Enviada em: quarta-feira, 2 de agosto de 2017 09:36
Para: Adilson Cezar
Assunto: Re: Ainda a condecoração.
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.
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.
Um filme de horror, eu diria, pous descobrimos que ninguém, nenhum poder pode ser considerado isento e impoluto. Ou seja, um horror!
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
LAMA NO VENTILADOR
Por Ruy Fabiano
O Globo, 17/09/2017
A delação premiadíssima dos irmãos Batista, com toda a carga de suspeitas que levantou, teve ao menos um efeito colateral positivo: obrigou o procurador-geral Rodrigo Janot a desengavetar denúncias que lá estavam há quase dois anos.
As denúncias contra os quadrilhões do PT e do PMDB misturam fatos antigos com outros recentes. Foi o meio que Janot encontrou de enquadrar o presidente da República, Michel Temer, que a lei exime de prestar contas de atos alheios e anteriores a seu mandato.
Mas a pressa, ainda que necessária, que Janot exibiu em relação a Temer, não a teve em relação a Lula, Dilma et caterva.
O caso Aluízio Mercadante, por exemplo, que tentou comprar o silêncio do ex-senador Delcídio do Amaral, que preparava delação premiada (a seguir feita), veio a público em março de 2016. Só agora Janot a encaminhou ao STF. Por quê?
Mercadante, que cometeu o mesmo delito que levou Delcídio à prisão sumária e à perda do mandato, não foi incomodado e exerceu seu cargo de ministro da Educação até a saída de Dilma.
Janot, a rigor, não incomodou nenhum dos governos do PT, pelos quais foi nomeado e renomeado.
Chegou a ser visto como um procurador do PT. Não explicou, até agora, por que incinerou a delação do ex-presidente da OAS, Leo Pinheiro, que tratava em minúcias de Lula e de um ministro do STF, Antonio Dias Toffoli. Sua atuação, até os 44 minutos do segundo tempo, esteve longe de mostrar isenção.
Ao sair, porém, em meio às trapalhadas (eufemismo de coisa bem mais séria) da delação dos irmãos Batista – e do comportamento que agora criminaliza de seu braço direito na PGR, Marcelo Miller -, decidiu jogar lama no ventilador.
E haja lama. O contribuinte, lesado por tudo quanto veio à tona, agradece. O problema é que a extensão do que remeteu ao STF faz prever encaminhamento lento e problemático. Por serem amplas demais, e documentadas de menos, as denúncias perdem clareza e objetividade. A defesa dos acusados agradece.
Janot viverá dias difíceis. Arranjou inimigos poderosos em todos os partidos. Mas o modo como o fez, de última hora e sem transparência em suas motivações, não o tornou um herói popular. Muito pelo contrário, o colocou sob suspeição.
Não terá, pois, a contrapartida que tem um Sérgio Moro, de compensar a ira dos poderosos com o apoio entusiástico da opinião pública. Inversamente, terá muito o que explicar, para fora e para dentro da PGR. Seu entorno na instituição está todo citado nos áudios de Joesley Batista e Ricardo Saud.
Ele, que inicialmente defendeu a probidade de Marcelo Miller, terminou por pedir-lhe a prisão. Tal como Lula, alegou que não sabia de nada, embora, por força do cargo que ocupava, devesse sabê-lo.
É a teoria do domínio do fato, que a PGR sustentou, com êxito, no Mensalão contra José Dirceu, levando-o à condenação.
O fato concreto é que, se o país já estava quase órfão de referências institucionais, agora ficou sem nenhuma. Os três Poderes estão, para dizer o mínimo, chamuscados com o que se extraiu das fitas de Joesley e Saud. E há mais, muito mais por vir, em áudios ainda não decodificados, em posse do STF.
Disso resultam urgências políticas, decorrentes da anomalia de um presidente da República, acusado de comandar uma quadrilha, continuar no cargo, em contraste com o rito judicial, lento, complexo e pouco confiável, incumbido de selar-lhe o destino.
O PT, que está em situação bem pior, já que sua quadrilha ficou com a parte do leão na rapina ao Estado, não hesita em insistir no “Fora, Temer!”. Pretende levá-lo com mais força às ruas, acreditando que até os antipetistas serão sensíveis ao apelo.
O certo é que a semana termina com extensa lista de ações da Justiça: O depoimento desastroso de Lula a Sérgio Moro; o agravamento da pena de José Dirceu e João Vaccari, no TRF 4 (para 40 anos), pendente ainda do voto de minerva; a rejeição unânime pelo STF da tentativa de Temer de colocar Janot sob suspeição; a prisão de Wesley Batista; a prisão do ex-governador Garotinho; a evidência de que Marcelo Miller era agente duplo (participava, inclusive, de um grupo no WhatsApp com o pessoal da JBS para tratar da delação junto à PGR). E a busca e apreensão no apartamento funcional do ministro da Agricultura, Blairo Maggi, acusado também de corrupção.
Diante de tal cenário, é absolutamente inviável especular sobre as eleições de 2018. Falta um ano – e até lá não se sabe quais serão os atores dessa peça de horrores a que o país assiste. Não se sabe sequer que partidos haverá - ou mesmo se haverá eleições.
Adam Smith did not believe people are merely economic maximizers. Instead, we balance self-interest with humane sympathy for others. Deirdre N. McCloskey reviews ‘Cents and Sensibility’ by Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro.
By Deirdre N. McCloskey
The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 13, 2017
Review of:
CENTS AND SENSIBILITY
By Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro
Princeton, 307 pages, $29.95
In the middle of the 19th century, when the new telegraph meant that Texas could communicate with Maine, Henry David Thoreau quipped: “But Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” Today, the university puts literature and economics under the same roof. But do the two have anything important to say to each other?
Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro say yes. Their new book, “Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn From the Humanities,” is a sweet contribution to the dialogue. Covering such topics as university admissions, child-rearing, organ harvesting and economic development, the chapters each analyze public questions first through economics, and then through literature. The conclusion is that economics—a hugely influential approach to studying human societies—isn’t worth all that much without first understanding what it means to be human.
Mr. Morson is a professor of Slavic literature at Northwestern University, and Mr. Schapiro teaches economics there, where he is also the president. The book is the fruit of an undergraduate course they taught together, which suggested critiques of their disciplines, and especially of economics. Economics, they argue, has been stripped down to a theory neglecting language and culture. At the same time, literary study has abandoned its responsibility to lead students to the best that has been thought and said. The humanities, Messrs. Morson and Schapiro contend, should acknowledge economics for worldly purposes. Yet for a truly human science the economists need literature, philosophy and history. Each discipline can supply what the other lacks.
Their agendum is, in their phrase, “a return to the ‘real’ Adam Smith. ” They exhort students of economics to grasp that the author of “The Wealth of Nations” also wrote “The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” The real Smith observes that human beings summon qualities of sympathy balanced with their self-interest. People are not merely economic maximizers: They are ethical creatures from the get-go.
Messrs. Morson and Schapiro advocate a fusion the economist Bart Wilson and the Nobelist Vernon Smith have recently dubbed “humanomics.” The humanities study categories, and the initial step of categorization is essential to any human inquiry. As Niels Bohr once said, humans ask the questions: good versus bad, big versus small, red giant stars versus white dwarves, Homo sapiens sapiens versus Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. You can’t measure gross domestic product or unemployment without first saying what they are, qualitatively, as categories of interest to humans. If we were to decide that a society were best judged using the number of houses of worship erected—or, for that matter, the number of M&M candies consumed—such a measure, not dollar-value output, is what we would study. There is no God-term telling us from the outside what categories humans care about. Economics, physics, biology, history—all need the first, humanistic, categorizing step.
In most chapters Mr. Schapiro writes about some piece of economics—how information about opportunities matters in determining which colleges students attend, how families and criminal enterprises respond to incentives, or why geographical determinism is the wrong way to think about economic growth. Then Mr. Morson writes about what “a humanist would add.” For instance, economists calculate in court the value of a human life by determining that person’s remaining lifetime cash earnings. Mr. Morson demurs. In such calculations the economists have not drunk deep from literary or philosophical springs.
Parts of the book explicitly, and all of it by implication, give an eloquent defense of the humanities against fanatical advocates for “STEM” (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). The STEM-ers want to shove aside the humanities, and most of the social sciences, too, in favor of fields they think are more likely to add to GDP. Messrs. Morson and Schapiro point to the example of Japan’s minister of education, who a few years ago proposed eliminating in public universities every field except STEM. No study of Japanese literature. No economics. Such naive zeal ignores that most of what actually goes on in STEM’s “M” and “S”—and even a good deal of the “E”—is, like the humanities, an inquiry into the artistic or intellectual products of humans. They have no economic usefulness. Astronomy and number theory should properly be viewed as quantitative kin to, say, theology and art history. Indeed, the very word “science” is unusual in contemporary English in signifying only the physical and biological. In other languages, and in English before the 1860s, it has a much wider meaning, “systematic inquiry,” as in the German word for the humanities—Geisteswissenschaften, or “spirit sciences.
In discussing the communication between literature and economics, Messrs. Morson and Schapiro focus rather more on method than on substance. But it is early days for humanomics, and a certain amount of methodological ground-clearing is justified. Both men, true, represent somewhat conventional, even old-fashioned, versions of their specialties. Mr. Morson, for example, adheres to the old “belletristic” theory of literary criticism, which regards its purpose as awarding stars like movie reviews to great literature. This book cannot mention Tolstoy or Dostoevsky without informing us, in case we forgot, that they are “great.” Still, when it comes to placing economics and the humanities in dialogue, “Cents and Sensibility” constitutes a wise first step. As to the people who disagree—who believe that maximizing utility subject to constraints is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know, or who believe that prudence and calculation can tell us nothing about the human spirit—well, they are exactly the people most in need of the book.
Ms. McCloskey is a distinguished professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and author, most recently, of “Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World.”
Appeared in the September 14, 2017, print edition as 'A Human Face For Economics.'
Blending history, philosophy, psychology, and sociology, the Scottish intellectual single-handedly invented modern political economy
Robert McCrum
The Guardian: Monday, 11 September 2017
1776 was an annus mirabilis for English and American prose, a year to compare with 1859 (Darwin’s On the Origin of Species; Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities; Mill’s On Liberty). In February, Gibbon published the first volume of his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; while in March a brilliant intellectual, a star of the Scottish Enlightenment, single-handedly invented the subject of modern political economy with An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations which swiftly became established in the minds of intelligent readers as The Wealth of Nations. When the first edition sold out in six months, the story went round that another celebrated Scot, the philosopher David Hume, was now joking that The Wealth of Nations probably required too much thought to be as popular as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.
Gibbon, in fact, was full of generous praise for his rival. He wrote to the Scottish historian and philosopher Adam Ferguson: “What an excellent work is that with which our common friend Mr Adam Smith has enriched the public! An extensive science in a single book, and the most profound ideas expressed in the most perspicuous language”.
Smith’s work, indeed, was every bit as singular as Gibbon’s. Although it provided a comprehensive and magisterial treatment of its subject, it was also a work of robust common sense, intelligible to any careful reader, braiding history, philosophy, psychology, and sociology in a compelling tapestry of theory and experience. Smith, writes one commentator, was concerned to improve “the human condition in practical ways for real people”. This was a book that had begun as a series of lectures delivered to audiences in Glasgow. Smith’s friend Hume, joking aside, declared that the book had “depth and solidity and acuteness, and is so much illustrated by curious facts, that it must at last take the public attention”.
Crucially, for Smith, a civilised society is a trading society
For Smith, in a doctrine that would have been music to the ears of any energetic new Americans, a nation’s labour is the source of its basic means. Moreover, Smith argued, there is an intrinsic value to the division of labour, where labour was the sole determinant of price. This simple proposition becomes complicated in more advanced societies by the intervention of wages, profit, and rent, three elements that complexify the basic economic model. Combined with Smith’s wide-ranging, lucid, and profound exposition, there’s also his assault on the mercantile system, an outmoded throwback that he conceived as restrictive, repressive, and inimical to individual self-expression in the marketplace.
At the heart of The Wealth of Nations is the provocative suggestion that self-interest is perhaps the only criterion of economic behaviour, and that the universal, unfettered pursuit of self-advantage was the only sure guarantee of general welfare. Arguably, it is the collision of Smith’s ideas with the political ambitions of the American revolution that would, eventually, make a decisive contribution to the development of western capitalism.
Crucially, for Smith, a civilised society is a trading society. There’s a famous passage in book 1 where he argues for the natural place of competitive trade.
“Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog. Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that… But man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, 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 in his favour…”
Accordingly, Smith’s opening theme is that the regulations imposed on commerce are ill-founded and counterproductive. In Smith’s day, the conventional wisdom was that gold and silver was wealth, and that countries should boost exports and resist imports in order to maximise this metallic treasure. It was Smith’s transformative insight that a nation’s real wealth lies in the constant traffic of goods and services thereby created – what we would call the gross national product. To maximise this, he argued, government should not restrict an individual nation’s productive capacity, but set it free.
Another central theme was that such productive capacity rests on the division of labour and on the accumulation of capital that such activity makes possible. Huge efficiencies can be gained by breaking production down into a multiplicity of small tasks, each undertaken by specialists. In book 1, Smith cites the example of pin-makers.
“A workman not educated to this business (which the division of labour has rendered a distinct trade), nor acquainted with the use of the machinery employed in it (to the invention of which the same division of labour has probably given occasion) could scarce, perhaps, with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make 20.”
The division of labour, he demonstrates, will leave producers with a surplus that they can exchange with others, or use to invest in more efficient labour-saving machinery. It was ideas of this kind that persuaded later readers such as Lord Acton to describe The Wealth of Nations as providing the “scientific backbone to liberal sentiment”, declaring that it was the “classic English philosophy of history”.
Smith’s third theme is that a country’s future income depends upon this capital accumulation. The more that is invested in better productive processes, the more wealth will be created in the future. But if people are going to build up their capital, they must be confident that it will be secure from theft. The countries that prosper are those that grow their capital, manage it well, and protect it. Smith demonstrated that this system is automatic. Where things are scarce, people are prepared to pay more for them; there is more profit in supplying them, so producers invest more capital to produce them. Where there is a glut, prices and profits will be low, and then producers switch their capital and enterprise elsewhere. Industry thus remains focused on the nation’s most important needs, with no need for central direction.
But, says Smith, the system is automatic only when there is competition. When governments grant subsidies or monopolies to favoured producers, or shelter them behind tariff walls, they can charge higher prices. The poor suffer most from this, facing higher costs for the necessities that they rely on. The Wealth of Nations also says that competition and free exchange are under threat from the monopolies, tax preferences, controls, and other privileges that producers extract from the government.
For all these reasons, Smith believes that government itself must be limited. Its core functions are to maintain defence, keep order, build infrastructure and promote education. It was the duty of good government to keep the market economy open and free, and not act in ways that might distort it. Enter George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams et al. The Wealth of Nations was, of course, published in the year of the Declaration of Independence. This strange fact lends added significance to Smith’s prediction that the Americans “will be one of the foremost nations of the world”.
A signature sentence
“Compared, indeed, with the more extravagant luxury of the great, [the blacksmith’s] accommodation must no doubt appear extremely simple and easy; and yet it may be true, perhaps, that the accommodation of an European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute masters of the lives and liberties of 10,000 naked savages.”
Three to compare
David Hume: The History of England (1754-61)
Henry Thomas Buckle: History of Civilization in England (1857)
Karl Marx: Capital, Volume I (1867)
Minhas poucas colaborações às revistas do UniCEUB, onde dou aulas desde 2004. Está na hora de colaborar mais um pouco.
Revista de Direito Internacional (Brazilian Journal of International Law)
v. 10, n. 1 (2013): Direito Internacional Econômico
Brazilian trade policy in historical perspective: constant features, erratic behavior
Universitas: Relações Internacionais
v. 9, n. 1 (2011)
Seria o Mercosul reversível? Especulações teóricas sobre trajetórias alternativas concretas 10.5102/uri.v9i1.1360
Prismas: Direito, Políticas Públicas e Mundialização (substituída pela Revista de Direito Internacional)
Vol. 2, No 1 Janeiro/Junho (2005)
Políticas de integração regional no governo Lula
Paulo Roberto de Almeida