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.
sábado, 8 de agosto de 2015
Fabio Giambiagi: Capitalismo: Modo de Usar, seu mais recente livro (25, e contando...)
Na verdade, de conformidade com este convite feito pela editora:
http://www.extras.elsevier.com.br/emailmktdal/capitalismo/
é possível ler boas partes introdutórias ao este livro.
Leia você também.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
quarta-feira, 25 de março de 2015
Como NAO se tornar capitalista, e continuar pobre - Salmaan A. Khan (Mises)
Aliás, já surgiu um Max Weber islâmico?
Gostaria de conhecer.
Falando nisso, parece que tem um Lutero muçulmano, mas não sabemos exatamente quem é.
Para evitar ser morto, por apostasia, ou qualquer outra infração grave à lei religiosa, ele se esconde sob um pseudônimo: Bahis Sed, e seu livro e "The Quran Speaks", ou O Corão Fala.
Quis comprar, mas ainda está muito caro: 36 dólares em sebo (no Abebooks). Vou buscar em biblioteca...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Middle Eastern Barriers to an Agile Marketplace
Salmaan A. Khan
Mises Daily, MARCH 25, 2015
According to economic historian Timur Kuran, “Around roughly the tenth century, the Middle East was an economically advanced region of the world, as measured by standard of living, technology, agricultural productivity, literacy or institutional creativity. Only China might have been more developed.” Today, however, the Middle East is a victim of historical legal impediments that increase time preference among consumers and investors, and which are fraught with failures to restructure Islamic legal code to fit for the numerous changes in the nature of commerce.
Corporate Governance
One of the most critical impediments to Islamic economies has historically been partnership laws. While Europe was building up large corporate enterprises that had hundreds, even thousands of shareholders, businesses in the Islamic world had limited partnerships to no more than six people. The rationale behind this is based on Islamic contract law, whereby if one of the business partners dies, the partner must liquidate the assets of the deceased, and give them to the heirs. However, this did not imply the business must be abolished with the death of a partner, but the added complication — compounded with skewed egalitarian Sharia inheritance laws which stated that two-thirds of any estate are to be distributed amongst relatives, both male and female — made it difficult for companies to achieve economies of scale due to a lack of longevity, specialization, and predictability within companies under Islamic regimes.
Furthermore, families in many areas have tended to be quite large due to the practice of polygamy, so due to many heirs being recipients of the inherited wealth, the business would often just dissolve. As Kuran notes, “Middle Eastern entrepreneurs minimized the risk of premature termination by keeping their partnerships small and ephemeral.” The consequence for Islamic economies has been a long-term game of catch-up once the Industrial Revolution commenced in Europe.
The Legacy of the Waqfs
Some scholars conclude that cultural and religious fatalism has contributed to the inadequacy of Middle Eastern economies, as the idea that "everything is in God’s” hands allows idleness to triumph. But, there is more empirical proof that the underdevelopment of the Middle East today has been heavily affected by the Ottoman Empire’s bureaucratization of special endowments called waqfs.
There were two kinds of waqfs depending on its waqfiyya, or deed, whereby the waqf’s founder would decide what its primary function would be. Either they were charitable waqfs, or family waqfs. Charitable waqfs were established for a social function — for operating a religious center and eventually expanding to take care of the poor, providing health services, schools, libraries, and the overall provision of public goods. Family waqfs, on the other hand, were used to establish property rights for families in need of a safe haven to stash their savings away from the confiscation by the sultan.
Due to the sanctity that waqfs were given, they were theoretically tax exempt. However, according to Murat Cizacka, “Given the authoritarian governments in power, the rulers could expropriate the private property for the sake of the ummah.”
Furthermore, when complications erupted in the case of family waqfs (since charitable waqfs operated under the public radar and its utilization of resources were transparent), they ran into more controversial problems that could not be as easily resolved in court. Moreover, the endowment deeds often were destroyed or damaged by war. Over time, these issues led to more and more expropriation and regulation by the Ottoman government. Meanwhile, Europe was providing similar services through a thriving profit-bearing corporate sector, as well as adopting double-entry bookkeeping and joint-stock companies. According to Kuran, "Westerners had access to commercial banks that could channel capital mobilized from the masses into large-scale productive ventures.”
Essentially, the catalyst of the waqfs’ stagnation was their very strict adherence to religious code. Competition for waqfs from other institutions was not allowed by Sharia Law. Through the legal system, by regulation of the ulama, waqfs attained a monopoly on the provision of public goods, including even the use of school textbooks.
Thus, a correlation can be drawn between the decentralized period of waqfs, in which Islamic countries were at the peak of international trade and prosperity, and the era of centralized control by the Ottoman state which led to a lagging and underdeveloped Middle East economy. As Kuran states, “the waqf was economically inefficient because of its perpetuity, inflexibility, lack of self-governance and absence of separate legal personality.” While once characterized by decentralized and more flexible institutions which brought greater economic prosperity, Middle Eastern economies today look quite different.
In the same way that the Russian people were the victims of totalitarian Russian regimes of the past, the people of the Middle East are today victims of brutal extractive regimes whose main enemies have commonly been their own people. And unfortunately, these regimes can still rely upon restrictive institutions of old to control the marketplace and enrich themselves.
quarta-feira, 1 de outubro de 2014
Cuba: minha primeira experiencia com o Facebook
Mas é que Cuba foi o objeto de minha primeira postagem no FaceBook, em 2010, quando eu ainda resistia a esta ferramenta, e na verdade fiquei ausente por mais três anos depois dessa experiência isolada e pioneira.
Quando decidir testar o novo instrumento, resolvi fazer um comentário sobre o anúncio pelo governo ditatorial em torno das mudanças econômicas na ilha, que pareciam prenunciar uma revolução capitalista no regime castrista, em direção de um sistema de tipo chinês, ou pelo menos vietnamita.
Nada disso aconteceu, como se sabe, mas aproveito para postar aqui o texto que fiz em setembro de 2010, em plena campanha eleitoral no Brasil.
Quatro anos depois, Cuba não mudou muito, ou quase nada, e o Brasil, se mudou alguma coisa, foi para pior, talvez no caminho de Cuba (aliás, ainda não se discutia a sustentação financeira da ditatura pelos companheiros totalitários do partido hegemônico brasileiro.
Em todo caso, rever antigos textos é sempre inspirador...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
O desenvolvimento do capitalismo em Cuba
domingo, 11 de maio de 2014
Dedicado a todos os inimigos do capitalismo e do imperialismo americano: nunca e' tarde para aprender alguma coisa
Christian Gheorghe's life is a rags-to-riches story worthy of a Disney movie, and no one is more surprised, or grateful, than he is.
He arrived in the U.S. from Communist Romania in the early 1990s speaking no English, with $26 in his pocket. He lived in a youth hostel and drove a limo for a living.
Today, he's working on his fourth successful startup, having sold all of his previous ones, including his third one, OutlookSoft, to SAP in 2007 for about $500 million.
The trajectory of his life — going from Communist Romania to the U.S. — is truly remarkable. In Romania, he made his living selling music records and taught himself a little bit of English by listening to English music like Pink Floyd, he told Business Insider.
When he sold enough records, he bought himself a Commodore 64 knock-off PC, which cost the equivalent of a year's wages.
"People asked me, are you crazy?" he laughs.
He taught himself to code by hacking into the video games on that machine.
He went on to get formal training before he moved to the U.S., a masters degree in Romania in mechanical engineering with a minor in computer science. But the degree wasn't recognized and accepted once he got here.
After arriving in the U.S., he stumbled into a job as a limo driver. That's how he met a man named Andrew Saxe, who would ultimately help him launch his new career. During the ride, Saxe learned about Gheorghe's interest in computers and told him to come by his office.
Saxe ran a computer software consulting company. He hired Gheorghe, and the two built a company together. That company was one of the earliest that did "big data," though they didn't call it that back then.
They sold it to Experian, and Gheorghe found himself CTO for Experian for a few years.
He launched a second startup, TIAN, and merged it with a company called OutlookSoft. Then, SAP came along and bought OutlookSoft. OutlookSoft did a form of big data known as business analytics, where companies slice, dice, report, and predict trends in their business by sifting through their financial transactions.
OutlookSoft was part of a crop of business analytics companies acquired by big enterprise software vendors around that time: Oracle bought Hyperion, IBM bought Cognos, and SAP bought OutlookSoft.
As a result, Gheorghe found himself as a CTO for SAP for a couple of years.
About four years ago, the bug to create a new startup hit again and Tidemark was born. It has all the signs of being another golden venture.
Tidemark also does business analytics/big data, but it's designed for the modern age: it works on a tablet and runs in the cloud.
More importantly, it is designed to be what Gheorghe calls a "revolution at the edge" with a "Siri-like interface." That means business folks can use it without help from their IT departments creating pre-programmed reports.
All they have to do is ask Tidemark a question, any question, about how their business is performing like ... Why isn't this product selling? What happens if we assign three more people to this project? What will our sales be next quarter?
Tidemark answers with charts and graphs. It even names the people in the company who could help with the project. It's like Google mixed withWolfram|Alpha, personalized for your job, on your tablet.
He's not the only one creating mobile, cloud-based analysis software. For instance, another hot startup, Anaplan, is doing the same and also doing well.
Still, Tidemark's approach — ask a question — is different. And it's already attracting attention. In the first 18 months since his product became available, his company is on track to hit $45 million in revenue, Gheorghe told us, growing 300% year over year. It has about 45 customers so far, with, on average, 180 business people at each customer using the product.
Tidemark has raised $93 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Silicon Valley Bank, and others.
SEE ALSO: Why Startup Founders Happily Give Up 90% Of Their Companies
Join the conversation about this story »
quarta-feira, 12 de março de 2014
Diferencas entre socialismo e capitalismo, em imagens - Joao Luiz Mauad
Imagens que valem mais do que mil palavras
Sobre o autor
João Luiz Mauad
Administrador de Empresas e Diretor do Instituto Liberal
sábado, 11 de janeiro de 2014
Capitalismo e Livre-Mercado: diferencas essenciais - Cracking the Egg
Friday, January 10, 2014
Free Market Vs. Capitalism: Clearing up Some Confusion
technically the "free market" is a form of capitalism. The definition of capitalism is rather broad:
"an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state."
According to this definition, most economic systems that are not state-controlled are capitalistic.
The free market, in its most pure and idealistic form, is what we refer to today as "the black market", or alternatively, "the underground economy". This is the most decentralized form of capitalism.
Corporatism is most centralized form of capitalism. It is essentially the same thing as socialism, only the states are substituted for corporations, government agencies for subsidiaries, bureaucrats for CEOs, and voters for shareholders.
In an ideal, free society, the free market would be the de facto form of capitalism, but such free trade has been so suppressed that it can only thrive underground. And incidentally, it has thrived greatly, at least on a global level, despite (or rather, because of) government oppression and intervention in the economy).
So when I say capitalism is completely different from the free market, this is what I mean: The capitalism in place today, around the world, is completely different from free market capitalism- it is in fact its polar opposite. And additionally, the polar opposite of Socialism is Anarchism, which goes to show that the advantages of capitalism may not be advantages at all. What brings us prosperity isn't capitalism, it's freedom!
domingo, 22 de dezembro de 2013
Capitalismo: um termo ideologicamente carregado, deve ser abandonado - Steven Horwitz
Grato ao meu amigo Orlando Tambosi por ter me chamado a atenção pelo artigo, que pesquei em seu blog.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
sexta-feira, 22 de novembro de 2013
China: a evidencia que os companheiros detestam ouvir, ler, saber
quarta-feira, 11 de setembro de 2013
Capitalismo e socialismo: equivalentes funcionais? Apenas para idiotas - Olavo de Carvalho, via Orlando Tambosi
Apenas tomo de empréstimo o texto abaixo, porque sintetiza, para uso de estudantes e outros curiosos, a argumentação correta quando algum beócio companheiro vem argumentar que o socialismo pode não ser perfeito, mas que o capitalismo também tem muitos defeitos (que precisam ser corrigidos, claro, por geniais construtores de miséria e injustiças como os companheiros).
Voltarei ao assunto, várias vezes, e também me permitirei transcrever trechos de minha tese de doutorado (de 1984) que trata justamente dessas distinções, e que aprendi com Braudel, com Hirschman (entre outros) e em incontáveis visitas às misérias do socialismo real, algo que os companheiros jamais conheceram.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
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A curta e precisa definição de Orlando Tambosi linkada acima:
Anticapitalistas confundem ideologia e realidade
terça-feira, 4 de junho de 2013
Acabando com a pobreza: os antiglobalizadores vao ficar decepcionados - The Economist
Eles vão ficar infelizes os altermundialistas: reduzindo a pobreza no mundo, sem mudança de sistema, metade das suas acusações caem por terra.
Que terrível ser atropelado pela realidade, não é mesmo?
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
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