Porque razão os judeus têm tido o sucesso económico que tem tido?

E a resposta abaixo fornece, também, pistas para as razões porque Portugal tratou os seus judeus como tratou, e, implicitamente, o preço que se pagou, e continua-se a pagar - sim, mesmo quatro séculos depois - por isso. Leitura recomendada na sua totalidade.

Why Do Jews Succeed? - Jerry Z. Muller - Project Syndicate

In recent decades, economists have been struggling to make use of the concept of human capital, often defined as the abilities, skills, knowledge, and dispositions that make for economic success. Yet those who use the term often assume that to conceptualize a phenomenon is a first step to manipulating it. And, indeed, “human-capital policy” is now much in fashion. But what if many of the abilities and dispositions in question are a product of history, capable of being understood and explained but not readily replicated?[...]

To the extent that human capital involves character traits and varieties of “know-how” that are transmitted within the realms of the family and the community, rather than by formal education, it becomes both methodologically elusive and difficult to manipulate by public policy.  [....]

Such factors provide a sense of why attention to the history of Jews under capitalism helps us to understand capitalism more generally. It reminds us that much of success in a capitalist society is based on cultural and historical factors that produce qualities such as innovativeness, willingness to tolerate risk, and willingness to defer gratification through savings and education.[....]

Exploring the economic history of the Jews also reminds us that groups that are disproportionately successful are met by different political reactions. Societies long oriented to economic dynamism tend to welcome the economically successful, viewing them as a source of mutual gains.

But cultures that tend to resent the economically successful – either as an affront to equality, or on the implicit assumption that the economic gains of some must be at the expense of others – tend to be more hostile toward Jews and given to conspiratorial theories to explain their economic success. Most societies lie somewhere along a spectrum between these two poles. [....]

Leituras diversas destes últimos dias sobre questões de economia

Das mais antigas para as mais recentes:

Debt and Dumb | Politics | Vanity Fair: As a young artillery captain in the Revolutionary War, Alexander Hamilton learned a crucial lesson: Good credit, based on the power to tax, is essential to a nation’s security. As the first U.S. Treasury secretary, he built America’s fiscal policy on that principle. Will the Tea Party destroy his legacy?

Working In The Dark | The New Republic: This was Keynes’s case for conscious corrective fiscal and monetary policy. Its relevance for today should be obvious. It is a vulgar error to characterize Keynes as an advocate of “big government” and a chronic budget deficit. His goal was to stabilize the private economy at a generally prosperous level of activity.

The End of the Future - Peter Thiel - National Review Online: The technology slowdown threatens not just our financial markets, but the entire modern political order, which is predicated on easy and relentless growth. The give-and-take of Western democracies depends on the idea that we can craft political solutions that enable most people to win most of the time. But in a world without growth, we can expect a loser for every winner. Many will suspect that the winners are involved in some sort of racket, so we can expect an increasingly nasty edge to our politics. We may be witnessing the beginnings of such a zero-sum system in politics in the U.S. and Western Europe, as the risks shift from winning less to losing more, and as our leaders desperately cast about for macroeconomic solutions to problems that have not been primarily about economics for a long time.

John Kay - The Map is Not the Territory: An Essay on the State of Economics

A propósito dos tempos que correm, um pouco de história económica ...

Bleed the Foreigner - Harold James - Project Syndicate

Today, the world is threatened with a repeat of the 2008 financial meltdown – but on an even more cataclysmic scale. This time, the epicenter is in Europe, rather than the United States. And this time, the financial mechanisms involved are not highly complex structured financial products, but one of the oldest financial instruments in the world: government bonds.

While governments and central banks race frantically to find a solution, there is a profound psychological dynamic at work that stands in the way of an orderly debt workout: our aversion to recognizing obligations to strangers.

The impulse simply to cut the Gordian knot of debt by defaulting on it is much stronger when creditors are remote and unknown. In 2007-2008, it was homeowners who could not keep up with payments; now it is governments. But, in both cases, the lender was distant and anonymous. American mortgages were no longer held at the local bank, but had been repackaged in esoteric financial instruments and sold around the world; likewise, Greek government debt is in large part owed to foreigners.

Because Spain and France defaulted so much in the early modern period, and because Greece, from the moment of its political birth in 1830, was a chronic or serial defaulter, some assume that national temperament somehow imbues countries with a proclivity to default. But that search for long historical continuity is facile, for it misses one of the key determinants of debt sustainability: the identity of the state’s creditor.

Dir-me-ão: a que propósito vem isto ... Bem, não estou seguro disso, mas alguma coisa aqui merece atenção!

Fair, Balanced, and Reality-Based: The Semi-Daily Journal of Economist Brad DeLong: James Scott, "Legibility," Flavius Apion, Anoup, the Emperor Justinian, Robin of Locksley, Rebecca Daughter of Mordecai, King Richard, and Others…: September 14, 2010;

In 542 AD the late Roman (early Byzantine?) Emperor Justinian I wrote to his Praetorian Prefect concerning the army--trained and equipped and paid for by the Roman State to control the barbarians and to "increase the state." Justinian was, Peter Sarris reports in his Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian, upset that: 

certain individuals had been daring to draw away soldiers and foederati from their duties, occupying such troops entirely with their own private business.... The emperor... prohibit[ed] such individuals from drawing to themselves or diverting troops... having them in their household... on their property or estates.... [A]ny individual who, after thirty days, continues to employ soldiers to meet his private needs and does not return them to their units will face confiscation of property... "and those soldiers and fioderati who remain in paramonar attendance upon them... will not only be deprived of their rank, but also undergo punishments up to and including capital punishment."

Justinian is worried because what is going on in the country he rules is not legible to him. Soldiers--soldiers whom he has trained, equipped, and paid for--have been hired away from their frontier duties by the great landlords of the Empire and employed on their estates and in the areas they dominate as bully-boys. One such great landlord was Justinian's own sometime Praefectus Praetorio per Orientem Flavius Apion, to whom one of Flavius's tenants and debtors, one Anoup, wrote:

Niall Ferguson: The 6 killer apps of prosperity | Video on TED.com

Interessante.

Niall Ferguson: The 6 killer apps of prosperity | Video on TED.com:

Over the past few centuries, Western cultures have been very good at creating general prosperity for themselves. Historian Niall Ferguson asks: Why the West, and less so the rest? He suggests half a dozen big ideas from Western culture -- call them the 6 killer apps -- that promote wealth, stability and innovation. And in this new century, he says, these apps are all shareable.

No que Marx, efectivamente, acertou ...

BBC News - A Point of View: The revolution of capitalism

Karl Marx​ may have been wrong about communism but he was right about much of capitalism, John Gray writes. 

As a side-effect of the financial crisis, more and more people are starting to think Karl Marx was right. The great 19th Century German philosopher, economist and revolutionary believed that capitalism was radically unstable.It had a built-in tendency to produce ever larger booms and busts, and over the longer term it was bound to destroy itself.Marx welcomed capitalism's self-destruction. He was confident that a popular revolution would occur and bring a communist system into being that would be more productive and far more humane. 

Marx was wrong about communism. Where he was prophetically right was in his grasp of the revolution of capitalism. It's not just capitalism's endemic instability that he understood, though in this regard he was far more perceptive than most economists in his day and ours.

Marx co-authored The Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels

Curiosidades

Em Florença, em 1338, cerca de metade da população em idade escolar frequentava a escola (Rodney Stark, em The Victory of Reason). Gostaria de saber como essa variável se foi comportando ao longo do tempo: se regrediu face à perda de poder económico da cidade, ou se o "costume" se manteve. Não estou seguro disso, mas aquele valor, penso eu, só seria alcançado por Portugal no início do século XX.

Para ter alguma perspectiva de onde se vem ....

Growth: Recent history | The Economist:

"The chart below shows a population-weighted history of the past two millennia. By this reckoning, over 28% of all the history made since the birth of Christ was made in the 20th century. Measured in years lived, the present century, which is only ten years old, is already 'longer' than the whole of the 17th century. This century has made an even bigger contribution to economic history. Over 23% of all the goods and services made since 1AD were produced from 2001 to 2010..."

Clicar para aceder a uma versão maior.

Chamada de atenção

O Expresso da próxima semana distribuirá em DVD (€ 9,90) o documentário "Inside  Job" sobre as causas da actual crise. É uma compra obrigatória. Um crítico disse que quem saísse do cinema sem estar muito zangado é porque não o viu realmente. 

Não trata bem os economistas: aos maus, "pouco virtuosos", designa-os como tal; aos bons, aqueles cujo testemunho serve para identificar as causas do desastre, não. Fora isso é excelente.

Da New Left Review, duas leituras interessantes

• New Left Review - Ho-fung Hung: America'sHead Servant? The PRC's Dilemma in the Global Crisis: "The subprime mortgage crisis and ensuing global downturn led many to speculate whether any challenger might emerge to replace the us as the dominant player in the capitalist world economy. [1] Because the financial crisis in the us and global North had originated in high indebtedness, low productivity and overconsumption, it seemed natural to look to their polar opposites—the East Asian exporters’ huge holdings of us debt, productive capacity and high savings rates—to identify likely candidates. Immediately after last year’s collapse of Lehman Brothers lifted the curtain on the global recession, there were proclamations of the final triumph of the East Asian, and above all Chinese, model of development; American establishment commentators concluded that the Great Crash of 2008 would be the catalyst for a shift of the centre of global capitalism from the us to China. [2] But by the spring of 2009, many had realized that the East Asian economies were not as formidable as appearances had suggested. While the sharp contraction in demand for imports in the global North had led to crash landings for Asia’s exporters, the prospect of either the us Treasuries market or the dollar bottoming out presented them with the difficult dilemma of either ditching American assets, and hence triggering a dollar collapse, or buying more, preventing an immediate crash but increasing their exposure to one in future. State-directed investment, rolled out late last year under the prc’s mega-stimulus programme, fostered a significant recovery for China as well as its Asian trading partners, but the growth generated is unlikely to be self-sustaining. Chinese economists and policy advisers have been worrying that the prc will falter again once the stimulus effect fades, as it is unlikely that American consumers will be picking up the slack any time soon. Despite all the talk of China’s capacity to destroy the dollar’s reserve-currency status and construct a new global financial order, the prc and its neighbours have few choices in the short term other than to sustain American economic dominance by extending more credit. In what follows, I will trace the historical and social origins of the deepening dependence of China and East Asia on the consumer markets of the global North as the source of their growth, and on us financial vehicles as the store of value for their savings. I then assess the longer-term possibilities for ending this dependence, arguing that, to create a more autonomous economic order in Asia, China would have to transform an export-oriented growth model—which has mostly benefited, and been perpetuated by, vested interests in the coastal export sectors—into one driven by domestic consumption, through a large-scale redistribution of income to the rural-agricultural sector. This will not be possible, however, without breaking the coastal urban elite’s grip on power."Penso que já tinha referenciado este artigo antes, mas não se perde nada em referenciá-lo de novo.
  

• New Left Review - Susan Watkins: Shifting Sands: "Correlations between anniversaries and historical conjunctures are likely to be ironic. When nlr was launched in London fifty years ago, in January 1960, it was one of myriad small harbingers of left renewal. Anti-colonial forces were registering victories in Africa, Asia and the Arab world; the Communist movement was emerging from the stranglehold of Stalinist orthodoxy; in North America, Western Europe and Japan a new generation chafed at the conformism of Cold War culture. By the mid-60s the Review had staked out a programme of mapping these three world zones in a series of comparative studies of national social formations—not least its own. Strongly oriented towards Continental theory and practice, the journal played its part in the intensive debates within Marxism that accompanied the heady days of 68. It helped to pioneer work on women’s liberation, ecology, media, film theory, the state. By the 1990s, the journal survived within an international landscape that would have seemed a sci-fi dystopia in 1960: the Kremlin’s economic policy run by Friedmanites, the General Secretary of the ccp lauding the stock exchange; Yugoslavia, the most pluralist and successful of the workers’ states, decimated by imf austerity policies and subjected to a three-month nato bombing campaign, cheered on by liberal opinion in the West; social democratic parties competing to privatize national assets and abolish labour gains. Neo-liberalism reigned supreme, enshrining a model of unfettered capital flows and financial markets, deregulated labour and internationally integrated production chains. On its fortieth anniversary, at the high noon of globalization and American supremacy, nlr was relaunched by its editorial committee in a spirit of uncompromising realism: ‘the refusal of any accommodation with the ruling system, as of any understatement of its power’. [1] Ten years on again, the continuation of the neo-liberal era itself has been thrown into question by the eruption of an epic financial crisis at the heart of the system. During the grandes journées of September 2008 Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant us institutions at the centre of the mortgage-backed securities market, were taken into government stewardship after their shares had plunged by 90 per cent. Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, Merrill Lynch was forced into a shotgun marriage with Bank of America, hbos with Lloydstsb; a tottering Citigroup, whose stock value had fallen from $244bn to $6bn, was shored up by government funds, Washington Mutual pulled from receivership by JPMorganChase. Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank and Société Générale were saved by massive Treasury transfusions into their bankrupt insurer, aig. In the months that followed, world output, trade, equity, credit and investment ground to a halt, while unemployment soared towards double digits across the Northern hemisphere. Running into trillions of dollars in direct and indirect support, the bailouts of the financial institutions will weigh on domestic economies—above all in the us and uk—for years to come. But did the massive state interventions also signal the end of the neo-liberal model? Ideologically, the wealth-creating prowess of big finance has been one of its central legitimating claims. There was a feeling, not just on the left, that the crisis could not but leave the paradigm itself discredited; it might even have dealt a body-blow to American hegemony. The humbling of the Wall Street giants—us Treasury Secretary Paulson offering to go down on his knees before Congress on their behalf—seemed to suggest that the world stood on the brink of a new era. Since then the financial system has been stabilized, although none of its underlying problems have been resolved. But despite the torrent of literature on the crisis, its historical meaning remains obscure. What ended, and what did not, in September 2008?"

A situação económica dos outros

O que se apresenta abaixo são referências de comentários e análises sobre as outras situações, aparentadas à nossa, na periferia sul e oeste da Zona Euro, lidas nos últimos dois meses. Todas acabam por carrear informação e análise que cruzam com a análise do que se passa, a nível económico e financeiro, em Portugal.

• Government sacrificing reform on altar of pay cuts - The Irish Times - Tue, Dec 08, 2009: "The savings would have come primarily through staff reductions, which will be the inevitable, permanent and calculable result of the Government’s ongoing recruitment embargo and other policies like the rationalisation of State agencies. The vision that we offered the Government was one where, in exchange for guarantees over pay, pensions and compulsory redundancies, staff would deliver the massive changes in work practices required to ensure that these falling staff numbers would not damage services. The proposed deal included explicit agreement on the redeployment of civil and public servants, within and between organisations, to ensure better services as budgets and staffing declined." (via The Irish Economy » Blog Archive » Public Sector Reform)

• So What’s It All About, Costas? | afoe | A Fistful of Euros | European Opinion: "As Titus Maccius Plautus reputedly put it, I am a rich man for just as long as I don’t have to pay back my debts, and of debts in Greece there were plenty, especially in the public sector. So the growth we saw in the first eight years of this century was hardly normal, since it was based on a model of growing indebtedness which was always going to fail one day or another. One consequence of this is that no one really knows what “trend” growth in Greece would look like at this point (the same goes for those other two Eurozone “star performers” Spain and Ireland) since we don’t really know how much of recent growth was valid, and how much was due to overheating, and we won’t really start to get a clear picture till we see what the downside is, and how far it runs."

• Why Standard and Poor’s Are Right To Worry About Spanish Finances | afoe | A Fistful of Euros | European Opinion: "Just how realistic is the view being taking by the Spanish administration at this point, and just what are the prospects of that imminent and sutainable return to growth in the Spanish economy on which everything seems to depend?"

• Why The Ratings Agencies Are Right And George Papaconstantinou Is Wrong | afoe | A Fistful of Euros | European Opinion

• FT.com / Columnists / Wolfgang Munchau - Greece can expect no gifts from Europe: "[...] The EU’s authorities, rightly or wrongly, are more afraid of the moral hazard of a bail-out than the possible spillover effect of a hypothetical Greek default to other eurozone countries. If faced with a choice between preserving the integrity of the stability pact and the integrity of Greece, they are currently minded to choose the former. To safeguard what is left of the stability pact, they are determined to link any help to a country’s willingness to comply. Otherwise the EU fears it might lose all leverage over budgetary processes elsewhere in the eurozone.. So instead of helping Greece, the EU might be asking Greece to pay a penalty. [...] The current strategy of the EU is to raise the political pressure – perhaps even provoke a political crisis – with the strategic objective that the Greek government might eventually relent. It is a dangerous strategy that could easily backfire. Even if George Papandreou, the Greek prime minister, were sympathetic to the EU’s demand, he would face enormous political headwinds if he tried to implement draconian austerity measures. [...] The real problem is that the Greek people have not been prepared by their political leaders for what lies ahead. [...]In the absence of help from the eurozone, the Greek government would have to resort to the International Monetary Fund if it were to encounter difficulties refinancing the debt. Unlike Argentina, Greece cannot devalue, and leaving the eurozone is not a realistic policy option either. Latvian-style austerity could thus come one way or the other, with or without default. [...]".

• Roubini Global Economics - RGE Monitor -- Europe EconoMonitor: Quantifying Eurozone Imbalances and the Internal Devaluation of Greece and Spain "Essentially, what Greece and Spain now face (alongside Ireland, Hungary, Latvia etc) is an internal devaluation which has to serve as the only means of adjustment since, as is evidently clearly, the nominal exchange rate is bound by the gravitional laws of the Eurozone. Now, I am not making an argument about the virtues of devaluation versus a domestic structural correction since it will often be a combination of the two (i.e. as in Hungary). What I am trying to emphasize is simply two things; firstly, the danger of imposing internal devaluations in economies whose demographic structure resemble that of Greece and Spain and secondly, whether it can actually be done within the confines of the current political and economic setup in the Eurozone."

• Que faire pour les Etats surendettés de la zone euro ? | Telos

• FT.com / Columnists / Martin Wolf - The eurozone’s next decade will be tough: "What would have happened during the financial crisis if the euro had not existed? The short answer is that there would have been currency crises among its members. The currencies of Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain would surely have fallen sharply against the old D-Mark. That is the outcome the creators of the eurozone wished to avoid. They have been successful. But, if the exchange rate cannot adjust, something else must instead. That “something else” is the economies of peripheral eurozone member countries. They are locked into competitive disinflation against Germany, the world’s foremost exporter of very high-quality manufactures. I wish them luck."

• FT.com / Brussels / Economy - EU to plan 10 years of growth: "Equally, it remains open whether the EU should set targets in its 2020 strategy, as some experts advise. “Targets are important policy levers, even if they are not met. They allow countries to compare themselves with others, and provide crucial goals and milestones that policymakers can use to raise awareness,” said Ann Mettler, executive director of the Lisbon Council think-tank."

• FT.com / Comment / Opinion - Iceland would benefit from paying up: "Dear Icelandic friends, It is painful to observe your agony. A proud and independent nation is forced to vote in a referendum whether to pay billions of euros to the governments of the UK and the Netherlands. If you say No, your country will be seen as an unreliable partner. If you vote for the reimbursement, you will condemn your children to pay for the sins of their fathers. The national debt will balloon to roughly 200 per cent of gross domestic product – one of the highest levels in the world." Este é um finlandês a contar a experiência do seu país de como ser um pagador cumpridor tem consequências positivas no longo prazo.

Recessão a sério foi aquela - agora, em comparação, é a brincar...

Este artigo do FT é instrutivo a diversos títulos: lembra-nos que crise, mesmo crise, de consequências brutais, foi a que se sucedeu ao colapso abrupto, inesperado para os contemporâneos [por favor, tomem nota, do carácter inesperado, e da palavra colapso], do Império Romano do Ocidente, o período denominado de (alta) Idade Média; destaca as características em que o nosso mundo globalizado aprofunda aquelas que definiam o mundo mediterrâneo globalizado da altura (sofisticação e especialização); e conclui que, por isso mesmo, a haver uma crise da nossa civilização, as consequências fariam com que a (alta) Idade Média parecesse um picnic (sic) em comparação. Tenha-se em atenção que não se está a afirmar que a sofisticação, e a especialização, é que provocam a crise civilizacional, mas sim, se ela se verificar, elas potenciam o desastre, o colapso: "The more complex an economy is, the more fragile it is, and the more cataclysmic its disintegration can be". Mas, claro, só falar disso, é tremendismo, segundo o Pacheco Pereira.

Apetece-me, no quadro disto, não sei porquê [figura de retórica], citar uma citação feita num livro de Jared Diamond, The Third Chimpanzee, lido recentemente  (já aconselhara a leitura de outro livro dele - ora cá está -, o Colapso). A citação é de um senhor chamado Arthur Wichmann, que ao historiar os esforços de exploração da Nova Guiné, concluiu: " Nothing  Learned, and Everything Forgotten!", ou, de outra forma, como alguém disse, Churchill, penso eu: "Quem não aprende com os erros da história, tende a repeti-los".

• FT.com / Comment / Opinion - Call this a recession? At least it isn’t the Dark Ages
  

 Read more >>   Options >>  

As origens, normalmente, não são para os desprevenidos aquilo que seria de esperar

As origens intelectuais e políticas das políticas de desenvolvimento? Bem, pelo menos, cruza com muito do que era invocado para justificar o "ultramar português". Tese interessante, mas há mais: por exemplo, a relação entre capitalismo/mercados livres e colonialismo/imperialismo - inesperada para a "convencional wisdom" na matéria; o posicionamento dos economistas clássicos versus outros intelectuais do tempo na questão da escravatura:

• How the British Invented “Development” to Keep the Empire and Substitute for Racism 16.0.09: "To repress independence movements, however, Hailey made a distinction between political development and economic development: “Political liberties are meaningless unless they can be built on a better foundation of social and economic progress.” (A line that autocrats have been using ever since.) The Colonial Office thought many colonies “little removed from their primitive state,” so “they will probably not be fit for complete independence for centuries.” Of course, changing the language from racist to economic development did not mean racism suddenly disappeared. As Wolton shows, “the white Western elites still believed in their fundamental superiority.” In the end, Wolton says, “The major powers would continue to be able to determine the future of the colonial territories – only this time the source of their legitimacy was based less on racial difference and more on their new role as protector and developmental economist.” After the war, even more officials went out to the Empire in what became known as the “second colonial occupation.” Why does this history matter today?" 

• The Imperial Origins of State-Led Development: 17.09.09: "So imperialism is not so clearly linked to capitalism and free markets after all; historically there has been a closer link between colonialism/imperialism and state-led approaches to development. People who like Imperialism are fond of a big military state presence, so it’s not so surprising that they are also fond of a big economic state presence."

• Lies My Poets Told Me: The Prehistory of Development Economics: 12.11.09:  "A couple months ago, Bill addressed the imperial origins of state-led development, arguing that economic development was a substitute for racism as a rationalization of empire. I think it’s worthwhile to delve a bit further into the intellectual and social context in which these ideas were put forward. Why bother? Because ideas matter for policy. There are good, hard-nosed reasons for believing that rationales are not mere epiphenomena of political interests. Understanding why and how certain policies are implemented requires some digging into the justifications of policymakers. A bit of intellectual archaeology might also identify some path dependence in economic thinking about development. The point is not to impugn the motives of current policymakers or academic researchers, but to shed light on any hidden intellectual baggage that might be weighing down their efforts. Old dead economists might teach us something valuable after all."

Leituras a propósito da queda do muro

Diversos (de história e economia):

• Berlin's moment of freedom that turned world history | World news | The Guardian
  

• Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin wall | vox - Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists: "Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin wall, Germany’s political unification has succeeded. This column argues that its economic unification has not – East German growth has been very disappointing and pulled down the economy as a whole. It blames policies that raised East German wages above market levels."

• Half-empty or half-full? East Germany two decades later | vox - Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists: "East Germany has done better than other ex-communist states, but it has not caught up to West Germany. There were two key mistakes – using politically expedient but highly distortionary payroll taxes to fund social buy-outs and trying to resist agglomeration effects by spreading money thinly across every town and village. This column argues that closing the gap will be tough, since convergence will come only when East Germany has the same level of social, institutional, business, and marketing infrastructure."

• The other 1989s | openDemocracy

• What was communism? | open Democracy News Analysis: "Judging from the politics and intellectual debates of today, neither those who celebrate the end of communism, nor those who are now articulating a radical alternative, have carried out such an assessment: between (on one side) the still resilient complacency of market capitalism and an increasingly uncertain world of liberal democracy, and (on the other) the vacuous radicalisms that pose as a global alternative, the lessons of the communist past remain largely ignored. And so, as they say, they will be repeated."

• 1989: how it ended | open Democracy News Analysis

• The Berlin Wall: So much gained, so much to lose | The Economist

Mais a ter em atenção

"[...] on the fact that advanced economies actually grew faster in the era before modern finance took hold. There have been assertions that it was all about rebuilding from the war, or that the picture looks very different if you look at per capita real GDP, with some flat assertions that if you look at the numbers right growth has been better since 1980s."

Krugman demonstra que o que é afirmado (a bold) está em conformidade com a evidência."

Reagan! Reagan! Reagan! - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com (esta nota foi antecedida por esta: The lost generation - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com).
______________________________
PS (8 de Novembro de 2009): Também a considerar: La finance est-elle utile à la croissance ? | Telos

PS (11 de Novembro de 2009): E este: Finance mythbusting, third world edition - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

Elementos de interesse para a discussão da globalização

UnderstandingSociety: A modern world-system?: "Immanuel Wallerstein created a huge stir in the 1970s with the publication of The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (1974). The book is an intellectual masterpiece, synthesizing a vast range of fundamental literature on the economic history of Europe and the world. You could look at the book as the first serious and extended effort to theorize globalization -- a term that barely existed at the time of publication. Or you could look at it as a general theory of colonialism -- an account of the pathways and influences through which the metropole dominated and exploited the periphery. It is worth looking back at this work today to tease out some of the guiding assumptions about history, sociology, and globalization it reflected."

Chama a atenção para a actualidade do tema, e para contributos importantes para a sua discussão.

Porque foi no Reino Unido e não noutro sítio

Já tinha falado da tese aqui - podem fazer uma pesquisa sobre "revolução industrial" (assim, com aspas e tudo) no motor de busca do blogue. No link referenciado abaixo podem ver um vídeo, muito interessante, sobre os motivos porque a revolução industrial aconteceu no Reino Unido, e não noutro sítio qualquer:

Why the Industrial Revolution Was in Great Britain The Big Picture Great Oxford talk economic historians Robert Allen, on why the Industrial Revolution actually occurred in Great Britain, and not France or the Netherlands or China

Ainda sobre a importância da história económica

Ainda sobre a importância da história económica (ver aqui) ter em atenção a opinião de Paul Samuelson:

De Laudibus Economic History - J. Bradford DeLong's Grasping Reality with All Eight Tentacles Paul Kedrosky comments:

Newsflash: Economic History Matters: Gosh, here is a surprise: Economist history matters. From an interview in The Atlantic with Paul Samuelson And sends us to:

Q: Very last thing. What would you say to someone starting graduate study in economics? Where do you think the big developments in modern macro are going to be, or in the micro foundations of modern macro? Where does it go from here and how does the current crisis change it?

A: Well, I’d say, and this is probably a change from what I would have said when I was younger: Have a very healthy respect for the study of economic history, because that’s the raw material out of which any of your conjectures or testings will come. And I think the recent period has illustrated that.

Ainda a questão de como a educação influencia o crescimento económico

Esta nota vem no seguimento de outra (ver aqui) onde se dava conta de uma opinião de Edward L. Glaeser quanto à influência que teria tido nos resultados do crescimento argentino, ao longo do século XX, do nível educativo menos bom desse país. A questão da ligação entre educação e crescimento económico é revisitada no artigo referenciado abaixo. Respigaram-se as perguntas feitas aí:

Education Last Century, and Economic Growth Today - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com

But why would education in 1900 correlate so well with income today?

Why did the 20th century belong to countries, like the United States, that were investing so much in education a century ago?

Why is the cross-country relationship between income and education levels so strong?

If the link between country level income and education is real, then we need to understand why the link between schooling and education gets magnified at the country level. Why should there be a social multiplier that causes the schooling-income link to increase at higher levels of aggregation?

Relevância actual de Marx

Muito interessante:

"Is Marx's vision still relevant in the twenty-first century world?

At bottom, Marx's biggest ideas were "critique," "exploitation," "alienation," "ideology," and "class." He also constructed a fairly specific theory of capitalism and capitalist development -- a theory that has historical pluses and minuses -- and a theory of socialism that can be understood along more democratic and more authoritarian lines. We might say that his theory of capitalism was too deeply grounded in the observed experience of mid-nineteenth-century Britain, and his theory of socialism paid too little attention to the crushing possibilities of power wielded by a future socialist state. Too much economics, too little politics in his worldview -- and too much of a Hegelian "necessitarianism" in his expectations about the future.

History has shown us a few things that Marx too would have recognized, with the benefit of another century of experience. History does not conform to a necessary logic of development. Capitalism is not one thing, but a set of institutions that have proven fairly malleable. There is no single "logic of capitalist development." Compromises and institutional accommodations are possible between contending economic classes. Social democracy, democratic socialism, Stalinist communism, fascist dictatorship, and liberal democracy are all feasible political institutions governing "modern" economic development.

So we might take a deep breath, take a step back, and ask a big counterfactual: How might Marx, with his critical eye for inequality and power and his acute sensibilities as a sociologist -- how might this social critic and theorist have processed the social realities of China in Shanghai in the 1980s? [...]"

Continuar a ler (recomenda-se) em UnderstandingSociety: If Marx had been born in Shanghai