A responsabilidade dos economistas quanto a não ter havido uma advertência clara, da sua parte - não que não tenha havido avisos, no entanto, de alguns deles - sobre o caminho perigoso, que as coisas estavam a tomar, e a discussão das razões que explicam que tal tenha podido suceder, é um tópico que tem estado na ordem do dia, desde alguns meses a esta parte, desde que a crise se manifestou de modo inequívoco.
Fui coleccionando artigos, notas, de qualidade, escopo, e profundidade diferentes, com vista a dar-lhe um tratamento integrado; o tempo foi passando, e nada. Assim, para arrumar, e arrumar de vez, coloco este conjunto de referências antigas, a que se deve seguir outro, em breve.
Comentário? Se houver paciência, engenho e arte.
"The crisis has provided much excitement for economists. On the one hand we are exhilarated by how much there is to learn. Nothing enlightens the functioning of markets like market failure. On the other hand, it is a time of personal growth and reflexion. It’s time to look inward and recognise our own limitations and the hubris of which we were guilty as a profession."
More Navel-Gazing from Academic Economists - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com More Navel-Gazing from Academic Economists By Justin Wolfers
"The abstract of a recent paper by Colander, Föllmer, Haas, Goldberg, Juselius, Kirman, and Sloth: The economics profession appears to have been unaware of the long build-up to the current worldwide financial crisis and to have significantly underestimated its dimensions once it started to unfold.
In our view, this lack of understanding is due to a misallocation of research efforts in economics. We trace the deeper roots of this failure to the profession’s insistence on constructing models that, by design, disregard the key elements driving outcomes in real-world markets. The economics profession has failed in communicating the limitations, weaknesses, and even dangers of its preferred models to the public. This state of affairs makes clear the need for a major reorientation of focus in the research economists undertake, as well as for the establishment of an ethical code that would ask economists to understand and communicate the limitations and potential misuses of their models.
The authors call it a “systemic failure of the economics profession.” Krugman calls it “equilibrium decadence,” but rightly reserves his scolding for the macro tribe. The claim is that academic macroeconomists have become mired in a particularly fruitless equilibrium, in which each is engaged in the search for ever-greater levels of formal elegance, at the expense of empirical relevance. There’s definitely something to this. Today’s macroeconomists write for other macroeconomists.
[...] Despite this observation, I don’t share the gloom of the naysayers, but my optimism comes from looking beyond macro. As a whole, the economics profession has become more empirically grounded. New large datasets offer the prospect of truly understanding individual behavior in a way that paying lip service to “micro-founded models” doesn’t. Many are engaged in the tricky business of writing more psychologically grounded models that are closely tied to real human behavior. Computational advances allow us now to take differences in people, and how they respond, far more seriously. The absence of available data doesn’t necessarily require more complex theory; we are also learning how better to measure the objects we model.
[...] It may be too early to say that the new macro is already taking shape, but I’m willing to bet there’s going to be a renewed emphasis on imperfect and sticky information; rigorous analysis of micro datasets; plausible approaches to empirical identification; and — I hope — a belief that data, rather than op-ed debates can resolve the big debates. Institutions matter; political economy matters too. Behavior can be imperfect, markets can fail, and the unexpected does, in fact, occasionally happen. Today’s problems are both too real and too big to make ignoring the real world a sustainable equilibrium. Update: Click through for related commentary from Willem Buiter, Mark Thoma, and Brad DeLong."
Economists are the forgotten guilty men Anatole Kaletsky - Times Online
In defense of economists Free exchange Economist.com
On the Failure of Macroeconomists - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com
Economist's View: "A Dark Age of Macroeconomics"
"We specialize mightily in academic economics, people will work on very narrow questions for their entire careers and become world class experts on that question, but they tend to forget what they learned in other areas over time, and they can't possibly keep up with developments outside their areas of specialization. So we rely and depend upon the expertise of others to inform us about areas in which we don't normally work."
RGE - Why So Little Self-Recrimination Among Economists?
Economics and the crisis of 2008 vox - Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists
The global crisis is also a critical opportunity for the discipline of economics – an opportunity to disabuse ourselves of notions we should not have so gullibly accepted. Notions such as the unqualified support for market deregulation or the dismissal of aggregate volatility now come through as frivolous fads, while abstractions from the institutional foundations of markets seem naïve.
[...] In CEPR Policy Insight No. 28 posted today, I present my views on what intellectual errors have been made and what lessons to draw from them in terms of new theoretical work that is needed. [...]
Many of the roots of the crisis are apparent today, but most of us did not recognize them before the crisis.
Three too-quickly-accepted notions impelled us to ignore these impeding problems.
[...] While the data robustly show a marked decline in aggregate volatility since the 1950s, it is now clear that the end of the business cycle was a myth. Indeed, the policy and technologies that made the economy more robust against small shocks also made the economy more vulnerable to low-probability "tail" events. [...]. This new and dense pattern of interconnections created potential domino effects among financial institutions, companies, and households. Massive drops in asset values and the simultaneous insolvencies of many companies highlight that aggregate volatility is part and parcel of the market system. It is also part of the creative destruction process. Understanding that such volatility will be with us should redirect our attention towards models that help us interpret the various sources of volatility and delineate which components are associated with the efficient working of markets and which result from avoidable market failures.
[...]. Free markets are not unregulated markets. Well-designed institutions and regulation are necessary for the proper functioning of markets. Institutions have received more attention over the past 15 years, but focus was on understanding why poor nations were poor – not on understanding which institutions are necessary as the basis of markets and for continued prosperity in advanced economies.
[...] We could trust the long-lived large firms to monitor themselves because they had sufficient “reputational capital”. This belief turned out to be false due to two critical difficulties – monitoring must be done by individuals, and reputational monitoring requires that ex post punishment is credible. Both turned out false. Individuals may not care about the firm’s reputational capital, and the scarcity of specific capital and know-how means that the necessary punishments were non-credible.
[...] As academic economists, we should remind policymakers of the implications these principles have for current policies. The first point is that fixing the short-run problem with policies that harm long-run growth is a bad option from a policy and welfare perspective. Innovation and reallocation are the keys to long-run growth, but potentially powerful groups tend to resist such changes. In developing nations, it is easy for impoverished populations suffering from adverse shocks and economic crises to turn against the market system and support populist, anti-growth policies. These threats are as important for advanced economies, particularly in the midst of the current economic crisis. Stimulus plans that bailout the financial and auto sector will influence innovation and reallocation. Reallocation may particularly suffer if the stimulus plans lock in factors in low-productivity sectors and activities. Market signals suggest that labour and capital should be reallocated away from, for example, the Detroit Big Three and highly skilled labour should be reallocated away from the financial industry towards more innovative sectors. Halted reallocation will also mean halted innovation.
These concerns are not a sufficient reason for rejecting the stimulus plan, but rather a call to consider its implications for long-run growth. Decisive action on the crisis is necessary; not just soften the blow of the recession but also to avoid a backlash that could be deeply harmful to long-run growth. A deep and long recession raises the risk that consumers and policymakers start believing that free markets are responsible for the economic ills of today. If so, we could see a move away from the market economy. The pendulum could swing too far, bypassing properly-regulated free markets, towards heavy government involvement that could threaten future growth prospects of the global economy. A comprehensive stimulus plan, even with all of its imperfections, is probably the best way of fighting these dangers. Nevertheless, the details of the stimulus plan should be designed so as to cause minimal disruption to the process of reallocation and innovation. Sacrificing growth out of our fear of the present would be as severe a mistake as inaction. The risk that the belief in the capitalist system may collapse should not be dismissed.
Ensino de economia aqui Krugman: aqui How the Entire Economics Profession Failed - The Daily Beast
Ladrões de Bicicletas: Sacudir a água do capote
A destreza das dúvidas :: Progress, don’t regress :: January :: 2009
Telos (responsabilidade dos economistas financeiros): aqui
Op-Ed Contributors - The End of the Financial World as We Know It - NYTimes.com
"To that end consider the strange story of Harry Markopolos. Mr. Markopolos is the former investment officer with Rampart Investment Management in Boston who, for nine years, tried to explain to the Securities and Exchange Commission that Bernard L. Madoff couldn’t be anything other than a fraud. [...]"Grasping Reality: Raghuram Rajan Is My Guru Now...
"Raghuram Rajan stood up in 2005 and warned everybody that increased financial complexity had made the world's financial markets riskier places. He is now my guru--along with Michael Mussa." “No One Saw It Coming” — REALLY? The Big Picture Raguram Rajan’s prophetic 2005 paper on the risks posed by securitization Ver aqui- Economists behaving badly - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com
- Foreign Policy: Warning: More Doom Ahead
“Because the United States is such a huge part of the global economy, there’s real reason to worry that an American financial virus could mark the beginning of a global economic contagion.” – Nouriel Roubini, March 2008
“If, as I suspect, the American consumer now enters a sustained slowdown, there will be unmistakable reverberations on U.S.-centric export flows in many major regions of the world.” – Stephen S. Roach, October 2006“The size of the financial markets ... has become so monstrously huge, there is no other means of maintaining stability than to establish a psychology of confidence. The governments themselves can only project to the markets a sense they know what they’re doing.” – David M. Smick, March 2008“I am worried that the collapse of home prices might turn out to be the most severe since the Great Depression.” – Robert J. Shiller, September 2007“If housing prices fall back in line with the overall rate price level ... it will eliminate more than $2 trillion in paper wealth and considerably worsen the recession. The collapse of the housing bubble will also jeopardize the survival of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” – Dean Baker, September 2002
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário