Temas de relações internacionais, de política externa e de diplomacia brasileira, com ênfase em políticas econômicas, em viagens, livros e cultura em geral. Um quilombo de resistência intelectual em defesa da racionalidade, da inteligência e das liberdades democráticas.
O que é este blog?
Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida.
Todo economista sensato é – ou deveria ser – a favor do livre
comércio. Digo “deveria ser”, já que não existem argumentos econômicos
contrários ao princípio, e que os economistas (insensatos?) que se
posicionam contrariamente, o fazem por outras razões que não as de ordem
propriamente econômica: defesa do emprego nacional, ausência de
reciprocidade por parte dos parceiros comerciais, desequilíbrios
setoriais devidos a externalidades negativas em outros setores, etc.; ou
seja, argumentos de natureza puramente política, quando não oportunista
ou meramente conjuntural.
Todos os políticos sensatos afirmam ser – por vezes, enganosamente – a
favor do livre comércio; mas, de fato, praticam o mais deslavado
protecionismo. Eles o fazem sob o argumento de que “a teoria é perfeita,
mas na prática não funciona”; na verdade, geralmente, eles estão apenas
atrás de reeleição no seu curral eleitoral, eventualmente ameaçada se a
competição estrangeira destruir muitos empregos localmente. David Ricardo
É compreensível que a lógica (inatacável) do livre comércio – evidenciada desde o início do século 19 pelo economista britânico David Ricardo, proponente da tese das vantagens comparativas relativas
– não seja muito compreensível ao cidadão comum (com perdão pela
redundância): pessoas sem maior instrução econômica – ou sem um
conhecimento mais acurado da história – não conseguem compreender que
comprar produtos mais baratos do exterior sempre será melhor do que se
tentar fazer tudo localmente, empregando os fatores nacionais na
produção de bens para os quais os países, ou seus atores
microeconômicos, dispõem de vantagens comparativas relativas, uma vez
que, deste modo, a renda aumentará para todos os parceiros no negócio,
tanto exportadores, quanto importadores. O cidadão comum só consegue ver
a “perda” dos empregos locais, ou a “transferência” de renda para o
exterior, deixando de perceber os benefícios evidentes da especialização
produtiva segundo a dotação (não estática) de fatores. Como se diz
comumente: o comércio nunca é um jogo de soma zero, ou seja, só uma das
partes pode ganhar, em detrimento da outra; todos sempre ganham no
exercício totalmente livre de trocas voluntárias.
É menos compreensível que políticos, em geral cidadãos mais educados
do que a média – ops, talvez não em todos os países… –, sejam contra o
livre comércio, já que eles (ou os seus assessores) estariam em
condições de comprovar o quanto o livre comércio contribui para o
aumento dos índices de produtividade, para os níveis de competitividade
e, portanto, para a geração de riqueza nacional, medidos direta ou
indiretamente quanto aos seus resultados de médio e de longo prazos. Mas
talvez não se possa pedir a políticos que sejam sempre racionais e
coerentes com a realidade.
É menos compreensível ainda, ou talvez não seja racionalmente
admissível, que economistas inteligentes se posicionem contra o livre
comércio, quando, mesmo decidido unilateralmente, ele só traz benefícios
aos países que o praticam. Como dito acima, os argumentos contra o
livre comércio por parte de ‘economistas’ não são de natureza econômica,
mas de ordem essencialmente política. Mesmo um economista reputado
inteligente como Paul Samuelson
produziu um ‘teorema’ e caiu na esparrela de opor-se ao livre comércio
sob a justificativa de que ele diminuía os salários dos trabalhadores
menos qualificados… nos Estados Unidos (sic!). Ele provavelmente não
mediu o aumento da renda – ou seja, do poder de compra, da capacidade
aquisitiva – desses mesmos trabalhadores na vigência do livre comércio.
Em outros termos, ainda que o livre comércio provoque pressão baixista
sobre os salários dos trabalhadores menos qualificados, eles adquirem
uma “renda extra” ao poderem adquirir bens e serviços mais baratos,
eventualmente de melhor qualidade também, quando importados.
Talvez os economistas que procedem como Samuelson tampouco querem, a
exemplo dos políticos oportunistas, ser acusados de contribuir para a
perda de empregos nacionais, ou para o aumento do déficit comercial,
seja lá o que for mais importante. Mas nada explica a construção de
argumentos aparentemente sérios contra o livre comércio, quando essa
oposição causa, objetivamente, perda de renda nacional, perda de
oportunidades de especialização produtiva – e, portanto, de ganhos de
produtividade em setores com demanda externa potencialmente maior – e
perda de nichos de integração na economia internacional, a maior
provedora possível de tecnologias inovadoras, know-how,
capitais e receitas de exportação. Não se pode esquecer que, por
definição, a soma do conhecimento externo sempre será maior do que
qualquer conhecimento interno, mesmo para a maior e mais poderosa
economia nacional (o que é evidente pelos dados de licenciamento
tecnológico e de registro de patentes).
O livre comércio, aliás, é um pouco como a tecnologia: destrói alguns
empregos localizados, setorialmente e temporariamente, ao mesmo tempo
em que cria novos empregos, em setores mais avançados e geralmente de
melhores salários. Pode ocorrer, claro, que as perdas sejam mais amplas,
de mais longa duração, e que os novos empregos não sejam, localmente,
de mais alta remuneração. Mas isto se deve a outros fatores causais,
talvez externalidades negativas ainda não revertidas pela economia
nacional, e não propriamente aos mecanismos do livre comércio, que
sempre tendem a produzir ganhos de renda na economia como um todo.
Sendo isso verdade – e não vejo argumentos contrários a essas ideias
que sejam racionalmente defensáveis – é surpreendente que o livre
comércio não seja ainda mais disseminado – ou seja, universal e
unilateral – do que os poucos exemplos parciais, quase em formato de
arquipélago ou de colcha de retalhos, dos acordos que podem ser
legitimamente classificados sob essa rubrica e como tal registrados na OMC.
Com efeito, a maior parte dos acordos ditos de livre comércio são, na
verdade, de liberalização comercial, deixando ainda largas frações das
economias nacionais – geralmente agricultura e indústrias intensivas em
trabalho – ao abrigo da concorrência estrangeira. Na verdade, como já
dizia outro economista britânico, John Stuart Mill,
mais importante do que a simples troca de mercadorias, o que o livre
comércio mais promove – aliás o simples ato de comerciar,
independentemente das condições – é o intercâmbio de “ideias”, que estão
sempre embutidas em quaisquer produtos.
O outro argumento – de natureza política, sublinhe-se mais uma vez –
que busca refrear o avanço dos acordos de livre comércio é o de que seus
ganhos (ou perdas), do ponto de vista da renda dos cidadãos, seriam
muito pequenos e difusos (ou seja, disseminados por toda a sociedade);
ao passo que seu impacto negativo é geralmente concentrado numa
indústria ou num setor específico, podendo produzir, portanto, efeitos
devastadores numa cidade ou numa região inteira. Se isso é verdade,
políticos responsáveis deveriam ser a favor do livre comércio, já que os
ganhos (ou perdas) para a economia e a sociedade como um todo são
incomensuravelmente maiores do que o argumento do foco concentrado, por
definição parcial e limitado a uma parte apenas da economia ou da
sociedade.
Um simples cálculo de contabilidade nacional
permitiria comprovar que o efeito de uma tarifa elevada ou de uma
salvaguarda – mesmo temporária – sobre um produto ou serviço qualquer
oferecido em competição a um similar nacional, é muito mais relevante do
que os custos setoriais e limitados do livre comércio, por vezes em
dígitos de milhões, contra simples dezenas ou centenas de milhares. Da
mesma forma, os empregos perdidos (ou não criados) pela ausência de
livre comércio são mais relevantes, no plano da qualidade e dos
vencimentos, do que os poucos empregos preservados temporariamente pela
sanha de algum político protecionista.
Este é, finalmente, o último argumento em favor do livre comércio: os
empregos assim ‘salvos’, estão irremediavelmente condenados, pois que
eles não poderão se manter indefinidamente num mundo irremediavelmente
globalizado (mas, de certa forma, ele sempre o foi, pelo menos para as
economias de mercado). A indústria assim protegida corre um risco
ampliado de, mais cedo ou mais tarde, perecer completamente, quando não
se lhe oferece a oportunidade (e a chance) de enfrentar a concorrência
pela qualificação tecnológica, pela reconversão produtiva, pela inovação
incremental.
A América Latina é uma região que, ao longo da história, produziu
alguns dos argumentos mais esgrimidos por economistas, políticos,
simples acadêmicos, contra o princípio e a prática do livre comércio.
Desde o imediato pós-Segunda Guerra, o economista argentino Raúl Prebisch, então diretor-geral da Comissão Econômica da ONU para a América Latina (Cepal),
com sede em Santiago, disseminou sua tese quanto à “deterioração das
relações de troca”, uma construção baseada na crença, a partir de
estatísticas selecionadas arbitrariamente, de que os países em
desenvolvimento exportadores de matérias primas sempre perderiam contra
os países desenvolvidos exportadores de manufaturas, pois que as
primeiras, argumentava ele, tendiam a ter seus preços reduzidos no
comércio internacional, ao passo que os segundos sempre ganhariam com a
venda de produtos industrializado.
Desse “intercâmbio desigual” se deduzia a necessidade de
industrialização – o que é absolutamente aceitável – mas também de
projetos, a serem negociados nos foros internacionais, no sentido de
“corrigir” os mercados de commodities pelos seus efeitos depressivos
sobre os seus preços, com o que se passou à elaboração de acordos
setoriais (café, cacau, açúcar, estanho, etc.) para diferentes matérias
primas livremente transacionadas desde sempre visando à estabilização e
manutenção de preços de referência (com quotas, estoques reguladores e
outros mecanismos intervencionistas). O Brasil, inclusive, é um país
“pioneiro” nesse tipo de intervenção, desde as primeiras medidas, no
início do século 20, de “defesa do café”, das quais resultaram processos
em cortes de Nova York contra a “manipulação dos mercados”.
Não existem, repito, argumentos racionais, economicamente
defensáveis, contra o livre comércio; tudo o que se disser contra ele
tem causas e fundamentação essencialmente políticas. Ainda aguardo o
teorema que irá provar o contrário, eu e David Ricardo…
Paulo Roberto de Almeida (São Paulo, 1949) é
Doutor em Ciências Sociais (Université Libre de Bruxelles, 1984), Mestre
em Planejamento Econômico (Universidade de Antuérpia, 1977), e
diplomata de carreira desde 1977. Foi professor no Instituto Rio Branco e
na Universidade de Brasília, diretor do Instituto Brasileiro de
Relações Internacionais (IBRI) e, desde 2004, é professor de Economia
Política no Programa de Pós-Graduação (Mestrado e Doutorado) em Direito
no Centro Universitário de Brasília (Uniceub). Visite seu site, seu blog ou confira seu CV-Lattes.
How Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand Was Corrupted by Laissez-Faire Economics
If read correctly, Smith's invisible hand shows the limits of laissez-faire
By Jeff Madrick
Economics, April 15, 2016
As I learned my economics and further explored the
influence of the Invisible Hand, the power of ideas became clearer
to me. Economic ideas have had enormous influence on
economic conditions—and vice versa. Over the past thirty-five years,
the ideas at the center of orthodox economics, did damage and laid the
groundwork for the financial crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession that
followed. The Invisible Hand, though alluring, is highly
ambiguous—it does good and harm.
A beautiful idea can be described as one that explains a
lot with a little. Such ideas are often simpler than previous
explanations of a phenomenon. But they can be siren songs, and
throughout history many such ideas have been found to be wrong: the
Aristotelian belief that heavy items fall fastest to earth; the
once-dominant idea that the veins and arteries are separate circulatory
systems; the notion, which seemed undeniable to educated people at one
time, that the earth is the center of the universe.
The Copernican idea that the sun, not the earth, is the
center of the solar system is a classic example of the best kind of
beautiful idea. It is elegant and simple and, most important, ultimately
correct. But time was still needed to break the shackles of the
older, mistaken beautiful ideas. Once accepted, such ideas are hard
to shed. They become part of us and color how we think.
Physical observation alone did not pave the way to the
Copernican idea, which took some time to gain acceptance. There
were also cultural and philosophical changes that opened paths to
such thinking. Our sense of our uniqueness as a species may have
already been diminishing culturally and intellectually before
Copernicus’s astronomical theory took shape, making it possible to
accept the radical notion that the earth was not the center of it all.
History is more a circle than a line—a feedback loop rather than simple
cause and effect. I’d argue that economists too often overlook that.
Honest economists readily admit their oversimplifications;
confused economists take them more literally.
The beautiful idea of the Invisible Hand enraptured
economists as well as many political thinkers for more than two
centuries. But it is not an idea with the power of, say, the Copernican
discovery. It is more a loose metaphor for the way markets may work than
an ironclad law. The Invisible Hand is believed by economists to
demonstrate that markets where goods and services are freely
exchanged will result in the greatest benefit to buyers and sellers
alike, and as noted direct investment where it is most useful,
enhancing the rate at which the economy can grow. All of this takes
place without any outside government intervention.
Orthodox economists have made the Invisible Hand the
basic foundation of their work. They grudgingly agree that
sometimes government intrusion in the market is necessary. Usually,
though, government efforts are seen as harmful. Most extraordinary,
many economists claim that just as the market for cornflakes is
self-adjusting, so, too, is an entire economy. Supply and demand
automatically adjust to a “general equilibrium” that satisfies as
many people as possible. In a recession, prices, wages, and interest
rates will fall. More goods will be demanded, and production will
rise again. Excessively rapid growth will result in higher prices,
which dampen demand and will perhaps create a recession that lasts
until the economy readjusts. A recession will only be temporary, as
will excessive growth.
Unlike the Copernican revolution, however, the Invisible
Hand is an assumption, not a scientifically based law. Its obvious
limitations have not prevented its supreme influence. The alllure of
the Invisible Hand is its elegance. The profound weakness is that it
is not nearly as complete a model of markets as many economists insist
it is. Its underlying assumptions—that people have material preferences
that don’t change, that they are rational decision makers, and that they
have all the price and product information they need—are extreme. The
Invisible Hand is thus a limited proposition, elegant but impure.
It especially draws theorists toward the
laissez-faire model of governing, which holds that government
intervention should be minimized. Indeed, the free market, not
government, is accepted as the dominant organizing mechanism of society.
Smith used the term “Invisible Hand” just once in The Wealth of Nations
and only once in his earlier work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The
historian Emma Rothschild, in her book on Smith and the Marquis de
Condorcet, two towering Enlightenment scholars, argues that Smith was
more ironic than serious about the Invisible Hand, always assuming an
active role for government in creating the rules and regulations of
society and fully conscious of the need for compassion and community,
which he outlined rather beautifully in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
But Smith took the Invisible Hand very seriously, I’d
argue, even as he assumed a large role for government. He was a
complex thinker, breaking new ground in many areas, and too much
time has been spent trying to make his abundant ideas consistent
with one another. He could believe in limiting government in some
ways but expanding it in others. Even though he explicitly mentioned the
Invisible Hand only once in The Wealth of Nations, elsewhere in his masterpiece he addressed it at length.
Smith was formally a moral philosopher at the University
of Edinburgh, and he had come to believe that individuals could
often make their own decisions without help from a higher authority,
a staple idea of the Enlightenment that was rapidly gaining
cultural acceptance. A market undirected by government fit this
philosophical disposition very well. Smith was determined to show
that such self-oriented behavior on the part of individuals led to a
common good. “Man has almost constant occasion for the help of
his brethren,” he famously wrote, “and it is in vain for him to
expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail
if he can interest their self-love.” And then follows his most quoted
line: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the
baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own
interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their
self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their
advantages.”
Emma Rothschild, appropriately skeptical of the Invisible
Hand, emphasizes its “loveliness.” To many, she observes, it is
“aesthetically delightful.” Rothschild notes that for the Nobel laureate
Kenneth Arrow and his highly regarded coauthor Frank Hahn the
Invisible Hand was “poetic.” Arrow and Hahn wrote that it is “surely the
most important contribution of economic thought.” Another Nobel
laureate, James Tobin, called it “one of the great ideas of history and
one of the most influential.” The American conservative philosopher
Robert Nozick is impressed by how it finds an “overall pattern or
design” out of a seeming jumble of decisions.
Its simple elegance, as I’ve said, is part of the reason
for its influence. Rebuttals of it tend to be intricate, but this does
not make them wrong. A rare readable rebuttal of Smith’s moral
contentions
can be found in Adam’s Fallacy, a short book by
the nonmainstream economist Duncan Foley. Others have built economic
systems that give less credibility to the central proposition that
economies are a collection of markets driven by the Invisible Hand and
more to the influence of tradition, culture, power, war, and the
development of the law, the banking system, and other institutions.
Economic growth cannot, it turns out, be explained by the simple
mechanism of the Invisible Hand, however key a role it played. These
other less traditionally economic factors matter enormously. Foley is
part of this tradition, as is the similarly nonmainstream Lance
Taylor, whose Maynard’s Revenge is a variation on the failures
of Smith’s theory. The Invisible Hand, however, overwhelmingly trumps
all these insurrectionary ideas in the practice of economics today.
With the stakes so high, how could I not have wanted to
understand the way economies create wealth? How could I not have
embraced the Invisible Hand? Was there some set of conditions and
choices that underlay prosperity, a set that could be maintained
and enhanced? In short, was there a universal key to economic
growth? Political decisions, the tides of history, scientific
breakthroughs, the spread of literacy, the rise of rapid
transportation—all these and more affect growth. But my college
textbooks, even when they included sections on Keynesian government
stimulus, by and large agreed that prosperity is mostly a consequence of
the Invisible Hand—that is, a free market.
Adam Smith may not have been an economist per se, but to
my mind he was an economic historian of his times. Better said, he was
an economic sociologist. He wanted to understand the causes of the
prosperity that existed in Scotland and the rest of Britain. History’s
leading theoretical innovators were trying to make sense of what they
saw as surprising and robust economic advances since the 1700s. They
noted how wealthy many individuals were becoming; how cities were
growing; how agriculture was feeding more people; how new water mills
and factories were producing goods more cheaply; how many new businesses
were being started; how canals and, over time, railway lines were
proliferating; and how technology was advancing rapidly. Neither they
nor their greatest successors created economic edifices out of theory;
instead, they created theory out of the concrete edifices they observed.
Unlike, say, Newton’s or Einstein’s theories, which offered predictions
based on immutable laws of nature (within defined limits, granted),
economic theories did not predict the Industrial Revolution or
the fabulous wealth of today’s rich nations. John Maynard Keynes was a
brilliant but mostly conventional economist until the devastating Great
Depression; when the facts on the ground changed, he said, he had to
change his ideas.
Adam Smith did not begin The Wealth of Nations
with the Invisible Hand. The general cause of increasing wealth is
productivity, he wrote in his first chapter, the growing quantity of
goods and services that can be produced per hour of work. More income
was produced per worker as productivity increased. The persistent
increase in productivity, accumulating over years, decades, generations,
and centuries, is the cause of the economic benefits we enjoy today.
This was accomplished through what Smith called the “division of labor.”
Smith started with the aforementioned pin factory, a
classic example of rising productivity, both simple and highly
illustrative. Smith may have called the manufacturing of pins
“trifling,” but the availability of cheap pins was important to the
burgeoning textile industry. Smith explained that one man could make one
pin a day, perhaps twenty. But when manufacturers learned to divide
and specialize the work, productivity exploded. Smith reported
that there were up to eighteen separate operations—“ one man draws out
the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth
points it”—and by dividing the labor, twenty men with specialized
skills could now make an astonishing forty-eight thousand pins in a
day. This huge multiplication of output was achieved even as the cost
of labor remained low. Here, in a nutshell, was the miracle of
modern wealth. But it was the Invisible Hand that directed business to
make such investments as demand created opportunity; it was the guidance
system, so to speak.
This primitive example of growing productivity is crystal
clear. Smith went on to show how it characterized industry after
industry. More than a century later, the division of labor became the
basis of mass production, which made use of elaborate machines that, by
and large, worked on the same principle of breaking tasks down to their
simplest level. Henry Ford took this to the extreme, paring down the
multiple tasks involved in building a car to a degree that no one had
imagined possible.
When Ford started out, a car with an internal
combustion engine typically cost around $5,000. He eventually got the
price down to a few hundred dollars, having figured out a way to make so
many more cars with little change in labor time or costs. There have
been countless examples in industrial history of this reduction in
price. By the end of the 1920s, about three-fifths of American families
had a car—compared to a little over one-fifth a decade earlier—and a
huge number owned washing machines, radios, and telephones. The increase
in television ownership in the 1950s was even more explosive—and even
with TVs being relatively more expensive, adjusted for inflation, than
the computer would later be. But since the 1980s, the price of a
personal computer has dropped substantially, and now about
three-quarters of Americans own one.
Division of labor was the central principle, but other
factors were exploited to increase productivity. New sources of power
made a significant difference by reducing labor time: wind and water
at first, well before Smith’s day, then coal, oil, and, finally, the
generators that produced the electricity (and, to a much lesser
degree, nuclear fission) that powered the increasingly complex
machines that produced more and more goods faster and faster with less
and less labor. Another major factor was the rising speed of the
transportation of raw materials, parts, and finished goods to
producers and markets—first over the waterways, then by train, and soon
on trucks and huge oceangoing vessels. The steam engine was key to these
developments, but so were navigational techniques. Transportation costs
were sharply reduced, which also radically enhanced the mobility of
labor. Soon communication became faster, further boosting productivity.
The telegraph was critical to American economic development in the
mid-1800s, as was the telephone by the end of the century. Lower costs
of parts made it possible to produce countless newly invented products
over the decades.
The size of the market was every bit as critical as
output—and maybe more so—and has usually been overlooked by
contemporary economists. The division of labor and other
productivity improvements could only be made if the market was large
enough. Smith knew this, giving the third chapter of The Wealth of Nations the
title “That the Division of Labor Is Limited by the Extent of
the Market.” What good would it be to make forty-eight thousand
pins rather than two hundred if there was no need for those pins,
even if the price dropped drastically? Markets had to expand beyond
the village to the region, the nation, and the world. This was
another reason that more efficient and low-cost transportation was so
necessary to the advance of productivity.
The process that created the incentives to increase
productivity and guide production and prices was itself driven by
self-interest, Smith argued. He observed that it is merely a human
“propensity” to want to barter and that the way to get what one wants is
by giving others what they want.
How much to produce? At what price to sell? Is this really
for the overall good? Shouldn’t somebody decide? This is the process of
the Invisible Hand. “By directing that industry in such a manner as its
produce may be of the greatest value,” Smith wrote, “he intends only
his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an
invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention.”
The fact that Smith used the term “Invisible Hand” only once in The Wealth of Nations has, as noted, misled some scholars into thinking that he did not really care about or even fully believe in it.
Yet the chapter in which he described it without
explicitly mentioning it—“ Of the Natural and Market Price of
Commodities”—is the most important in the book. First of all, Smith
assumed there was a “natural” price for every good, one ambiguously
based on the long-term costs of producing the product. “When the
quantity of any commodity which is brought to market falls short of the
effectual demand,” he wrote, “a competition will immediately begin
[among those who want to buy it], and the market price will rise.” In
other words, as demand increases, the price rises until it reaches
the point at which the entire quantity produced is consumed. If
supply increases, the opposite occurs. As he wrote, “When the
quantity brought to market exceeds the effectual demand . . . some
part must be sold to those who are [only] willing to pay less, and
the low price which they give for it must reduce the price of the
whole.” Thus, more people can own the product at the lower price.
Supply and demand shift to strike a balance at a specific
price, which is called the equilibrium point. If there is too much of
a commodity or, similarly, too much labor or land, the employer will cut
jobs or wages or the landowner will reduce the price or amount of
salable land until the wage or the price reaches its so-called natural
level. If there is greater demand, the employer will hire more workers
or the landowner will prepare more land for use. Natural price and
effectual demand are ambiguous ideas, but they were key, if unexplained,
assumptions for Smith. Later economists would spend a lot of time
trying to make these ideas more explicit. But they essentially accepted
the assumptions without ever to this day devising a complete explanation
of how price and demand are determined. Price always gravitates to its
natural level, Smith said, so that demand is fully met and the resources
of a nation are fully used. Economists assume as much today.
Smith acknowledged potential obstructions to the ideal
functioning of markets. Producers can try to keep secret a rise
in demand, thus avoiding competition. Lack of widespread
information about prices and the availability of goods is an
inherent problem. Similarly, anyone with a monopoly can keep the
market understocked or prices too high. A tariff to keep exports out
keeps prices too high to satisfy effectual demand.
Smith did not fully explore some other problems. Simply
said, he believed market participants must know what they want and
what they are willing to pay. Barring such (rather formidable)
obstacles, the process is automatic. Government will only hinder it with
taxes, product standards, and price regulations.
In his chapter on natural and market price, then, is
Smith’s almost complete description of the Invisible Hand. So
accepted and seemingly obvious is his theory that it is hard to believe
that Smith did not conceive of the supply and demand curves that
all first-year economics students learn. Alfred Marshall, the
talented British economist, drew these about a century later.
In addition to the problems just cited, there is another
major gap in the explanation of how the Invisible Hand functions. The
main claim is that price sends a message to buyers and sellers on
how they can adjust their consumption and production. But the
countless buyers and sellers must communicate with each other,
after all—in effect, bargain. This is no easy task.
Smith’s proposal that there is a natural price for a
product is sketchy, to say the least. There is no convincing explanation
of where this natural price comes from. Smith presumed that there
exists for goods and services a price known by custom and practice and
that the price goes down and more people buy as new and cheaper
supply comes on the market. Within this set of narrow possibilities,
the Invisible Hand can spread the benefits of productivity and
induce businesses to invest more, expand capacity, increase
production, and reduce labor costs. They may also hire more workers and
even raise wages.
A bookseller, for example, might sell a book for $19.95
and see how many takers he gets, thus testing the market. But what if
a $14.99 price would attract many more buyers, resulting in a
greater total profit for the bookseller? A competitor might then sell a
similar book as cheaply, and so the experimentation that led to an
equilibrium price would continue. Léon Walras, the influential
French economist who in the late 1800s used mathematics to expand
the Invisible Hand as a model for the entire economy, did not have
an answer to how the process would work in real life, either.
Walras presumed that there was an economy-wide “auctioneer” who
gathered all prices of goods and sold them to those willing to pay.
That assumption about the process by which the Invisible Hand
matches buyers and sellers has not been improved upon by
contemporary economists. How the equilibrium point is reached remains
a mystery.
This central ambiguity matters a lot. Prices can in fact
be shoved around by powerful forces: big business, strong unions, and
ubiquitous monopolies, or at least oligopolies with market power.
In financial markets, prices can be manipulated by collusion or
secret trading or access to inside information. In labor markets,
wages can be affected by the ability of businesses to fire workers
without cause or by stern government policies that restrain growth
and keep unemployment high.
Belief in the Invisible Hand allows economists to
minimize these concerns. The battle against unions, for example, is
driven by a claim that the Invisible Hand guides business and labor to
set fair wages. Union organizers believe that they are not set fairly
and that workers need collective bargaining to level the playing
field. Alan Greenspan, as Federal Reserve chairman, believed that
bargaining power mattered. High unemployment, he realized, could keep
workers insecure and therefore less willing to bargain hard for their
jobs, giving business more power over wages than the Invisible Hand
would dictate. One measure of insecurity is the rate at which workers
are willing to quit their jobs. If the quit rate is high, workers are
secure and might ask for higher wages, putting pressure on business to
raise prices and stimulating inflation; if the quit rate is low,
workers don’t have the security to bargain hard. (Of course, unions
sometimes have too much power, too, driving wages too high.) Greenspan
kept a close eye on this and seemed to encourage worker insecurity.
Faith in the Invisible Hand led to the once-general belief
that a higher minimum wage results in lost jobs. It presumes that the
wage paid reflects the worth of the workers and that any wage
increase resulting from a minimum wage law represents an overpayment
to workers, reduces profits, and also reduces the hiring of new
workers. But in fact often the wage can be too low because of a
business’s power or generally restrictive government policies that keep
unemployment high. In that case, a hike in the minimum wage would be
healthy economically, restoring demand for goods and services, and would
not cause jobs to be lost. At the turn of the nineteenth century, the
American economist John Bates Clark made one of the first claims that,
economy-wide, wages reflect the worth of labor. As we shall see, there
is little serious empirical work to justify this conclusion, and recent
studies—what I call dirty economics—have shown that increases in the
minimum wage result in very few lost jobs, if any. Empirical analysis is
at last changing economists’ minds.
Another concern regarding the labor and other markets is
often referred to as asymmetric information. The classic example is
the used-car salesman who has more information about the car than the
buyer has, much of which is kept secret. As Smith feared, a
market cannot work under these circumstances. Buyers cannot make proper
bids without knowing what they are buying. This concern extends to
markets in health care, insurance, and mortgages—and arguably to most
other markets as well. It is not only the poor subprime mortgage buyer,
for example, who will make errors, but almost all homebuyers who enter
into such transactions only two or three times in their lives. How can
they possibly be knowledgeable and informed? Even sophisticated pension
fund managers clearly did not have enough information about the complex
mortgage securities fashioned by Wall Street to make sensible
decisions in the years leading up to the 2008 crisis. Countless pension
funds and individual investors and the Department of Justice have
been suing major banks like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs
over alleged deceptive practices, and in several cases
multibillion-dollar settlements have been reached. One Goldman Sachs
banker—if only one—has gone to jail for selling the complex products
without informing his buyers. A pure interpretation of the Invisible
Hand suggests such easy fraudulent behavior should not be possible.
The Invisible Hand also depends on market participants
knowing and understanding their self-interest well and therefore
making rational decisions about buying and selling products.
Behavioral economics has uncovered many examples of buyers being
unable to make such rational decisions, a factor economists once
minimized. An obvious example is herd behavior in buying stocks,
in which buyers are lured into paying high prices because so many others
are. The opposite, also damaging, is irrational risk aversion, with
investors refusing to buy even when the odds of gains are good. Another
example is susceptibility to misleading advertising. Still another is
fashion itself, evident in surges in demand for new products like the
iPhone or traditional ones like an Hermès Birkin bag. One can argue that
there is some satisfaction in being a part of fashion, of course, but
not if it leads to buying bad products or stocks whose prices will
inevitably fall precipitously.
The seeming power of the Invisible Hand, however,
enables many economists to neglect or set aside these concerns. Milton
Friedman forcefully argued that competition will correct most wrongs.
Fraudulent products or manipulated financial services will create
opportunities for honest competitors, overpricing will create
opportunities for sellers to reduce prices, and herd behavior leading to
overspeculation will be counteracted by sellers who know better. There
is no need for labor unions to offset the power of business, as John
Kenneth Galbraith had claimed in his concept of “countervailing power”;
unions will only keep wages too high by interfering with the Invisible
Hand.
The Invisible Hand is a source of clean economics in a
dirty world. Great castles can be built on the Invisible Hand, but a
rising tide will wash them away. This is what happened in 2008.
Among the most important limitations of the Invisible Hand
are economies of scale. The Invisible Hand presumes that it will
eventually cost more to produce a good, not less. The supply curve rises
to meet the demand curve. But the greatest productivity increases in
the Industrial Revolution were arrived at as the volume of sales
increased; this is what enabled Henry Ford and others to cut prices. The
more you make, the lower the unit cost. The supply curve could actually
fall when more units were demanded at lower prices, and it often did.
Economies of scale are a major component of wealth creation and of the
history of economies. Smith’s pin factory was a version of this.
The grandest leap of faith among economists, however,
concerns more than how the Invisible Hand works in a single market. A
general equilibrium was reached for all markets and the economy as
a whole. This conclusion, arrived at by economists like Léon Walras, is
remarkably convenient, but the assumptions required to make such a claim
are extreme.
The many obstacles to the workings of the Invisible
Hand amount to an overwhelming criticism. The Invisible Hand is
an approximation, usually not applicable in the real world
without significant modification. Dependence on it leads to major
policy errors, most of them having to do with restraining
government intervention. We assume away monopolies, business power, lack
of access to information, the likelihood of financial bubbles,
economies of scale.
The proof is in the pudding. Predictions about economies
based on this generalized theory have often been proved wrong. The
most important of these is that economies should be stable because
they self-adjust to reach general equilibrium. Yet we have had
countless deep recessions and financial bubbles and crashes since the
start of the Industrial Revolution. The eighteenth century was rife
with them, but so have been the past thirty years of the modern
laissez-faire era. Simplistic, convenient belief in the Invisible Hand
led to mindless financial deregulation beginning in the 1970s and
an astonishingly misplaced faith—one that ignored asset bubbles
and income inequality, among other things—that the Great
Moderation would maximize prosperity. This is why the devout
believer Milton Friedman could state in 2005 that the economy was
stable; he couldn’t imagine that it wasn’t, and he never looked under
the hood of Wall Street securities to see what was really going on.
If rightly read, Smith’s theory proposes the opposite of
laissez-faire political practice, suggesting that there is a need for a
visible hand of government. It describes both why markets work and
why they fail, as well as how much guidance from an outside force
is needed to keep them on track. The Invisible Hand is a
brilliant idealization of markets that shows how limited
laissez-faire theory is in reality.
Esse
texto recomenda quatro artigos e livros para que você comece a entender
a extensa obra de Milton Friedman. Os textos são resumidos e, quando
disponíveis, colocamos alguns links para que você possa ter acesso aos
textos originais quando disponíveis pela rede.
CAPITALISMO E LIBERDADE, com Rose Friedman(baixe em português).
Este é um dos livros de Friedman para o público geral – e não para
economistas. Mas isso não o impede de tratar de temas profundos e
controversos. O livro começa relatando como a liberdade econômica e a liberdade política são duas faces da mesma moeda.
O exemplo que Friedman usa é: imagine que você vive em um país onde em
tese há liberdade de manifestação, mas onde tudo é do governo. Você pode
protestar contra o governo, mas você teria que convencer o gerente da
gráfica do governo a publicar seus panfletos, o chefe da seção de
locação de caminhões do governo a lhe emprestar um carro de som e o
diretor da rádio do governo a divulgar sua marcha contra o governo… No
fim das contas, você teria que convencer diversas partes do governo a
deixar que você tente mudá-lo. Interesses privados e corporatistas
impediriam toda mudança. Neste livro, Friedman também advoga o
fim das licenças governamentais para advogados e médicos como método de
aumentar a concorrência e baixar preços – o que significaria o fim da Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil e do Conselho Federal de Medicina
aqui no Brasil. Ele também introduz a ideia de substituir o sistema de
assistência social tradicional por um modelo de “imposto de renda
negativo”, em que as pessoas que tivessem renda menor a determinado
patamar recebessem impostos ao invés de pagar. Esse modelo de política social pró-mercado é tido como a inspiração para o Bolsa Família – inclusive pelo ex-Senador Eduardo Suplicy. Por fim, ele traz uma de suas grandes contribuições: a ideia de que a educação estatal pode ser substituída por vouchers educacionais
em que os pais podem ir ao mercado escolher em qual escola privada eles
querem matricular seus filhos. Esse modelo foi implementado por países
tão diversos quanto Colômbia, Chile, Estados Unidos e Suécia.
UMA HISTÓRIA MONETÁRIA DOS ESTADOS UNIDOS, com Anna Schwartz(baixe em português). A História Monetária é provavelmente o livro acadêmico mais influente de Milton Friedman. Ele revolucionou a interpretação padrão que se dava às causas da Grande Depressão.
Até a publicação deste livro, predominavam a visão de que a Grande
Depressão tinha sido causada por “crises de superprodução” (na linha de JK Galbraith) ou por erros naturais causado pelas irracionalidades dos investidores (de acordo com John Maynard Keynes). Friedman e Schwartz mostram que a Grande Depressão foi causada por erros políticos do Banco Central americano
(Fed). Ao invés de perseguir uma regra de política monetária que
mantivesse a quantidade de dinheiro circulante na economia estável (ou
ligeiramente crescente), o Fed fez com que essa quantidade caísse
fortemente – e transformou o que seria uma recessão breve na maior crise
econômica da história. Em 2002, o próprio ex-presidente do Fed Ben Bernanke reconheceu isso, ao dizer: “Milton e Anna, vocês estavam certos. Nós somos responsáveis – e devemos desculpas.”
INFLAÇÃO E DESEMPREGO. (palestra de aceitação do Prêmio Nobel em Economia): (baixe em inglês). Nesse texto, Milton Friedman resume sua refutação
teórica à teoria econômica prevalente à época que era utilizada como
justificativa para inflação mais alta e mais intervenção governamental
discricionária: a Curva de Phillips.
A Curva de Phillips presume uma associação negativa entre desemprego e
inflação (o que implica em que crescimento econômico necessariamente
deveria ser acompanhado de inflação mais alta). Friedman demonstrou que no longo prazo o desemprego não responde à inflação e é possível haver recessão econômica e inflação.
Durante os anos 1970, os EUA entraram em recessão inflacionária
(chamada de “estagflação”) e as teses de Friedman e seus amigos de
Chicago (Ed Prescott, Bob Lucas e Ed Phelps) se mostaram corretas.
O GOVERNO TEM ALGUMA FUNÇÃO EM GERIR A MOEDA?, com Anna Schwartz (baixe em inglês). Neste artigo, que faz uma interessantíssima revisão do pensamento monetário de dois séculos, passando por Alfred Marshall e Friederich Hayek, os
autores explicam porque eles acham que um sistema privado de moedas não
existe, embora eles entendam que provavelmente este seria mais
eficiente do que um sistema de moedas monopolísticas. A
conclusão é que barreiras políticas, o costume histórico da população e a
vantagem de ter um único meio para trocas é o que leva a uma tendência
ao status quo. Mas ele dizia que isso podia mudar no futuro – e até previu em 1999 que surgiria algo como Bitcoins para substituir o papel moeda! Ao contrário do que dizem alguns dos críticos de Friedman, ele não preferia o sistema de bancos centrais governamentais
– afinal, ele construiu sua carreira apontando os maiores erros
históricos do Fed. Ele simplesmente tentava sugerir as melhores
políticas a partir da presunção de que ele não poderia alterar a base do
sistema monetário. E este texto mostra isso claramente.
Recent debates over who is most qualified to serve as the next chairman of the Federal Reserve have focused on more than just the candidates’ theory-driven economic expertise. They have touched on matters of personality and character as well. This is as it should be. Given the nature of economies, and our ability to understand them, the task of the Fed’s next leader will be more a matter of craft and wisdom than of science.
When we put a satellite in orbit around Mars, we have the scientific knowledge that guarantees accuracy and precision in the prediction of its orbit. Achieving a comparable level of certainty about the outcomes of an economy is far dicier.
The fact that the discipline of economics hasn’t helped us improve our predictive abilities suggests it is still far from being a science, and may never be. Still, the misperceptions persist. A student who graduates with a degree in economics leaves college with a bachelor of science, but possesses nothing so firm as the student of the real world processes of chemistry or even agriculture.
Before the 1970s, the discussion of how to make economics a science was left mostly to economists. But like war, which is too important to be left to the generals, economics was too important to be left to the Nobel-winning members of the University of Chicago faculty. Over time, the question of why economics has not (yet) qualified as a science has become an obsession among theorists, including philosophers of science like us.
It’s easy to understand why economics might be mistaken for science. It uses quantitative expression in mathematics and the succinct statement of its theories in axioms and derived “theorems,” so economics looks a lot like the models of science we are familiar with from physics. Its approach to economic outcomes — determined from the choices of a large number of “atomic” individuals — recalls the way atomic theory explains chemical reactions. Economics employs partial differential equations like those in a Black-Scholes account of derivatives markets, equations that look remarkably like ones familiar from physics. The trouble with economics is that it lacks the most important of science’s characteristics — a record of improvement in predictive range and accuracy.
This is what makes economics a subject of special interest among philosophers of science. None of our models of science really fit economics at all.
The irony is that for a long time economists announced a semiofficial allegiance to Karl Popper’s demand for falsifiability as the litmus test for science, and adopted Milton Friedman’s thesis that the only thing that mattered in science was predictive power. Mr. Friedman was reacting to a criticism made by Marxist economists and historical economists that mathematical economics was useless because it made so many idealized assumptions about economic processes: perfect rationality, infinite divisibility of commodities, constant returns to scale, complete information, no price setting.
Mr. Friedman argued that false assumptions didn’t matter any more in economics than they did in physics. Like the “ideal gas,” “frictionless plane” and “center of gravity” in physics, idealizations in economics are both harmless and necessary. They are indispensable calculating devices and approximations that enable the economist to make predictions about markets, industries and economies the way they enable physicists to predict eclipses and tides, or prevent bridge collapses and power failures.
But economics has never been able to show the record of improvement in predictive successes that physical science has shown through its use of harmless idealizations. In fact, when it comes to economic theory’s track record, there isn’t much predictive success to speak of at all.
Moreover, many economists don’t seem troubled when they make predictions that go wrong. Readers of Paul Krugman and other like-minded commentators are familiar with their repeated complaints about the refusal of economists to revise their theories in the face of recalcitrant facts. Philosophers of science are puzzled by the same question. What is economics up to if it isn’t interested enough in predictive success to adjust its theories the way a science does when its predictions go wrong?
Unlike the physical world, the domain of economics includes a wide range of social “constructions” — institutions like markets and objects like currency and stock shares — that even when idealized don’t behave uniformly. They are made up of unrecognized but artificial conventions that people persistently change and even destroy in ways that no social scientist can really anticipate. We can exploit gravity, but we can’t change it or destroy it. No one can say the same for the socially constructed causes and effects of our choices that economics deals with.
Another factor economics has never been able to tame is science itself. These are the drivers of economic growth, the “creative destruction” of capitalism. But no one can predict the direction of scientific discovery and its technological application. That was Popper’s key insight. Philosophers and historians of science like Thomas S. Kuhn have helped us see why scientific paradigm shifts seem to come almost out of nowhere. As the rate of acceleration of innovation increases, the prospects of an economic theory that tames the economy’s most powerful forces must diminish — and with it, any hope of improvements in prediction declines as well.
SO if predictive power is not in the cards for economics, what is it good for?
Social and political philosophers have helped us answer this question, and so understand what economics is really all about. Since Hobbes, philosophers have been concerned about the design and management of institutions that will protect us from “the knave” within us all, those parts of our selves tempted to opportunism, free riding and generally avoiding the costs of civil life while securing its benefits. Hobbes and, later, Hume — along with modern philosophers like John Rawls and Robert Nozick — recognized that an economic approach had much to contribute to the design and creative management of such institutions. Fixing bad economic and political institutions (concentrations of power, collusions and monopolies), improving good ones (like the Fed’s open-market operations), designing new ones (like electromagnetic bandwidth auctions), in the private and public sectors, are all attainable tasks of economic theory.
Which brings us back to the Fed. An effective chair of the central bank will be one who understands that economics is not yet a science and may never be. At this point it is a craft, to be executed with wisdom, not algorithms, in the design and management of institutions. What made Ben S. Bernanke, the current chairman, successful was his willingness to use methods — like “quantitative easing,” buying bonds to lower long-term interest rates — that demanded a feeling for the economy, one that mere rational-expectations macroeconomics would have denied him.
For the foreseeable future economic theory should be understood more on the model of music theory than Newtonian theory. The Fed chairman must, like a first violinist tuning the orchestra, have the rare ear to fine-tune complexity (probably a Keynesian ability to fine-tune at that). Like musicians’, economists’ expertise is still a matter of craft. They must avoid the hubris of thinking their theory is perfectly suited to the task, while employing it wisely enough to produce some harmony amid the cacophony.
Alex Rosenberg is the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy and chair of the philosophy department at Duke University. He is the author of “Economics — Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns,” most recently, “The Atheist’s Guide to Reality.”
Tyler Curtain is a philosopher of science and an associate professor of English and comparative literature the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was recently named the 2013 recipient of the Robert Frost Distinguished Chair of Literature at the Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College, Vt.
Muitos “intervencionistas” não se assumem como tal, eles dizem que não defendem a priori, como um “mandamento moral”, a intervenção do estado na economia, são apenas pragmáticos que acreditam que em certas situações, a melhor maneira de lidar com um problema específico é chamando o governo, mas que não há razões para achar que este é superior ao mercado em todas as situações assim como o contrário não seria válido.
Eu costumo dizer que esse povo defende uma espécie de “governo robô”, que só existe na cabeça deles. É como se o governo tivesse um botão de “liga e desliga” que o defensor da intervenção aciona conforme a sua vontade. Se a intervenção é momentaneamente desejável segundo algum critério do sujeito, ele “liga” o governo para fazer exatamente aquilo que tem em mente. Quando o momento passa, o nosso intervencionista desliga o governo e tudo volta a ser como antes.
Um exemplo dessa visão está ocorrendo exatamente agora na pendenga comercial entre o governo brasileiro e o argentino. Como é sabido, aproveitando a tara por protecionismo com a oportunidade oferecida pelos portenhos, o governo brasileiro dificultou a importação de carros da Argentina. Já que não é de bom tom se dizer protecionista e nem afirmar que a medida é uma retaliação às barreiras protecionistas levantadas anteriormente pela Argentina, o governo brasileiro tratou de dizer que a medida serve apenas para monitorar melhor o fluxo comercial do setor automotivo. Se foi por “amores ao protecionismo” ou por retaliação nós não sabemos, mas certamente não foi pelo motivo alegado. Para os propósitos deste texto, vamos supor que o motivo foi o “menos pior” dentre os disponíveis: por retaliação. Vamos aceitar a hipótese altamente improvável de que o governo brasileiro está convencido das benesses do livre comércio, mas que está tentando conseguir da Argentina o fim (ou diminuição) de algumas barreiras e para isso “blefa” com protecionismo também.
Voltando a idéia do “governo robô” e assumindo a hipótese acima temos o seguinte quadro: sabemos que o melhor dos mundos seria Argentina e Brasil não terem barreiras protecionistas, mas a Argentina colocou barreiras, o que nos faz perder. Se o governo não intervier, nós ficaremos abertos e eles fechados. É um cenário melhor do que nos fecharmos também, mas é uma situação pior do que se eles estivessem abertos como nós, logo, podemos usar o governo para nos fecharmos temporariamente, causando perdas a eles de forma que se “rendam”, desistam dessa politica protecionista e se abram novamente e quando isso ocorrer o nosso governo sai de cena e abre a economia novamente. É o típico exemplo de intervenção “pragmática”, “pontual” que supostamente melhora a situação de maneira geral.
Milton Friedman, economista de Chicago, gostava de dizer que nada é mais eterno que órgãos estatais criados sob a alegação de alguma politica temporária. Ele falava do FMI (Fundo Monetário Internacional) que foi criado para “garantir” o funcionamento do tratado de Bretton Woods, mas que continua firme e forte 40 anos após o fim do dito tratado que lhe deu origem. No Brasil nós temos inúmeros exemplos da mesma tendência. Um fantástico é o do Banco do Brasil, criado por Dom João para “fomentar o desenvolvimento”, continua vivo até hoje, mesmo depois de ter sido criado o BNDES (outro banco que teria a mesma função), SUDENE, SUDAM e até a Caixa Econômica Federal (mais voltada a subsidiar o setor de construção civil)– ou seja, mais de um século depois e com várias estatais e órgãos destinados a fazer a mesma coisa (ou quase a mesma coisa), o Banco do Brasil continua firme.
O velho mestre de Chicago falou de órgãos, mas o mesmo pode ser dito de politicas públicas como subsídios, tarifas, impostos etc.. Em suma, o governo não é um robô que você liga e desliga a hora que bem entende e a razão é muito simples. Não existe incentivo para se “desativar” uma imensa gama de politicas econômicas. Peguemos como exemplo a idéia de retaliar barreiras protecionistas. Imagine que uma dada proteção beneficia um setor da economia em $10 e prejudique toda a massa de consumidores em $20 que terá que pagar mais caro pelos mesmos produtos ou por produtos de pior qualidade. Economicamente, portanto, ela seria uma tarifa ineficiente que gera destruição de riquezas. Mas, por outro lado, mesmo que ela destrua riquezas, ela também redistribui riquezas em uma direção que faz toda diferença e gera os incentivos para sua execução. Os $10 ganhos pelo setor protegido é um valor muito alto mesmo que você divida tal valor por todos os membros desse setor. Já os $20, mesmo sendo o dobro do valor no total, individualmente, dada a imensa massa de consumidores, não significará muita coisa. Logo, individualmente cada membro do setor a ser protegido tem um belo incentivo para fazer lobbies e pressão em prol das barreiras, já a massa de consumidores, individualmente, não tem o mesmo incentivo para lutar contra as mesmas. O resultado final, muito provavelmente, será a aplicação das barreiras.
Mais importante ainda para nossa discussão é a “retirada de uma barreira”. Assim como o incentivo é maior pelo lado de quem recebeu o subsídio na hora de criar a barreira (dado o valor que o subsídio representa individualmente), também será maior para quem se beneficia dele na hora de derrubar a mesma barreira. O setor que será “desprotegido” perderá muito individualmente, enquanto os consumidores (também individualmente) ganharão pouco. Mesmo que no agregado, o montante ganho pelos últimos seja maior que o perdido pelos primeiros, a politica tende a não sair porque o incentivo mais forte na produção de lobbies e pressão está com o primeiro grupo. Barreiras protecionistas, portanto, podem não ser tão “eternas” quanto os órgãos/estatais lembrados por Friedman, mas são bem resistentes. Aplicar novas barreiras, mesmo que seja como retaliação, temporárias etc.. é brincar com fogo. Depois de criadas, a derrubada das mesmas não é tão simples como os defensores parecem acreditar.
Para complicar nada garante que uma nova barreira terá como resposta do “outro lado”, menos barreiras. Assim como A retaliou criando uma barreira, B pode responder do mesmo jeito, aumentando as suas barreiras. O resultado final será ambos os países fechados e com uma montanha de barreiras comerciais para serem derrubadas (o que como já foi explicado não é tão simples). Governos não são deuses fora de qualquer influência e incentivos, que são acionados ou desligados conforme a vontade de um “planejador central” ou de algum intelectual. Eles são formados e influenciados por pessoas iguais a quaisquer outras. Assim como uma empresa de sorvete fabrica os sabores que os demandantes mais estão dispostos a pagar, o governo também produzirá leis e regulamentos conforme a demanda daqueles que mais caro estão dispostos a “pagar”. E dada a natureza de um governo (de dispor sobre a propriedade de todos), infelizmente, na maior parte dos casos, sempre o lado que demanda algum privilégio, algum subsidio terá essa disposição a pagar mais e acabará levando a regulamentação.
Mesmo assumindo que a politica do governo brasileiro foi de retaliação (e não uma deliberada escolha pelo protecionismo), se trata de uma péssima politica. Se um país está se fechando, podemos até tentar convencê-lo do contrário, mas em termos de politica comercial o melhor que podemos fazer é nos abrirmos ainda mais, ou, se já tivermos tarifas zero, não fazer nada. Dadas as circunstâncias é a politica que gera o maior ganho. Cair na estratégia de retaliação só aumenta o prejuízo. O resultado mais provável é que não consigamos abrir o país que se fechou (até porque ele se fecha pelos mesmos incentivos perversos descritos anteriormente) e ainda temos as nossas próprias barreiras para tentar derrubar depois.
From the Book: 
