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.

A recuperação irlandesa

The latest employment figures, por Kevin O'Rourke, em The Irish Economy:

“So, we hear Ireland is recovering”, a French friend said to me last night.

(Mind you, they said something similar in the summer of 2010. Our government has an incentive to sell the Irish good news story, and “Europe” has an incentive to buy it.)

So, here are the latest employment data, reporting the largest seasonally adjusted quarterly fall in employment in two years, and which surely deserve a thread of their own.

[Pesquisando na internet, é relativamente fácila encontrar artigos escritos no Verão de 2010, antes da intervenção do FMI, com notíciais iguais às que se leram no Verão deste ano: "A Irlanda já está a sair da crise"]

O nascimento do FED | Murray N. Rothbard

Já era tempo de colocar aqui uma sugestão para ver Rothbard em acção em 1984, o inspirador e fundador dos austro-libertarians-anarcho-capitalists, aqui na sua habitual tónica de história revisionista. Para Murray esta história é sempre feita de pessoas, das suas particularidades pessoais, as suas relações e interesses. E o seu relato sobre a criação do FED não é diferente. Espero que a achem interessante.

Escola - uma instituição contrária à nossa evolução natural?

Why Children Protest Going to School: More Evolutionary Mismatch, por Peter Gray (Psychology Today):

Most children in our society protest going to school. Am I telling you something new?

They protest in many ways—by feigning illness, by dragging their feet in the morning, by doing the least they can to meet the school's demands (or not doing even that), and by violating school rules when they can get away with it. (...)

Why all this protest? Education is a good thing, right? Children need to become educated to do well in society. Society goes to tremendous expense and trouble to provide schooling—lots of it!—for every child (whether they want it or not). Are these kids just spoiled ingrates? If so, then you and I—and essentially everyone else who ever attended school after schooling became compulsory—were also spoiled ingrates. We all protested it. In fact, back in the days when schools first became compulsory kids protested it even more than they do now, even though there was much less of it then. They had to be beaten with birch sticks to get them to stay in school and do what the teachers told them to do.

In my last essay I used the concept of evolutionary mismatch to explain why infants and young children protest going to bed—alone, in the dark, at night. The term refers to a lack of congruity between environmental conditions today and those that existed during the time of our evolutionary ancestors. For at least 99 per cent of our history as human beings, we were all hunter-gatherers. Anthropologists have pointed out that the hunter-gatherer way of life is the only stable way of life our species has ever known. Ever since the origin of agriculture, a mere 10,000 years ago, we have been caught in an ever-faster whirlwind of cultural change. From a biological perspective, we are all still hunter-gatherers, doing the best that we can to cope with the conditions of life that exist today. In my last essay I pointed out that infants and young children protest going to bed alone because, in hunter-gatherer days, to do so would likely lead to death. The monsters under the bed were real. They were jackals, tigers, and other nighttime predators, prowling around looking for small snacks unprotected by adults. Instincts and fears that evolved when we were hunter-gatherers have not changed.

Now I want to apply the concept of evolutionary mismatch to the problem of education.

As I pointed out in one of the first essays in this blog, the means by which children became educated in hunter-gatherer cultures were the opposite of the means by which we try to educate children in our schools today. One of the most cherished values of all band hunter-gatherer societies that have ever been studied by anthropologists is freedom. Hunter-gatherers believed that it is wrong to coerce a person to do what the person doesn't want to do—and they considered children to be people. They rarely even made direct suggestions, because that might sound like coercion. They believed that people, on their own initiative, would learn to contribute to the welfare of the band, because they would see the wisdom of doing so and experience the joy of it. For hundreds of thousands of years, that was the organizing principle of human society. The hunting and gathering life required great personal initiative and creativity, and it required trust that people would share and cooperate because they wanted to. Hunting and gathering people seemed to understand that—and they also seemed to understand that children would best grow up to be free, trusting, cooperative, creative adults if they were permitted freedom throughout their childhood, in the context of the moral community and models that the band provided

.Um ponto - interrego-me se este não será um dos tais artigos "sem nenhuma relação com a realidade criados" pela "mitologia romântica" à volta das sociedades primitivas (não digo que seja ou não seja; provavelmente só um antropólogo pudesse esclarescer)

Previsões para 2012

Feliz Zulauf, gestor de investimentos suíço (via Business Insider):

Then I expect next year one country, probably three, will exit the euro. That will make 2012 very interesting because there are no rules on how to exit the euro. A country exiting the euro means the next day, when they exit, their banking system is bust. That means the banking system has to be immediately nationalized in a new currency.

They introduce a new currency, they nationalize the banking system, and then, of course, the government is also bust. Then the government will default. That’s what you have to expect next year. I think Greece will do so and Portugal and Ireland are candidates also

"Corrida ao banco" na Letónia?

Latvia's Largest Bank Is Fighting Off A Bank Run After Rumors Of Collapse (Business Insider):

RIGA, Latvia (AP) — Latvia's largest bank is scrambling to contain a run among depositors gripped by fears of the bank's imminent collapse.

The panic among Swedish-owned Swedbank's depositors began Sunday after rumors spread that the financial institution was facing legal and liquidity problems in Estonia and Sweden.

Em defesa do desemprego?

Unemployment Is The Cure, por Paul Hertzog (P2P Foundation):

So ultimately it comes down to this. For the employers, which is to say, predominantly large hierarchical structures that exist by skimming surplus value off of their workers’ work and simply paying them some portion of that value as a wage, there is an “employment crisis.” However, for the people, a job merely serves as a conduit for income, and consequently, the crisis is not an “employment crisis” but an “income crisis.”

This is a crucial point, so I’ll make it again another way.

An Employment Economy has to make people think of their “income crisis” as an “employment crisis.” An Unemployment Economy has no such necessity.

An Unemployment Economy begins with the premise that people perform best at activities in which they enjoy intrinsically and for which they volunteer. This self-selection principle is a key ingredient of current open-source coding economies, and was even used by Google to allow it’s employees to self-direct a portion of their daily work-time. Self-selection is not volunteerism; it’s compensated work. Otherwise someone is still exploiting you and getting the benefit of your labor, only for free.

Furthermore, calling it an “employment crisis” implies that the solution is to create more employment, but calling it an “income crisis” implies that the solution is to create more income. This can be done in a variety of ways, many of which have nothing to do with getting a job.

Aviões-robots dos EUA infectados com virús?

Exclusive: Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet (Wired)

A cimeira

Há 20 anos, a 8 de Dezembro de 1991, os presidentes das Ucrânia, da Bielorrúsia e da Federação Russa reuniam-se na floresta de Belovezhskaya para decidir o futuro da URSS.

Peter Joseph lá vai fazendo a sua carreira

A via não é acabar com a moeda, mas pelo menos demonstra que pelo menos mais um movimento social percebe algo do problema do actual sistema monetário que nos impingem coercivamente, o que é muito mais que as queixas à esquerda sempre com algum instinto mas pouca análise. Pelo menos aparentemente, o zeitgeist parece inofensivo e baseado em atitudes pessoais e sociais supostamente voluntárias, o que em si é positivo (não estou certo, se por algum truque da história virem a ter poder nas mãos, nem que seja daqui a 100 anos).

De certa forma, este tipo de movimento, a cientologia e muita outras franjas pronunciam uma mudança social e civilizacional que se vai fazendo. E todas elas põem em causa a estrutura pesada dos actuais Estados. Riscos há sempre. Muita literatura de ficção científica o antecipou. No longo prazo, será o cristianismo a ter que manter a coisa controlável. Não sei se me percebem, mas é a verdade.

PS: interessante apresentar-se como "Director & Film Maker"procurando sempre escapar ao Profeta.

A "hipótese da eficiência dos mercados" e as suas implicações

Uma teoria económico que me parece frequentemente mal interpretada é a chamada "hipótese do mercado eficiente".

Em que consiste essa teoria? Basicamente, que o preço de um activo financeiro num dado momento reflecte toda a informação disponível nesse momento sobre esse activo; a ideia é que qualquer "bom negócio" que surja desaparece em poucos instantes (talvez numa questão de minutos ou segundos), já que os investidores, ao saberem disso, vão investir nesse titulo, fazendo subir o seu preço e , portanto, deixa de ser um "bom negoócio"; p.ex., mal se sabe que uma empresa descobriu petróleo, o preço das suas acções sobe nesse preciso momento, fazendo com que esse investimento deixe de ser especialmente rentável (apenas durante uma fracção muito escassa de tempo é que alguém pode ganhar dinheiro na bolsa com isso, talvez apenas a primeira pessoa a ter ouvido a noticia "a Gasosas & Gasolinas, Lda. descobriu petróleo na Praia da Rocha"). Ou seja, a HME sustenta que, se uma acção (ou outro investimento qualquer; vou falar em "acções" por comodidade) estivesse barata face às suas perspectivas de rentabilidade e risco esperadas, já alguém a teria comprado, fazendo subir o seu preço (mutatis mutandis para "cara") - por isso, o preço das acções deve reflectir exactamente o que se sabe sobre a sua potencial rentabilidade.

Uma metáfora clássica dada para ilustrar a HME é de que não há notas de 50 euros (bem, a metáfora costuma ser com dólares...) na calçada - se houvesse, já alguém as teria visto e apanhado.

Agora, vamos ao equívoco que me parece comum na interpretação do que é a HME (ver, p.ex., alguns comentários a este post d'O Insurgente) - o "eficiente" aqui significa apenas "eficiente a traduzir a informação disponível em preços"; não tem nada a ver com "eficiente a garantir o bem-estar económico e social" - os mercados podem dar origem a crashs, recessões, desemprego em massa, poluição, etc., etc. que não é por isso que deixam de ser "eficientes" no sentido específico que a HME dá à palavra (dizer "a crise de 1929/1987/2000/2008/etc. deita por terra a hipótese do mercado eficiente" é um pouco como dizer "como é que alguém pode defender a família nuclear depois de Three Mile Island, Chernobil e Fukushima?") .

A HME tem algumas implicações:

- Uma é que só por sorte se pode fazer "bons negócios"; em média, investir em mercados como a bolsa dará um rendimento que só será maior do que, p.ex., um depósito a prazo para compensar o investidor do risco corrido (bem, não sei bem se isto é um implicação da HME ou se é apenas a HME explicada por outras palavras)

- A mais conhecida é a do "caminho aleatório", de que a evolução futura do preço de um título é imprevisível. A ideia é de que, se o preço actual de um título já reflecte toda a informação disponível, o preço só será afectado por nova informação ainda desconhecida. Como a informação futura é, por definição, actualmente desconhecida, é impossível prever como o preço do título vai evoluir ao longo do tempo - essa evolução vai forçosamente ser aleatória e imprevisível (um ponto fundamental para perceber a diferença entra a HME e o que normalmente se entende por "eficiência" - à partida soa algo contra-intuitivo chamar "eficiente" a um mercado aleatório e imprevisível)

- Outra poderá ser a de que a chamada "gestão passiva" (isto é, uma estratégia de investimentos que se limita a seguir uma regra pre-estabelecida - estilo "ter uma carteira com uma composição idêntica à do PSI20" - em vez de activamente escolher onde investir e tentar fazer previsões) pode ser mais rentável que a "gestão activa": afinal, se só por sorte se consegue fazer "bons negócios", mais vale seguir uma regra pré-estabelecida do que estar a pagar a gestores, analistas, etc. para tentar descobrir como o mercado vai evoluir (mesmo que a rentabilidade antes de despesas seja um bocadinho menor, é compensado com o que se poupa em salários, comissões e prémios de desempenho)

- numa linha semelhantes (ou talvez isto seja um subponto do ponto anterior), que escolher onde investir jogando dardos para um lista de títulos e comprar os escolhidos tenderá a dar os mesmos ou melhores resultados do que contratar especialistas (o raciocínio é o mesmo; é impossivel prever como vai evoluir o mercado, e pelo menos assim poupa-se dinheiro em comissões)

- que tanto faz entregar a gestão dos nossos investimentos no mercado de capitais a analistas com um MBA, uma pós-graduação em Matemáticas Avançadas e uma licenciatura em Economia ou a uma gata siamesa; afinal, é impossível prever como as acções vão evoluir, e os custos de manutenção do felino até são menores (de novo, poupa-se dinheiro em comissões)

- ocorre-me também que a HME pode implicar que cobrar impostos altos aos trabalhadores da banca de investimentos pode aumentar a eficiência (no sentido usual da palavra) da economia - o meu raciocinio: em termos globais, pouco diferença faz as empresas do ramo terem super-génios ou super-trabalhadores ou apenas pessoas ligeiramente acima da média; cada empresa individual pode ter interesse em ter os melhores trabalhadores (isso pode fazer a diferença de segundos que permite ser a empresa A em vez da B a fazer um bom negócio antes que ele desapareça), mas para a indústria no seu todo pouco diferença fará ter trabalhadores altamente produtivos em vez de apenas medianamente produtivos (o mercado pode ser uns segundos mais rápido a identificar - e eliminar - bons negócios, mas isso mal se notará no conjunto da economia, ou mesmo para os lucros do conjunto das empresas de investimento); e esses impostos altos, ao desencorajar os trabalhadores potencialmente mais produtivos de ir trabalhar para os mercados bolsistas, iriam levá-los a ir trabalhar para áreas onde as suas capacidades efectivamente façam uma diferença relevante (em vez de serem utilizadas num jogo de soma quase nula). Admito que na prática seria provavelmente díficil (ou quase impossível) aplicar impostos específicos a ramos empresariais específicos.

[penso que as duas últimas "implicações" não aparecem em nenhum manual de economia - embora alguns textos falem de babuínos - mas parecem-me conclusões lógicas da HME]

Uma nota final - a HME não poderá ser uma profecia auto-destruída? Afinal, a ideia é que, como há centenas/milhares/dezenas de milhares de investidores à cata de bons negócios, qualquer bom negócio que exista será imediatamente identificado e deixará de existir. Mas se os investidores agirem de acordo com a HME, não irão perder tempo à procura de bons negócios (limitar-se-ão em investir em fundos passivos, ou seguir os conselhos de investimento dos seus gatos), logo as tais potenciais oportunidades de bons negócios não serão identificadas, haverão muitas possibilidades de ganhar dinheiro não-aproveitadas, e os preços acabarão por não reflectir toda a informação disponível (mas talvez a HME tenha implícito a premissa que haverá sempre um núcleo considerável de pessoas que não vai investir de acordo com a HME, tal como as teorias que dizem que votar é irracional têm implícita a ideia que haverá sempre muita gente a votar).

O anarco-capitalismo é impossível?

Anarcho-”Capitalism” is impossible, por Anna Morgenstern (Center for a Stateless Society):

People calling themselves “anarcho-capitalists” usually want to define “capitalism” as the same thing as a free market, and “socialism” as state intervention against such. But what then is a free market? If you mean simply all voluntary transactions that occur without state interference, then it’s a circular and redundant definition. In that case, all anarchists are “anarcho-capitalists”, even the most die-hard anarcho-syndicalist.

Defining capitalism as a system of private property is equally problematic, because where would you draw the line between private and public? Under a state, state property is considered “public” but as an anarchist, you know that’s a sham. It’s private property owned by a group that calls themselves the State. Whether something is owned by 10 people or 10 million doesn’t make it more or less “private”. (...)

[T]hat mass accumulation and concentration of capital is impossible under anarchism, has several aspects.

One big one is that the cost of protecting property rises dramatically as the amount of property owned increases, without a state. This is something that rarely gets examined by libertarians, but it’s crucial.

One reason for this is that large scale property ownership is never all geographically massed. A billionaire doesn’t have all his property in one small geographic area. In fact, this sort of absentee-ownership is necessary to become a billionaire in the first place. Most super-wealthy own stock in large corporations that have many factories, retail outlets, offices and the like all over the place. Leaving aside whether joint-stock companies are even likely in anarchy for now, this geographical dispersion means that the cost of protecting all of this property is enormous. Not only because of the sheer number of guardians necessary, but because one must pay those guardians enough that they don’t just decide to take over the local outlet. You could hire guardians to watch the guardians, but that in itself becomes a new problem…

But the property needs to be protected not only from domestic trespassers, but from foreign invasion as well. Let us imagine that an anarcho-capitalist society does manage to form, Ancapistan, if we will. Next to Ancapistan is a statist capitalist nation, let us call it Aynrandia. Well, the Aynrandians decide “hmm, Ancapistan lacks a state to protect its citizens. We should take over and give them one, for their own good of course.” At this point the billionaires in Ancapistan must either capitulate, welcome the Aynrandians, and Ancapistan is no more, or they must raise a private army to repel the Aynrandians. Not only will the second option be ridiculously expensive, for the reasons I’ve outlined above, but a lot of property will get destroyed if the Aynrandians decide to engage in modern total warfare. Ahh but what about all the middle class people in Ancapistan, won’t they form a militia to defend themselves? Well yes, but they won’t form a militia to defend a bunch of billionaires’ property.

The anarcho-capitalists often have a nonsensical rosy picture of the boss-worker relationship that has no basis in reality. Almost no one wakes up and goes in to work thinking “thank the heavens for my wonderful boss, who was kind enough to employ a loser like me”. When external invasion arrives, the middle classes will defend themselves and their own property. But they’re not going to risk their lives for Wal-mart without getting a piece of the action.

So, due to the rising cost of protecting property, there comes a threshold level, where accumulating more capital becomes economically inefficient, simply in terms of guarding the property. Police and military protection is the biggest subsidy that the State gives to the rich. In some sense the Objectivists are correct that capitalism requires a government to protect private property. (...)

What is likely, judging from history, is that something like a private syndicalism would arise, where owners of value-producing property would lease it out to organizations of workers, simply because it would be easier for them than trying to hire people on a semi-permanent basis.


Mining was organized like this for quite a while, for instance, until the advent of bank-financed joint stock mining companies, which bought out most of the prospector/owners in the 1800s.

So we see, even assuming an “anarcho-capitalist” property regime, anything recognizable as “capitalism” to anyone else could not exist. In fact the society would look a lot like what “anarcho-socialists” think of as “socialism”. Not exactly like it, but much closer than anything they’d imagine as capitalism.

However, under anarchism, even such a strict property regime is not guaranteed. There is no way to impose it on a community that wants to operate a different way. I predict there will lots of different communities and systems that will compete for people to live in them and whatever seems to work the best will tend to spread. There’s nothing the anarcho-capitalists could do to prevent people from agreeing to treat property in a more fluid or communal manner than they’d prefer. Nor is there anything the anarcho-socialists could do to prevent a community from organizing property in a more rigid or individualistic manner than they’d prefer.

For, just as anarcho-capitalism is impossible, anarcho-socialism is also impossible, depending on how you define things.

MAD patents

Arnold Kling: "Hal Varian of Google describes the current situation in patent litigation as one of Mutually Assured Destruction. That is, they way you protect yourself from patent litigation is to acquired some patents yourself, so that you can threaten to counter-sue anybody who sues you. Ugh."

Mr Libertarian Ron Paul ao longo dos anos

Influência de Hayek na "Escola de Chicago"?

Hayek and Modern Macroeconomics, por Alex Tabarrok:

David Laidler exaggerated but he was much closer to the truth than Krugman or Warsh when he wrote in 1982 regarding new-classical macroeconomics:

… I prefer the adjective neo-Austrian… In their methodological individualism, their stress on the market mechanism as a device for disseminating information, and their insistence that the business-cycle is the central problem for macroeconomics, Robert E. Lucas Jr., Robert J. Barro, Thomas J. Sargent, and Neil Wallace, who are the most prominent contributors to this body of doctrine, place themselves firmly in the intellectual tradition pioneered by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek.

Thus, Hayek was an important inspiration in the modern program to build macroeconomics on microfoundations. The major connecting figure here is Lucas who cites Hayek in some of his key pieces and who long considered himself a kind of Austrian. (Indeed, to the great consternation of some of my colleagues, I once argued that Lucas was the greatest Austrian economist of the 20th century.)

Sobre os salários dos gestores

Taxing Job Creators, por Paul Krugman:

Right now the official rhetoric of the right, and a fair number of people who consider themselves centrist, is that high-income individuals are “job creators” who must be cherished for the good they do.

Yet textbook economics says that in a competitive economy, the contribution any individual (or for that matter any factor of production) makes to the economy at the margin is what that individual earns — period. What a worker contributes to GDP with an additional hour of work is that worker’s hourly wage, whether that hourly wage is $6 or $60,000 an hour. This in turn means that the effect on everyone else’s income if a worker chooses to work one hour less is precisely zero. If a hedge fund manager gets $60,000 an hour, and he works one hour less, he reduces GDP by $60,000 — but he also reduces his pay by $60,000, so the net effect on other peoples’ incomes is zip. (...)

So, are conservatives comfortable with this analysis? I would guess not, that they have a deep-seated belief that the 1%, by working harder, are doing the 99% a big favor, creating jobs and raising incomes — and that this gain isn’t fully (or even largely) captured by the money they’re paid.

My point, then, is that this claim — and the lionization of high earners as people who make a vast contribution to society — is not, in fact, something that comes out of the free-market economic principles these people claim to believe in. Even if you believe that the top 1% or better yet the top 0.1% are actually earning the money they make, what they contribute is what they get, and they deserve no special solicitude.

Are CEOs paid their value added?, por Tyler Cowen:

Remember Paul Krugman’s forays into “the wage reflects what the top earners are really worth” topic, and the surrounding debates? Why should this discussion be such a fact-free zone? Why so little discussion of tax incidence?
Let’s start with the literature.

Read this paper by Kevin Murphy (pdf), especially pp.33-38. Admittedly the paper is from 1999 and it won’t pick up the more recent problems with the financial sector. But most of the data are from plain, ol’ garden variety CEOs. In many of the estimations we see CEOs picking up less than one percent of the value they create for the firm, and all of the estimates of their value capture are impressively small, albeit rising over time. Never is the percentage of value capture anything close to one hundred percent. “One percent value capture” is an entirely plausible belief.

Nos comentários, o post do Cowen foi "demolido" pelos comentadores, já que o estudo não diz o que ele diz que diz - segundo o estudo, a remuneração dos CEOs equivale a 1% da subida do valor das empresas nesse período, mas não há nada que diga que toda essa valorização é resultado do trabalho do CEO.

What is the marginal product of a CEO?, também por Cowen:

If you read carefully my post from yesterday, you may have noticed what a tricky question this is. “CEO” of course is a discrete position, and while there are companies with “zero” or “two” CEOs, those comparisons are not the correct ones to define marginal product; in any case they would give you two very different numbers.


Nor is it correct to compare “this CEO” to “his likely replacement.” That difference could be zero, but it does not mean the CEO adds zero value or will or should receive zero pay. Keep in mind that we are already juggling a few margins here, including “getting this CEO to work harder or better” and “this CEO vs. another.”

Alternatively, imagine there are ten firms in the economy, of differing size and import, all bidding for managers in a pool of fifty people. A credible CEO offer has to satisfy a participation constraint, namely getting the candidate to take the job over CEO at a lesser firm or working in a lesser job. But if a CEO can add 50 percent of value to a firm, that CEO will not in general be paid fifty percent of the firm’s value and need not be paid anything close to that. The shareholders know he will take the job for less and there are other candidates who might add forty-seven percent of value. The firm can make a credible offer of “two percent of value added” and it might be accepted.

Unlike hiring widget-makers for “less than their marginal product,” there is no subsequent disruption of equilibrium which must follow from this apparent disjunction of CEO pay and marginal product. For instance there is no firm-level incentive to further expand output or hire extra CEOs. There is one discrete slot, a wide range of potential compensation values, and the final sum is set by a bargain, determined by the context of principal-agent theory. (...)

In general, it is confusing to suggest that CEOs will be paid their marginal product. The traditional notion of marginal product does not apply to a CEO in the simple “widgets per worker” way. There are ways you can define “marginal product” to make the claim “CEOs are paid their marginal product” more or less true, but that is not my preferred way forward. Instead we should get more used to thinking intuitively within the principal-agent model, even though it is harder to do.

Isso levanta uma questão sobre o próprio conceito de "produto marginal" - qual é o produto marginal de um trabalhador? O aumento da produção que ocorreria se a empresa contratasse mais um trabalhador (neste caso, a diferença entre a produção de 1 vs 2 CEO)? Ou a diminuição da produção que ocorreria se a empresa despedisse um trabalhador (neste caso, a diferença entre a produção de 0 vs 1 CEO)? Nos cursos e manuais de economia simplesmente assume-se um função de produção contínua com factores de produção infinitamente divisiveis (e aí o produto marginal é simplesmente a derivada), mas há muitas situações no mundo real em que isso não se aplica.

Thinking About CEO Pay, por Arnold Klin:

2. I think that Tyler's reasons for skepticism about measuring the marginal product of a CEO are applicable to many, if not most, employees in a modern business. Recall the Garett Jones characterization of workers as producing organizational capital, not widgets. CEO's have a lot of influence over the organizational capital development of their firms. When you have an entity as big as a Fortune 500 company, slightly better approaches to developing organizational capital can make billion-dollar differences in value.


The concept of marginal product assumes a sort of mathematical continuity that just isn't there in the real world. The textbook representation of business decisions as solutions to calculus problems is grossly misleading. In an actual business, you don't have an equation for your demand curve. You don't have a cost function.

3. I think of CEOs as players in a tournament. Their performance reflects both skill and luck factors. Their pay reflects both their performance and still other luck factors.

4. I suspect that the relationship between pay and value for CEO's falls far short of the standards of cosmic justice. But I suspect that even coming up with those standards is far beyond anyone's capability.

CEOs and Marginal Product, por Alex Tabarrok:

Contra Tyler, it is, of course, perfectly reasonable to compare a CEO with his or her likely replacement. Board of Directors do this all the time. If the Board finds that revenues would be the same with a new CEO the theory doesn’t say that the current CEO should get a zero wage (as Tyler oddly suggests). It says that the current CEO should not be paid more than the wage necessary to hire the replacement. If the current CEO is paid more, he may be out a job. If the current CEO is paid less, he may move.


Tyler argues that CEOs are paid far too little (less than 1% of their marginal product). I say that as a result of the process described above CEOs are paid more or less their marginal product on average. Indeed, according to one astute writer, Gabaix and Landier find that replacing “replacing the No. 250 chief executive with the No. 1 will increase the value of the company by only 0.014 percent.” More or less means that principal agent problems, risk aversion and uncertainty also matter but they matter within a range determined by the usual process. I also believe that the case for some CEOs being overpaid because they choose friendly board members is far stronger than Tyler’s case that CEOs on average are radically underpaid.

Já agora, aproveito para relembrar a minha teoria sobre Salários, produtividade e economia "mainstream" (e a discussão acerca disso no Fiel Inimigo).

Resultados das eleições egipcias

Nationwide Vote for Party-Coalition Lists (Stage 1), em Al-Jadaliyya:

Party/Coalition List	Votes	% Votes
Freedom and Justice	3565092	36.62321885
Al-Nour	2371713	24.3639615
Egyptian Bloc	1299819	13.35268647
Al-Wafd	690077	7.088973018
Al-Wasat	415590	4.269242848
Revolution Continues	335947	3.451092006
Reform and Development	185138	1.901872235
National Party of Egypt	153429	1.576134317
Freedom	136784	1.405144767
Adl	76769	0.788627022
Conservative Party	76743	0.788359931
Egyptian Citizen	67602	0.694456929
Democratic Peace	51704	0.531141106
Al-Ghad	39999	0.41089883
Union	39527	0.406050102
Nasserist	39257	0.403276466
Egyptian Revolution	36975	0.379834102
Democratic Front	33293	0.342009919
Egyptian Arab Union	31233	0.3208481
New Egypt Party	27106	0.278452553
Egypt Revolution	26804	0.27535019
New Independents	10793	0.110873549
Revolution's Guards	5875	0.060352274
Citizens and Human Rights	4436	0.045569819
Social Peace	3416	0.035091637
Wai	3180	0.032667274
Arab Party for Justice and Equality	3165	0.032513183
Constitutional Social Liberal	3047	0.031301001
Total	9734513	100

[Clicando nos links vai-se para uma breve apresentação de cada partido]

6 anos do Vento Sueste

Hoje este blog faz 6 anos. Normalmente, assinalo esta data re-lembrando alguns posts publicados durante o ano; este ano a colheita foi má: com a Primavera Árabe, a crise do euro e a queda do governo, a maior parte dos meus posts acabaram por ser sobre assuntos quotidianos e não sobre temas dignos de re-postagem. No entanto, ficam aqui alguns:

• A crítica de Rui Albuquerque ao anarquismo (Outubro de 2011)

• A matemática de "Caminhando", de Thoureau (Setembro de 2011)

• A vontade indómita e a sociedade "industrial-burguesa" (Maio de 2011)

• Análise de blogs por links mútuos (Janeiro de 2011)

De novo os agricultores e caçadores-recolectores

Farmers, foragers, and us, por Razib Khan:

My tentative thesis is that in our modern age the conflict between “traditional” and “Western” values is to some extent really be a conflict between “traditional” and “more traditional” values. That the individualistic ethos of the modern West, which puts less emphasis on the elaborate norms imposed from identity-groups, is a “throwback” to small-scale societies.

Caracterização do Google, do Facebook e da Wikipedia

What Future Does Facebook Have?, por Brad DeLong:

The key question that everybody has when they go to the world wide web is a simple one: "What do I need to know?" Different web companies give different answers to that question:

• Wikipedia: You need a summary overview sketch of a particular person, place, thing, or event that you already have in mind--and we will provide you with such a sketch, written by a tag time of altruistic left- and right-libertarians and by some people who care too much about the topic.

• Google: You need to know what pages on the internet have been most linked to by others and that contain keywords that you already have in mind.

• Facebook: You need to know what your friends and your friends of friends already know that you do not.

Ao contrário de DeLong, eu não acho que "a resposta do Facebook" seja a melhor (na verdade, exactamente por ser a mais parecida com o que temos no mundo real, acaba por ser a que tem uma menor "vantagem comparativa")

Crise politica na Ossétia do Sul

South Ossetian opposition leader rejects new vote (Associated Press):

South Ossetia does not need a new presidential election, the candidate whose apparent victory over a Kremlin-backed rival was annulled in the breakaway Georgian province said Thursday.

As anti-corruption crusader Alla Dzhioyeva spoke, armed troops surrounded the government building in the separatist capital of Tskhinvali, gearing up for a rally of her supporters.

Dzhioyeva declared herself president after she led with about 57 percent of Sunday's runoff vote with ballots from 74 of the 85 precincts counted, while rival Anatoly Bibilov trailed with 40 percent.

But the separatist government annulled the vote due to alleged violations and barred Dzhioyeva from participating in the new vote.

"I won my election — 17,000 out of 30,000 (voters) cast their ballots for me," the 62-year-old former school principal told journalists. "This is our victory, and they want to steal it."

She said thousands of supporters would rally later in the day in front of the government building as South Ossetia's Supreme Court deliberates her appeal on the annulment and whether she is allowed to run in the March re-vote.

Dzhioyeva also demanded the court reach its decision by Thursday evening. But she later met with Russian envoy Sergei Vinokurov and said discussions would continue Friday. Russia exerts strong influence in South Ossetia, providing lavish aid and recognizing it as an independent nation.

Fearing a large protest, trucks and armored military vehicles continued to cordon off the government building in the capital of Tskhinvali, and dozens of armed military officers, some of them masked, surrounded the area.

Addressing Dzhioyeva's supporters, who gathered at a nearby square, former defense minister Anatoly Barankevich urged them to refrain from violence. "They are just waiting for an excuse to declare an emergency situation," the widely respected veteran said.

Re: Opções para Portugal

João Miranda expõe algumas opções para Portugal (via O Insurgente):

Intervenção do BCE para salvar o euro emitindo moeda: Inflação. Perda colossal do poder de compra. Portugal entra em austeridade por via inflacionista (salários reais da função pública caem mais 10% ou 20%)

Pelo menos, ambíguo - há várias décadas que os economistas polemizam entre si sobre se uma expansão monetário origina sempre uma subida de preço ou se isso só acontece quando a economia está em pleno emprego (o caso recente dos EUA, em que uma expansão monetária brutal provocou apenas um pequeno aumento da inflação, parece dar razão à segunda teoria). Assim, se a primeira teoria estiver certa, João Miranda está certo; se a segunda estiver certa, seria possivel ao BCE emitir moeda sem causar inflação, já que a economia da zona euro está provavelmente longe do pleno emprego.

Portugal sai da zona euro: Queda abrupta do PIB português. Financiamento congela. Política de austeridade.  Portugal tem que cortar na despesa para atingir défice zero de imediato.
.
 Zona euro implode: Queda abrupta do PIB da zona euro. Financiamento congela. Política de austeridade.  Portugal tem que cortar na despesa para atingir défice zero de imediato.

Em ambos os casos, falta uma coisa - "Desvalorização do novo escudo aumenta a competitividade da indústria e da agricultura nacionais, que passam a vender mais. O empobrecimento geral criado pela austeridade é parcialmente contrabalançado pelo enriquecimento de sectores da burguesia rural e industrial, pelo que, no conjunto, o país fica um pouco menos mal do que nas opções Cenário actual e Grécia sai do euro"

extremismo ao centro

O terrorista islamofóbico-pro-Israel é considerado louco. Dizem que é de extrema-direita tradicionalmente anti-semita. Eu acho que está mais perto do que tenho chamado de extremistas ao centro-direita, os zelosos protectores das "[sociais] democracias-liberais" inspirados em parte pelo messianismo neo-conservador e o complexo de "Munich" (agir quanto antes porque senão teremos um novo Hitler, como quem esquece que foi Estaline quem venceu em toda a linha). Bons e tranquilos cidadãos, profundos apreciadores da serenidade social se horroriza legitimamente com as vítimas do terrorismo, e com a maior das calmas pode defender a necessidade e legitimidade da violência institucional armada em massa como instrumento civilizacional, a racionalidade do Vietname e Hiroxima.

A economia de "Sem Tempo"

Atenção - possíveis spoilers.

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