Ho sparso di becchime il davanzale, Eugenio Montale

Ho sparso di becchime il davanzale
per il concerto di domani all'alba.
Ho spento il lume e ho atteso il sonno.
E sulla passerella già comincia
la sfilata dei morti grandi e piccoli
che ho conosciuto in vita. Arduo distinguere
tra chi vorrei e non vorrei che fosse
tornato tra noi. Là dove stanno
sembrano inalterabili per un di più
di sublimata corruzione. Abbiamo
fatto del nostro meglio per peggiorare il mondo.

Key Letter by Descartes, Lost for 170 Years, Turns Up at Haverford College

O impacto desta descoberta poderá vir a ser o equivalente as cartas do Ricardo encontradas no seculo passado e publicadas na edição das suas obras completas organizada pelo Sraffa.


A long-lost letter by René Descartes has come to light at Haverford College, where it had lain buried in the archives for more than a century, and the discovery could revolutionize our view of one of the 17th-century French philosopher's major works.

The find, made last month by a Dutch researcher, Erik-Jan Bos of Utrecht University, prompted Mr. Bos to quote another great thinker.

"Eureka," he said he yelled on opening a digital image of the letter that Haverford had scanned from its special collections and e-mailed to him. At the time, nobody knew how important the letter was. In fact, few knew of its existence.

But for Haverford, the discovery was a two-edged sword. The letter, Mr. Bos said, was stolen property.

The president of the Pennsylvania college, Stephen G. Emerson, said this week that when he found out the letter had been stolen—from Paris's Institut de France about 170 years ago—he knew it must be returned. So in June, Mr. Emerson will fly to France with the letter in his carry-on bag, and give it back.

Descartes wrote the letter in 1641 to his friend Marin Mersenne about his major work published that year, Meditations on First Philosophy. According to Mr. Bos, who has done extensive research on Descartes's correspondence, the letter provides an abundance of new information about how the thinker completed his book.

Most important, Mr. Bos said, the letter shows how Descartes drastically changed the book's outline, cutting out three parts entirely. Before the letter was written, Mr. Bos said, "Descartes had a very different idea about how this book should appear."

Para ler o resto do artigo clique aqui

Miscelâneas

Os bons resultados na arrecadação - apesar da base de comparação não ser uma brastemp - e os números do mercado de trabalho, parecem confirmar o diagnóstico deste blog sobre o estado atual da economia brasileira. O cenário positivo é, seguramente, um desalento para a turma do quanto pior o melhor, uma estranha aliança entre a nova direita e os orfãos da queda do muro.

Mudando de assunto.Política externa não é a minha praia, mas me parece lamentável a reação do atual governo frente ao ocorrido ontem em Cuba em nada, alias, diferente do comportamento equivocado do governo passado em relação ao governo Fugimori.Realismo, nem sempre, é a melhar opção de política de defesa do interesse nacional.

Problemas no Imperio

Vinicius Torres Freire, no jornal da Ditabranda. apresenta um bom resumo dos problemas da economia americana. O cenário descrito so surpreende aqueles que ainda acreditam em contos de fadas. Os problemas econômicos são serios e complicam-se ainda mais devido ao clima belicoso existente na esfera política. Esta não é uma historia nova, muito pelo encontrário, é uma repetição - agora como farsa - do ocorrido nos anos 30. Por enquanto ainda esta restrita a esfera política mas há risco crescente que isto venha a ocorrer, também, na esfera econômica. Na europa apesar da Grecia, os problemas estão longe de comparáveis a gravidade do cenário americano.

O cenario é tragico e preocupante, principalmente, por que ate o presente momento, Pepino o breve, vulgo Obama, não demontrou ter o talento necessário para liderar o Imperio neste complicado momento de sua história. Retorica brilhante não é substituto perfeito para a ausência de propostas e coragem política.


"Quem bate? É o frio. Não adianta bater, /que eu não deixo você entrar/ etc.", dizia o jingle de um velhíssimo desenho animado de propaganda de cobertores das Casas Pernambucanas, nos anos 70 do século passado.
Ontem se ouvia muito analista de mercado a dizer que o inverno duro derrubou o ânimo ainda tiritante de americanos, alemães e franceses.
Quem bateu foi o frio? A neve que interditou comércios e obras?
Na verdade, o caldo da economia e da finança mundiais voltou a engrossar. Não se trata de dizer que há catástrofe à vista. Mas houve animação excessiva com os "brotos verdes" da economia, em particular da parte dos donos do dinheiro grosso da finança e de seus porta-vozes.
Felizes com a recuperação rápida do preço de ativos financeiros, acabaram por contagiar além da conta as opiniões dominantes na mídia.
Na economia dita "real", o dinheiro nem de longe desabrochou como no caixa da banca e associados. Este inverno ruim no hemisfério Norte apenas tornou um pouco mais sombria uma recuperação econômica ainda muito nebulosa.
Um indicador de confiança do consumidor americano, o do Conference Board, foi ao nível mais baixo em dez meses. A opinião dos americanos sobre sua situação econômica atual é a pior desde 1983. Pioraram as expectativas de encontrar emprego, de ter um trabalho satisfatório, de ganhar mais.
O desemprego americano é o mais alto desde o início dos 1980; o trabalho precário é mais comum. O índice do Conference Board costuma traduzir com certa precisão a atitude do consumidor -medo de desemprego implica carteira mais fechada.
Faz 17 anos que não havia tantos bancos problemáticos nos Estados Unidos, segundo o FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance, meio regulador, meio garantidor de depósitos). São bancos bem menores do que aqueles quebrados em 2008 -trata-se de instituições regionais e até municipais. Mas são quase 9% dos bancos.
O risco de quebras continua a crescer. O total de empréstimos bancários continua a cair em 2010. Os consumidores franceses cortaram despesas. Os empresários alemães também ficaram mais desanimados em janeiro, segundo o instituto Ifo. O presidente do banco central britânico, Mervyn King, disse que o crescimento europeu empacou, que isso não é bom para o Reino Unido, e insinua que o BC deles deve continuar a "imprimir dinheiro". São todas notícias de ontem.
Há ainda o caso grego, metáfora para o problema de endividamento excessivo de vários governos europeus. Governos do mundo todo fizeram mais deficit e dívida a fim de conter uma depressão econômica.
Contiveram: o estímulo do gasto público fez as economias andarem mais rápido no final de 2009. Mas o efeito do estimulante passa.
Fica o efeito colateral: dívidas. Governos pagam dívidas aumentando impostos ou cortando gastos. O que reduz o consumo global da economia. A conta vai chegando.
Persiste o temor de que algum governo dê calote, o que seria catastrófico. Mesmo muito a contragosto, é provável que um país rico como a Alemanha evite a quebra de primos pobres. Mas o inverno está passando, e o clima não está nada bom.

Fonte: FSP

Caiu a ficha...

Finalmente parece que caiu a ficha e tornou-se consensual a avaliação sobre o bom estado atual da economia brasileira. Temores, infundados, que a economia sucumbiria a crise foram, cuidadosamente, colocados de lado e não se fala mais nisto. É como se tais cenários catastróficos jamais tivessem sido apresentados ao distinto público avido pelas tolices daqueles que ignoram o be a ba da macroeconomia e um pouco da historia econômica do grande bananão.

Se há uma lição a aprender da recente crise é que em se tratando da economia brasileira apostar no pior não é, seguramente, a melhor opção.

Nakano

Ótimo artigo do Nakano. Não sei se a tese apresentada é correta, mas seguramente ela levanta questões importantes e nos leva a pensar.

Muito tem sido escrito sobre a chamada nova classe média brasileira, e particularmente importantes são as pesquisas pioneiras de Marcelo Neri, da Fundação Getulio Vargas. Realmente seus estudos revelam que o Brasil assiste a uma mega-ascensão de famílias pobres para a classe C, que tem renda mensal de R$ 1.115 a R$ 4.808. Desde o Plano Real essa classe passou de 32% da população para 52% hoje. Portanto, a classe média brasileira é enorme e composta de mais de 90 milhões de pessoas.
Neste artigo, quero chamar a atenção para as consequências sobre a dinâmica da economia brasileira e a mudança na pauta política que essa classe emergente está trazendo.
O relevante é entender que as causas maiores dessa grande transformação não foram os programas sociais do governo (Bolsa Família, aumento do salário mínimo e outras formas de transferência de renda), que sem dúvida têm sua contribuição significativa, mas, sim, as mudanças demográficas que ocorreram a rigor em meados da década de 80, quando tivemos uma forte queda na taxa de natalidade. Vinte anos depois, a população jovem que busca emprego começou a se reduzir, mudando totalmente a dinâmica do mercado de trabalho.
De fato, a população brasileira de jovens de 15 a 24 anos atingiu um pico de 35,1 milhões de pessoas em 2004 e começou a declinar a partir de então, tendo atingido 33,9 milhões em 2009. Com isso, a "oferta ilimitada de trabalho" chegou ao fim, e os novos empregos, para serem preenchidos, passaram a oferecer salários mais altos. Esse aumento de emprego vem acompanhado de maior produtividade, sem gerar pressão inflacionária, e também demanda melhor qualificação técnica, isto é, educação com qualidade, que é outra grande transformação que ocorre no Brasil.
As consequências para a dinâmica da economia brasileira são óbvias: passamos a ter endogenamente um mecanismo de crescimento que se retroalimenta, típico das economias capitalistas desenvolvidas. O salário real aumenta e amplia o mercado, que, por sua vez, estimula aumento de investimento e criação de novos empregos, que, acompanhados de incremento de produtividade, podem se sustentar por longo prazo.
A consequência política dessa megatransformação é a mudança da agenda eleitoral. O maior temor que uma nova classe tem é perder as suas conquistas: emprego e acesso a bens de consumo, que lhes dão novo status social. Por isso é conservadora. Não será mais a subclasse social de pobres contra a situação que vai decidir as eleições majoritárias no Brasil. Discurso contra não ganhará mais eleições. Introduziu-se na agenda eleitoral a política macroeconômica voltada para crescimento, criando empregos, sem esquecer a estabilidade. A conjugação dessa dinâmica eleitoral, associada a um mecanismo endógeno de expansão do mercado doméstico, levará a economia brasileira a um crescimento sustentado de longo prazo. As barreiras a esse processo, como as atuais políticas monetária e cambial, terão pelo menos 90 milhões de brasileiros, que, tendo acesso à educação, ganharão consciência política e terão voz decisiva pelo menos nas eleições, e a deste ano será decisiva para o Brasil entrar numa nova era.

Fonte: UOL

Fame is a fickle food, Emily Dickinson

Fame is a fickle food
Upon a shifting plate
Whose table once a
Guest but not
The second time is set.

Whose crumbs the crows inspect
And with ironic caw
Flap past it to the Farmer's Corn –
Men eat of it and die.

Why an american recovery matters

Michal Spence apresenta uma boa análise dos problemas da economia americana.

It is hard to be optimistic about America at present. With the help of crucial government support in the crisis, the US financial sector (or at least parts of it) has bounced back, while America’s real economy struggles with high unemployment, discouraged labor-force dropouts, and damaged balance sheets.

So it is no surprise that the American public and the US Congress are angry. The focus of that anger has been the massive and unwise financial-sector bonuses. As a result, regulatory reforms have thus far consisted of, first, a threat to the Federal Reserve’s autonomy, and, second, a tax on bonuses.

The first idea is a bad one. The latter may be politically mandatory and marginally beneficial in fiscal terms. Its effects on risk-taking are debatable. But the much-needed structural reforms to limit leverage and contain the risks that the financial system periodically imposes on the real economy – and the public purse – have only belatedly gotten off the to-do list, and the prospects of enacting them are difficult to estimate.

In fairness, the new rule proposed by former US Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker to separate financial intermediation from proprietary trading is not a bad idea. Combined with elevated capital requirements for banks, it would reduce the chance of another simultaneous failure of all credit channels. But it is not sufficient. Hedge funds can also destabilize the system, as the collapse of Long Term Capital Management in 1998 demonstrated. So they also need clear, albeit different, limits on leverage.

Para ler o resto do artigo clique aqui

Crise da Grécia não vai contaminar os EUA

Ótimo resumo do debate sobre o impacto da crise grega sobre a economia americana e o papel da política fiscal na superação da crise econômica. Martin Wolf tem razão, ainda não é o momento para o aperto fiscal. Não se deve repetir os erros dos anos 30.


Niall Ferguson não é dado a meias palavras. Por isso, não me surpreendi com sua alegação*, na semana passada, de que os EUA enfrentarão uma crise grega. Mas considerei a ideia um exemplo de histeria.
Da mesma forma que muitos outros países de alta renda, os EUA estão decerto andando por uma corda bamba. Mas os perigos são a frouxidão excessiva em curto prazo e o aperto excessivo em curto prazo. Esse é um dilema do qual Ferguson não parece consciente.
O professor Ferguson afirmou que, de acordo com projeções da Casa Branca, o deficit público federal dos EUA excederá o PIB do país, a partir de 2012; que a previsão é que os EUA jamais voltem a operar com um Orçamento equilibrado; que foi a política monetária, e não os deficit, que salvou a economia; que taxas de juros mais altas estão a caminho; e, além de tudo, que alta dívida fiscal é prejudicial.
Brad DeLong, da Universidade da Califórnia em Berkeley, respondeu afirmando que partes do argumento oferecido por Ferguson estão erradas ou são enganosas: as projeções da Casa Branca são que a dívida federal detida pelo público seja de 71% do PIB em 2012 e de não mais de 77% em 2020; a política monetária não teria sido capaz de produzir nem mesmo a recuperação limitada que estamos vendo, caso não tivesse recebido ajuda; e taxas de juros mais altas podem de fato estar a caminho, mas nada da atual curva de rendimentos sugere que esse seja o caso.
Além disso, não existe necessidade de medidas de equilíbrio do Orçamento em um país cujo PIB nominal cresce ao menos 5% ao ano em tempos normais.

Almoço grátis
O professor Ferguson está tentando apavorar as autoridades norte-americanas para evitar que mantenham ou, ainda melhor, ampliem o estímulo fiscal, se bem que a verdadeira questão seja a sustentabilidade em prazo mais longo. Ele também acusa seus oponentes de acreditar em um "almoço grátis keynesiano". Não é fato. O argumento, em lugar disso, é o de que a produção mais alta agora excede o custo que o serviço da dívida terá amanhã.
O professor Ferguson acredita, em lugar disso, em um almoço grátis conservador. Estamos falando da opinião de que um aperto fiscal agora teria pouco efeito sobre a atividade econômica. Normalmente, quando a política monetária tem margem de manobra e a captação do setor público não sofre restrições, isso seria verdade.
Mas, como apontaram Olivier Blanchard, economista-chefe do FMI (Fundo Monetário Internacional), e seus colegas, em relatório recente, "já que a política monetária, incluindo créditos e relaxamento quantitativo, em larga medida atingiu os seus limites, as autoridades econômicas têm pouca chance a não ser depender da política fiscal".
Os países de alta renda que tiveram os mais elevados saltos em deficit e dívidas foram, como não poderia deixar de ser, Irlanda, Espanha, Reino Unido e EUA, exatamente o que haviam previsto Stephen Cecchetti e seus colegas no BIS (Banco de Compensações Internacionais), em estudo divulgado na semana passada. Foram esses os países que tiveram os maiores booms de crédito e bolhas de ativos. Foi neles que os gastos do setor privado sofreram mais restrições após a redução do endividamento.
Os saltos nos deficit fiscais são um reflexo da reacomodação conduzida pelos setores privados em crise. Nos EUA, o balanço financeiro do setor privado (a disparidade entre renda e gastos) se alterou de menos 2,1% do PIB no quarto trimestre de 2007 a mais 6,7% no quarto trimestre de 2009, um movimento da ordem de 8,8% do PIB. Essa virada imensa aconteceu a despeito dos esforços do Federal Reserve (Fed, o banco central dos EUA) para sustentar os empréstimos e gastos. Viradas assim aconteceram nos demais países atingidos pela crise.
Se esses governos tivessem decidido equilibrar seus Orçamentos, como muitos conservadores exigem, dois possíveis desfechos seriam possíveis: o mais plausível seria o de que viveríamos agora uma segunda Grande Depressão; o mais fantasioso seria o de que, a despeito de vasta alta na tributação ou imensos cortes de gastos, o setor privado teria continuado a captar e gastar dinheiro como se não tivesse havido uma crise.

Acreditar em magia
Em outras palavras, um imenso aperto fiscal resultaria na verdade em expansão da economia. Acreditar nisso é como acreditar em magia. A forte elevação nos deficit fiscais foi uma resposta apropriada. Mas o professor Ferguson está certo: todos sabem que esses deficit não podem ser mantidos por prazo indefinido.
Como apontaram Carmen Reinhart e Kenneth Rogoff em estudo recente, quando a relação entre a dívida pública e o PIB excede os 90%, o crescimento médio cai em 1% ao ano. Isso pode ser dispendioso. Além disso, existe o risco de que, em dado momento, haja uma perda de confiança e disparada nas taxas de juros.
A dificuldade, porém, é que, como o McKinsey Global Institute também apontou em relatório recente, "os episódios históricos de redução do endividamento foram dolorosos, durando em média de seis a sete anos e reduzindo em 25% a relação entre dívida e PIB".
A única maneira de acelerar o processo seria por meio de falências em massa ou inflação. Caso essas soluções sejam descartadas, o que existiria para sustentar a demanda? Se a política fiscal também for excluída, a única exceção seria a demanda externa. Mas quem teria chances de compensar a contração da demanda nos EUA e nas demais economias seriamente atingidas? A resposta, infelizmente, é ninguém.
No entanto, como apontou o estudo do BIS, as perspectivas fiscais de longo prazo, ditadas em larga medida pelo envelhecimento da população, são precárias. Projetando com base em pontos de partida bastante desfavoráveis, os autores do estudo do BIS argumentam que a relação entre dívida pública e PIB pode chegar a 250% na Itália, a 300% na Alemanha, a 400% na França, a 450% nos EUA, a 500% no Reino Unido e a 600% no Japão, em 2050.
Caso o objetivo seja impedir que os papéis de dívida soberana desses países de alta renda sejam reduzidos ao status de "junk bonds", essas nações de fato precisam de planos confiáveis de reacomodação. Quanto a isso não existe desacordo. A melhor abordagem seria a redução acentuada no crescimento em longo prazo dos gastos com benefícios. Além disso, quando as economias se recuperarem, ação fiscal de curto prazo será igualmente necessária. As medidas teriam de incluir cortes de gastos e aumentos de impostos, para restaurar a receita perdida na crise.
E com isso chegamos ao grande dilema: e se a redução do endividamento privado e os deficit fiscais persistirem por anos, nos EUA e em outros países, como aconteceu no Japão? Nesse caso, os países de melhor classificação de crédito, entre os quais até mesmo os EUA, poderiam perder toda sua margem de manobra fiscal. Isso ainda não aconteceu no Japão. Pode não acontecer nos EUA, tampouco. Mas a possibilidade ainda assim existe.
Por isso, sim, os países de alta renda enfrentam fortes desafios fiscais. E, sim, os países atingidos pela crise começam de posições fiscais insustentáveis. Mas os EUA não são a Grécia. Além disso, um forte aperto fiscal realizado hoje constituiria um grave erro. Existe um forte risco -na minha opinião, uma certeza- de que isso devolveria o planeta à recessão. O setor privado precisa se curar. Isso, e não a reacomodação fiscal, é a prioridade.

Fonte: UOL

Como salvar os Piigs

Não sou tão pessimista, mas a análise me parece correta. Há sempre espaço para a política econômica e por isto o pessimismo não se justifica.




Os problemas fiscais da Grécia são, como argumentei muitas vezes, apenas a ponta do iceberg mundial. Pois a próxima rodada da recente crise financeira global será o risco soberano ascendente, especialmente nas economias avançadas que operem com grandes deficit orçamentários e acumulem dívida pública ampla, ao socializar prejuízos financeiros privados a fim de reanimar o crescimento econômico.
De fato, a história sugere que uma severa recessão e socialização de prejuízos privados muitas vezes conduzem a um acúmulo insustentável de dívida pública. Além disso, crises financeiras provocadas por dívidas excessivas no setor privado costumam ser seguidas alguns anos mais tarde por moratórias nacionais e/ou alta inflação.
A Grécia também serve como indicador de alerta para a zona do euro, na qual todas as economias conhecidas como Piigs (Portugal, Irlanda, Itália, Grécia e Espanha) sofrem o problema gêmeo da sustentabilidade de dívidas públicas e da sustentabilidade da dívida externa. A adesão ao euro e as "operações de convergência" conduzidas na alta das Bolsas levaram os rendimentos dos títulos desses países a se aproximar do oferecido pelos títulos da dívida pública alemã, e o boom de crédito resultante sustentou um crescimento excessivo do consumo.
A maioria dessas economias estava sofrendo de uma perda de mercados de exportação diante de concorrentes asiáticos cujos trabalhadores recebem salários mais baixos. Na Espanha e na Irlanda, um boom de habitação exacerbou os desequilíbrios externos ao reduzir a poupança nacional, estimulando o consumo e o investimento residencial. E a valorização do euro nos últimos anos serviu como golpe final contra a competitividade.
Assim, restaurar a competitividade, e não apenas um ajuste fiscal, é necessário para a retomada do crescimento sustentável. Existem apenas três maneiras de fazê-lo. Uma década de deflação seria uma resposta, mas isso seria acompanhado por estagnação econômica e, como aconteceu na Argentina no começo da década, resultaria em situação política insustentável, conduzindo a uma desvalorização (ou seja, ao abandono do euro) e a uma moratória.
Acelerar as reformas estruturais que estimulam a produtividade e manter sob controle o crescimento dos salários no setor privado e no setor público é a abordagem correta, mas igualmente difícil de implementar em termos políticos. Ou um euro mais fraco poderia ser adotado, se o BCE se dispusesse a afrouxar a política monetária ainda mais -o que não é provável. No entanto, um euro mais baixo não eliminaria a necessidade de reformas estruturais nesses países.

Alternativa FMI
Um programa informal de resgate ou um programa concreto do Fundo Monetário Internacional (FMI) poderia reforçar fortemente a credibilidade de uma política de reposicionamento fiscal e de reformas estruturais. Se o programa for informal, a Comissão Europeia imporia condições fiscais e estruturais à Grécia, enquanto a União Europeia e/ou o BCE ofereceria as verbas, que seriam necessárias.
Os mercados continuarão céticos, especialmente se a implementação resultar em manifestações de rua, tumultos, greves e manobras legislativas para postergar as medidas. Até que a credibilidade seja restabelecida, o risco de um ataque especulativo contra os títulos de dívida pública persistiria, dados os deficit orçamentários e a necessidade de rolar dívidas. Porque a União Europeia não tem histórico no que tange a impor condições e o financiamento pelo BCE seria percebido como uma forma de resgate, um programa formal do FMI seria a melhor abordagem. Os programas de mais sucesso empreendidos diante de um risco de crise de financiamento de dívida pública e/ou externa foram aqueles como no México, Turquia e Brasil.
Garantias de empréstimos pela Alemanha e/ou União Europeia são menos desejáveis do que um programa do FMI, porque é muito difícil desenvolver e implementar de maneira confiável a condicionalidade dessas garantias. O apoio do FMI, por outro lado, é desembolsado em parcelas e condicionado à realização de objetivos.
As autoridades gregas e a União Europeia vinham negando até recentemente que houvesse necessidade de um pacote de empréstimos, devido à preocupação de que isso pudesse ser visto como um sinal de fraqueza. Trata-se de um erro grave. Ajuste fiscal e reformas sem verbas de apoio são mais suscetíveis de fracasso.
Ao mesmo tempo, se a Grécia não ajustar plenamente suas políticas a fim de restaurar a sustentabilidade fiscal e a competitividade, um resgate parcial pela União Europeia e BCE continua provável, a fim de evitar o risco de contágio no restante da zona do euro. Uma moratória na Grécia, afinal, teria os mesmos efeitos mundiais que o colapso do Lehman Brothers teve em 2008.
A União Europeia e o BCE estão preocupados com o risco moral de qualquer "resgate". Mas é exatamente por isso que um programa confiável do FMI, vinculando apoio financeiro à realização gradual de reformas estruturais e fiscais, seria o caminho certo para salvar a Grécia e os demais Piigs.

Nouriel Roubini

Fonte: UOL.

O outro carnaval, Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Fantasia,
que é fantasia, por favor?
Roupa-estardalhaço, maquilagem-loucura?
Ou antes, e principalmente,
brinquedo sigiloso, tão íntimo,
tão do meu sangue e nervos e eu oculto em mim,
que ninguém percebe, e todos os dias
exibo na passarela sem espectadores?

Moral convictions

É a minha serie favorita...



After working as a crime reporter in Montreal, Canada, René Balcer landed a television gig in 1990 writing for a new police drama created by the Hollywood screenwriter Dick Wolf. It was supposed to be NBC’s next big hit, but that show, “Nasty Boys,” was canceled in midseason. Balcer went on to write for Wolf’s other pilot, an underdog series called “Law & Order” that was gaining critical attention. Unlike such popular dramas as “L.A. Law” and “Hill Street Blues,” the show focused on the criminal proceedings rather than on the cops’ and lawyers’ personal lives. Shot with hand-held cameras, “Law & Order” also had a gritty style that looked like nothing else on network television at the time. Last September, “Law & Order” began its 20th season, tying with “Gunsmoke” for the longest-running prime-time drama in American history.

In this conversation, Mr. Balcer, now the show’s executive writer and producer, talks about the drama’s ability to remain topical as it draws from headlines and debates relating to terrorism, torture and abortion that were unimaginable 20 years ago.

How did your earlier career in reporting affect your television writing and producing?

It gave me an appreciation of what detectives see on the ground, the kind of decisions they have to make, how they get sensitized and desensitized to the violence they encounter. Detectives see people at their worst moment in life; that colors their perspective. But good detectives can talk to anybody, be it a drunk on the sidewalk or a bank president, and make that person feel he is their best friend.

“Law & Order” is often advertised as “ripped from the headlines.” What is the process behind fleshing out a news story into a teleplay?

We take the headline and use it as a jumping-off point from which we tell an entirely different story. We focus on what kind of issues the story raises and what it says about human nature.

A recent episode drew from an attempted bombing of a Jewish center in Riverdale, N.Y., in May 2009, in which a police informant gave plotters a fake explosive substance and the New York Police Department apprehended them. How did you use this as a jumping-off point?

One of the problems with terrorist investigations is the police’s reliance on informants. It’s difficult for undercover cops to infiltrate terrorist cells because the cells deal only with people they know. This is a problem not just for New York and the United States but also for international terrorist investigations. Getting inside Al Qaeda is impossible unless you start working with someone who is already in it. It’s dicey when you’re relying on civilian informants, who had been active plotters and have now decided to cooperate.

The case of the attempted Riverdale bombing is about terrorism, but we built the episode around the informant. This character became interesting in the context of his personal dilemma, as well as the compromises he had to make to maintain his credibility with the friends he’s informing on and with the police. A lot of informants used in terrorist investigations are recent immigrants, and the police have no choice but to work with what they’ve got.

Detective Cyrus Lupo, played by Jeremy Sisto, was formerly a member of the N.Y.P.D. Intelligence Division, which investigates terrorist cells abroad. What was the inspiration for this character?

The N.Y.P.D. maintains around 70 detectives who are posted overseas for two to four years. These detectives do not have authority to carry a weapon or make arrests; they interact with local police to get advance information, such as terrorist and suicide-bombing methods, that would be useful to the N.Y.P.D.’s investigations back home. These detectives are also sent to gather intelligence on possible terrorist plots in New York City. In fact, a number of detectives were stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq back in 2001 and 2002, conducting and assisting in interrogations of detainees. The program started right after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, and the division has been very effective, sometimes more effective than the F.B.I. or the C.I.A., in collecting information overseas.

That’s what Detective Lupo did prior to joining the precinct on “Law & Order.” It gives him a different perspective on his job, on the city, on America. He has a more worldly view of things than other characters we have seen on the show. I’ve always loved Lord Jim types; he’s a very romantic character.


In this season’s premiere, the Manhattan district attorney, Jack McCoy, played by Sam Waterston, prosecuted a former Justice Depart-ment attorney for “depraved indifference murder” because the interrogation techniques he sanctioned in a memo, drafted in New York City, led to the death of an Abu Ghraib prisoner. What was the reaction to the premise?

Salon.com and Huffington Post loved it. Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly hated it. They thought this was René Balcer’s liberal fantasy. How dare the show take the Bush administration to task, they suggested, and what’s wrong with torture anyway? The fact is that in a 2002 memo, before he was attorney general, Alberto Gonzales wrote that one of his real concerns was that a local district attorney might prosecute a member of the administration for torture. He envisioned the possibility. I know some localities—Berkeley, for example—are looking into how they can assert such jurisdiction. So it’s not so far-fetched.

How are real crime scenes different from those portrayed on television?

You can show as much blood and guts as you want, but what you can’t show is the smell of blood and charred flesh.

In an interview with NPR’s “Fresh Air,” Dick Wolf called the first half of the show a murder mystery and the second half a moral mystery. Why a “moral mystery,” and not just a “legal mystery?”

In the second half, you dig into questions about the administration of justice: Should we prosecute? What is the measure of justice here? Should we make a deal? What are the different levels of culpability and liability? As these questions get answered, the fundamental issues arise.

A recent episode, for example, was based on the shooting of George Tiller, a doctor who performed late-term abortions. The real trial had not yet occurred, but on the show there is a justification defense: The defendant shot the doctor in order to prevent him from performing a late-term abortion. So the doctor was killed in defense of a particular life.

The show’s trial explores different aspects of the abortion debate. The defense invites testimony from a woman who had discussed on television her decision to take her pregnancy to term, rather than do a late-term abortion, even though her child would be born missing half her brain and would not live more than a day. The defense argued that the defendant had seen this woman’s story, [and that it] affected his thinking about abortion [and motivated him to murder the doctor]. During the courtroom testimony, the woman explains that, though her child died in her arms, this was her way of respecting the child’s dignity. The witness makes clear, however, that she is not anti-abortion, that it was just the right decision to make. After hearing this testimony, the assistant district attorney, Connie Rubirosa, suddenly rethinks her take-no-prisoners pro-choice position. She is now asking where…my privacy ends and where another life’s dignity begins.

In terms of the “moral mystery” in the second half, we are re-evaluating Roe v. Wade and the assumptions that buttressed it 35 years ago. For example, certain birth defects were death sentences then, but now in many cases medical advancements can offer a quality of life not previously available. Now we have a bill of rights for disabled Americans. How does that affect fetuses with disabilities? Aren’t their rights protected? A lot of the ground rules have changed.

So is Roe v. Wade a decision to be revisited? Should it be put back to the states to decide? Should the viability of a fetus outside the uterus, which is usually at 22 weeks, become a factor as far as abortion on demand is a defensible position?

There have been a number of Catholic characters over the years on “Law & Order,” and certain archetypes have emerged. Jack McCoy is lapsed but with righteous moral convictions; Detective Mike Logan was a cynic, having been sexually abused by a parish priest; Detective Rey Curtis was devout. What unites these characters? Do they all have savior complexes?

(Laughs.) I suppose all these characters have that social activist side to Catholicism, the kind of activism that Pope John Paul II hated and that led him to suspend that Nicaraguan priest [Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann for his involvement in the Sandinista National Liberation Front]. I think the belief in public and community service is the common ground where these characters would meet.

Fonte: America magazine

Economists Eye Identity

Uma nova/velha fronteira da economia que ainda não recebeu a devida atenção da comunidade de economistas do grande bananão.


In 1995, George A. Akerlof, a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, circulated a working paper on the impact of social class and conformity on decision making. Akerlof argued that people make decisions—demand education, practice discrimination, marry, divorce, have children, and so on—based in large part on external factors, such as the quest for peer status.

A short time later, Akerlof received a letter from Rachel E. Kranton, a former student who was then an assistant professor of economics at the University of Maryland at College Park. The paper, she wrote, was flawed because it overlooked the role of identity in determining economic outcomes.

"I wouldn't call it chutzpah," Kranton says about her letter to Akerlof. Whatever the case, Akerlof was displeased. He also thought Kranton was wrong. "I understood identity as an aspect of people's tastes," he recently recalled, "and economists had already incorporated taste into their theories."

Despite his skepticism, Akerlof, who was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 2001, felt he owed Kranton an opportunity to explain herself. They met at the Brookings Institution, in Washington, where Akerlof was ensconced as a resident fellow while his wife, Janet L. Yellen, served on the Federal Reserve Board. (Yellen, a much-rumored candidate to become the first woman to chair the Federal Reserve Board, is currently president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.)

Over lunch, Kranton explained her ideas about identity, which originated in Middle East studies—"a field," she says, "that has grappled with questions about how communities are defined." Her husband, Abdeslam E. Maghraoui, is an associate professor of political science at Duke University and a scholar of political identity in the Muslim world. "Identity looms large in the intellectual discourse of my family," Kranton says over the phone from her office at Duke, where she is a professor of economics.

By the end of the meal, Akerlof was convinced that Kranton was on to something significant. "The important part about an idea," he tells me, "is the intuition that something isn't being done." But several questions remained. What exactly is identity? And how could it be incorporated into economics?

They began to meet frequently and read widely in the humanities and social sciences. The work of the Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto, who died in 1923, was particularly influential. Pareto's basic observation, Akerlof explains, was that people "don't just care about economic things, they also care about what they should and should not do, and those beliefs are shaped by who they think they are."

Akerlof points to the persistence of taboos against homosexuality. "These views, which are very arbitrary and cause a great deal of unnecessary pain and suffering, are not well captured in standard economics." People's senses of who they are shape their ideas about how they, and others, should behave. Those beliefs, moreover, change with time. For instance, a young mother in the early 1960s faced a very different choice about whether to pursue a career than do her contemporary counterparts. "Once we saw that"­—Akerlof calls it an "Aha!" moment—"we could see how identity applies to almost all areas of human motivation, from the behavior of children riding on a merry-go-round to how CEO's operate."

In 2000, Akerlof and Kranton formally introduced identity into economics in a paper published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. "Because identity is fundamental to behavior, choice of identity may be the most important 'economic' decision people make," they wrote. More papers followed. Now Princeton University Press is publishing a book-length treatment of Akerlof and Kranton's ideas, Identity Economics: How Our Identities Shape Our Work, Wages, and Well-Being. "Identity economics is at the frontier," they write. "We change economics by closely observing economic and social life and transforming existing theory."

Identity economics, according to Akerlof and Kranton, is both a continuation of and a departure from other developments in the field over the last half-century that have brought economics closer to reality. Game theory allows for a more supple analysis of everything from marriage to monetary policy, and behavioral economics incorporates psychology into the discipline, highlighting the predictable irrationality of human behavior. And since the publication of Gary Becker's groundbreaking book The Economics of Discrimination in 1957, economists have taken up the study of social issues, like fertility, crime, and punishment.

But while Becker and his disciples account for some noneconomic motivations, they generally assume such tastes to be universal and static. Akerlof and Kranton, however, argue that taste is largely dependent on social context. "Taste has been taken as a given, and economists weren't supposed to explore where they come from and how they change. But taste is not a cultural constant," Kranton tells me. "Once you recognize that, you have a different view of how people will act in certain circumstances."

Imagine a new cadet at West Point. On his first day, he is given a haircut, stripped to his underwear, put in a uniform, and forced to endure a number of arduous rituals, like saluting and repeating the same phrase over and over again. Why? The cadet is assuming a new identity as a future officer in the U.S. Army, and he is being indoctrinated with the norms of military life, where incentives—medals, ranks, camaraderie—are not financial-based. Current economics, however, can't explain how a cadet's new identity, and his commitment to ideals like duty and honor, will change his preferences and behavior. Identity economics emphasizes a cadet's identification with the military, and civilian employees' identification with their workplace.

"In each case," Akerlof and Kranton write, "identity would be a component of the workers' utility," and an organization's success depends on employees who share its goals. "Without identity," Kranton says, "you will miss a huge part of what drives economic outcomes and economic behavior." Akerlof adds, "The field is heading in this direction because these ideas answer questions that don't have good answers without them."

Akerlof and Kranton's work has stirred criticism. Some economists question whether identity is an empirically valid concept; others are doubtful that identity can be modeled effectively. But they have prominent supporters, like Amartya Sen, a professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University and the author of Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (W.W. Norton, 2006). "Our priorities, obligations, and concerns are strongly influenced by our identities," Sen says. "This fact doesn't come through sufficiently in standard economic reasoning, so George and Rachel's remarkable work supplements standard economics in a very significant way."

Fonte: TCHE

Economia e vida, na perspectiva da encíclica Caritas in veritate

Sou um dos organizadores deste pequeno livro do Núcleo Fé e Cultura da PUC-SP


Na Campanha da Fraternidade de 2009, a economia e a política vistas a partir do pensamento de Bento XVI e da Doutrina Social da Igreja

Este livro nasceu de um conjunto de acontecimentos providencialmente coincidentes. Em 2010, a Campanha da Fraternidade Ecumênica tem por tema “Economia e vida”, convidando-nos a aprofundar as implicações da Doutrina Social da Igreja para a vida econômica e social no Brasil. Em julho de 2009, recebemos a nova encíclica social de Bento XVI, Caritas in veritate, dezoito anos depois da última encíclica dedicada à temática, Centesimus annus, de João Paulo II.
Nesse meio-tempo, após um período de crescimento econômico aparentemente elevado, mas que terminou com uma crise previsível, o mundo do capitalismo globalizado percebe hoje com clareza a necessidade de repensar seus fundamentos e suas práticas econômicas recentes. Paralelamente, os problemas da pobreza, das escandalosas desigualdades sociais e do desenvolvimento continuam presentes, mas a maior parte das velhas fórmulas que procuravam responder a esses problemas encontra-se desacreditada. Neste contexto, o Núcleo Fé e Cultura – órgão da Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo voltado especificamente ao diálogo entre o Magistério da Igreja e os desafios da pós-modernidade e da globalização – e o Observatório Internacional Cardeal Van Thuân para a Doutrina Social da Igreja – organismo internacional que busca acompanhar e colaborar com as atividades do Pontifício Conselho Justiça e Paz, da Santa Sé – fizeram um convênio de colaboração. Essa é a origem deste livro. [...] Em seu conjunto, Economia e vida, na perspectiva da “Caritas in veritate” traça um amplo painel interdisciplinar sobre a forma como o Magistério da Igreja enfrenta os problemas relacionados à vida econômica e política no Brasil e no mundo, indo desde a antropologia filosófica e a teoria do conhecimento até as questões do desenvolvimento econômico, do meio ambiente, da economia de mercado, da relação entre empresas e bem comum e da defesa da vida. Só posso congratular-me com a iniciativa da publicação desta obra, fazendo votos para que seu estudo seja proveitoso para muitos leitores.

Do Prefácio do Cardeal Odilo P. Scherer, arcebispo de São Paulo.

Sumário

Ia. Parte: Fundamentos

1. Caridade e verdade: fundamentos da dimensão histórica e pública do cristianismo
Cardeal Renato Raffaele Martino

2. A caridade na verdade nas três encíclicas de Bento XVI
Dom Giampaolo Crepaldi

3. A solidariedade como compreensão da Caritas in veritate
Thais Novaes Cavalcanti

4. O diálogo entre a Doutrina Social da Igreja e o mundo na Caritas in veritate
Stefano Fontana

5. A arquitetura mundial de Bento XVI
Thierry Boutet



IIa. Parte: Economia e desenvolvimento

6. O desenvolvimento na Caritas in veritate
Simona Beretta

7. Finanças, racionalidade, bem comum na Caritas in veritate
Stefano Zamagni

8. Empresa, empreendedores e consumidores a serviço do desenvolvimento humano integral segundo a Caritas in veritate
Cristian Loza Adaui & André Habisch

9. Caritas in veritate e Economia de Comunhão
Luigino Bruni


IIIa. Parte: Desenvolvimento e defesa da vida

10. Vida, família e desenvolvimento: a unidade antropológica da Caritas in veritate
David L. Schindler

11. Defesa da vida, meio ambiente e economia na perspectiva do pensamento de Bento XVI
Francisco Borba Ribeiro Neto


IVa. Parte: No contexto latino-americano e brasileiro

12. Caritas in veritate e a América Latina: novos nomes para o desenvolvimento
Juan Esteban Belderrain

13. Os desafios da economia brasileira a partir da Caritas in veritate
Antonio Carlos Alves dos Santos

14. Caritas in veritate e os movimentos populares no Brasil
Vando Valentini & Rafael Marcoccia

15. Refletindo sobre a política e a economia no Brasil a partir de Caritas in veritate
Francisco Borba Ribeiro Neto

Revolutionaries

I was born in England in 1948, late enough to avoid conscription by a few years, but in time for the Beatles: I was fourteen when they came out with "Love Me Do." Three years later the first miniskirts appeared: I was old enough to appreciate their virtues, young enough to take advantage of them. I grew up in an age of prosperity, security, and comfort—and therefore, turning twenty in 1968, I rebelled. Like so many baby boomers, I conformed in my nonconformity.

Without question, the 1960s were a good time to be young. Everything appeared to be changing at unprecedented speed and the world seemed to be dominated by young people (a statistically verifiable observation). On the other hand, at least in England, change could be deceptive. As students we vociferously opposed the Labour government's support for Lyndon Johnson's war in Vietnam. I recall at least one such protest in Cambridge, following a talk there by Denis Healey, the defense minister of the time. We chased his car out of the town—a friend of mine, now married to the EU high commissioner for foreign affairs, leaped onto the hood and hammered furiously at the windows.

It was only as Healey sped away that we realized how late it was—college dinner would start in a few minutes and we did not want to miss it. Heading back into town, I found myself trotting alongside a uniformed policeman assigned to monitor the crowd. We looked at each other. "How do you think the demonstration went?" I asked him. Taking the question in stride—finding in it nothing extraordinary—he replied: "Oh I think it went quite well, Sir."

Cambridge, clearly, was not ripe for revolution. Nor was London: at the notorious Grosvenor Square demonstration outside the American embassy (once again about Vietnam—like so many of my contemporaries I was most readily mobilized against injustice committed many thousands of miles away), squeezed between a bored police horse and some park railings, I felt a warm, wet sensation down my leg. Incontinence? A bloody wound? No such luck. A red paint bomb that I had intended to throw in the direction of the embassy had burst in my pocket.

That same evening I was to dine with my future mother-in-law, a German lady of impeccably conservative instincts. I doubt if it improved her skeptical view of me when I arrived at her door covered from waist to ankle in a sticky red substance—she was already alarmed to discover that her daughter was dating one of those scruffy lefties chanting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh" whom she had been watching with some distaste on television that afternoon. I, of course, was only sorry that it was paint and not blood. Oh to épater la bourgeoisie.

For real revolution, of course, you went to Paris. Like so many of my friends and contemporaries I traveled there in the spring of 1968 to observe—to inhale—the genuine item. Or, at any rate, a remarkably faithful performance of the genuine item. Or, perhaps, in the skeptical words of Raymond Aron, a psychodrama acted out on the stage where once the genuine item had been performed in repertoire. Because Paris really had been the site of revolution—indeed, much of our visual understanding of the term derives from what we think we know of the events there in the years 1789–1794—it was sometimes difficult to distinguish between politics, parody, pastiche...and performance.

From one perspective everything was as it should be: real paving stones, real issues (or real enough to the participants), real violence, and occasionally real victims. But at another level it all seemed not quite serious: even then I was hard pushed to believe that beneath the paving stones lay the beach (sous les pavés la plage), much less that a community of students shamelessly obsessed with their summer travel plans—in the midst of intense demonstrations and debates, I recall much talk of Cuban vacations—seriously intended to overthrow President Charles de Gaulle and his Fifth Republic. All the same, it was their own children out on the streets, so many French commentators purported to believe this might happen and were duly nervous.

By any serious measure, nothing at all happened and we all went home. At the time, I thought Aron unfairly dismissive—his dyspepsia prompted by the sycophantic enthusiasms of some of his fellow professors, swept off their feet by the vapid utopian clichés of their attractive young charges and desperate to join them. Today I would be disposed to share his contempt, but back then it seemed a bit excessive. The thing that seemed most to annoy Aron was that everyone was having fun —for all his brilliance he could not see that even though having fun is not the same as making a revolution, many revolutions really did begin playfully and with laughter.

A year or two later I visited a friend studying at a German university—Göttingen, I believe. "Revolution" in Germany, it turned out, meant something very different. No one was having fun. To an English eye, everyone appeared unutterably serious—and alarmingly preoccupied with sex. This was something new: English students thought a lot about sex but did surprisingly little; French students were far more sexually active (as it seemed to me) but kept sex and politics quite separate. Except for the occasional exhortation to "make love, not war," their politics were intensely—even absurdly—theoretical and dry. Women participated—if at all—as coffee makers and sleeping partners (and as shoulder-borne visual accessories for the benefit of press photographers). Little wonder that radical feminism followed in short order.

But in Germany, politics was about sex—and sex very largely about politics. I was amazed to discover, while visiting a German student collective (all the German students I knew seemed to live in communes, sharing large old apartments and each other's partners), that my contemporaries in the Bundesrepublik really believed their own rhetoric. A rigorously complex-free approach to casual intercourse was, they explained, the best way to rid oneself of any illusions about American imperialism—and represented a therapeutic purging of their parents' Nazi heritage, characterized as repressed sexuality masquerading as nationalist machismo.

The notion that a twenty-year-old in Western Europe might exorcise his parents' guilt by stripping himself (and his partner) of clothes and inhibitions—metaphorically casting off the symbols of repressive tolerance—struck my empirical English leftism as somewhat suspicious. How fortunate that anti-Nazism required—indeed, was defined by—serial orgasm. But on reflection, who was I to complain? A Cambridge student whose political universe was bounded by deferential policemen and the clean conscience of a victorious, unoccupied country was perhaps ill-placed to assess other peoples' purgative strategies.

I might have felt a little less superior had I known more about what was going on some 250 miles to the east. What does it say of the hermetically sealed world of cold war Western Europe that I—a well-educated student of history, of East European Jewish provenance, at ease in a number of foreign languages, and widely traveled in my half of the continent—was utterly ignorant of the cataclysmic events unraveling in contemporary Poland and Czechoslovakia? Attracted to revolution? Then why not go to Prague, unquestionably the most exciting place in Europe at that time? Or Warsaw, where my youthful contemporaries were risking expulsion, exile, and prison for their ideas and ideals?

What does it tell us of the delusions of May 1968 that I cannot recall a single allusion to the Prague Spring, much less the Polish student uprising, in all of our earnest radical debates? Had we been less parochial (at forty years' distance, the level of intensity with which we could discuss the injustice of college gate hours is a little difficult to convey), we might have left a more enduring mark. As it was, we could expatiate deep into the night on China's Cultural Revolution, the Mexican upheavals, or even the sit-ins at Columbia University. But except for the occasional contemptuous German who was content to see in Czechoslovakia's Dubc ek just another reformist turncoat, no one talked of Eastern Europe.

Looking back, I can't help feeling we missed the boat. Marxists? Then why weren't we in Warsaw debating the last shards of Communist revisionism with the great Leszek Ko akowski and his students? Rebels? In what cause? At what price? Even those few brave souls of my acquaintance who were unfortunate enough to spend a night in jail were usually home in time for lunch. What did we know of the courage it took to withstand weeks of interrogation in Warsaw prisons, followed by jail sentences of one, two, or three years for students who had dared to demand the things we took for granted?

For all our grandstanding theories of history, then, we failed to notice one of its seminal turning points. It was in Prague and Warsaw, in those summer months of 1968, that Marxism ran itself into the ground. It was the student rebels of Central Europe who went on to undermine, discredit, and overthrow not just a couple of dilapidated Communist regimes but the very Communist idea itself. Had we cared a little more about the fate of ideas we tossed around so glibly, we might have paid greater attention to the actions and opinions of those who had been brought up in their shadow.

No one should feel guilty for being born in the right place at the right time. We in the West were a lucky generation. We did not change the world; rather, the world changed obligingly for us. Everything seemed possible: unlike young people today we never doubted that there would be an interesting job for us, and thus felt no need to fritter away our time on anything as degrading as "business school." Most of us went on to useful employment in education or public service. We devoted energy to discussing what was wrong with the world and how to change it. We protested the things we didn't like, and we were right to do so. In our own eyes at least, we were a revolutionary generation. Pity we missed the revolution.

Tony Judt

Fonte: NYBooks

Recordação, Rainer Maria Rilke

E tu esperas, aguardas a única coisa
que aumentaria infinitamente a tua vida;
o poderoso, o extraordinário,
o despertar das pedras,
os abismos com que te deparas.

Nas estantes brilham
os volumes em castanho e ouro;
e tu pensas em países viajados,
em quadros, nas vestes
de mulheres encontradas e já perdidas.

E então de súbito sabes: era isso.
Ergues-te e diante de ti estão
angústia e forma e oração
de certo ano que passou.

Tradução: Maria João Costa Pereira

Truth? There's the rub

Ótimo artigo do Simon Blackburn sobre a virtude . Uma raridade em qualquer ambiente.


New Year, and a general election year to boot. A good time, then, to think about resolutions and virtue, truth, authenticity, principle, sincerity and accuracy. In a democracy, it is said, we get the politicians we deserve, so Peter Mandelson's proudly flaunted £21.5K Patek Philippe wristwatch may be a welcome signal that, as befits a man in charge of universities, he has a passion for this last virtue. But no sooner does this thought flit across one's mind than it is hunted down by the worry that the First Secretary of State's watch may be only a sign that he would like to be thought to have a passion for accuracy. The trouble with semiotics is that signs and symbols can mean so many different things: what we might call their impact is so difficult to control, or even to measure, although perhaps in this case focus groups helped.

But now it must occur to many observers that even the most expensive and exclusive Swiss timepiece hardly delivers more accuracy than comes with an iPhone or a quartz timepiece given away with ten gallons of petrol. So, horribile dictu, perhaps it was not even accuracy that was on Lord Mandelson's mind, but the very human joy of using conspicuous consumption to signal the wealth about which he is so relaxed.

Not that I would deny our leaders the joy of dressing up. Philosopher David Hume said: "It cannot reasonably be doubted, but a little miss, dressed in a new gown for a dancing-school ball, receives as complete enjoyment as the greatest orator, who triumphs in the splendour of his eloquence, while he governs the passions and resolutions of a numerous assembly." The First Secretary and Department for Business, Innovation and Skills supremo does not often rise to the latter enjoyment, so perhaps we should be glad that he has the former. And dressing up may appeal to an electorate whose main pleasure lies in shopping and discarding. Perhaps in that light we should also see Tony Blair's reported million-dollar consultancy (plus perks) with Louis Vuitton as the final consummation, the symbolic apotheosis of the whole new Labour project. Social justice is not forgotten, for at the end of the yellow brick road is a world in which absolutely everyone has a million-dollar fashion consultancy.

Mention of our previous Prime Minister reminds us that accuracy is not a very fashionable virtue. Sincerity is apparently enough. Hand-on-heart, eye-rolling, catch-in-the-voice, hammed-up sincerity - sincerity that attains the perfect pitch of faith - is supposed to be the business all by itself. It does not matter if it lies alongside a very relaxed attitude to evidence, to probabilities carefully weighed, to possibilities explored, or indeed to any of the procedures that need to attend a sifting of truth from falsity. The leap of faith vaults over all that mundane grubbing around in the puzzling world. It transcends, it elevates and, above all, it exonerates. Or so the faithful believe. Of course, to be fair, everyone is more or less selective in attributing to faith a magical cleansing power. It has to be faith in one's own truth. Fairy dust has to be rationed - in the old days by the authorities, but now increasingly by the market. Faith in the tenets that other people sometimes go in for does not have the same cleansing powers. Quite the reverse, in fact.

Sincerity is a virtue, but it can be a very cheap one, given our propensity to self-deception. Some philosophers have found this notion paradoxical: how can I myself be both the confidence trickster practising on my innocence, and the dupe who is taken in? And since it is usually a bad thing to be taken in, what is in it for me qua confidence trickster? If I am, say, an investor, and deceive myself into believing that some strategy is risk free, then I, qua confidence trickster, am impoverished just as much as I, qua victim (unlesss I am a banker, of course). The difficulty arises because we think of deception as an intentional process with an intended outcome, which is that the person deceived believes something false. But in self-deception the process is not intentional in this way. Rather, the agent allows himself to be seduced, not by himself, but by the attractions of a world in which something he would like to be true is in fact true. What fine figures we imagine ourselves to cut, with our Swiss watches, alligator handbags and yellow cross-garters! We can after all see ourselves as others see us, and look! - their faces are aglow with love and admiration, and just a faint, but rather pleasurable, tinge of envy.

The self-deceived but sincere politician is a familiar pest. We may signal what remains wrong with him (or her, of course) by suggesting that they lack authenticity. Blown around on the winds of desire and opportunity, they remain people without qualities, without principles or resolution. We cannot know where they stand because they do not stand anywhere: they swim with the currents and tides of the moment.

Many philosophers have set a lot of store by authenticity. In fact, perhaps the best-ever piece of light verse about a philosopher introduces it, in the exacting double-dactyl form:

Higgledy-piggledy

Herr Rektor Heidegger

Said to his students

"To Being be True!

Lest you should fall into

Inauthenticity

This I believe -

And the Führer does too!"

The verse suggests that there is something fake about Heidegger's injunctions to authenticity, and it is easy to sympathise. Indeed, Theodor Adorno wrote a whole book attacking him on the topic without managing to put it anything like as neatly as the verse does. But authenticity certainly has its jargon: wholeness, integrity, truth, the natural, the self-sufficient, the real, the original, the rooted - all favourably contrasted with what is superficial, artificial, imposed, merely conventional, social, constructed, fragmented, self-estranged, false.

The literary critic Lionel Trilling cited Polonius' otherwise banal advice to his departing son Laertes as the first expression of the ideal: "To thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then to any man be false." Fine words, but why should we believe them? What if Laertes' own self is insincere and insecure, irresolute and unknowing, a politician all the way down? If this is how he is, and Laertes expresses his own self, he may give promises he cannot keep, begin undertakings he cannot follow through, use language that means nothing, fantasise 24/7, and hand-on-heart say whatever he would most like to be true.

Many traditions in philosophy, from before Plato through Christianity to Freud, have insisted that the true self lies only at the end of a long quest, a hard process of analysis, discovery and purification. And only an extreme scepticism could lead us to argue in advance against such processes of self-examination and self-improvement. What we may more reasonably question is whether they result in discovery of some authentic self that was there all along, or only the invention of a new way to act, a new script to follow or a new persona to put on. The metaphor of being born again may be more accurate than it sounds, and there is no guarantee that what is newly born is less self-deceived, less of a bore or an idiot, or in any sense more authentic, than whoever started the process.

If all the world's a stage, you cannot expect sincerity from the world any more than you can expect it from actors in their professional roles. You should not, for instance, expect fidelity or loyalty to a previous part, for the persona who breaks the promise is most likely not the persona who gave it. You should not expect the sentiment sincerely felt and voiced at one time to be an accurate indicator of the sentiment that will be just as sincerely felt and voiced at another. The selves it is appropriate or strategic to present at each moment are not linked by ties of identity. They make up only an agglomeration or a commonwealth, and any loyalties through time are at best the fortunate precipitate from favourable social circumstances. Even when faced with the most blatant chicanery or abject disgrace - well, hey! we just need to draw a line under it and move on. This year we can see how well this lesson has been learnt as all three political parties compete to disavow more previous election pledges than the others.

We can indeed wonder about possibilities of improvement and dwell on ideals of virtue and excellence as aids to it. We can undertake self-examination, although the term is often misplaced. For when we ask ourselves what we really want, or what we really believe about something, and find the question hard, this is not because we cannot find ourselves or cannot interpret what we find. The question is not answered by uncovering an inner, pre-formed self with an unambiguous desire or belief. It is answered by looking one more time at the choice or at the evidence, and deciding what to desire or what to believe. It is not navel-gazing that gives us such solutions, but thinking the thing through one more time, in engagement with the world.

Which brings us back to accuracy. Universities should be about the attempt to see things that matter and see them as they are. They are about getting things right rather than putting them right, although we all suppose that decisions based on truth are apt to be better than decisions that are not. Universities are about habits of truth, and a habit of truth works not because on any, or many, occasions you can measure its impact. It works by setting an example.

So as an aside - a silly little philosophical point of small predictable impact - it is worth remarking that the Higher Education Funding Council for England's choice of "impact" as a paradigm of causation to which we must all aspire was particularly idiotic. If we want to pick a term from physical science, we might better say that in the human world examples and ideas work by osmosis and infusion rather than by mechanical force. A billiard ball has no choice about whether or how to move if it is impacted upon by another. But unlike the physical world, the political and social world is made up by human beings who do have choices, and it is the human environment that will eventually colour the way they choose. The human environment is an unimaginably complex network of values, stories and examples, nuances and implicatures, sometimes cemented in language, sometimes scarcely noticed, to which any particular person may or may not respond. It makes up what we also call a culture. A little word like "truth", "justice" or "integrity" does its quiet work not by impact, but by action stretching over centuries, and in itself no stronger than a flower, as the poet has it.

Unfortunately, one human option is to evade particular truths. A university can speak with the tongue of men and angels, but what it says may fall on deaf ears. Hume's little miss enjoying her new dress is probably not in a mood to hear unpleasant truths about the value of education. And surely not all can be wrong with a world in which there are £21.5K Swiss watches and million-dollar consultancies falling into the right persons' laps? In an ideal society, of course, these attitudes would not belong to those in power, but which politician is going to work for a society that would find it odious to elect a person such as himself?


Simon Blackburn is professor of philosophy, University of Cambridge. His most recent book is The Big Questions: Philosophy (2009).


Fonte: T.H.E

Entrevista com Richard Thaler

Thaler, one of the founders of behavioral economics, was out of town when I visited Chicago. I subsequently caught up with him on the phone, and I began by asking him what remained of the efficient-markets hypothesis, which he has long questioned.



Thaler: Well, I always stress that there are two components to the theory. One, the market price is always right. Two, there is no free lunch: you can’t beat the market without taking on more risk. The no-free-lunch component is still sturdy, and it was in no way shaken by recent events: in fact, it may have been strengthened. Some people thought that they could make a lot of money without taking more risk, and actually they couldn’t. So either you can’t beat the market, or beating the market is very difficult—everybody agrees with that. My own view is that you can [beat the market] but it is difficult.

The question of whether asset prices get things right is where there is a lot of dispute. Gene [Fama] doesn’t like to talk about that much, but it’s crucial from a policy point of view. We had two enormous bubbles in the last decade, with massive consequences for the allocation of resources.

When I spoke to Fama, he said he didn’t know what a bubble is—he doesn’t even like the term.

I think we know what a bubble is. It’s not that we can predict bubbles—if we could we would be rich. But we can certainly have a bubble warning system. You can look at things like price-to-earnings ratios, and price-to-rent ratios. These were telling stories, and the story they seemed to be telling was true.

So what are the policy implications? What should the government do to prevent bubbles from inflating, in the housing market, for example?

Several things. I think Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should raise lending requirements in certain areas that look frothy. God did not say that you should be able to borrow one hundred percent of the price of a house.

What was the ultimate cause of the financial crisis? Poor regulation? Greed? Bad market signals? Human frailty?

Leverage caused the crisis—and I would say that is a pretty uncontroversial statement. Human frailty comes into play at two levels. One, the people who were taking out the subprime mortgage loans—many of them didn’t understand what they were doing. Two, the C.E.O.s clearly didn’t understand what their traders were doing. I call that the “dumb principal” problem. Go down the list—A.I.G., Citigroup, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers. These companies were destroyed or devastated by a small part of the firm that was hurtling forward and was risking the entire firm. The people in charge were either greedy or stupid, or possibly both.

What about the rational-expectations hypothesis, another Chicago theory? What’s left of that one?

(Laughs) Is there anybody who really believes in Ricardian equivalence? That’s a preposterous idea. I wonder if you can find anyone, other than, possibly, [John] Cochrane and [Robert] Barro, who has made the calculation as to what impact government spending will have on their future taxes and bequests. People don’t act “as if” they were doing that either. They are ignoring it.

I spoke to Cochrane. He said the problem with behavioral economics is it is too flexible—you can use it to explain anything. He also pointed out that Robert Shiller has been calling for economics to incorporate psychological insights for thirty years, but little progress has been made.

[In answering this question, Thaler brought up the Internet stock bubble, during which shares in Palm, the handheld computing companies, were worth more than the entire market capitalization of Palm’s parent company, 3Com.]

[Cochrane] has a model explaining why, during the Internet bubble, the prices of Palm and 3Com were rational. Rational models are one hundred per cent flexible. If you allow time-varying discount rates, there is no discipline whatsoever. If you look at what happened to tech stocks and then to real estate, and you say maybe there wasn’t a bubble—where is the discipline in that?

I think it’s fair to say that behavioral economics hasn’t solved everything. That is true. But to say Shiller and I have been doing it for thirty years—there was just me and him. Now we have some young recruits. We are not outmanned a thousand to one. But there is work to do.

Do you think the financial crisis will come to be seen as a watershed for behavioral economics—a moment it became mainstream, or even dominant?

I think it is seen as a watershed, but we have had a lot of watersheds. October 1987 was a watershed. The Internet stock bubble was a watershed. Now we have had another one. What is the old line—that science progresses funeral by funeral? Nobody changes their mind.

What will happen is that the economists [in their thirties and forties] are pretty open to these ideas. They don’t think it is very controversial. That’s where economics will be in ten years. They will be running the subject. People like Posner and Becker and Fama and Lucas and I—we will be history.

But you don’t think the financial crisis and recession will cause an intellectual revolution in economics, as happened in the nineteen-thirties?

No. Nothing will happen fast. But the next generation of economists, it is safe to say, will be more open to alternative models of human behavior and less confident that markets work perfectly.

Do you think that Chicago economics of the old school has lost some of its swagger?

No, I don’t see any measurable loss of swagger. Posner goes against the grain. He’s probably the counterexample to the theory that nobody learns anything. Becker and Lucas and so on—that group probably thinks he has lost his mind.

That brings us to the Keynesian revival, and to the dispute about the Obama Administration’s stimulus package. What are your views on that?

The General Theory—anybody who goes back and reads that book can’t help but be impressed. It contains so many insights, including many that anticipated behavioral finance. As for the stimulus, I don’t know where we would be now if there hadn’t been a stimulus package.

Back to Chicago matters. You say you don’t see much less swagger, but I hear that there has been a lot of internal discussion, and debate, about what happened. Is that not true?

Yes. There has been a ton of discussion in the lunchroom. For six months, it was the only thing anybody could talk about. The thing I will say about my colleagues is that they were very engaged by what was going on. The good thing I will say about the Chicago School is that it was always about the world, not about the abstract. That continues. People like Kevin Murphy just want to understand how the world works.

The tradition of Chicago price theory is a good one, and it is a low-tech methodology that tries to apply simple economic theory to the world. [Steve] Levitt is a perfect illustration of that. In some ways, I, too, can fit into that definition of the Chicago School.

Ainda o déficit externo...

Não é o artigo mais sofisticado do "alexandre eram os deuses astronautas", mas o argumento me parece correto.


Imagine uma empresa que fature R$ 100 milhões/ano. Usa R$ 62 milhões para pagar seus funcionários, R$ 21 milhões para a diretoria e os restantes R$ 17 milhões para investir e aumentar seu faturamento nos próximos anos, configuração que mantém seu fluxo de caixa devidamente equilibrado. No entanto, novas oportunidades de investimento aparecem e não há dúvida de que, no melhor interesse dos seus acionistas, a empresa deve aproveitá-las. O que fazer?
Para financiar o investimento adicional, só existem três alternativas: reduzir o pagamento aos funcionários; baixar a remuneração da diretoria; ou ir a mercado, seja tomando empréstimos, seja emitindo novas ações. Considere, porém, que a empresa decida pela terceira opção. Caso o retorno dos projetos seja maior que o custo do capital, não há maiores problemas: com a maturação dos projetos o fluxo suplementar de caixa será superior à remuneração do capital adicional e a empresa, após certo tempo, terá plenas condições de remunerar credores e acionistas.
É fácil concluir que, sob as condições acima, tomar recursos no mercado, o equivalente a um deficit no seu fluxo de caixa, é uma boa decisão e qualquer analista digno desse título louvará a estratégia empresarial. Caso, porém, a empresa estivesse incorrendo em deficit devido a investimentos ruins, ou gastos maiores com funcionários e diretoria, a reação seria a oposta. Sem o crescimento adicional do seu faturamento ela teria dificuldades para servir seus novos compromissos e, assim, não apenas os preços de suas ações cairiam mas também os custos associados a novas dívidas se tornariam maiores, refletindo riscos mais elevados quanto à sua capacidade de pagamento.
A esta altura os 17 leitores já chegaram a duas conclusões importantes. A primeira é que deficit não são, em si mesmos, bons ou ruins; o que interessa é o que se faz com os recursos tomados ao longo desse período, isto é, se os investimos em bons projetos ou se os consumimos em despesas que não gerarão receita adicional.
A segunda conclusão é que não estou falando de uma empresa, mas sim do Brasil, país em que, nos 12 meses terminados em setembro de 2009, o consumo privado respondeu por 62% do PIB, o consumo público por 21%, e o investimento por modestos 17%.
Esperamos (na verdade ansiamos) que o investimento se eleve como proporção do produto, pois se trata de fator crucial para que o país possa acelerar sua taxa de crescimento de longo prazo, mas, como no caso acima, as alternativas existentes são apenas três: reduzir o consumo privado (aumentar a poupança), reduzir o consumo público (fazer o ajuste fiscal), ou incorrer em deficit externo. Não há dúvida de que optamos pelo terceiro caminho.
Nossos "keyenesianos de quermesse" associam essa escolha ao ressurgimento da chamada "vulnerabilidade externa", mas, pela discussão acima, deve ficar claro que esta vulnerabilidade depende do que for feito com os recursos que forem tomados, seja sob a forma de investimento estrangeiro, seja sob a forma de dívida (há uma diferença importante entre eles que, por falta de espaço, não vou abordar).
Caso esses recursos sejam utilizados para financiar o ritmo crescente dos gastos públicos, provavelmente enfrentaremos problemas à frente, quando a expansão do PIB não se mostrar suficiente para servir ao capital tomado. Usados, porém, para investimentos que acelerem não apenas nosso crescimento mas também as exportações, não há por que temer deficit externos. Deficit não é kriptonita; o que fazemos com ele é.

Fonte: FSP

FHC privatiza, Lula conglomera

Bom artigo do Vinicius Torres Freire, colunista do jornal da ditabranda, sobre a consolidação dos "barons" no grande bananão. Espera-se que a eles não seja necessário adicionar o adjetivo que acompanha seus similares americanos: "robber".

Nem toda fusão & aquisição tem o dedo do governo Lula. Algumas são feitas a braçadas, outras à boca miúda, algumas levam só a benção estatal. Algumas das principais personagens desses grandes negócios são proprietários do que antes eram apenas empreiteiras gigantes, agora conglomerados diversificados (Odebrecht, Camargo Corrêa e Andrade Gutierrez).
Os grandes empreiteiros conversam muito bem com Lula, em pessoa.
Outra parte do jogo é armada por Luciano Coutinho, do BNDES, que anunciou o projeto das "campeãs" e "multinacionais" brasileiras e o implementou com eficácia, em tempo escasso -o economista assumiu o banco faz menos de três anos.
O contexto histórico deu o resto do impulso à criação de "chaebol" coreanos ou "keiretsu" japoneses à moda brasileira (ou se trata de algo como a criação de conglomerados americanos e alemães na virada do século 19 para o 20?). A crise financeira descapitalizou ou quebrou empresas no Brasil e lá fora. O mundo rico (a contragosto) e o Brasil (com gosto) convocaram o Estado para resolver a lambança. O relativo sucesso do Brasil na crise reforçou os vetores ativistas do governo.
O BNDES terá R$ 180 bilhões do Tesouro no biênio 2009-10. Ajudou a concentrar o negócio de carnes na mão do JBS; o de frango, suínos e derivados na mão da Perdigão-Sadia (a Perdigão já era "semiestatal"); a telefonia nacional na mão da Oi; boa parte do negócio de celulose na mão da Votorantim-Aracruz.
O comentário vem a propósito da simpatia do governo pelo desejo da Camargo Corrêa de açambarcar um terço da distribuição de eletricidade no Brasil, embora tal negócio seja ainda incipiente. Além da Camargo, a Odebrecht também gostaria de levar a Brasiliana (Eletropaulo e AES), hoje de BNDES e AES; pode ser que tente levar a Duke no Brasil. E a Cemig sempre sonhou em ser grande consolidadora do setor.
Com a Odebrecht, a Petrobras forma um grande elo da ciranda de fusões & aquisições do período Lula 2. Sócias na Braskem, que engoliu a Quattor, Petrobras e Odebrecht quase monopolizaram e verticalizaram a petroquímica no Brasil. Por falar nisso, a Braskem comprou ontem as petroquímicas muito mal das pernas da Sunoco, nos EUA.
Odebrecht e Petrobras estão preocupadas com o movimento anunciado ontem pela Cosan, que fundiu seus negócios de etanol e postos com a Shell (lembre-se que a Cosan comprara os postos Esso no Brasil).
A Petrobras quer ter pelo menos um quinto do negócio do álcool no Brasil. Está procurando mais usinas para comprar, uma meia dúzia. A Odebrecht tem a ETH Bionergia, que está acabando de comprar a Brenco (também de etanol, com apoio e sociedade do BNDES).
A consolidação não acabou -as alcooleiras estão mal das pernas, endividadas. Os estrangeiros estão chegando, na contramão das "múltis brasileiras". A múlti francesa do agronegócio Louis Dreyfuss levou a Santelisa, a segunda do etanol (a primeira é a Cosan). A múlti americana de commodities Bunge vendeu seu negócio de fertilizantes para a Vale (outra "semiestatal") a fim de se concentrar no etanol.
O que falta? Farmacêuticas, siderurgia? Quem dá mais?

Fonte: FSP

Entrevista com Raghuram Rajan

I met Rajan in his office at the Booth School of Business. I began by asking him about the academic work he and several colleagues at the business school did in the years leading up to 2007 on banking and liquidity. In addition to exploring theoretical issues that turned out to be important, Rajan, in the summer of 2005, issued a prescient warning about the dangers of a financial blowup involving the credit markets. It was striking, I remarked, that despite Chicago’s image as a bastion of market efficiency, it was also home to much more questioning research in the financial system.



Raghuram Rajan: Forget the public utterances: the research done at this place was, essentially, right on the ball—issues of liquidity, the fact that liquidity might dry up, and who’s there to provide liquidity in those situations. One of my colleagues, Doug Diamond, is, in many ways, the father of modern banking theory. He wrote the book on bank runs, literally. When he was traveling around giving his talks, people used to say, “Why are you working on history?” Unfortunately, this stuff is all too real these days.

The point is, research drives thinking, and there are all kinds of research being done here. People at the extremes get a lot of press, people who say: “Let’s not do anything, let’s liquidate”—the Andrew Mellon kind of view. There are people at Chicago who hold that view. There are others who understand that the banking system is a lot more important than, and different from, most corporations. Yes, you can close down some banks without a problem, but there are some banks that are so intertwined you don’t have an option.

There are some people who say, Simon Johnson [an M.I.T. economist who was formerly at the International Monetary Fund] for instance, “Oh, we know how to shut down these banks. We did it at the I.M.F.” The I.M.F. never did anything of this size—not by any stretch of imagination. The U.S. has closed down banks, such as Wachovia or Washington Mutual, or at least dissolved them, which are really big banks. But when you come to Citigroup or Bank of America it is a completely different kettle of fish. We have to figure out how to do it—without any question. And we could have been much tougher on the banks than we have been. Even now, we could be much tougher than we are. But to argue that it’s a very simple thing to do—it’s just a matter of nationalizing them or shutting them down—there are a whole lot of issues that are raised there.

All I am saying is that there are no easy answers in this thing … and one doesn’t have to be corrupt or in the pay of the financial sector to say, hey, wait a minute: it’s not as simple as letting them all go under or taking them all over. That’s my rant about the banking sector. By and large, I think we’ve done all the things that needed to be done. I think the downside of what we haven’t done is that we haven’t made the banks face up to more pain. That would have made it politically easier to do what needed to be done.

When you say, “make the banks face up to more pain,” what do you mean? Tougher regulation? Big equity stakes for the government—along the British lines?

Equity stakes and other things. For example, even now [the government] can require all compensation above a certain amount to be paid in equity, and equity that is real equity. The way banks do it now is they pay people in shares, but they also buy back equal amounts of shares [in the market]. So there is no increase in capital.

What we have right now is a situation where every saver in the country is, essentially, paying a huge tax to bail out the banking system. We are all getting screwed on our money market accounts—getting 0.25 per cent—and the banks are making a huge spread on nearly every asset they hold, because they are financing them at pretty close to zero rates. Another way of doing this—a way that would be nice to try—is to force the banks to load up on capital.

What is the point of all this? The point of all this is to get banks to lend. Well, they have been doing everything else except lending. Now, it may be that there aren’t that many profitable lending opportunities at this point. But if there aren’t, why are all the savers paying for this? Because you are not getting them to lend any more, and you are not getting more investment, which was the whole point of having interest rates so low. In fact, what you are doing is setting up a whole lot of other asset bubbles at this point.

Another way would be to put more direct pain on the banks. For example, if they were flush with capital and found they couldn’t pay bonuses, so all of this [money] went into increasing the capital base, they would have an incentive to make loans to reduce the effective capital that they had. What we have at the moment is that the citizenry is paying for the banks. Get the banks to pay for themselves.

That gets away from the whole Chicago issue. But what I’m arguing is in Chicago you have the extreme, which says, “Let the chips fall they may. What’s the problem with letting a few banks go under?” Whether you hold that view depends on how much you think the banks as an institution matters. Doug Diamond and I think it does matter. There is a lot of organizational and relationship capital embedded in the banks. If you let them go, it is very hard to start them up [again].

What about the causes of the crisis?

Within the big tent of Chicago, again, there are [also] so many different explanations for why this happened. Whether it was an agency problem in the banking system itself. Whether it was markets going haywire—Dick Thaler would be in that camp—irrational exuberance of one kind or another. Or whether it was government intervention—the story about pushing credit to the less well off segments of the population. My sense is, if you think seriously about this, all parts of it are important.

When you have a systemic crisis of this kind in a developed country … the whole point about development is that you deal with some of these problems. You don’t have populist extension of credit. You don’t have banks going haywire. There is reasonable supervision. That is what we have always argued—you get good institutions. And all of it broke down. Which would suggest it is not a small breakdown; it is not a small thing that went wrong. You can’t pin it all on Greenspan. It is a systemic breakdown, and we need to look more broadly at why it happened.

How long have you been in Chicago?

I came here in 1991.

When it was largely associated with the efficient-markets hypothesis?

I would guess…. When I came here, Merton Miller and Gene Fama were the leaders of the finance group. Clearly, both of them were strongly persuaded of the old Chicago viewpoint. Since then, I would say that Dick Thaler and Rob Vishny have been two important figures arguing that there are some serious departures from fundamentals. The whole point about a strong form of efficiency is this: If everybody knows things are going wrong why don’t they correct it? Vishny’s arguments have been about why it doesn’t get corrected—limits to arbitrage and stuff like that. I think that is quite persuasive. Dick Thaler’s [work] has been about how people make mistakes of a certain kind. That by itself is not enough to explain major departures. If somebody makes mistakes, why doesn’t somebody else see those mistakes and try to take advantage of them?

Who brought in Thaler and Vishny? Was a deliberate decision taken to try and broaden out the Chicago approach?

Vishny evolved. He was a dyed-in-the-wool corporate-finance guy when he came in, and then he got interested in market efficiency and things like that. He put his money where his mouth is. He ran a very successful [investment] fund. And now he’s come back. Vishny evolved and therefore wasn’t an import of the virus. Thaler was a direct import. I think Gene, to his credit, and Vishny played a big role in bringing Dick in.

I want to tell you a story that I don’t know if anybody else has told you. Dick Thaler used to teach a course on market inefficiency. For nine weeks, he would pound the notion that markets were inept in this way and that way. The tenth week he would invite Gene Fama in. And Gene would demolish everything that Dick had taught the students over those nine weeks. It was Chicago at its best—where you have a debate but you respect each other’s viewpoint even though it is diametrically opposed to yours…. It’s not about people; it’s about ideas. Unfortunately, in too many departments, disagreements about ideas turns into personal disagreement. That’s an important difference in Chicago—that we criticize the idea, and we criticize it very fiercely internally, but not the person.

Is there a big difference between the business school and the university economics department?

The economics department, as you know, has these giant personalities. I would say the business school has fewer personalities…. Maybe there are fewer giants at the business school, but it may also be that the culture here is one of greater give and take.

As an outside observer, it sometimes seems that the business school is starting to loom over the economics department. Is that fair?

We have a lot more younger people—just because of the size. We have an economics group, a behavioral group, a finance group. I think in the numbers we are bigger. Also, business schools typically have substantial resources, and so on. All those things help. But I would say it is still a formidable economics department.

Have there been a lot of in-house debates about the crisis? Seminars, that sort of thing?

Oh yes, when the crisis started getting worse and worse we had a whole bunch of seminars across the school. And our lunchroom is full of debate about this, all the time—again, because we differ internally about what the causes and remedies may be. It boils down to two or three things.

One: the extent to which it was animal spirits and mistakes versus distorted incentives.

Two: the importance of the banking system. If you let them all collapse, can they regenerate immediately, or is there a difficulty in rebuilding organizations once they collapse? Some people say liquidate and from the ashes you will see the phoenixes rising. Other say no—ashes are ashes and you get nothing from that.

Three: there is also some argument about the extent of the financial center-political system nexus. Those on the left and the right basically think they are in bed with each other. Those at the center think that [policymakers] are in a difficult situation.

So you have some sympathy for Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, and others in the Obama Administration who are being attacked for being too soft on Wall Street? After all, people tend to forget how dire things seemed at the end of 2008 and the start of 2009.

(Nods) Here’s the thing. A lot of people were saying the only way out was to nationalize the banks, and now they are not revisiting what they talked about then. And what about the guys who said, “Let them all fail”? They aren’t going back to what they said either…. Maybe if we had let them fail we would have had a better outcome—who knows? But I think you have to give the authorities credit for at least putting a floor under the panic. And I think [Hank] Paulson deserves some of the credit. This Administration followed some of what he did.

Now, they were playing in an environment where they really were making it up as they went along, so I have a lot of sympathy for what they did. But I do think in hindsight, and even at the time, that they could have been a lot tougher. Their fear was that if they were a lot tougher they would have taken the bottom out. I think even at that time they could have been tougher.

You mean when they were handing out debt guarantees and equity injections and so on?

Yes. At that time, they could have asked for more [in return], but I don’t think they were focussed on it. The problem now is the banks act as if there was never a problem. It’s the ex post rationale: we paid you back with profits. Well, nobody was willing to lend to you then. The effective interest rate the government should have charged would have been infinity. When there is no quantity available, the price was infinity. (Laughs) So to argue that it wasn’t a subsidized loan just because you paid it back is ridiculous. They know it, but, obviously, it’s harder to make the case to the public.

Where do we go from here?

The real problem is that the United States has, in many ways, been encouraging too much consumption as a palliative for other things that haven’t been solved. So we muddle along because the crisis wasn’t deep enough [to force big changes]. We used all our bullets. We don’t have any bullets left, and we are in the process of encouraging risk-taking all over again. I’m not saying we are necessarily going to have another crisis soon. But what do we have in reserve if we haven’t dealt with the fundamental problems? That’s my worry—that we will emerge without a serious sense that there are problems we need to fix. We will have identified bonuses as an issue, or something like that, and imposed some constraints. But we won’t have dealt with the underlying deep problems.

Back to your own research on banking: Did you encounter any opposition to it internally?

No, we weren’t raising any hackles. Our research was about liquidity and the possibility of it drying up. It wasn’t about market efficiency, or anything of that sort. It was technical and a bit obscure. In a sense what we did was we added some institutional detail to the traditional theory.

Were there are precursors at Chicago to your line of work?

Well, there is Ronald Coase. Coase is an important figure at Chicago, and he started this whole thing about worrying about organization.

We have talked about the efficient-markets theory. What about the other big modern theory associated with Chicago—the rational-expectations hypothesis? What’s left of that one?

The fault of the macroeconomics profession was not so much rational expectations, which is a convenient and useful device. It was to ignore the plumbing. Economists could afford to do that for a long time because the plumbing didn’t back up. Now that the plumbing has backed up you find that loans aren’t really made in a pristine, pure market. Things can break down. There can be quantity constraints, when nobody is willing to lend to anybody at any price.

It’s not so much rational expectations, which I think was an important advance. The mistake was that we thought the economy works reasonably well, and we could ignore the institutional details. We learned that was wrong.