ter aceite a proposta alemã para sair do euro?

Greece should seize Germany's botched offer of a velvet Grexit, por Ambrose Evans-Pritchard ("Sim")

The Great Greek Bank Drama, Act I: Schaeuble's Sin Bi, por Frances Coppola ("Não")

O que vai acontecer se os bancos gregos abrirem nos próximos dias

Fecham no dia seguinte (ou talvez um pouco depois do almoço).

Como improvisar bancos

We can all get by quite well without banks - Ireland managed to survive without them, por Patrick Cockburn  e Money in an Economy Without Banks - the Case of Ireland, por Antoin Murphy.

Resumo breve - em 1970 houve uma greve bancária que durou meses; com os bancos fechados (e num mundo sem multibancos e transferencias eletrónicas de dinheiro), os cheques (incluindo "cheques" improvisados) tornaram-se a moeda corrente:

Undated cheques, often endorsed over to others but never cashed, became a form of currency. When the supply of cheques dried up, people wrote new ones on any available piece of paper, sometimes adding a postage stamp to give it an official appearance. There was talk of some cheques being written on beer mats and lavatory paper. It was a system that worked because it drew on local knowledge and trust. The people exchanging cheques and IOUs knew each other well, and if they did not, they could soon find the necessary information to assess each other’s credit-worthiness. At that time there were 11,000 pubs in Ireland and 12,000 shops that became substitutes for the banks. Antoin E Murphy, who carried out a study on the strike’s effects, found the public’s ability to assess risk “was based on a vast pool of information available to transactors on the credit-worthiness of other transactors”.

[via Jesse Walker]

Aliás, parece que nos últimos meses os cheques pré-datados tem estado também a tornar-se uma espécie de moeda na Grécia.

Dívida grega insustentável por causa das últimas duas semanas?

Andam a circular noticias de que um relatório confidencial do FMI dirá que "Greece will need debt relief far beyond what euro zone partners have been prepared to consider due to the devastation of its economy and banks in the last two weeks (..) European countries would have to give Greece a 30-year grace period on servicing all its European debt, including new loans, and a very dramatic maturity extension, or else make explicit annual fiscal transfers to the Greek budget or accept "deep upfront haircuts" on their loans to Athens".

Custa-me a acreditar que uma crise de duas semanas, em que não houve qualquer destruição da capacidade produtiva (eventualmente alguns investimentos não se terão realizado), e em que não há nenhuma razão para a economia não regressar ao normal ("normal" pelos padrões da Grécia de 2015) a partir do momento em que volta a haver dinheiro líquido nos bancos, tenha consequências tão grandes a longo prazo que seja responsável por tornar insustentável dívida que antes era sustentável.

Seria interessante que se pudesse realmente ler o que diz o relatório do FMI, em vez de estarmos limitados ao que as "fontes" que tiveram "acesso confidencial" ao relatório retransmitem.

Adenda: está aqui o relatório, em PDF

 

Os problemas do euro?

Greece again, por John Cochrane:

There are two original sins in the euro, neither having to do with fiscal union. The first is that each country has its own banks, and each government uses its banks as piggybanks to stuff with government debt. European bank regulators and Basel regulations treat sovereign debt as risk free. Then, if the government defaults, the whole banking system is dragged down with it. The second is the endlessly repeated fallacy that government default means the country must change the units of its currency. If Chicago defaults on its debts, nobody thinks it must introduce a new currency, or that Chicago's banks will fail.

A currency union needs a banking union, or at least banks that are not stuffed with government debt. A currency union needs to let sovereigns default without changing currencies or paralyzing the banking and payments system. A currency union needs a banking union.

Uma coisa que ainda não percebi (e se calhar até é sigilo bancário) é se os bancos gregos estão particularmente expostos à dívida pública grega - à partida, numa união monetária, e se os bancos fossem bem geridos, não haveria razão para os bancos do país A possuirem mais dívida pública do Estado de A do que os bancos dos outros países. O lógico seria os bancos de qualquer país da zona monetária terem uma carteira de investimentos incluindo dívida de todos os Estado, distribuída de forma a maximizar a relação rentabilidade-risco (ou seja, a percentagem do seu capital que um banco finlandês tem investido em dívida pública grega não deveria ser muito diferente da percentagem de capital que um banco grego tem em dívida pública grega) - ou se houvesse alguma relação, até deveria ser de os bancos gregos investirem menos em dívida pública grega do que os bancos dos outros países; o motivo - em caso de falência do Estado grego muitos dos negócios em que os bancos gregos estão envolvidos irão ser afetados (devedores que irão à falência e não podem pagar as dívidas; depositantes que ficarão perto da falência e terão que levantar o dinheiro do banco para não passarem fome, etc.), logo para reduzir o risco global (e numa lógica de não pôr os ovos no mesmo cesto) os bancos gregos deveriam investir menos em dívida pública grega do que, p.ex., os bancos belgas.

As ideias das esquerdas gregas

Através de João Pereira da Silva,  cheguei a este artigo[pdf] de Christos Laskos, John Milios and Euclid Tsakalotos (este último é o atual ministro das finanças grego), onde os autores (que imagino representem algo muito próximo do pensamento dominante no governo grego) basicamente defendem a posição "europeísta revolucionária" contra as posições a favor da saída do euro da "ala esquerda" do Syriza (nomeadamente de Stathis Kouvelakis e Costas Lapavitsas[pdf])

Os autores parecem-me marxistas ortodoxos do século XIX (considerando que o fundamental é a luta de classes e que as fronteiras nacionais são pouco mais que uma distração, e também com alguma desconfiança face ao Estado); já os que eles criticam parecem-me marxistas-leninistas do século XX (isto é, aquilo em que a maior parte das pessoas pensa quando houve a palavra "marxismo"), defendendo a ligação entre a luta anti-capitalista e as lutas de libertação nacional. 

Algo que dá que pensar - alguma imprensa internacional noticiou a nomeação de Tsakalotos dizendo isto:

"European Monetary Union has created a split between core and periphery, and relations between the two are hierarchical and discriminatory," he wrote in a paper on the website of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, a British socialist group.

O paper é este texto (já agora, a AWL é uma organização semi-trotskista britânica, que considera que a URSS era "coletivista burocrática", ao contrário tanto dos trotskistas clássicos - que acham que era um "estado operário deformado" - como do Socialist Workers Party britânico - que acha que era "capitalista de estado"). E o que é relevante aqui é que não é Tsakatolos a dizer isso - é uma citação de Lapavitsas et al.[pdf], que Tsakatolos se dedica a criticar nos parágrafos seguintes, considerando ser uma ideia inspirada pela "teoria de dependência" (os autores parecem considerar a teoria da dependência errada, achado-a contraditória com o crescimento económico da China e outros países do Extremo-Oriente; acho que eles estão a ser muito rápidos a jogar essa teoria fora - na verdade, creio que a atual crise do euro e as análises que têm sido feitas delas até tem muito material para uma síntese entre a teoria da dependência e a macroeconomia mais mainstream). O que terá levado a imprensa a apresentar Tsakatolos como defendendo a posição oposta à que ele realmente defende nesse debate? O estilo gráfico do artigo, sem nada que à primeira vista permita distinguir citações de trechos originais não ajuda, mas suspeito que parte da culpa está nas espetativas que o século XX criou acerca do que alguém apresentado como um  "marxista ortodoxo" é suposto acreditar.

Algo que me parece mais difícil de conciliar com as teses deste texto (que anda quase todo à volta de dizer que o conflito é trabalhadores contra capitalistas e não países periféricos contra países do centro) é a participação de Tsakatolos num governo de coligação com os nacionalistas de direita Gregos Independentes.

Uma nota final: os acontecimentos da última semana são capazes de estar a dar razão à outra facção.

Mais um trilema impossível?

Uma ideia que me ocorreu - para os países periféricos da zona euro provavelmente é impossível (na ausência de solidariedade internacional significativa) ter estas três coisas ao mesmo tempo:

- romper com a austeridade
- permanecer no euro
- ter um sistema bancário com reservas fracionárias

A Grécia tentou, mas ao fim de 15 dias acabou por desistir do primeiro ponto; se não fizessem isso, provavelmente em breve teriam, ou que começar a emitir moeda própria, ou reformarem radicalmente o sistema bancário (transformando os depósitos não cobertos por reservas noutra coisa que não depósitos).

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

Bernie Sanders e a "Segunda Emenda"

Bernie Sanders Gets His Gun, por John Stoehr, em The American Conservative:

The senator from Vermont identifies himself as the only democratic socialist in the U.S. Congress. He has called for breaking up the big banks, for easing drug laws, and for expanding social-insurance programs. In May, he introduced a bill that would impose a tax on Wall Street transactions to make college tuition obsolete.

But Sanders is also an ardent defender of the Second Amendment. This, according to elite liberals’ opinion, does not compute. The implication of their argument is that Sanders is at odds with the values and priorities of the Democratic base. Indeed, Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern appeared downright worried that his economic populism might seduce unsuspecting liberals: “Before liberal Democrats flock to Sanders, they should remember that the Vermont senator stands firmly to Clinton’s right on one issue of overwhelming importance to the Democratic base: gun control.” (...)

Sanders’s record on gun legislation is somewhat mixed. He used to be a National Rifle Association candidate of choice, but these days, given his support for tepid gun-control measures, he’s persona non grata with the NRA. Even so, Sanders has been opposed for the most part to greater government oversight of ownership and sale of firearms. During his long tenure in Congress—for 16 years in the House of Representatives before being elected to the Senate in 2006—Sanders opposed universal background checks, and after the Sandy Hook killings in 2012 he said that even the strongest gun-control law would not have prevented a massacre of innocents.

What got Mark Joseph Stern’s back up was Sanders’s support of tort reform in favor of firearms manufacturers. In 2005, he voted for the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which immunized gun makers against liability claims. As Stern writes: “It is one of the most noxious pieces of pro-gun legislation ever passed. And Bernie Sanders voted for it.” (...)

Fact is, the real issue in the gun debate is geography. Bernie Sanders knows it. Vermont is a rural state with relatively weak gun laws and relatively low rates of gun violence. Guns are normal. Meanwhile, most liberal Democrats, especially the ones who write for Slate and MSNBC, live in populous urban centers located on the east and west coasts, where in their experience having a gun makes no sense at all.

I’m not bothered by hypocrisy. What bothers me about this mainstream liberal reaction to Bernie Sanders’s record on gun legislation is what it says about mainstream liberalism, especially its understanding of the values of the white working class, a bloc of voters that the Democratic Party still needs in order to advance a majoritarian agenda.

As a close friend of Sanders told National Journal: “He doesn’t really care about guns. But he cares that other people care about guns. He thinks there’s an elitism in the antigun movement.” And he’s right.

Uma coisa que me ocorre é que até que ponto o alinhamento político nos EUA sobre a questão das armas (basicamente, "direita" contra o "gun control", "esquerda" a favor) não passará de um simples acidente - afinal no resto do mundo não há (ou não havia até há poucos anos) esse alinhamento (frequentemente até era mais a esquerda a defender a ideia do "povo em armas"), e penso que mesmo nos EUA é relativamente recente (creio que as primeiras leis de "gun control" nos EUA após da Guerra da Secessão foram feitas por inspiração do Ku Klux Klan, e na década de 1960 essas propostas vinham muitas vezes de Republicanos "lei e ordem", como Ronald Reagan).

A Grécia conseguiria sair do euro se quisesse?

Can Greece Leave?, por John Cochrane:

Is Grexit even possible?

It strikes me that the best Greece can do with a Drachma is to create a two-currency system, sort of like Cuba or Venezuela, or at best Argentinal (...).

If the government brings back the Drachma  as a way to pay pensions, government salaries, and bank accounts, Euros will still circulate in Greece.

18% of Greek GDP is tourism. That number may be understated -- I don't know if it includes tourist spending at restaurants, stores, transport, and other places that mix tourists and locals. Tourists will spend Euros, not Drachmas. So hotels, gas stations, restaurants, grocery stores, clothes stores, airlines, car rentals, etc. will likely still gladly take euros and euro credit cards, and from locals as well as tourists. (...)

So, the Drachmaized Greece that I see is not the cleanly devalued newly competitive powerhouse that some on the left seem to envision.  Instead I see a two-currency economy. Pensioners and government workers and anyone unlucky enough to still have a Greek bank account get Drachmas. Hotel owners, restaurant owners, and exporters get euros, above or under the table.

Ver também Sair do euro aumentaria a competitividade grega?

Quer a ideia de John Cochrane que quem iria usar dracmas seriam os funcionários públicos e os pensionistas, quer a minha que iriam ser sobretudo os assalariados cuja remuneração seria fixada em dracmas, implicarão que quem terá mais a perder com a saída do euro seria exatamente a base social do Syriza (talvez os eleitores do ANEL-Gregos Independentes tenham mais a ganhar? Se for o caso, talvez possa explicar o facto de nas últimas semanas o ANEL ter parecido ser mais duros com os credores do que a direção do Syriza).

Porque não se fala em PRexit?

Greece vs Puerto Rico and what's "systemic.", por John Cochrane:

 How is a Greek default different from a Puerto Rican default?

Answer: because Puerto Rico doesn't have its own banking system. It can't shut down banks. Banks in Puerto Rico are not loaded up on Puerto Rico debt, so depositors are not in danger if the state government defaults.

Puerto Rico, like Greece, uses a common currency. But there is no question of PRexit, that people wake up one morning and their dollar bank accounts are suddenly PR Peso bank accounts. So they have no reason to run and get cash out

   No, Puerto Rico Isn’t Greece, por Paul Krugman:

There are obvious parallels between the crisis in Puerto Rico and the disaster in Greece — a poor economy overshadowed by a huge wealthier economy to the north, budget problems, declarations that the debt is unpayable. And I don’t want to minimize the problems and pain in San Juan. But it’s important to understand that the depth of the pain is just not of the same order of magnitude, and not just because Puerto Rico’s banks are secured by a national safety net, although that helps. (...)

Greek real consumption per capita has plunged, whereas Puerto Rico’s has actually risen. (...)

What’s supporting that consumption? Some of it surely involves private remittances from Puerto Ricans working on the mainland and sending money home. But it’s also fiscal federalism: as Puerto Rico’s economy has stumbled, its payments to Washington have dropped while its receipts from federal social insurance programs have risen, so that the island is in effect receiving aid on a scale that would be inconceivable in Europe.

A respeito do artigo de Cochrane, diria que a vantagem de Porto Rico não ter bancos próprios não é só esses bancos não estarem particularmente expostos à dívida porto-riquenha, mas também não haver o perigo de, por uma qualquer zanga entre Porto Rico e o governo federal dos EUA, o FED deixar de financiar os bancos porto-riquenhos.

O que em breve o governo grego terá que fazer

Se ganhar o "não" no referendo, e perante a crise bancária, a Grécia terá de certeza que fazer uma destas 3 coisas:

- Sair do euro (ou, no mínimo, lançar uma moeda paralela ao euro)

- Decretar que todos os depósitos bancários acima de certo limite são convertidos em ações dos bancos respetivos

- Decretar que todos os depósitos bancários acima de certo limite são convertidos nalguma forma de aplicação financeira a prazo não mobilizável antes do fim do prazo (o mais natural seriam obrigações dos bancos, mas também pode ser algo do estilo das "contas de investimento" propostas na Islândia)


O objetivo da segunda ou da terceira medida é resolver o problema de como, sem acesso a um banco central que possa emprestar dinheiro em caso de pânico, manter um sistema financeiro em que o valor dos depósitos é muito superior ao dinheiro que os bancos têm em caixa.

[Tanto a segunda como sobretudo a terceira poderiam estar submetidas a uma cláusula estipulando que, caso o BCE volte a mandar dinheiro, esses títulos podem ser reconvertidos em depósitos]

Eu por mim preferia a terceira solução. Mas seria conveniente que o valor a ser convertido já tivesse sido congelado nos bancos e que o governo anunciasse previamente que, se ganhar o "não", era esse o "plano B" caso a troika não cedesse. É verdade que isso iria reduzir bastante a possibilidade de o "não" ganhar (muita gente saber que, nesse caso, o dinheiro que tinham no banco iria ser convertido em obrigações que só iriam vencer daqui a uns anos), mas por outro lado acho que iria dar mais força negocial ao governo grego saber-se que já havia um plano para manter o sistema bancário a funcionar sem sair do euro mesmo sem apoios do BCE (e, no caso de vitória do "não", esse plano ter sido implicitamente sufragado pelo povo grego), em vez da conversa completamente confusa "vai tudo correr bem" do Tsipras e do Varoufaki.

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

Resultados de independências

Independence Day: Any Reason to Celebrate?, por Bryan Caplan:

Can anyone tell me why American independence was worth fighting for?

Most libertarians interpret the Revolutionary War as a libertarian crusade. But when you ask about specific libertarian policy changes that came about because of the Revolution, it's hard to get a decent answer.

In fact, with 20/20 hindsight, independence had two massive anti-libertarian consequences: It removed the last real check on American aggression against the Indians, and allowed American slavery to avoid earlier - and peaceful - abolition.

If libertarians have little reason to celebrate American independence, who does? Leftists? They ought to take the Indian and slavery issues seriously, too. I guess getting rid of titles of nobility and such was a step toward greater equality, but a step worth shedding blood over?

How about conservatives? They're likely to say "This war created our country - of course it was worth it!" But without the war, conservatives would still have a country to get misty-eyed over - it would just be Britain instead of America. If you're going to love whatever country you're born in, it's hard to see the point of fighting to make a new one.

A respeito do parágrafo final, uma coisa que me ocorre: em tempos no Facebook estava a decorrer uma discussão sobre quem eram os grande portugueses, e claro falava-se de D. Afonso Henriques; mas bastaria a História ter corrido ligeiramente diferente para D. Afonso Henriques ser lembrado, não como o criador do nosso país, mas como alguém que tentou destruir o nosso país.

Possível perfil de um regime militar na Grécia

De vez em quando lêem-se artigos à esquerda insinuando que a troika/as instituições não se importariam se o governo Syriza fosse afastado por um golpe de Estade e susbstituido por algo como uma junta militar.

No entanto, suspeito que, neste momento, a haver um regime militar na Grécia, mais facilmente seria um regime nacionalista radical e pró-russo (quiça com alguns tiques "bolivarianos") do que um regime pró-troika. Ou seja, algo mais parecido com os regimes militares árabes dos tempos da Guerra Fria do que com a maior parte dos regimes militares latino-americanos da mesma época.

Note-se que não estou a dizer que é provável um regime militar na Grécia neste momento - estou apenas a dizer que um regime militar nacionalista "anti-imperialista" é mais provável que um regime pró-troika.

Sugestão de leitura: Greece November 2011: “The Coup D’ Etat that Did Not Happen….” Part I e Part II, onde se refere os boatos de ligações entre grupos de oficiais do exército, setores ultraconservadores da Igreja e grupos de extrema-direita e da ala nacionalista da Nova Democracia (os atuais Gregos Independentes).

A Grécia das Caraíbas

The tragedy of Puerto Rico, America’s very own Greece, por Felix Salmon:

Puerto Rico, like Greece, is the poor southern cousin of a politically-motivated monetary union which was not designed with such populations in mind. Like Greece, it is burdened with a massive debt it can’t realistically pay back. Like Greece, it is therefore going to default. And like Greece, that default is going to prove extraordinarily painful, in large part because of the constraints being imposed from the north. (...)

Puerto Rico’s case is different from most other debt defaults. After all, debtors generally have some protections. Most bankruptcy laws, for instance, protect debtors’ assets and incomes from being seized, at least temporarily. And in the case of sovereign nations like Greece, it’s almost impossible for any court, foreign or domestic, to force the country to pay monies it doesn’t want to pay.

Puerto Rico, by contrast, is stuck in the worst of all worlds. It has to abide by the rulings of New York courts, should bondholders file suit. And at the same time, it’s not allowed to file for — and receive the protections of — bankruptcy. (US municipalities, like Detroit, can file under Chapter 9 of the American bankruptcy code; Puerto Rico, which is a territory, cannot.) As a result, Puerto Rico is at the mercy of the courts, which will take one look at the island’s unambiguous bond contracts and declare that it has to pay its debts, in full.