Sobre Piketty

Brad DeLong descreteia sobre o livro de Piketty, Capital no Século XXI (2013), principais pontos, críticas (as boas e as menos boas). Interessante e uma boa súmula das questões que o livro levantou e levanta. Leitura recomendada.

The Melting-Away of North Atlantic Social Democracy

Curta e seca

Na linha de citar cartas de economistas, e agora de outro quadrante, esta de Joan Robinson para Ronald Meek é exemplar, a diversos títulos:

Joan Robinson's Letter to Ronald Meek: 

When I say I understand Marx better than you, I don’t mean to say that I know the text better than you do. If you start throwing quotations at me you will have me baffled in no time. In fact, I refuse to play before you begin.

What I mean is that I have Marx in my bones and you have him in your mouth. To take an example – the idea that constant capital is an embodiment of labour power expended in the past. To you this is something that has to be proved with a lot of Hegelian stuff and nonsense. Whereas I say (though I do not use such pompous terminology): ‘Naturally – what else did you think it could be?’

Preto sobre branco: a brutal verdade do capitalismo financeiro (norte-americano) actual

Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs - NYTimes.com

A gravura acompanha o artigo, e como o artigo é brutal, e como o artigo quer ser brutal.

Fui encaminhado para este depoimento no NYT por este artigo do Económico (aqui).

TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it. 

 

To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for. 

It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief. 

But this was not always the case. For more than a decade I recruited and mentored candidates through our grueling interview process. I was selected as one of 10 people (out of a firm of more than 30,000) to appear on our recruiting video, which is played on every college campus we visit around the world. In 2006 I managed the summer intern program in sales and trading in New York for the 80 college students who made the cut, out of the thousands who applied. 

I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work. 

[continuar a ler:.... é obrigatório]

O combate político do nosso tempo é este, mas anda tudo distraído, mesmo aqueles a quem o que se segue parece confirmar as suas percepções (estou a ser claro, não estou?)

We need to know who funds these thinktank lobbyists | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian

Shocking, fascinating, entirely unsurprising: the leaked documents, if authentic, confirm what we suspected but could not prove. The Heartland Institute, which has helped lead the war against climate science in the United States, is funded among others by tobacco firms, fossil fuel companies and one of the billionaire Koch brothers.

It appears to have followed the script written by a consultant to the Republican party, Frank Luntz, in 2002. "Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate."Luntz's technique was pioneered by the tobacco companies and the creationists: teach the controversy. In other words, insist that the question of whether cigarettes cause lung cancer, natural selection drives evolution, or burning fossil fuels causes climate change, is still wide open, and that both sides of the "controversy" should be taught in schools and thrashed out in the media.

The leaked documents appear to show that, courtesy of its multimillionaire donors, the institute has commissioned a global warming curriculum for schools which teaches that "whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy" and "whether CO₂ is a pollutant is controversial".