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.

domingo, 31 de julho de 2016

Os amigos russos de Trump: assets ou liabilities? - Politico

Parece que Mister Trump tem negócios obscuros, que ele será chamado a explicar ao longo da campanha presidencial. Provavelmente soçobrará sem conseguir desvendar questões inexplicáveis e muito pouco transparentes.
A despeito de ser o candidato que ninguém no mundo quer -- salvo o Putin, claro, e seus amigos oligarcas russos --, Trump será o homem mais discutido, mais escrutinado, mais inquirido, de qualquer campanha presidencial americana EVER.
E tudo isso por um grande idiota, não um imbecil completo (do contrário não teria conseguido preservar seus ativos e riquezas patrimoniais), mas um idiota no sentido de ser o candidato menos adequado para liderar uma potência como os EUA (ou qualquer outro paiseco de qualquer continente do planeta Terra).
Vamos ler este relato importante de uma das grandes revistas políticas dos EUA.
Grato ao Roque Callage pelo envio, que apreciei...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida


Trump and the Oligarch

He claims no ties to Russia. Here’s how he made millions from one of its wealthiest men.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/07/donald-trump-2016-russian-ties-214116#ixzz4FxDrHL7a 
Follow us: @politico on Twitter | Politico on Facebook


The house wasn’t built for a Russian oligarch, although it looked the part. The 62,000-square-foot, 17-bedroom mansion is a palace of new-money flash, featuring Greek fountains, tennis courts, trompe l’oeil murals, underground parking for dozens of cars, and a 100-foot swimming pool and hot tub overlooking the ocean. It even had a faux-aristocratic name: “Maison de l’Amitie,” or the House of Friendship. It was the trophy of a Boston-area nursing home magnate, until he lost his fortune in 2004. That’s when Donald Trump scooped it up.

After paying $41 million for the place in November 2004, Trump called it “the finest piece of land in Florida, and probably the U.S.” He vowed to upgrade the structure into “the second-greatest house in America.” (Second, of course, to his nearby Mar-a-Lago resort.) But Trump had no intention of living there. He intended to flip it for a quick—and huge—profit. His initial asking price, less than two years after buying it, was $125 million. By the time Trump listed the property, in early 2006, the real estate market was already cooling off. The property sat on the market for about two years as a frustrated Trump churned through real estate brokers and slashed his price 20 percent. It wasn’t at all clear who might pay Trump three times his buying price for a neoclassical palace amid a looming recession.

In the summer of 2008, Trump found a solution to his problem in the form of one of the world’s hundred richest men: a 41-year-old Russian billionaire named Dmitry Rybolovlev. Then with a net worth that Forbes estimated at $13 billion, Rybolovlev had made his fortune in the wild west of 1990s post-Soviet Russia. He’d spent a year in prison on murder charges (he was later cleared) and wore a bulletproof vest when his own life was threatened. He would pay Trump $95 million for Maison L’Amitie in what was widely described as the most expensive U.S. residential property sale ever.

“People were shocked” at Trump’s coup, said Jose Lambiet, a local reporter-turned-blogger who knows Trump and once toured the property with him. “They couldn’t believe that he did it.”

“It was a great deal,” Trump told POLITICO in a mid-July telephone interview. “I’m good at real estate.”

That’s hard to deny. Trump more than doubled the property’s sale price in less than four years. All it took was a signature Trumpian combination of bravado and exaggeration, along with something more controversial: Russian money.

The nature of Trump’s connection to Russia has exploded recently as a campaign issue, thanks to his friendly comments about Russian President Vladimir Putin; the ties that several of his advisers have to Moscow; his contrarian views on NATO and Ukraine, which happen to echo Putin’s; and his startling call on Wednesday for Moscow to find and release Hillary Clinton’s deleted private emails.

But the connection isn’t just political. Trump has repeatedly explored business ventures in Russia, partnered with Russians on projects elsewhere, and benefited from Russian largesse in his business ventures. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Donald Trump Jr. said at a real estate conference in 2008.

On Wednesday, Trump angrily insisted that he has “nothing to do with Russia,” and said that he has no investments in the country.
He did, however, grant one pointed exception: Maison de l’Amitie. “The closest I came to Russia, I bought a house a number of years ago in Palm Beach, Florida,” Trump told reporters. “I bought the house for $40 million and I sold it to a Russian for $100 million including commissions.”
It is also a story of a classic Trump deal: a lucrative flip, figures on both sides that don’t really add up, and at the center, a house that may not have been what either party claimed.

Why did a Russian billionaire pay Trump so much money for a house the new owner is believed never to have set foot in, which he has denied owning, and which he now intends to tear down? The answer offers an important window into Trump’s kinship with Russia’s oligarchs, and what he likely sees in them as business allies. It is also a story of a classic Trump deal: a lucrative flip, figures on both sides that don’t really add up, and at the center, a house that may not have been what either party claimed.
***
Even by Palm Beach's standards of splendor and excess, the French Regency-style estate at 515 N. Country Road, with its spectacular ocean views and hundreds of feet of private beach, stood out. A butler employed there once encountered tourists with cameras outside the house’s front gates, ogling the modernist statues outside. “When does the museum open?” they asked.

In an interview, Trump shrugged off the Maison de l’Amitie sale as a “small deal,” compared to his other ventures, the way some people might refer to a summer cabin in the woods. “That was a house I bought for fun,” Trump said. He also downplayed his personal investment in the place, saying that he only made minor improvements to the property. “I cleaned it up a little bit, but not too much,” Trump told POLITICO. “The primary thing was, I painted it.” The implication, of course, would be that the price differential between his purchase and sale was almost entirely profit.
Back when Trump was trying to flip the house at a dizzying price, however, he claimed to have done far more. “I bought the land and gutted the house,” Trump told a reporter in late 2005. After the property went on the market, Shawn McCabe, vice president of Trump Properties in Florida, told Forbes that Trump had put in at least $25 million of his own money. Kendra Todd, a former contestant on Trump’s hit NBC show, The Apprentice, who went to work for Trump and helped to oversee the property’s renovation, said in an interview that Trump had done extensive work, from redoing a pool house to landscaping. “He was really involved with the project. He made the selections for the stone and the fixtures,” Todd said.

Documents submitted in March to Palm Beach’s architectural commission by a private firm retained by the buyer suggest that the actual work was modest. They say Trump had the main house’s interior “remodeled, updating with a new kitchen and dividing a large room to create additional bedrooms and bathrooms,” along with “some minor interior alterations of doors, frames & windows.”
The $100 million house Trump sold to Dmitry Rybolovlev. | AP Photo
The $100 million house Trump sold to Dmitry Rybolovlev. | AP Photo
Whatever improvements Trump actually made, they weren’t enough to quickly attract a buyer. As the house went unsold for months, according to a 2008 account in the New York Observer, Trump churned through three real estate brokers.

Some thought his asking price ludicrous. Lambiet, a former Palm Beach Post reporter who now publishes the local blog GossipExtra, noticed flaws and shortcuts during a personal tour Trump gave of the property in 2007. Trump, for instance, boasted that he’d installed gold fixtures in the bathrooms. But when Lambiet scratched a faucet, he found gold paint under his fingernails. And when Trump pointed out hurricane windows, which he also claimed were bulletproof, Lambiet found them suspiciously thin. “You knew in a hurricane the first wave was going to come right in,” he recalled in an interview.

In March 2008, Trump slashed the price to $100 million.

Trump rejected at least one offer for less than his asking price, one of his former brokers, Dolly Lenz, told the Observer in 2008. Lenz described the would-be buyer as an American socialite. Perhaps Trump understood that the payoff he was demanding would have to come from outside the U.S. A new generation of ultra-wealthy foreigners had emerged in the previous decade, many of them Russians who had reaped mind-boggling wealth as formerly state-controlled industries were privatized, the spoils mostly shared among political cronies. By then, Trump had pursued or completed multiple deals with Russian partners. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia,” Donald Jr., said at that 2008 real estate conference. Lenz told the Observer that she also believed a Russian might be Trump’s savior: “If you didn’t target the Russian billionaires, then you shouldn’t be in business.”
***
Enter Dmitry Rybolovlev. Barely over 40 and worth a Forbes-estimated $12.5 billion in 2008, Rybolovlev was not exactly a familiar name on the Palm Beach social circuit. A former medical student who became a stock broker as the country transitioned from socialism to a market economy in the 1990s, he invested in heavy industry. In 1995, then just 29 years old, he was chairman of the Russian fertilizer giant Uralkali. Dubbed “the fertilizer king,” he would become one of the world’s wealthiest men, peaking at No. 59 on the Forbes 500 list. (Today, he’s listed as the 148th wealthiest man.) Like many Russian oligarchs, his success unfolded in the shadow of violence. Caught up in the dangerous world of 1990s Russian industry, he began wearing a bulletproof vest and moved his family to Switzerland. In 1996, he was jailed for almost a year, accused of plotting the murder of a rival businessman. (Rybolovlev has said he was pressured in jail to sell shares of his company for his freedom, suggesting possible extortion; he was later acquitted.)

Today, Rybolovlev is better known for other things. There was his record-setting purchase of an $88 million Manhattan apartment for his 22-year-old daughter; his ownership of Monaco’s pro soccer team; and recent accounts in the New York Times and The New Yorker of claims that an art broker who helped him purchase works by the likes of Picasso and da Vinci overcharged him by hundreds of millions of dollars.
Back then, Rybolovlev was just starting to collect the treasures for which he is now famous. He and his wife, Elena, whom he married in 1987, were developing an appetite for grand properties, and planned to build a replica in Geneva of Marie Antoinette’s chateau at Versailles. But they also hunted for estates overseas, and in early 2008, a broker led them to Maison de l’Amitie.

By then Trump had lowered his asking price, but he was determined to make a nine-figure sale sure to draw national headlines. “He wanted to break $100 million,” said David Newman, a lawyer at Day Pitney who represented Elena Rybolovleva. Trump clearly felt competitive about the final price. When the Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan listed his home in Aspen, Colorado, for $135 million a few months earlier, Trump publicly complained that “some character [is] putting on a price just to try to top Trump.”

Ultra high-end real estate sales are often detached from normal market forces. An ego-driven buyer might have a perverse incentive to pay more, not less. “People are happy to say, ‘I got the most expensive house in the U.S.,’” Newman said. This is particularly true of Russian oligarchs, he added: “They like to buy the biggest and the best.” In this sense, Trump and Rybolovlev had something fundamental in common.

But as the deal took shape, the Florida real estate market began to crash. And for all of Trump’s talk of renovations, sources close to the Rybolovlevs would later tell reporters that the house was uninhabitable. (Lambiet says it’s hard to air condition and has persistent mold.) Perhaps fearing they were being played, the Rybolovlevs pressed Trump for a $25 million discount, an undisclosed source close to the family told the New York Times in 2012.

But Trump wanted his magic number. If he really did put $25 million into the house, a $75 million sale wouldn’t leave much profit. Trump also said in the interview that he could tell Rybolovlev was hooked: “He wanted it very badly.” Trump held firm.

And Rybolovlev caved. It may be that the Russian decided the extra $25 million was breadcrumbs from his $13 billion fortune. It’s also possible that Rybolovlev’s wealth far exceeds his financial acumen. Last year, the Russian accused a Geneva-based art dealer of swindling him out of $500 million to $1 billion through huge markups on fine art purchases. In one case, Rybolovlev paid $118 million for a nude portrait by Modigliani, which he now believes the dealer bought for just $93.5 million on his behalf.

In July 2008, a family trust established by Rybolovlev paid Trump $95 million, according to a warranty deed recorded by Palm Beach County. Trump, for whom appearances are everything, continues to state the price as $100 million (“plus commissions,” as he put it Wednesday; he has previous said that total included a $5 million credit for broker fees).

Five years after the sale, Palm Beach County appraised the house for just $59.8 million. It has since rebounded to a healthier $81.8 million, still nearly 15 percent less than Rybolovlev paid.
“I got a good price,” Trump said, dismissing skeptics who say he took advantage of Rybolovlev. “People don’t want to see that big a profit being made.”
But the drama around what had become Palm Beach’s most famous trophy house had only begun.
Within months, the Rybolovlev marriage broke apart in ugly fashion. Elena accused her husband of serial infidelity, charging in her divorce petition that, during parties on his yacht, he shared his “young conquests with his friends, and other oligarchs.” Among her demands on his assets was a claim to half the value of Maison de L’Amitie, which she accused Dmitry of buying with a trust to keep it from her. Her lawsuit charged that her husband had “a history of secreting and transferring assets in order to avoid his obligations.” The Panama Papers leaked in April showed that, around the time the couple split up, Rybolovev used offshore companies to move luxury assets like real estate and fine art out of Switzerland, where they would have been exposed to her divorce claims, according to the International Consortium for Investigative Journalists, which acquired the documents. (Rybolovlev has denied trying to hide assets from his wife, and in an April statement, a lawyer for his family’s trust said his offshore holdings had been set up “completely legitimately.”)

The divorce took on an action-movie flavor as Rybolovlev tried to dodge legal papers staking Elena’s claim to his assets. In 2011, a process server stalked Rybolovlev in Hawaii, where the Russian had purchased a $20 million house from the actor Will Smith. As the Russian tried to escape, the server jumped on the mogul’s moving black Cadillac Escalade to slap legal documents on the windshield, according to affidavits described by the Palm Beach Post. Another incident, filmed and posted on YouTube, shows a server sprinting toward Rybolovlev’s SUV shouting, “Dmitry!” as the driver guns the engine and speeds off.
With Maison de L’Amitie in a legal tug of war, Dmitry Rybolovlev distanced himself from the property. In one 2011 deposition, he denied owning the house, “directly or indirectly.” (The actual owner was a family trust created to secure the financial future of his two daughters, he said.)
A Palm Beach Post reporter asked Trump about the confusion: Did he know exactly who had bought his house? “Somebody paid me $100 million,” Trump joked.
***
Trump has much in common with Russia’s oligarchs—billions in wealth, supreme self-confidence, a taste for trophies and a love of flaunting riches—and in recent years, he has gravitated toward them. In 2013, he partnered with the Russian real estate mogul Aras Agalarov to bring the Miss Universe pageant, which Trump owned at the time, to Moscow. Trump later boasted that “all the oligarchs” had attended the event. While in Moscow, Trump discussed plans for real estate projects there.
It is hard to verify the claim Trump made this week that he has no investments in Russia and that his dealings with Russians are very limited. His company is private and is not required to disclose its finances. In a break from modern presidential norms, Trump refuses to release his personal tax returns.
“The big question is whether any hard evidence comes out about whether Trump has any financial interests linked to Russia,” says Democratic consultant Jeremy Rosner, who served on Bill Clinton’s national security council staff. “And that’s why it’s so important that he release his tax records. Otherwise, we could have a Manchurian Candidate with the keys to the Oval Office who is under the control of a foreign power. And voters deserve very clear evidence that that is not the case.”

A close look at the case of Maison de L’Amitie doesn't suggest any connection to Putin. Rybolovlev is not usually described in media accounts as a close ally of the Russian leader, and Kremlin officials have publicly criticized him over a 2006 industrial accident at a Uralkrali mine. “He’s not very well received here in Russia,” an unnamed adviser to the Russian government told the New York Times in 2013.
Trump says he’s never so much as shaken hands with Rybolovlev, his nearly $100 million man. “I never met him. He was represented by a broker,” Trump said in the interview. “I heard good things about him in many ways, and about his family.” Trump added that Rybolovlev’s nationality was not relevant to him. “He just happened to be from Russia. He’s a rich guy from Russia.”
Asked whether Trump and Rybolovlev had ever spoken, a spokesman for the Russian said he “would [not] comment on a private, personal relationship.”o
The dust is now settling on Rybolovlev’s divorce. In 2014, a Swiss court ordered Rybolovlev to pay Elena $4.5 billion, a sum later slashed to $600 million. The couple finally settled on undisclosed terms last fall. Forbes currently estimates Rybolovlev’s net worth at $7.7 billion. He now lives in Monte Carlo, residing in a penthouse apartment, overlooking its famous harbor and attending games of his AC Monaco soccer club with Prince Albert.
But dust clouds may soon rise over Maison L’Amitie. In April, Palm Beach’s architectural commission approved a plan to demolish the home. The House of Friendship, having faced bankruptcy and bitter divorce, will likely be torn down. Rybolovlev may never set foot in it.
Trump speculated that the property will be subdivided. Which is fine by him, he says, unsentimental about a home he once envisioned as America’s second-greatest.

“I have no emotion,” Trump said, “other than it was a great deal.”
That’s hard to dispute. Even with the work Trump did on the house, Lambiet still marvels at the quick profit he turned.
“This is what he does with everything. He puts a little veneer on things and he doubles the price, and people buy it,” Lambiet said. “He’s all smoke and mirrors—and that house was the proof.”

Annabelle Timsit contributed to this report.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/07/donald-trump-2016-russian-ties-214116#ixzz4FwemVyMt
Follow us: @politico on Twitter | Politico on Facebook

sábado, 30 de julho de 2016

Nunca Antes na Diplomacia...: a politica externa brasileira em tempos nao convencionais - livro Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Apresentação sumária do meu mais recente livro publicado sobre a política externa brasileira, mais exatamente sobre a diplomacia lulopetista e as bases conceituais de uma política externa sensata, profissional, lançada quando eu me encontrava no exterior:

Nunca Antes na Diplomacia...: a política externa brasileira em tempos não convencionais
(Curitiba: Editora Appris, 2014, 289 p.; ISBN: 978-85-8192-429-8)

Em tempos de grandes mentiras, o ato de falar a verdade torna-se revolucionário.
George Orwell



Nunca antes na diplomacia? Provavelmente...
Tudo o que sempre lhe intrigou na política externa da era do “nunca antes”, e não tinha a quem perguntar?
Agora já tem, ou, pelo menos, onde ler a respeito. Um diplomata experiente explica o que representaram esses tempos não convencionais na diplomacia brasileira.
Conceitos, fundamentos, ideias (as boas e as más), mas sobretudo os resultados práticos, examinados com isenção, em torno de uma diplomacia que rompeu o consenso nacional de que ela sempre desfrutou tradicionalmente. De fato, nunca antes...

Paulo Roberto de Almeida assina aqui uma de suas obras mais lúcidas, apresentando uma visão contrarianista ao “pensamento único” sobre a política externa dos últimos anos.

Este livro apresenta uma avaliação do que representaram, para o Itamaraty, os anos de diplomacia partidária, um período de desvios nas melhores tradições da Casa de Rio Branco.
Nunca antes na história do País, e de sua diplomacia, preconceitos ideológicos e plataforma partidária influíram tanto nas questões de competência do Itamaraty.
Eu louvo a sua coragem, no sentido de romper a cortina de silêncio em torno das más escolhas feitas na última década, expondo abertamente a sua contrariedade com as posições adotadas em nome do Brasil.
Do Prefácio do Embaixador Rubens Antônio Barbosa,
presidente do Conselho de Comércio Exterior da FIESP.

Sumário:
Prefácio, Embaixador Rubens Antônio Barbosa
As ideias e as práticas da diplomacia brasileira nos últimos 20 anos
Introdução, Paulo Roberto de Almeida
1. Bases conceituais de uma política externa nacional
2. As relações internacionais do Brasil em perspectiva histórica
3. Processos decisórios na história da política externa brasileira
4. A política da política externa: as várias diplomacias presidenciais
5. Duas diplomacias em perspectiva: a profissional e a engajada
6. As novas roupas da diplomacia regional do Brasil
7. Uma nova arquitetura diplomática?: mudanças na política externa
8. Pensamento e ação da diplomacia engajada: uma visão crítica
9. Nunca antes na diplomacia: balanço e avaliação
10. Uma política externa exótica: seus efeitos institucionais
11. A opção preferencial pelo Sul: um novo determinismo geográfico?
12. Uma grande estratégia para o Brasil?
13. O Barão do Rio Branco: o que ele fez, então?; o que faria, agora?
Bibliografia geral
Livros de Paulo Roberto de Almeida
 

Editora Appris: http://www.editoraappris.com.br/

Aquisição do livro

Versão e-book:
E-BOOK - Nunca Antes na Diplomacia: A Política Externa Brasileira em Tempos não Convencionais por R$ 27,00 

Pode ser solicitado online nos sites da

Jordan Young: morte de um brasilianista

Jordan M. Young, um grande brasilianista, morreu em 21 de Julho de 2016Abaixo, uma descrição de seu livro mais autobiográfico:


Lost in the Stars of the Southern Cross


Paperback, 224 Pages
Just weeks before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, 21-year-old Jordan Young arrived in Brazil with $35 in his pocket and dreams of adventure. Unable to return to the U.S. because of war travel restrictions, Jordan studied at the University of São Paulo, worked as a rural sociologist in the Amazon, and helped organize the Rubber Army to support the WWII war effort. In the process he met the Brazilian beauty whom he married many years later. His memoir tells the story of the Brazil of the 1940s that no longer exists and the making of a Brazilianist. Jordan M. Young is professor emeritus of history at Pace University in New York, NY. He is the author of several books about Brazil and an early proponent of the study of Brazilian culture in the United States.

Gordon on Economic Growth in the USA, 1870-2014 - book review by William Nordhaus


Why Growth Will Fall

Gustave Caillebotte: The Floor Planers, 1875
Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Gustave Caillebotte: The Floor Planers, 1875
Robert Gordon has written a magnificent book on the economic history of the United States over the last one and a half centuries. His study focuses on what he calls the “special century” from 1870 to 1970—in which living standards increased more rapidly than at any time before or after. The book is without peer in providing a statistical analysis of the uneven pace of growth and technological change, in describing the technologies that led to the remarkable progress during the special century, and in concluding with a provocative hypothesis that the future is unlikely to bring anything approaching the economic gains of the earlier period.
The message of Rise and Fall is this. For most of human history, economic progress moved at a crawl. According to the economic historian Bradford DeLong, from the first rock tools used by humanoids three million years ago, to the earliest cities ten thousand years ago, through the Middle Ages, to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution around 1800, living standards doubled (with a growth of 0.00002 percent per year). Another doubling took place over the subsequent period to 1870. Then, according to standard calculations, the world economy took off.
Gordon focuses on growth in the United States. Living standards, as measured by GDP per capita or real wages, accelerated after 1870. The growth rate looks like an inverted U. Productivity growth rose from the late nineteenth century and peaked in the 1950s, but has slowed to a crawl since 1970. In designating 1870–1970 as the special century, Gordon emphasizes that the period since 1970 has been less special. He argues that the pace of innovation has slowed since 1970 (a point that will surprise many people), and furthermore that the gains from technological improvement have been shared less broadly (a point that is widely appreciated and true).
A central aspect of Gordon’s thesis is that the conventional measures of economic growth omit some of the largest gains in living standards and therefore underestimate economic progress. A point that is little appreciated is that the standard measures of economic progress do not include gains in health and life expectancy. Nor do they include the impact of revolutionary technological improvements such as the introduction of electricity or telephones or automobiles. Most of the book is devoted to describing many of history’s crucial technological revolutions, which in Gordon’s view took place in the special century. Moreover, he argues that the innovations of today are much narrower and contribute much less to improvements in living standards than did the innovations of the special century.
Rise and Fall represents the results of a lifetime of research by one of America’s leading macroeconomists. Gordon absorbed the current thinking on economic growth as a graduate student at MIT from 1964 to 1967 (where we were classmates), studying the cutting-edge theories and empirical work of such brilliant economists as Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, Dale Jorgenson, and Zvi Griliches. He soon settled in at Northwestern University, where his research increasingly focused on long-term growth trends and problems of measuring real income and output.
Gordon’s book is both physically and intellectually weighty. While handsomely produced, at nearly eight hundred pages it weighs as much as a small dog. I found the Kindle version more convenient. Here is a guide to the principal points.
The first chapter summarizes the major arguments succinctly and should be studied carefully. Here is the basic thesis:
The century of revolution in the United States after the Civil War was economic, not political, freeing households from an unremitting daily grind of painful manual labor, household drudgery, darkness, isolation, and early death. Only one hundred years later, daily life had changed beyond recognition. Manual outdoor jobs were replaced by work in air-conditioned environments, housework was increasingly performed by electric appliances, darkness was replaced by light, and isolation was replaced not just by travel, but also by color television images bringing the world into the living room…. The economic revolution of 1870 to 1970 was unique in human history, unrepeatable because so many of its achievements could happen only once.
The series of “only once” economic revolutions behind this short summary makes up the next fourteen chapters of the book. Most of the innovations are familiar, but Gordon tells their histories vividly. More important, in many cases, he explains quantitatively the way these economic revolutions boosted the living standards of the statistically average American. Among the most illuminating chapters are those on housing, transportation, health, and computers.
The last two chapters are about the fall in Rise and Fall. This book differs from the Spenglerian “decline of the West” genre in an important respect. As the mathematicians might say, Gordon moves up a derivative. In other words, he is not predicting that living standards in the US will decline; rather he views it as likely that the growth rate of living standards will decline from its very rapid pace in the special century.
Gordon sees two sources for his pessimistic outlook. The first is that the long list of “only once” social and economic changes cannot be repeated. A second source is what he calls “headwinds.” These are structural changes in the economy that reduce actual output below the country’s technological potential and provide another reason for slow growth in living standards in the decades ahead.
The central subject in Rise and Fall is the rapid growth of output in the 1870–1970 period, followed by a period of slower growth. We must clarify that “growth” in Gordon’s view involves intensive rather than extensive expansion. Intensive growth is that of output per unit of input, also called productivity, while extensive growth refers to total output. A standard productivity measure that encompasses all inputs is called “total factor productivity” or TFP.1
What are the underlying trends? Figure 1 on this page shows the growth in total factor productivity by decade since 1890. I show two estimates to provide an idea of how robust Gordon’s conclusions are. The one labeled “Gordon” is from his Figure 16.5. The alternative measure, which I have constructed for this review, combines other sources, with private GDP for the first half of the period covered and business output for the second half.2 (The data were provided by Gordon. A shortcoming of his book is the absence of an online appendix, and in this respect it is behind best practice.)
nordhaus_Figure1_Table1
The main result of both measures is to confirm that there was a marked slowdown in productivity growth when we compare the earlier period (1890–1970) to the latest period (1970–2014). Both series give a slowdown of 0.6 percentage points per year in productivity growth. The alternative estimate is that the growth in productivity slowed from 1.7 percent per year in the earlier period to 1.0 percent per year in the second period.
The alternative series shows a smoother increase from the 1890–1920 period to the 1920–1970 period, and then a sharp drop after 1970. Gordon makes much of the robust productivity growth during the Great Depression and World War II, but this is not apparent in the alternative series.
Productivity growth slowed sharply after 1970, with little variability from decade to decade. The slowdown has been puzzling scholars for four decades. My own view is that it is a decline from one thousand cuts. Important ones are rising energy prices, growing regulatory burdens, a structural shift from high- to low-productivity growth sectors (such as from manufacturing to services), as well as the source that Gordon emphasizes, the decline of fundamentally important inventions.
So Gordon’s basic hypothesis looks rock solid: there has been a substantial slowdown in productivity growth since the end of the special century in 1970.
It is commonplace to complain that gross domestic product does a poor job of representing true economic welfare because it omits harmful elements such as pollutionn.3 This is true. However, most readers will be surprised to learn that the major shortcoming of conventional measures is that they underestimategrowth. Moreover, according to Gordon, the understatement was arguably much larger in the special century than before or after.
Why do conventional measures understate actual improvements in living standards? Gordon gives two principal reasons. First, the growth of real income is systematically understated because of flawed price indexes. The price indexes used to convert current dollars of output into inflation-corrected or “real” output overestimate price increases and consequently understate real output growth. Second, GDP omits many aspects of economic activity that are not captured in market transactions. The common omissions are environmental degradation, leisure time, nonmarket work, and improvements in health.
We can begin with the price-index problem. For this, I take an example familiar to most people, lighting. If you were to examine the US economic accounts, you would not find a component that measures the price of lighting or the real output of lighting. Instead, you would find elements such as the price of fuel (whale oil or electricity) and the price of lighting devices (oil lamps or lightbulbs). For each of these prices, we today have carefully designed techniques for collecting prices and spending. So, you might think, by combining correctly the prices of the lighting devices and the fuels (the input prices), we might accurately track the price of producing a certain amount of light (the output price).
Or so we thought until the actual estimates were made. It turns out for lighting that the output price fell much more sharply than the input prices. We can take the example of standard incandescent lightbulbs and LEDbulbs to illustrate. Assume that we need 800 lumens to light a space (a candle produces about thirteen lumens). Suppose that we light the space for 50,000 hours. This would require about 50 incandescent bulbs and 60 watts x 50,000 hours or 3,000 kilowatt-hours (kwh) of electricity. At the current US average electricity price of ten cents per kwh, the cost of incandescent lighting over the period would be about $350 ($50 for the bulbs and $300 for the electricity). Now assume that a new technology, LED bulbs, becomes available. You can get the same illumination with one $5 six-watt LED bulb lasting 50,000 hours. When you calculate the life-cycle costs, the 800 lumens x 50,000 hours cost only $35 ($5 for the bulb + $30 for the electricity).
So the price of lighting declined by 90 percent. And—the critical point for Gordon’s story—with the introduction of LED bulbs, every $100 of expenditures on lighting produced ten times the real output. This is not an isolated example. This same quantum jump came with each improvement in lighting technologies: from oil lamps, to kerosene lamps, to incandescent, to compact fluorescent, to LED lighting. A more detailed look at the history of lighting indicates indeed that conventional measures have understated the growth in the output of lighting by a huge margin.
How do conventional measures of prices or real output treat this major change in prices and real output? They simply ignore it. More precisely, the LED bulb is “linked” to price and output indexes when it is introduced. This means that the amount or efficiency of lighting per dollar is assumed to be unchanged.
Gordon emphasizes that this tiny but revealing story about lighting is told time and again during the special century. The major inventions that revolutionized American living standards were seldom captured in the standard indexes. Examples include running water, toilets, telephones, air travel, phonographs, television, air conditioning, central heating, antibiotics, automobiles, financial instruments, and better working conditions. These tectonic shifts in technology and living standards would generally go unrecorded in “real GDP” growth and in the growth of “real wages.”
The second source of mismeasurement concerns activities that are outside the purview of standard output measures. On close examination, many of these have little effect on the growth of real output when included. For example, if you included a correction for carbon dioxide emissions, it would reduce the level of output, but such a correction would not reduce real output growth at all over the last decade.
However, one specific measurement of error makes an enormous difference—the omission of improvements in health status. Gordon has a fascinating chapter on the sharp “only once” improvements in health and life expectancy. While some of his views on the sources of improvements in health are not persuasive, his final conclusion on the importance for living standards seems justified:
A consistent theme of this book is that the major inventions and their subsequent complementary innovations increased the quality of life far more than their contributions to market-produced GDP…. But no improvement matches the welfare benefits of the decline in mortality and increase in life expectancy….
His statement refers to a strange aspect of output measurement. Suppose we lived on average fifty years, and the average consumption of housing, food, etc. rose by 10 percent. Then our measures of living standards (real GDP or real income) would rise by 10 percent. However, assume that we had the same consumption every year, but had less illness because of antibiotics, or less pain because of anesthetics, or lived twenty years longer. Then there would be no measured gain in living standards. This seems strange, but that is the way our methods for measuring output and income are designed.
There have been several studies attempting to incorporate the benefits of improved health into measures of living standards.4 These show two important points. First, including health status increases sharply the improvement in living standards over the last century. And second, this health-status bonus was larger during the special century than before or after.
In recent years, trends in average living standards interacted with rising income inequality to produce stagnant wages in the lower and middle income groups. Table 1 shows the basic trends over recent decades. The first row shows the results of the last part of the special century. The last two rows show the period of slower growth.
The column labeled “average” shows the growth in per capita, inflation-corrected, post-tax income. This shows an income slowdown that parallels the productivity slowdown, with a decline of 1.4 percentage points from the first to the third subperiod. The slowdown in the growth of real income was largely due to the slowdown in productivity growth from the special century to the more recent period.
The last three columns show how the growth was divided between the bottom fifth, the middle fifth, and the top 1 percent of the income distribution. The first subperiod was one of shared prosperity; indeed, the bottom groups fared slightly better than the top. However, in the most recent years, particularly since 2000, the decline in average income growth was further exacerbated for the lowest income groups by a declining share of the total. So, for the bottom fifth, the growth in real income declined from 3 percent at the end of the special century to essentially zero in the last fifteen years. Of this catastrophic decline, about half was due to the slower overall growth, while half was due to rising inequality. Gordon has an extensive review of the sources of rising inequality, but his emphasis on the role of declining productivity growth is an important and durable part of the story of stagnant incomes.
The last chapter of the book suggests that the US faces major “headwinds” that will continue to drag down living standards relative to underlying productivity growth. In Gordon’s account, these headwinds are rising inequality, poor-quality education, the aging population, and rising government debt. Gordon forecasts that average growth in real income per person over the next quarter-century will be 0.7 percent per year—even lower than the 1.3 percent per year in the 2000–2015 period. If inequality continues to grow, this might lead to declining incomes of the bottom part of the distribution—and therefore to true Spenglerian decline. I emphasize that these forecasts are highly speculative and contingent on many economic, fiscal, and demographic forces.
What of the future of economic growth? Here Gordon is a leading proponent of the view emphasizing the likelihood of “secular stagnation.” There are actually two variants of the stagnation. The first, emphasized by Lawrence Summers, is “demand-side”: a global savings glut along with low inflation is leading to weak aggregate demand in the high-income regions. This syndrome is consistent with zero or negative interest rates in Europe and Japan.
Gordon’s view of stagnation is “supply-side”—referring to a slackening in the growth of productivity rather than persistent weakness caused by the business cycle and high unemployment. His pessimism does not involve the neo-Malthusianism of groups like the Club of Rome, which foretold resource exhaustion, or concerns of those like Nicholas Stern, who sees future climate-driven catastrophes. Rather, Gordon’s concept of stagnation comes from his view about the slow future pace of technological change. He recognizes the perils of forecasting technological futures. But in the end he sees the slow growth of decades since 1970 shown in Figure 1—not those of the special century—as the norm for the years to come. He does not argue that returning to rapid growth is impossible. Instead, he thinks that we have exhausted the major society-changing “only once” inventions, and he sees no prospect that we will find a similar set of inventions of such breadth and depth in the near future.
In discussing the future, Gordon dissects the arguments of the technological optimists who see a growing part in the economy for robots and artificial intelligence. An extreme pole of technological futurism is a theory called “the Singularity.” As computer scientists look into their crystal ball, they foresee artificial intelligence moving toward superintelligence, which denotes intellect that is much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field, including not just games like Go but also scientific creativity, general wisdom, and social skills. At the point where computers have achieved superintelligence, we have reached the Singularity, where humans become economically superfluous. Superintelligent computers are the last human invention, as imagined by the mathematician Irving Good:
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.
Gordon has no sympathy for these futuristic views. Moreover, the economic data (such as those shown in the figure and table) show no trace of a coming Singularity. If anything, growth has slowed even more since the financial crisis of 2008. But as we observe that games like chess or Go are won by a computer, it seems prudent to keep an eye on the evolution of superintelligence.
To summarize, Rise and Fall is a magnificent book on American economic history of the last century and a half. This review can touch only the major themes and has necessarily skimmed over many of the fascinating discussions of individual sectors and historical episodes. If you want to understand our history and the economic dilemmas faced by the nation today, you can spend many a fruitful hour reading Gordon’s landmark study.
Notes:
  1. 1
    Productivity comes in several varieties. The simplest to measure is labor productivity, or output per hour worked. However, this does not account for improvements in education, or for changes in the access of the average worker to a larger stock of more productive capital. Total factor productivity (TFP) is a more complicated concept to measure than labor productivity because it involves measuring the contribution of capital and education, as well as determining how to weigh the different inputs, but today these are standard procedures.

    A final detail is whether productivity relates to business output, to private output, or to total GDP (the latter also includes government output). Accurate measures are usually confined to business output because government output in such areas as education and military forces is difficult to measure and therefore these areas customarily are measured as inputs (teachers) rather than outputs (learning). Gordon generally uses the more comprehensive GDP because it is available for longer periods. It must be reemphasized that all productivity figures refer to measured output and omit the unmeasured contributions of important new and improved products discussed in Gordon’s main text. 
  2. 2
    The alternative is a splicing of the following sources: data for the early part is total factor productivity for the private economy (private GDP), 1890–1950, from Historical Statistics of the United States, Millennial Edition(Cambridge University Press, Vol. 3, Series Cg270, Cg278). The data are based on an early study by John Kendrick in Productivity Trends in the United States (Princeton University Press, 1967). These data are used for the TFP growth rates for 1890–1900 to 1940–1950. For the period 1948–2014, I use total factor productivity for the US private business sector from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. These are available at www.bls.gov/mfp/#tables, “Historical multifactor productivity measures (SIC 1948–1987 linked to NAICS 1987–2014).” These data are used for the TFP growth rates for 1950–1960 to 2000–2014. Note that for the two periods of overlap (1950–1960 and 1960–1970), the early (Kendrick) series and the BLS series are virtually identical. From 1948 to 1970, the private GDP TFP growth rate averaged 2.13 percent per year while the BLS series averaged 2.03 percent per year.  
  3. 3
    Economic statisticians have developed techniques for incorporating external effects like pollution into the measurement of national output. The method is straightforward. You would begin with a measure of the physical emissions, such as annual carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions or sulfur dioxide emissions. These would be parallel to the production of new houses, currently included in the accounts. You then multiply the quantity by a “shadow price,” which would measure the social cost of the emissions. Again, the parallel here would be multiplying the quantity of new houses by the price of the houses. Since the emissions price is a damage, or negative price, the price times quantity of emissions would be subtracted from total output.

    As an example, total CO2 emissions for the United States in 2015 were 5,270 million tons. The US government estimates that the social cost of emissions is $37 per ton (all in 2009 dollars). So the total subtraction is $37 x 5,270 = $195 billion. This would be a debit from the $16,200 billion of total output in that year, or slightly more than 1 percent of output. (These data are from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Energy Information Administration.)

    Note, however, that CO2 emissions declined over the decade from 2005 to 2015, from 5,993 billion to 5,270 billion tons per year. So the subtraction from GDP to correct for CO2 emissions was smaller in 2015 than in 2005. Growth of corrected GDP was therefore a tiny bit higher after correcting for CO2 emissions than before the correction. To be precise, after correction, the real growth rates over the 2005–2015 period would be 1.394 percent per year using the corrected figures instead of 1.385 per year using the official figures.So correcting for CO2 emissions would lower the estimate of output, but would raise by a tiny amount the estimate of growth. 
  4. 4
    Studies on the impact of adding health to the national economic accounts include an early example from William Nordhaus, “The Health of Nations,” in Measuring the Gains from Medical Research: An Economic Approach, edited by Kevin Murphy and Robert Topel (University of Chicago Press, 2010).  

sexta-feira, 29 de julho de 2016

Eric Carle: um grande ilustrador de livros infantis

Eric Carle, Your Favorite Children’s Book Illustrator, Is 87 And Still Making Art

Consider these nostalgia-inducing book titles of your youth: Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? The Hungry, Hungry Caterpillar. The Grouchy Ladybug. Are you seeing blue horses, butterflies and aphids yet? If so, you have Eric Carle ― the master illustrator behind the 1960s and ‘70s’ best children’s books ― to thank.
Carle is the collage artist who made layered illustrations of famished bugs and observant mammals to accompany the most unforgettable stories of your childhood. Brown Bear debuted in 1967, Caterpillar in ‘69, and Ladybug in ‘77, rounding out just the beginning of one of the most well-known picture book producers’ careers. Even if you were a ‘90s kid, these books likely made their way into your library checkout history.
Read more here.

Oswaldo Aranha: discursos de posse no MRE, 1938; 1939 - CHDD-RJ

Textos constantes do site do CHDD, relativos aos ministros de Estado das Relações Exteriores na República:
URL: http://funag.gov.br/chdd/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=135%3Aoswaldo-aranha&catid=55%3Aministros&Itemid=92
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

DISCURSO DE POSSE
MINISTRO DAS RELAÇÕES EXTERIORES OSWALDO ARANHA
15 DE MARÇO DE 1938


A minha vida pública é de ontem, contemporânea de todos vós. Sabem, assim, Sr. Ministro, quantos nos honram com sua presença a esta solenidade, que eu não o vim substituir, mas continuar, mesmo porque neste departamento da vida do nosso país, a coerência fez-se continuidade e esta tradição, inviolável.
Somos, Vossa Excelência por uma longa e brilhante carreira e eu pela minha missão em Washington, funcionários desta casa.
Foi uma grande honra para mim entrar, após ter exercido as mais altas e responsáveis posições na vida política do meu país, há três anos, para o Itamaraty.
Considerei sempre, como devem considerar todos os brasileiros, uma nobre missão a de vir trabalhar à sombra desta casa, viver as suas tradições e compartilhar as suas responsabilidades.
Não tem o nosso país atalaia mais alta na sua história de benemerências, nem mais nobre lição de pacifismo, e de devoção à justiça de outro povo aos demais, do que aquela que se contém nos anais diplomáticos da formação do Brasil.
A diplomacia brasileira é a escola da paz, a organização da arbitragem, a política da harmonia, a prática da boa vizinhança, a igualdade dos povos, a proteção dos fracos, a defesa da justiça internacional, enfim, uma das glórias mais puras e altas da civilização jurídica universal.
A ela deve o nosso povo a parcela maior de suas grandezas, a configuração de suas fronteiras imensas, a conquista de sua unidade, a estrutura de suas soberania, a confiança dos demais povos, e, mais que tudo, o uso e gozo da paz em que temos vivido os brasileiros, mesmo em meio de lutas e de guerras.
Herança do Império desdobrada pela República, a nossa diplomacia é, hoje, uma instituição nacional, inviolável em sua coerência, sagrada em suas tradições, definida em seus fins, clara em seus meios, na qual podem e devem confiar todos os brasileiros como nela têm confiado e confiam os demais povos.
O povo brasileiro é um penhor de boa vontade, de conciliação, de harmonia e de paz.
A obra pacífica do Brasil, no continente e no mundo, não foi, nem é traçada por conveniências ou interesses.
É ideia, é sentimento, é educação e é moral – é atitude tradicional do povo e do Estado brasileiros.
Não houve nem haverá lugar entre nós, dada a nossa índole e formação, para outra política senão aquela – suaviter in modo et fortiter in re – que presidiu à nossa evolução e há de fortalecer e alargar a nossa grandeza.
Representando o nosso governo nos Estados Unidos da América do Norte, o maior centro de convergência das atenções e atividades universais, pude bem medir o respeito por essas nossas tradições e bem avaliar o prestígio da nossa conduta continental e internacional.
É que, meus senhores, a política internacional do Brasil foi sempre uma expressão da opinião nacional do Brasil. 
É só na vontade do povo, na consulta a sua opinião e aspirações, que a paz encontra a sua segurança.
Os governos e os homens nem sempre têm sido bons intérpretes dos seus povos.
Neste erro tiveram suas origens todas as guerras.
É na subordinação dos governos aos seus povos que as nações devem procurar a boa inspiração para os seus destinos, e a solução para os problemas da comunhão universal.
Esta prática, sempre seguida pelo Brasil, foi a base na qual assentou a obra da paz realizada exemplarmente pela civilização brasileira no decurso da sua história e no concerto das nações.
Acreditou-se, num dado momento, que a economia, tornada substância da política, acabaria por inaugurar uma era de cooperação pacífica entre os povos, favorecida por interesses comuns.
Outras soluções foram sugeridas e até adotadas, desde as da força até as do isolamento, como sendo as melhores para manter e desenvolver os meios e instrumentos apropriados à solução pacífica dos problemas e conflitos universais.
A verdade, porém, é que ao termo de tão longos esforços e atormentadas experiências, chegamos todos quantos procuramos o bem estar universal à conclusão de que a paz, a sua segurança e a sua manutenção, residem afinal na obediência dos governos à vontade popular e no respeito das nações à opinião dos seus próprios povos.
O Brasil, justamente porque conduziu sua política internacional consultando sempre a vontade, a aspiração e a opinião de seu povo, é um modelo de cooperação, de desambição e de paz no concerto das nações continentais e mundiais.
O governo atual, malgrado as falsas interpretações de quantos ignoram a sua origem e a sua razão de ser, fundou a sua política exterior nas fontes mesmas da tradição e da opinião do Brasil.
O eminente chefe da nação tem dado, na política internacional do seu governo, as demonstrações mais definitivas de sua fidelidade às nossas tradições diplomáticas, procurando alargá-las e consolidá-las pelo fortalecimento de uma política continental de boa vizinhança e de amizade com os demais povos.

DISCURSO DE POSSE
MINISTRO DAS RELAÇÕES EXTERIORES OSWALDO ARANHA
27 DE MARÇO DE 1939


Senhor Ministro, meus Senhores,

Esta cerimônia, ainda quanto seja uma simples formalidade íntima do Itamaraty, tem uma grande significação.
Ela mostra que a continuidade e a coerência são as linhas mestras desta casa, da ação diplomática e da vida mesma de quantos se devotam ao serviço exterior do Brasil.
A fidelidade aos princípios básicos de nossa formação e evolução política foi e será existencial, na ordem interna do Itamaraty e na exterior do Brasil.
A defesa dessas normas no campo internacional e a sua conservação e aperfeiçoamento na vida diplomática e dos diplomatas brasileiros tornam-se cada dia mais necessárias.
As grandes crises econômicas e políticas universais vieram e virão da falta de continuidade e de coerência dos governos e da crescente infidelidade dos povos aos princípios e tradições, que lançam, através dos tempos, os alicerces mesmos da solidariedade e do aperfeiçoamento humanos.
O respeito ao passado, a devoção às ideias, o sentimento das tradições nunca transviaram os homens e sempre protegeram o destino dos povos.
A força moral do Brasil, no continente como no mundo, emana dessa política invariável de apego àquelas normas que traçaram as suas fronteiras geográficas e alargam todos os dias as de seu prestígio internacional.
Esta cerimônia demonstra como essa linha geral preside, igualmente, ao exercício de nossas funções e ao trato de uns com outros no desempenho das atribuições que nos são confiadas no serviço exterior de nosso país.
E nada, meus amigos, eleva mais uma corporação do que a segurança de que cada um de seus membros, nas suas divergentes atividades, obedece à lei geral, à harmonia do todo, ao supremo interesse do país.
A impessoalidade é a primeira condição para bem servir e melhor contribuir para a obra comum que nos cumpre realizar nesta casa.
A minha viagem aos Estados Unidos veio demonstrar que, lá como aqui, estivemos juntos e solidários, porque, ainda quando distanciados pelas atividades, nunca estivemos ausentes, mas mais reunidos pelo dever e pelo ideal.
O nosso trabalho foi comum, e a conjugação de nossos esforços tão perfeita que, quando se for apreciar a obra por nós realizada nos Estados Unidos, o historiador não a poderá atribuir a mim ou aos meus auxiliares, mas ao Itamaraty, ao governo, ao presidente da República, enfim, ao Brasil, aos que o serviram e aos que o estão agora servindo sob a inspiração desses antepassados.
É esta a significação desta cerimônia: um funcionário substitui outro, sem que a função, no que tem de essencial, sofra a menor solução de continuidade, porque aqui, nesta casa e neste serviço, os homens passam, maiores ou menores, como expressões efêmeras de uma devoção eterna, que as gerações de nossos diplomatas têm conservado, à defesa, à integridade, à grandeza e ao prestígio do Brasil.
Agradeço às generosas palavras do Ministro Freitas Valle, porém, mais ainda, aos relevantes serviços por ele prestados e por todos vós ao governo, durante minha estada nos Estados Unidos, facilitando-me e aos meus companheiros o desempenho de uma missão que, graças à direção do Presidente da República e assistência do Itamaraty, veio confirmar e ampliar a tradicional política de cooperação e de amizade de nossos dois povos, pela qual trabalharam, no Império e na República, sem exceção, todos quantos dirigiram os nossos grandes destinos políticos, nacionais e internacionais.

Tocqueville, sobre academicos e politicos: correto sobre ambos... - comentario por Paulo R. Almeida

Retraduzido do inglês:

Eu já cruzei com homens de letras que escreveram sobre a história sem ter tomado parte em assuntos públicos, e com políticos que se ocuparam de produzir eventos sem jamais pensar sobre eles.
Eu observei que os primeiros estão sempre inclinados a buscar causas gerais, enquanto os segundos, vivendo em meio a fatos diários desvinculados entre si, são levados a acreditar que tudo é devido a incidentes específicos, e que os fios que eles movimentam são os mesmos que movimentam o mundo.
É de se presumir que ambos estão igualmente equivocados.

Alexis de Tocqueville

Extraído do frontspício do clássico de Graham Allison e Philip Zelikow:
Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis
(2nd edition; New York: Longman, 1999, 416 p.; ISBN: 0-321-01349-2)

Na introdução a esse clássico, os autores dizem que "The Cuban missile crisis stands as a seminal event." (p. 1), no sentido em que ela sucitou uma nova fase da Guerra Fria, novos procedimentos, e alguma contenção na corrida maluca aos extremos que estava representada pela "doutrina" do MAD, Mutual Assured Destruction, ou seja, o pacto de aniquilamento recíproco que guiava as estratégias (ou táticas?) de dissuasão entre os dois principais contendores da Guerra Fria.
O mesmo poderia ser dito, e foi dito por George Kennan, da Grande Guerra (1914-1918), descrita por ele como "the greater seminal event of the 20th century", aquele do qual derivaram todas as tragédias do século mais mortal de toda a história humana.

Voltando ao Tocqueville, preciso buscar o locus dessa citação, mas desde já concordo com o publicista e grande pensador francês: acadêmicos estão sempre pretendendo generalizar eventos singulares e deles extrair causas gerais, geralmente inutilmente, enquando políticos, que são homens práticos, vivem apenas cada momento, sem pensar nos antecedentes ou consequentes.
Enfim, para que servem os pensadores que ficam encontrando falhas em todos os demais mortais comuns? 
Para nosso prazer intelectual, unicamente.
Acho que isso basta...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Brasília, 29/07/2017

quinta-feira, 28 de julho de 2016

Think tanks around the world: Funag among the best (government affiliated) - UPenn ranking 2016

Not a surprise, but a prize, certainly.
A Funag, onde estou atualmente trabalhando (como diretor do seu Instituto de Pesquisa de Relações Internacionais - IPRI), figura entre os 40 melhores think tanks do mundo na categoria "associados a governos".
Está neste relatório:

2015 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report 
Report by James G. McGann
University of Pennsylvania, jmcgann@sas.upenn.edu
Disponível neste link:
http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1009&context=think_tanks

Primeiro, o percentual dos think tanks nas diversas regiões do globo:
Agora, os países com o maior número de think tanks, o Brasil aparece em 12o. lugar (mas los hermanos nos superam com mais 50% do nosso total; por una vez se nos adelantaran, como diriam alguns, mas estamos crescendo).

Aqui, o ranking dos think tanks na categoria "associados a governos":

Leiam o relatório neste link:
http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1009&context=think_tanks

Vamos melhorar, sem dúvida, com a ajuda de todos vocês.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 
Diretor do IPRI, Funag
Instituto de Pesquisa de Relações Internacionais
Tel.: (55.61) 2030-9115
ipri@funag.gov.br
www.funag.gov.br/ipri


Contato:
http://www.funag.gov.br/ipri/index.php/contato