Depois do comércio livre, o quê?

Economists Have No Idea What Replaces Free Trade, por Noah Smith, na Bloomberg:

One of the most interesting sessions I attended at last week’s American Economic Association meeting was a panel titled “Making global markets work for American workers.” The discussion, featuring economists Dani Rodrik, Kimberly Clausing and Josh Bivens, laid out the problems with free trade, the shortcomings of U.S. trade policy during the past few decades and some suggestions for improvement. But although the economists did a great job of critiquing the old free-trade consensus, there was no clear idea of what to replace it with.

Economists still tend to strongly back trade liberalization. But the cozy consensus in favor of removing trade barriers is eroding. The experience of the China shock, in which a sudden wave of import competition devastated the lives of many American manufacturing workers, was a wake-up call.  The bipartisan backlash against trade agreements, which threatened to leave economists in the political wilderness, was another. Economists such as Rodrik and Bivens, who have criticized the free-trade consensus for a long time, are getting heard more, while free-trade defenders such as Clausing are forging more nuanced arguments.

Ainda sobre blogues - a sua por vezes inesperada evolução

Continuando a falar de blogues (nomeadamente aqueles mega-blogues que tinham montes de colaboradores), estes muitas vezes têm evoluções inesperadas; exemplos:

a) O que era a principio o mais "centrista" dos blogues da esquerda radical (ou o mais radical da esquerda moderada?) acabou por se tornar o principal blogue da esquerda mais radical (numa espécie de joint venture entre ultra-trotskistas e comunistas relativamente ortodoxos, tendo tido ainda uns autónomos à mistura; e claro, com permanentes polémicas internas e cisões, na melhor tradição da extrema-esquerda)

b) Aquele que inicialmente me parecia o menos conservador dos principais 3 ou 4 blogues de direita parece-me agora o mais Trump/CHEGA.

EUA: a complicada relação entre milícias e Antifas

O movimento das "milícias" nos EUA parece estar em turbulência sobre colaborar ou não com os antifas (ou com o John Brown Club) na luta contra o controle de armas.

Ler também A Collection Of Antifascist Reflections From The Streets Of Virginia.

A política industrial de Trump

Trump's Surprising Embrace of Industrial Policy to Fight China, por Matt Stoller:

Today I’m going to write about the Trump administration’s surprising rejection of the traditional Republican free market orthodoxy. He is embracing a more traditional American concept for organizing the economy: Industrial policy.

[Uma nota - este post que re-posto aqui é de uma newsletrer/ blogue/??  alojado no Substack, talvez dando razão ao artigo que cito no post anterior]

Um regresso aos blogues?

A return to blogs (finally? sort of?), por Joanne McNeil:

Newsletters seem to have circled around from being the new blogs to being like blogs (but with posts that are emailed to readers). The web interface of any given public Substack is basically that of a blog. You can even set up comments. And there are subscription apps like Stoop that organize newsletters’ content as RSS readers did for blogs. (...)

It’s been long enough now that people look back on blogging fondly, but the next generation of blogs will be shaped around the habits and conventions of today’s internet. Internet users are savvier about things like context collapse and control (or lack thereof) over who gets to view their shared content. Decentralization and privacy are other factors. At this moment, while so much communication takes place backstage, in group chats and on Slack, I’d expect new blogs to step in the same ambiguous territory as newsletters have — a venue for material where not everyone is looking, but privacy is neither airtight nor expected.

Eu um dia sou capaz de escrever mais alguma coisa sobre isto (nomeadamente a respeito do que o João Vasco Gama escreve aqui).

A entrada na universidade deve ser via testes e notas, não via "avalições holísticas"

Going from standardized tests to recommendations will compound inequality in the long-term, por Razib Khan, no Gene Expression:

[T]he tests were not fair. You often needed resources to engage in the study of “classics.” They clearly favored those with privilege. But, they were invariably fairer than other paths to an official position.(...)

In contrast, other paths toward an official position, such as recommendation, tended to be monopolized by those with connections.

The “natural experiment” has happened many times. The plaintiffs in the above case assert that “teacher recommendations” “would provide a fairer way of judging students.” They are either ignorant or being disingenuous. Teachers are human, and there is a fair amount of evidence that they naturally bias toward believing children with polish and who “look the part” are smarter and more competent.

 E, do outro lado do expectro político,The Progressive Case for the SAT, por Freddie Deboer, na Jacobin:

The student who is captain of the sailing team, president of the robotics club, and who spent a summer building houses in the Global South will likely look more “holistically” valuable than a poorer student who has not had the resources to do similar activities. Who is more likely to be a star violin player or to have completed a summer internship at a fancy magazine: a poor student or an affluent one? College essays are more easily improved through coaching than test scores, and teachers at expensive private schools likely feel more pressure to write effusive letters of recommendation than their peers in public schools.

Favoring the “soft” aspects of a college application is straightforwardly beneficial to the more privileged at the expense of the less.

E nesta thread no Twitter, links para mais uma carrada de artigos no mesmo sentido. Ver também o que tenho escrito sobre o assunto no Vias de Facto:Investigador quer que o ensino superior seja ainda mais selectivo e discriminatório e  O acesso ao ensino superior (de novo).

O mal da "meritocracia" está na "-cracia", não no "mérito-"

The Problem Isn't the 'Merit,' It's the 'Ocracy', em The Scholar's Stage:

A pure meritocracy undistorted by existing class cleavages will distort the nation it is inflicted upon. Deciding who rules and who is ruled through a system which selects on a narrow field of virtues inevitably leads to one outcome: an aristocracy of the meritorious few who do not have the experience or the inclination to act in the interests of masses less virtuous than they.

O post é totalmente EUA-cêntrico, mas penso que pode ser generalizado sem grande esforço.

Roger Scruton como snowflake que queria um safe space

European conservatives mourn their intellectual hero, por Cas Mudde(VoxEurop):

Although many obituaries imply that he was fired by his university, Scruton in fact resigned from the University of London’s Birkbeck College on his own initiative, upset by the growing critique of his openly right-wing views.

Hence, Scruton can also be seen as the original right-wing snowflake, who thinks freedom of speech is not so much about the state protecting the right of everyone to say what they want, but about (...) having the right to say dismissive things about others without being criticized for their remarks.

Reino Unido põe na gaveta comércio livre unilateral?

UK to use high tariff threat to raise pressure in trade negotiations (Reuters):

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is mulling to use the threat of high tariffs to raise pressure on the European Union, the United States and other nations to strike trade deals with Britain, The Times newspaper reported on Saturday.

A mim parece-me que a ideia, que a dada altura foi muito falada, do Reino Unido, fora da UE, abolir unilateralmente as tarifas, nunca fez grande sentido - como é que o RU poderia "ter todos as cartas" nas negociações com a UE (como os brexiters diziam) se prometesse logo à partida que, decorressem as negociações como decorressem, as produtos da UE poderiam entrar sem barreiras? E, sobretudo,  a conversa de que a industria automóvel alemã irá pressionar a UE a fazer um acordo com o RU em condições favoráveis a este último parece ter implícito um cenário em que na ausência de um acordo o default fosse ser mais díficil exportar automóveis da Alemanha para o RU.

A classe operária como parteira de democracia

Movimentos de protesto contra regimes autoritários tendem a produzir regimes democráticos (em vez de fracassarem ou mudar um ditador por outro) sobretudo quando têm grande apoio do operariado industrial.

We checked 100 years of protests in 150 countries. Here’s what we learned about the working class and democracy, por Sirianne Dahlum, Carl Henrik Knutsen e Tore Wig, no Monkey Cage (Washington Post):

In a new study, we systematically examine how citizens have sought to promote democracy in about 150 countries. Here’s what we find: Industrial workers have been key agents of democratization and, if anything, are even more important than the urban middle classes. When industrial workers mobilize mass opposition against a dictatorship, democratization is very likely to follow.

Who Revolts? Empirically Revisiting the Social Origins of Democracy, por Sirianne Dahlum, Carl Henrik Knutsen e Tore Wig, em The Journal of Politics, Vol. 81, Nº 4 (Agosto de 2019):

Several prominent accounts suggest that democratic transitions are more likely to take place when opposition to the incumbent regime is led by certain social groups. We further develop the argument that opposition movements dominated by industrial workers or the urban middle classes have both the requisite motivation and capacity to bring about democratization. To systematically test this argument, we collect new data on the social composition of antiregime opposition movements, globally from 1900 to 2006. We find that movements dominated by one of these urban groups more often result in democracy, both when compared to other movements and to situations without organized mass opposition. As expected, the relationship is stronger in urban than rural societies, and in more recent decades. When further differentiating the groups and accounting for plausible alternative explanations, the relationship between industrial worker campaigns and democratization is very robust, whereas the evidence is mixed for middle-class campaigns.

O autoritarismo centrista

O artigo tem por base Bloomberg nos EUA, mas parece-me que o raciocínio também poderá ser aplicado a Macron em França, p.ex..

Michael Bloomberg Has an Anti-Democratic Streak, por Jeet Heer, em The Nation:

The affinity of centrists with authoritarianism makes sense when we consider that people on the extreme ends of the political spectrum are likely to be wary of unchecked state power. They can easily imagine such power being used against them. Centrists like Bloomberg, who are safely ensconced in mainstream society and hold positions of high social status, are more likely to take an uncritical view of trampling on democratic norms, since they have the comfort of knowing that the authorities are unlikely to go after reputable figures.

Writing in The New York Times, political researcher David Adler cited comparative polling showing that “across Europe and North America, centrists are the least supportive of democracy, the least committed to its institutions and the most supportive of authoritarianism.” While it’s become commonplace to locate the authoritarian threat as a product of extremism, Adler found “evidence of substantial support for a ‘strong leader’ who ignores his country’s legislature, particularly among centrists. In the United States, centrists’ support for a strongman-type leader far surpasses that of the right and the left.”

Efeitos (e vantagens) da democracia direta

 Direct Democracy and Local Public Goods: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia [PDF], por Benjamin A. Olken, na American Political Science Review,Vol. 104, No. 2, (Maio de 2010):

This  article  presents  an  experiment  in  which  49  Indonesian  villages  were  randomly  assigned to   choose   development   projects   through   either   representative-based   meetings   or   direct election-based plebiscites. Plebiscites resulted in dramatically higher satisfaction among villagers, increased knowledge about the project, greater perceived benefits, and higher reported willingness to contribute. Changing the political mechanism had much smaller effects on the actual projects selected, with some evidence that plebiscites resulted in projects chosen by women being located in poorer areas. The results suggest that direct participation in political decision making can substantially increase satisfaction and legitimacy.

Direct Democracy and Land Use Policy: Exchanging Public Goods for Development Rights [PDF], por Elisabeth R. Gerber and Justin H. Phillips, em Urban Studies, Vol. 41, No. 2, (Fev., 2004):

This study analyses the effects of one type of direct democracy—voter requirements for new development—on municipal growth. Analysing data from a sample of California communities, we consider the impact of voter requirements on the land use process and outcomes. We find that—in general—voter requirements fail to stop new development; property owners and developers can and do adapt to the constraints created by these direct democracy institutions. We also find, however, that voter requirements change the land use process in important ways. Specifically, they change the way developers interact with interest groups in the community and force developers to compensate current residents for enduring some of the negative aspects of growth.

Legislative Response to the Threat of Popular Initiative [link de acesso restrito], por Elisabeth Gerber, no American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Fev., 1996):

A spatial model of the policy process is used to identify conditions under which the threat of initiatives constrains legislative behavior. Legislators in states that allow initiatives are expected to pass laws that more closely reflect their state's median voter's preference than legislators in states that do not allow initiatives.

Direct Democracy: New Approaches to Old Questions [link de acesso restrito], por Arthur Lupia and John G. Matsusaka, na Annual Review of Political Science, Vol. 7 (Junho de 2004):

We organize the discussion around four “old” questions that have long been at the heart of the direct democracy debate: Are voters competent? What role does money play? How does direct democracy affect policy? Does direct democracy benefit the many or the few? We find that recent breakthroughs in theory and empirical analysis paint a comparatively positive picture of the initiative and referendum. For example, voters are more competent, and the relationship between money and power in direct democracy is less nefarious, than many observers allege. More new studies show that the mere presence of direct democracy induces sitting legislatures to govern more effectively.

 [Via Shom Mazumder]

A morte do liberalismo (inglês?)

Como a direita liberal parece estar a desaparecer (pelo menos no mundo anglo-saxónico).

The Strange Death of Libertarian England, por Chris Dillow (suponho que em referência a este livro de 1935):

It wasn’t just the Labour party that took a beating in last month’s general election. So too, but much less remarked, did right-libertarianism.

The Tories won on policies that repudiated many of their professed beliefs: ahigher minimum wage; increased public spending; and the manpower planning that is a points-based immigration policy. And the manifesto (pdf) promise to “ensure that there is a proper balance between the rights of individuals, our vital national security and effective government” should also alarm libertarians. John Harris quotes an anonymous minister as saying that the libertarianism of Britannia Unchained is “all off the agenda” and that “some of the things we’ve celebrated have led us astray.”

Este post de Tyler Cowen, What libertarianism has become and will become — State Capacity Libertarianism, parece-me apontar no mesmo caminho, ainda que em tom entusiástico: o que ele me parece estar a defender é um liberalismo que aceita ou até defende qualquer intervenção do Estado desde que seja para beneficiar a economia e as empresas (só aquelas intervenções puramente redistributivas parecem ficar de fora); a passagem em que Cowen escreve que "A good strong state should see the maintenance and extension of capitalism as one of its primary duties, in many cases its #1 duty" parece-me o protótipo do "pro-business, not pro-market" (diga-se que isto parece-me muito a definição de "neoliberalismo" que o "ladrão de bicicletas" Alexandre Abreu dava há uns anos - afinal ele até teria alguma razão; já Simon Cook - vereador conservador numa pequena localidade inglesa - considerou o "state-capacity libertarianism" como os liberais adultos a tornarem-se conservadores mas sem puderem usar a palavra "conservador"; por outro lado, um dos comentadores ao artigo de Cowen respondeu "You've basically invented fascism").

Localizações de instituições públicas

Há muito que sou da opinião que a sede do Centro Hospitalar e Universitário do Algarve deveria ficar em Paderne (mesmo a meio caminho entre Portimão e Faro).

Create your own government policy distraction by moving the last public institution you visited to the provincial hometown of one of your grandparents.

For example, I am moving the V&A to Derry

— James Shaddock (@jpshaddock) 20 de janeiro de 2020

(o twitt acima é, suponho, a respeito da transferência da Câmara dos Lordes para York)

Reservas à "Teoria Monetária Moderna"

Uma crítica pela esquerda à TMM e também à "garantia universal de emprego".

Modern Monetary Theory Isn’t Helping, por Doug Henwood, na Jacobin:

Sometimes it’s really hard to figure out just what MMTers believe. Are they just saying, in very roundabout ways, that it’s okay for the federal government to run a small deficit in normal times and occasional big ones in crises like 2008? That would be hard for anyone but the most wicked austerity hound to disagree with.

Or is it that we shouldn’t worry about deficits at all?

Antifa contra o "gun control"

Antifa Seven Hills issued a lengthy statement after Vice News reported the group would be attending a rally to protest pending gun control legislation in front of the Virginia Capital in Richmond on January 20.

Vice reported that while conservative gun-rights activists and antifa appear to be "unlikely bedfellows," Antifa Seven Hills "believe they've got more in common with working-class white Virginians, regardless of their political bent" than many moderate Democrats.

According to Vice, the group opposes the new gun bills introduced by Democrats late last year because those kinds of laws are used "primarily to criminalize poor people, minorities and leftists."

The outlet said the "shared skepticism" of political moderates and authorities is the reason why Antifa Seven Hills views the rally as a chance to "extend an olive branch to other gun owners—at least those who don't align with the far-right militias or white supremacists who are also expected to show up to the event."

(Newsweek)

Atenção que "Antifa" não é uma organização, mas um nome genético atribuído a (ou usado por) vários grupos, largamente sem nada comparável a um comando central (ou seja, este artigo refere-se apenas a um grupo "antifa", não ao conjunto do movimento)

Islamismo e textualismo

Islamic Wine-Goblets and Christian Adultery, por Roderick T. Long:

Throughout Islamic history, there have been traditions that regarded some source of moral and spiritual knowledge other than the Qur’an and Hadith (e.g., philosophical reason, personal mystical inspiration, communal customs, etc.) as superior in authority to the Qur’an and Hadith, and on this basis happily engaged in and celebrated activities forbidden by the literal words of Qur’an and Hadith, such as wine-drinking (and wine-poems, and wine-cups inscribed with Qur’anic verses), figurative painting, a “positive valorization of idol-worship,” the “calling of God by the names of Hindu deities,” etc., etc. (...)

A final explanation offered by Ahmed appeals to an unfortunate accident of geography: “the rise in a relatively unimportant part of northern Arabia in the eighteenth century of Wahhābism,” a particularly rigid legalist-textualist form of Islam, “followed by the accession to power in the Arabian peninsula by the adherents of this movement in the early twentieth century, followed in turn by the discovery of copious quantities of the most strategically critical and financially lucrative modern commodity in the Arabian peninsula, the funds from which have entrenched the power of the Saʿūdī Wahhābī state and supported the propagation of [its] creed worldwide.”

A situação no Haiti seria considerada um "golpe de Estado" em grande parte do mundo

Exclusive: Haiti's Moise plans to use new powers to overhaul constitution (Reuters):

Haiti’s President Jovenel Moise, who began ruling by decree this week, wants to use his new power to overhaul the constitution in an attempt to break a “decades-long cycle of political crises,” a planned presidential statement seen by Reuters shows.

Isto parece ser tudo legal, mas quer a ideia da legislatura acabar sem novas eleições e a partir daí o presidente governar por decreto, quer sobretudo a do presidente aproveitar esses poderes adicionais para rever a Constituição parecem muito peculiares.

Os sonhos mudam em regimes autoritários?

How Dreams Change Under Authoritarianism, por Mireille Juchau, na New Yorker:

Not long after Hitler came to power, in 1933, a thirty-year-old woman in Berlin had a series of uncanny dreams. In one, her neighborhood had been stripped of its usual signs, which were replaced with posters that listed twenty verboten words; the first was “Lord” and the last was “I.” In another, the woman found herself surrounded by workers, including a milkman, a gasman, a newsagent, and a plumber. She felt calm, until she spied among them a chimney sweep. (In her family, the German word for “chimney sweep” was code for the S.S., a nod to the trade’s blackened clothing.) The men brandished their bills and performed a Nazi salute. Then they chanted, “Your guilt cannot be doubted.”

These are two of about seventy-five dreams collected in “The Third Reich of Dreams,” a strange, enthralling book by the writer Charlotte Beradt. Neither scientific study nor psychoanalytic text, “The Third Reich of Dreams” is a collective diary, a witness account hauled out of a nation’s shadows and into forensic light. The book was released, in Germany, in 1966; an English translation, by Adriane Gottwald, was published two years later but has since fallen out of print. (Despite ongoing interest from publishers, no one has been able to find Beradt’s heir, who holds the rights.) But the book deserves revisiting, not just because we see echoes today of the populism, racism, and taste for surveillance that were part of Beradt’s time but because there’s nothing else like it in the literature of the Holocaust. “These dreams—these diaries of the night—were conceived independently of their authors’ conscious will,” Beradt writes. “They were, so to speak, dictated to them by dictatorship.”

Imigração para o Canadá

Unskilled foreigners seek move to Canada (The Beaverton):

A British and American couple, both unemployed, are seeking to emigrate to Canada despite having no real skills to offer the country, early reports indicate.

British and American media have said that an American actor and her husband have the intention of living in the country on a semi-permanent or permanent basis. 

Sobre o acordo comercial EUA-China

Uma sucessão de posts de Brad Setser no Twitter.

Considerações sobre o controle das rendas

Considerations on Rent Control, por J. W. Mason:

Among economists, rent regulation seems be in similar situation as the minimum wage was 20 years ago. At that time, most economists  took it for granted that raising the minimum wage would reduce employment. Textbooks said that it was simple supply and demand — if you raise the price of something, people will buy less of it. But as more state and local governments raised minimum wages, it turned out to be very hard to find any negative effect on employment. This was confirmed by more and more careful empirical studies. Today, it is clear that minimum wages do not reduce employment. And as economists have worked to understand why not, this has improved our theories of the labor market.

Rent regulation may be going through a similar evolution today.

A ala libertária dos Trabalhistas britânicos

Black Rose - The Labour Party Libertarian Socialists:

This is why we are launching Black Rose: the libertarian socialist caucus of the Labour Party. Black Rose will be a radically democratic, decentralised organisation for members of the party who identify as intersectional libertarian socialists: people who, like all other socialists (and as stated by our party’s old Clause IV), believe in the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, but who also recognize that the fullest realisation of this core socialist principle can only occur in a system where the working class have direct power over their lives. We believe in the transfer of power from the state to the ordinary civilian, through principles of radical democracy, decentralisation, liberation and anti-capitalism.

We also recognise intersectionality: the recognition of the multitude of ways in which individuals and communities are affected by a multiplicity of oppressive structures and coercive power relations. These include not just class, but also racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, ableism, colonialism, just to name a few.

An intersectional approach requires the recognition of these oppressive structures and relations in order to understand people's and communities' social, political and economic positions in order to work towards solutions to emancipating them. For us, intersectionality, libertarianism, and socialism go hand-in-hand and guide us in all our political activities.

Within the party, we will advocate for changes to our current policy platform. We want the party to oppose the war on drugs that has left communities in ruin, and end it in government, decriminalising drugs alongside policies based on a public health approach to addiction. The party must also oppose state surveillance and excess police powers, such as stop-and-search.

To this end, we aim to bring motions to the next party Conference to ensure these stances are adopted and that Labour politicians offer a real alternative to the authoritarian status quo.

In terms of policy, we welcome the moves made by John McDonnell and his team towards a model of public ownership that puts workers and communities in charge of services, and not the state as nationalisation previously has done. The party must continue in this vein, studying all parts of our policy platform and revising policies where needed to put as much economic and political power into the hands of the civilian as possible. Black Rose will be lobbying for this.

We also aim to be much more than a cog in an electoral machine; we want to be an organisation that puts our principles into practice, engaging with and supporting the wider left outside the party. We must become organisers out in the real world, organising in our workplaces through trade unions and in our communities through renters’ unions. We also need to be supporting smaller, member-led unions doing great work on the ground such as IWW, IWGB, and UVW. These unions, as well as plenty of other worthwhile extra-Parliamentary struggles, often lack support from Labour members, mostly due to a lack of awareness of their work. This is something that has to change.

Our organisation will be built from the ground up with other libertarian socialist members, ensuring that our principles are embedded into our very organisational structures. Although we draw inspiration from our comrades in the Libertarian Socialist Caucus of the Democratic Socialists of America, our structures will only be the result of a multitude of voices of the Labour Party coming together to create a true model for radical democracy.

Os conselhos operários na Revolução Iraniana

Do seu aparecimento em 1978/79 à sua repressão pelo regime de Khomeini.

The Iranian Revolution at the Twilight of the Workers' Council, por Arya Zahedi, no Commune (via Libcom):

On February 9, 1979, after a group of pro-Khomeini technicians at the main air base outside Tehran mutinied, pro-shah elite units, called “Immortals,” attacked the base. The rifts in the state shone bright, a moment of opportunity had arrived. Word spread throughout the city. Barricades went up. Far-left guerilla groups rushed into the city to confront the shock troops. Police stations and military barracks were overrun. An arms factory was raided and over fifty thousand weapons expropriated and distributed to the insurgents. Prisons were blown open. Government buildings occupied. On February 11, the TV and radio stations declared the victory of the revolution.

At the center of the mobilization were the working class committees — shoras — which had evolved out of the strike committees of November the previous year. In the context of the insurrection, these committees flourished. The shoras developed out of the real needs of the workers after the collapse of the shah’s regime. Many owners and managers, particularly of state-owned firms close to the regime, had fled. The workers took over the factories and ran them through their councils. This holiday of workers’ self-organization was brief, however, as Khomeini and forces within the Islamic Republican Party (IRP) that had formed around him immediately began to weaken the power of the shoras as an independent base of working class action.

Jeanine Áñez, presidente-ditadora?

Constitucionalista afirma que Presidenta no necesita a la ALP para gobernar después del 22 de enero (Agencia Boliviana de Información):

Sucre, 12 ene (ABI).- El abogado constitucionalista, Marco Baldivieso, sostuvo el domingo que la presidenta Jeanine Áñez no necesita a la Asamblea Legislativa Plurinacional para gobernar después del 22 de enero

Combate ao absentismo escolar na China

"Schools in China's Guizhou and Guangxi have introduced "smart uniforms" embedded with GPS trackers and facial recognition tech to stop students from skipping class and to assure parents of their children's attendance and safety."

Criptomoedas e o padrão-sardinha

Isto faz-me lembrar que por volta de 1983 as conservas de sardinha transformaram-se numa espécie de moeda nalguns subúrbios de Portimão - as fábricas de conserva (que pouco depois acabariam por fechar) começaram à pagar às operárias em latas de conserva em vez de em escudos.

Crypto And Sardines Combine To Create An Investment Opportunit, por Frances Coppola:

Hot on the heels of the ill-fated Bananacoin (remember that?) comes another token linked to the price of a foodstuff. Yesterday, the crypto world was rocked by the announcement of an Initial Sardine Coin Offering. Specifically, a Vintage 2020 Sardine Coin, known as SARD2020. (...)

But issuing a stablecoin pegged to vintage sardines is not as silly as it sounds. It is a lot more credible than pegging a cryptocurrency to bananas, though this is a pretty low bar. Sardines are not only delicious, they can be valuable. Canned sardines that have been aged under controlled conditions are prized for their “mellower flavor, which after years of turning becomes more subtle and nuanced, with a soft, plump texture that probably comes from the tiny bones in the fish breaking down over time.” Because of this, they command a premium price. In 2013, one brave individual bought a 32-year-old can of sardines for $53: the original price of the can was probably less than a dollar.

Ver também: O padrão-carapau

64% dos trabalhadores preferiam ser dirigidos por um robot do que pelo seu gestor humano

 E na China e na Índia chega aos 90%.

64% workers globally would trust a robot manager more than their human boss, por Khatarine Roomey (ThePrint):

But a new survey shows some workers have much friendlier views toward AI. Oracle and Future Workplace found 82% of workers believe robot managers are better at certain tasks – such as maintaining work schedules and providing unbiased information – than their human counterparts.

And almost two-thirds (64%) of workers worldwide say they would trust a robot more than their human manager. In China and India, that figure rises to almost 90%.

Os imigrantes que enfrentam a Amazon

Meet the Immigrants Who Took On Amazon (Wired):

How a group of Somalis became leaders in the fight to change a tech behemoth.

"It's Not Working: Steeltown USA"

Documentário norte-americano de 1980 sobre soluções para empresas que fecharam, nomeadamente a sua compra por cooperativas organizadas pelos seus trabalhadores.



[Via Libcom]

Possíve confusão na próxima noite eleitoral nos EUA?

An Inconclusive 2020 Election Night Is Already Looming, por Jonathan Bernstein (Bloomberg):

We know it’s going to happen. In several states where voting by mail is either the only or a major form of casting ballots, and where those ballots take time to collect, the Election Day counts are — not can be, but are — highly misleading. We know that millions of votes will be counted after election night. And we know that those votes will tilt toward Democrats.

Therefore, we know that the count on election night will be better for Republicans than the eventual total count. One of the states involved, Arizona, is likely to be an important swing state in 2020, so it’s possible that election night will end with Arizona seemingly giving Republicans the presidency, only to flip to the Democrats a few days later. After all, in the 2018 Arizona Senate contest, Republican Martha McSally led after Election Day, but Democrat Kyrsten Sinema won when all the ballots were counted and it wasn’t all that close; Sinema prevailed by 2.4 percentage points, or 55,900 votes.

Manzanar - parte 2?

BREAKING: US CUSTOMS & BORDER PROTECTION NATIONALLY HAVE BEEN ORDERED TO DETAIN & "REPORT" ALL IRANIANS ENTERING THE COUNTRY DEEMED POTENTIALLY SUSPICIOUS OR "ADVERSARIAL" REGARDLESS OF CITIZENSHIP STATUS. 

[Para quem não perceba o título]

Como o latifúndio reduz o crescimento económico

Pelo menos parece ter sido o caso nos EUA, onde, na colonização do Oeste, as terras foram na maior parte dos sítios entregues (pelos Homstead Acts) a quintas familiares, mas nalguns sítios foram entregues a grandes empresas (nomedamente ferroviárias). Até hoje, os sítios onde as terras foram entregue a grandes empresas continuam menos ricos que os outros,

Land Concentration and Long-Run Development: Evidence from the Frontier United States [PDF], por Cory Smith (Massachusetts Institute of Technology):

Worldwide, land ownership is concentrated in the hands of relatively few people. This paper studies the impacts of land concentration on the long-run development of communities founded in the frontier United States using quasi-random variation in land allocation policies. I collect a large database of modern property tax valuations and show that land concentration had persistent effects over a span of 150 years, lowering investment by 23%, overall property value by 4.4%, and population by 8%. I argue that landlords’ use of sharecropping raised the costs of investment, a static inefficiency that persisted due to transaction costs in land markets. I find little evidence for other explanations, including elite capture of political systems. I use my empirical estimates to evaluate counterfactual policies, applying recent advances in combinatorial optimization to show that an optimal property rights allocation would have increased my sample’s agricultural land values by $28 billion (4.8%) in 2017.

 Uma sequencia no Twitter onde o autor explica o artigo.

Eu há uns 11 anos comecei a escrever um post (na sequência deste do Carlos Novais) em que iria abordar a questão das ineficiências que podem ser provocadas pela grande propriedade - deve estar nos rascunhos, pelo que pode ser que ainda venha a ver a luz do dia.

O candidato favorito dos soldados norte-americanos?

Não é quem eu estava à espera.

Pelo menos em termos de donativos (fonte: Which Democratic Candidates Are National Security Employees Opening Their Wallets for?, na Foreign Policy).

Já agora, e pela mesma fonte,  o candidato favorito do deep state parece ser Pete Buttigieg.

Achei a diferença!

A Helena Matos pede no Blasfémias para se "descubra as diferenças" entre a morte (ou as reações à morte) de Bin Laden e de Qasem Soleimani.

Efeitos de um imposto sobre a riqueza nos investimentos arriscados

Does a wealth tax discourage risky investments?, por Joshua Gans (Digitopoly):

The other day I wrote about the potential impact of a wealth tax. In so doing, I wrote: “we can all agree that the wealth tax likely deters risk-free saving.” This was a paraphrase of a claim made by Larry Summers who then went on to say that it was unknown whether a wealth tax would encourage or discourage risky investment. But I did wonder what the impact of a wealth tax would be on various types of investments and in examining this I realized that the claim was incorrect. In fact, a wealth tax is unlikely to have any change on the risk profile of investments in contrast to an income (or even consumption tax) that will. I discovered later that this was a known result being contained in a paper from Joe Stiglitz (QJE, 1969).

Centralização, descentralização e anarco-sindicalismo

In Defense of A/S: Centralism and Decentralism, por Piper Tompkins/Ivysyn (via Libcom):

This is the third in a series of posts here on the Antisystemic blog which defend Anarcho-syndicalism from various criticisms. This edition of "In Defense of A/S" will deal with the issue of "centralism". Anarcho-syndicalism and Anarchism more broadly are often criticized for supposedly fetishizing decentralization. The Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin, in his critique of Anarchism, states that Anarchists advocate small scale market economies rather than working class control of society at large.1 I have personally encountered criticisms of Anarchism and Anarcho-syndicalism which contend that there can not be a rationally planned system of production without top down central planning which Anarchism and Anarcho-syndicalism are presumed to be allergic to.