A Importância do Livre Comércio

"Contrary to what skeptics often assert, the case for free trade is robust. It extends not just to overall prosperity (or “aggregate GNP”), but also to distributional outcomes, which makes the free-trade argument morally compelling as well."
Bhagwati explica.

O Dinheiro é a Origem de Todos os Males?

Para quem não gosta do espírito americano de busca da prosperidade, a resposta é sim. Por outro lado, até Amartya Sen absolve a busca pelo enriquecimento de culpa pelos males do mundo, ao considerá-la um meio para alcançar objetivos pessoais e liberdade. O sociólogo Claude Fischer, de Berkeley, entretanto oferece outras interpretações:

"British sociologist Mike Savage makes a passing remark in a recent book that puts a twist on the question of whether money makes the man. “Precisely because money is impersonal,” he writes, “it is possible for people to be differentiated on the basis of how much money they have without this being deemed to undermine their individual, human qualities” (p. 224). Other distinctions between people, Savage says, impugn a person’s character or morality, but money is impersonal. He quotes a working-class Brit who says, perhaps defensively, “There’s no difference between me and Lord Clare; he’s got the money and I haven’t. . . . Even a roadsweeper’s equal to me; I earn twice as much as he does, but it doesn’t make much difference to me, he’s my equal.”

From this perspective, distinctions of money can, odd as it may seem, be democratic and even egalitarian. Each person is, in his or her essence, as good, has the same claim to respect, is as valued as much as anyone else. The money you have, by this logic, is as incidental as the color of shirt you wear for determining your moral worth. Distinctions of character — being honest, hard-working, family-loving, reverent, and so on — and not money determine how much respect one gets. In that way, Savage’s interviewee could say he felt equal to a lord; any differences were only about money.

By this logic, the Americans who foreigners thought were so money-oriented were more egalitarian than the visitors with their gentleman and gentlelady airs.

Good money

This moral rehabilitation of money brings us to the work of sociologist Viviana Zelizer. In a couple of her books (such as this and that), Zelizer examines how contemporary Americans cope with the “taint” of money, their feeling that it soils what it touches. Most Americans feel, for example, that gifts should be personalized things, not crude cash (while in other cultures, newly-weds, for instance, expect to get showered with crisp bills). Americans try to camouflage cash exchanges in various ways — in gifts that can be returned, in “earmarking” (this bank account is for Susie’s college; that account is for Christmas presents), or if need be, with checks placed in tasteful gift cards. In the end, Zelizer writes, “across a wide range of intimate relations, people manage to integrate monetary transfers into larger webs of mutual obligations without destroying the social ties involved. Money cohabits regularly with intimacy, and even sustains it.”

What appears to have changed historically is the growing distaste for open cash or crude materialism. It seems that, as Americans became more affluent over the last two centuries, as the middle class expanded, and as bourgeois sentimentality developed (see this earlier post), Americans became more uncomfortable with naked money, especially with mixing cold cash and warm relations. Confounding friendship and business, for example, was increasingly thought impolite. Some scholars have written about a “post-materialist” sensibility. As people became wealthier over several generations, they shifted their focus to “higher” things, like environmentalism, self-expression, and nurturing relationships. (One need not admire money, in seems, if one has lots of it to spare.)"

A Dignidade da Burguesia

A edição de Cato Unbound deste mês nos traz um tema muito interessante: Quais são as origens do sistema econômico que, nos últimos 200 anos, tem trazido prosperidade econômica para um número cada vez maior de pessoas?

"The making of the modern world is a question of perennial interest. We are, after all, modern. One of the signal developments of modernity is that for the first time, widespread economic prosperity becomes possible. Not all societies attain it, even in the modern world. But only modern societies have done it at all. How did they do it?

Answering this question may do more for human welfare than any other intellectual task before us. What is special about the prosperous modern society? Many answers have arisen. Institutionalist accounts stress law and social practice; Marxists point to proletarian and colonial exploitation; thinkers of a wide variety of persuasions have examined genetic and environmental factors.

In this month’s Cato Unbound, we are pleased to offer an iconoclastic view. All previous answers are wrong, says polymath economist Deirdre McCloskey. Professor McCloskey is at the halfway point of a four-part series of books on the rise of the bourgeoisie. In it, she argues that what really changed in the modern world was the rhetoric of economic activity.

If this sounds wildly improbable, it shouldn’t. The classical art of rhetoric referred not to blustering phrases and glib talk, but to the unforced art of persuasion via argument and evidence. People began to talk differently about economics, and to conceive of economic production and exchange in new ways that had never been seen before. In simple terms, the artisans and shopkeepers of the world became understood as a dignified, honest, and worthwhile group — rather than a crafty cabal of dishonest penny-pinchers.

Laws, institutions, and wealth all followed, but they could not have done so without a revolution in thought. The revolution began as an idea, and it became an idea that convinced the world.

Ou, como escreve Deirdre McCloskey:

"The Big Economic Story of our own times is that the Chinese in 1978 and then the Indians in 1991 adopted liberal ideas in the economy, and came to attribute a dignity and a liberty to the bourgeoisie formerly denied. And then China and India exploded in economic growth. The important moral, therefore, is that in achieving a pretty good life for the mass of humankind, and a chance at a fully human existence, ideas have mattered more than the usual material causes. As the economic historian Joel Mokyr put it recently in the opening sentence of one of his luminous books, “economic change in all periods depends, more than most economists think, on what people believe.”[5] The Big Story of the past two hundred years is the innovation after 1700 or 1800 around the North Sea, and recently in once poor places like Taiwan or Ireland, and most noticeably now in the world’s biggest tyranny and the world’s biggest democracy. It has given many formerly poor and ignorant people the scope to flourish. And contrary to the usual declarations of the economists since Adam Smith or Karl Marx, the Biggest Economic Story was not caused by trade or investment or exploitation. It was caused by ideas. The idea of bourgeois dignity and liberty led to a rise of real income per head in 2010 prices from about $3 a day in 1800 worldwide to over $100 in places that have accepted the Bourgeois Deal and its creative destruction...

I claim that a true liberalism, what Adam Smith called “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty,” contrary to both the socialist and conservative ideologues, has the historical evidence on its side. Despite the elements of regulation and corporatism defacing it (and the welfare programs improving it), it has worked pretty well for the poor and for the people for two centuries. I reckon we should keep it — though tending better to its ethics. "

Os ensaios que seguem ao de Deirdre McCloskey também valem a leitura. Para completar as boas referências ao tema, eu recomendo o fascinante livro de Daniel Friedman, Morals and Markets.

Andrei Shleifer e a Era de Milton Friedman

As conclusões do novo artigo de Andrei Shleifer, onde ele compara interpretações diferentes sobre as causas do crescimento econômico e da prosperidade (texto ressaltado por mim):

"The last quarter century of world development has presented economists interested in economic policy with many complex challenges. To name a few, economies moving
from socialism to capitalism and embracing market policies at first collapsed, and began
growing only after three to six years. The rapidly growing and heavily market oriented
Asian economies suffered major setbacks in the late 1990s, with major recessions that
slowed them down for at least a couple of years. The economies of South America
embraced budget discipline and privatization in the 1980s and 1990s, yet showed truly
lackluster economic growth. Importantly, many of these regions ended the era in a
spurt of rapid economic growth, but the troubles along the way raised questions
about appropriate tactics of policy reform.

Grappling with these questions improved our understanding of the workings of market economies, and of interactions between the state and the private sector. Transition has
taught us that economic and political disorganization, combined with obsolete human
capital of both economic agents and politicians, can sharply slow down the economic
turnaround. The Asian crisis has reinforced the centrality of the financial system in the
workings of a market economy, and exposed the vulnerability of that system to financial
bubbles and generally imprudent financial arrangements. The Latin American experience
has laid bare the fact that private ownership and fiscal prudence yield only limited benefits in a regime of overbearingtaxation and regulation. All these episodes taught important lessons for the tactics of economic policy making.

Perhaps the crux of these lessons is to focus on the right problem. The two areas of the world facing most dramatic economic challenges today are Africa and Latin America. When thinking about their growth performance, surely the most obvious problem is the lack of new businesses and investment, particularly in the formal sector. It seems highly unlikely that the central challenges have to do with whether inflation should be above or below 10 percent (so long as public deficits are under control), or whether there should be a 0 or 1 percent transaction tax on capital flows (so long as capital markets are broadly open). It seems obvious that the central challenges have to do with the shortages of human capital, and with predatory regulatory and tax policies conducted by African and Latin American states. Indeed, my feeling is that reducing the burdens of (particularly corporate) taxation and regulation, and replacing extremely inefficient regulations with more appropriate ones, are the
central challenges facing many developing countries today. The World Bank has properly
drawn attention to the necessary reforms through its Doing Business report, and we
have seen significant steps toward progress, especially among transition economies.
But tactics is only part of a broader strategy. On strategy, economics got the right
answer: free market policies, supported but not encumbered by the government, deliver
growth and prosperity. And while a lot has been accomplished in the last quarter century,
a lot remains to be done. Most countries have embraced responsible fiscal policies, but it is
far from clear that such policies can survive the volatility in the world’s economy. World
trade has a long way to go to become truly open. Many developing countries, especially in
South Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa, urgently need government much less
hostile to business. Many countries desperately need improvements in their legal systems,
including bankruptcy systems, to secure property rights. Indeed, many Sub-Saharan
African countries are rethinking their development strategies, after several state-centered
false starts. It is far from a foregone conclusion that their governments will make good
choices. We have a long haul ahead of us."