Um colega de lista de discussão sobre temas mais sérios, fez uma pausa para mandar esta recomendação, que ainda não segui, mas vou fazê-lo, enquanto leio uma dissertação de mestrado (ugh...):
2009/12/14 Leonardo Teles:
Caros,
No inicio de uma cansativa viagem de retorno, fui deleitado com um delicioso programa da RNE (Radio Nacional Espanola) sobre musica 'moderna'. Trata-se um programa sobre a época do SWING, musica de 50 anos atras. Os comentários do apresentador explicando algo da historia das músicas da um 'que' todo especial ao programa. Recomendo. Excelente para deixar de pano de fundo em casa para relaxar.
http://www.rtve.es/programas/voces
Todos os mais de 100 programas estao disponiveis no link para que sejam ouvidos online.
Divirtam-se. O ultimo programa disponivel (Ay,que me vuelvo loca) é realmente muito gostoso. Recomendo. Podem ser acessados via o link 'PROGRAMAS', no canto superior esquerdo.
Abraços e uma ótima semana para todos,
--
Leo Teles
terça-feira, 15 de dezembro de 2009
1569) Paul Samuelson: as razoes de sua ampla aceitacao
Why Everyone Read Samuelson
By DAVID R. HENDERSON
The Wall Street Journal, Opinion, December 14, 2009
The late Nobel laureate's mathematical approach to economics has been a mixed blessing.
Three years after World War II drew to a close, a young professor at MIT published "Foundations of Economic Analysis." Its mathematical approach to economics would revolutionize the profession. And its author, Paul Samuelson, would go on to earn many awards and honors, culminating in 1970, when he won the Nobel Prize in economics—the second year it was awarded. Samuelson died on Sunday at the age of 94.
His influence has been profound, but the mathematization of economics has been a mixed blessing. The downside is that the math hurdle in leading U.S. economics programs is now so high that people who grasp the power of economic concepts to explain human behavior are losing out in the competition to mathematicians.
The upside is that Samuelson sometimes used math to resolve issues that had not been resolved at a theoretical level for decades. As fellow Nobel laureate Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago said in a 1982 interview, "He'll take these incomprehensible verbal debates that go on and on and just end them; formulate the issue in such a way that the question is answerable, and then get the answer."
For instance, Swedish economist Bertil Ohlin had argued that international trade would tend to equalize the prices of factors of production. Trade between, say, India and the United States would narrow wage-rate differentials between the two countries. Samuelson, using mathematical tools, showed the conditions under which the differentials would be driven to zero: It's called the Factor Price Equalization Theorem.
He contributed fundamental insights in consumer theory and welfare economics, international trade, finance theory, capital theory, general equilibrium and macroeconomics. In finance theory, which he took up at age 50, Samuelson did some of the initial work that showed that properly anticipated futures prices should fluctuate randomly.
Economists had long believed that there were goods that would be hard for the private sector to provide because of the difficulty of charging those who benefit from them. National defense is one of the best examples of such a good. In the 1954 Review of Economics and Statistics, Samuelson gave a rigorous definition of a public good that is still standard in the literature.
"Let those who will write the nation's laws if I can write its textbooks," Samuelson said during a speech at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. He revised his own widely read textbook, "Economics," about every three years since 1948. One of the best and punchiest statements in the 1970 edition was his comment about a proposal to raise the minimum wage from its existing level of $1.45 an hour to $2.00 an hour: "What good does it do a black youth to know that an employer must pay him $2.00 an hour if the fact that he must be paid that amount is what keeps him from getting a job?"
This is the kind of comment that causes many on the left to grit their teeth; and yet Samuelson was a liberal Keynesian and the best-known rival of the late libertarian monetarist, Milton Friedman. The two men respected each other highly, but the intellectual influence was mainly one way. Over time, Samuelson came more to Friedman's views, especially on monetary policy.
In the 1948 edition of his textbook, Samuelson wrote dismissively, "few economists regard Federal Reserve monetary policy as a panacea for controlling the business cycle.'' But in the 1967 edition, he wrote that monetary policy had "an important influence'' on total spending. In the 1985 edition, Samuelson and co-author William Nordaus (of Yale) would write, "Money is the most powerful and useful tool that macroeconomic policymakers have,'' and the Fed "is the most important factor'' in making policy.
Paul Samuelson began teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1940 at the age of 26 and remained there, publishing on average almost one technical paper a month for over 50 years. In addition to the Nobel Prize, he also earned the John Bates Clark Award in 1947, awarded for the most outstanding work by an economist under age 40. He was president of the American Economic Association in 1961.
Samuelson, like Milton Friedman, had a regular column in Newsweek (from 1966 to 1981). Unlike Friedman, he did not have a passionate belief in free markets—or, for that matter, in government intervention in markets. His pleasure seemed to come from providing new proofs, demonstrating technical finesse, turning a clever phrase, and understanding the world better.
But not always. Samuelson had an amazingly tin ear about communism. As early as the 1960s, economist G. Warren Nutter at the University of Virginia had done empirical work showing that the much-vaunted economic growth in the Soviet Union was a myth. Samuelson did not pay attention. In the 1989 edition of his textbook, Samuelson and William Nordhaus wrote, "the Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive."
Although I was never a fan of Samuelson's textbook, an appendix on futures markets in a late 1960s edition laid out beautifully how the profit motive in futures markets causes reallocation from times of relative plenty to future times of relative scarcity. In 1990 I asked him to do an article on futures markets for "The Fortune (now "Concise") Encyclopedia of Economics." He replied quickly that he did not have time and ended graciously, "My loss."
Mr. Henderson is a research fellow with Stanford University's Hoover Institution and an economics professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. He is editor of "The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics" (Liberty Fund, 2008.)
By DAVID R. HENDERSON
The Wall Street Journal, Opinion, December 14, 2009
The late Nobel laureate's mathematical approach to economics has been a mixed blessing.
Three years after World War II drew to a close, a young professor at MIT published "Foundations of Economic Analysis." Its mathematical approach to economics would revolutionize the profession. And its author, Paul Samuelson, would go on to earn many awards and honors, culminating in 1970, when he won the Nobel Prize in economics—the second year it was awarded. Samuelson died on Sunday at the age of 94.
His influence has been profound, but the mathematization of economics has been a mixed blessing. The downside is that the math hurdle in leading U.S. economics programs is now so high that people who grasp the power of economic concepts to explain human behavior are losing out in the competition to mathematicians.
The upside is that Samuelson sometimes used math to resolve issues that had not been resolved at a theoretical level for decades. As fellow Nobel laureate Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago said in a 1982 interview, "He'll take these incomprehensible verbal debates that go on and on and just end them; formulate the issue in such a way that the question is answerable, and then get the answer."
For instance, Swedish economist Bertil Ohlin had argued that international trade would tend to equalize the prices of factors of production. Trade between, say, India and the United States would narrow wage-rate differentials between the two countries. Samuelson, using mathematical tools, showed the conditions under which the differentials would be driven to zero: It's called the Factor Price Equalization Theorem.
He contributed fundamental insights in consumer theory and welfare economics, international trade, finance theory, capital theory, general equilibrium and macroeconomics. In finance theory, which he took up at age 50, Samuelson did some of the initial work that showed that properly anticipated futures prices should fluctuate randomly.
Economists had long believed that there were goods that would be hard for the private sector to provide because of the difficulty of charging those who benefit from them. National defense is one of the best examples of such a good. In the 1954 Review of Economics and Statistics, Samuelson gave a rigorous definition of a public good that is still standard in the literature.
"Let those who will write the nation's laws if I can write its textbooks," Samuelson said during a speech at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. He revised his own widely read textbook, "Economics," about every three years since 1948. One of the best and punchiest statements in the 1970 edition was his comment about a proposal to raise the minimum wage from its existing level of $1.45 an hour to $2.00 an hour: "What good does it do a black youth to know that an employer must pay him $2.00 an hour if the fact that he must be paid that amount is what keeps him from getting a job?"
This is the kind of comment that causes many on the left to grit their teeth; and yet Samuelson was a liberal Keynesian and the best-known rival of the late libertarian monetarist, Milton Friedman. The two men respected each other highly, but the intellectual influence was mainly one way. Over time, Samuelson came more to Friedman's views, especially on monetary policy.
In the 1948 edition of his textbook, Samuelson wrote dismissively, "few economists regard Federal Reserve monetary policy as a panacea for controlling the business cycle.'' But in the 1967 edition, he wrote that monetary policy had "an important influence'' on total spending. In the 1985 edition, Samuelson and co-author William Nordaus (of Yale) would write, "Money is the most powerful and useful tool that macroeconomic policymakers have,'' and the Fed "is the most important factor'' in making policy.
Paul Samuelson began teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1940 at the age of 26 and remained there, publishing on average almost one technical paper a month for over 50 years. In addition to the Nobel Prize, he also earned the John Bates Clark Award in 1947, awarded for the most outstanding work by an economist under age 40. He was president of the American Economic Association in 1961.
Samuelson, like Milton Friedman, had a regular column in Newsweek (from 1966 to 1981). Unlike Friedman, he did not have a passionate belief in free markets—or, for that matter, in government intervention in markets. His pleasure seemed to come from providing new proofs, demonstrating technical finesse, turning a clever phrase, and understanding the world better.
But not always. Samuelson had an amazingly tin ear about communism. As early as the 1960s, economist G. Warren Nutter at the University of Virginia had done empirical work showing that the much-vaunted economic growth in the Soviet Union was a myth. Samuelson did not pay attention. In the 1989 edition of his textbook, Samuelson and William Nordhaus wrote, "the Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive."
Although I was never a fan of Samuelson's textbook, an appendix on futures markets in a late 1960s edition laid out beautifully how the profit motive in futures markets causes reallocation from times of relative plenty to future times of relative scarcity. In 1990 I asked him to do an article on futures markets for "The Fortune (now "Concise") Encyclopedia of Economics." He replied quickly that he did not have time and ended graciously, "My loss."
Mr. Henderson is a research fellow with Stanford University's Hoover Institution and an economics professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. He is editor of "The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics" (Liberty Fund, 2008.)
segunda-feira, 14 de dezembro de 2009
1568) Antiglobalizadores atacam outra vez: sim, a Attac quer uma ilusoria "justica climatica"
Abaixo o último boletim científico de uma entidade formada por lunáticos climáticos, antiglobalizadores vieux style, surrealistas econômicos e outros malucos do pensamento científico, que pretende ter um boletim do seu conselho científico (sic), atacando, de acordo com o seu nome oficial, a atual organização econômica da exploração dos recursos naturais, que eles pretendem substituir por uma fantasmagórica "justiça climática" (seja lá o que isso queira dizer).
Em todo caso, vou comentar, em próxima oportunidade, suas posições absolutamente malthusianas sobre os problemas do meio ambiente, assim que me liberar de outros encargos urgenges.
Aqueles que desejam ler os trabalhos da Attac, podem clicar aqui.
Attac - La lettre du Conseil Scientifique
La Lettre du Conseil scientifique d’Attac - numéro spécial Copenhague
Procédure d’urgence pour la planète en danger
Geneviève Azam (Attac), Annick Coupé (Solidaires), Laurent Hutinet (Amis de la Terre), Gus Massiah (CRID), Pierre Tartakowsky (LDH), Sophie Zafari (FSU), ont publié, dans le Hors-série d’octobre-novembre de Politis intitulé "Le chaos climatique", un analyse intitulée "Procédure d’urgence pour la planète en danger". On pourra la lire ici.
Voir l'intégralité de l'édito
Copenhague
> Pour une justice écologique, libérons le climat des marchés financiers
Attac a fait de l’urgence climatique et de la justice climatique une de ses priorités de campagne et d’éducation populaire. Elle a publié une brochure au contenu duquel on peut accéder ici http://www.france.attac.org/spip.ph...
Cette brochure s’inscrit dans la continuité des travaux de l’association et de ses combats et s’attache à montrer et expliciter les enjeux du financement du changement climatique, enjeux écologiques, économiques, sociaux et politiques. C’est une démarche essentielle pour s’approprier des débats qui ne peuvent être laissés seulement à des experts et pour pouvoir conjuguer écologie et solidarité, écologie et justice, écologie et démocratie. Il serait suicidaire d’oublier que la question climatique, devenue une des priorités planétaires incontestables, est d’abord et avant tout le fruit d’alertes et de travaux remarquables de la communauté scientifique académique au premier chef, mais aussi de travaux permanents de contre-expertises indépendantes et citoyennes contrebalançant les discours des gouvernements et des transnationales de tous les secteurs peu enclins à remettre à plat nos modèles de développement.
> Our world is not for sale (OWINFS)
L’ONG, "Our world is not for sale" (OWINFS) http://www.ourworldisnotforsale.org/fr se présente de la manière suivante "Notre monde n’est pas à vendre (OWINFS) est un réseau mondial d’organismes, de militants et de mouvements sociaux qui s’opposent aux ententes commerciales et aux accords d’investissement qui favorisent les intérêts des sociétés les plus puissantes du monde au détriment des personnes et de l’environnement". A l’occasion de Copenhague, OWINFS publie sur son site plusieurs textes ; on pourra lire, en particulier :
"Changez le commerce, pas notre climat !" http://www.ourworldisnotforsale.org...
"La grande rupture" http://www.ourworldisnotforsale.org...
> Les propositions de la FASE
L’importante ONG brésilienne FASE, née au tout début des années 1960 http://www.fase.org.br/v2/ qui, avec 160 autres organisations, participe au mouvement "Climate justice now" http://climatjustice.org/ En octobre 2009, FASE a défini sa position en huit points stratégiques (libre traduction de Jacques Cossart)
> Scandale : le soja GM détruit l’Amérique du Sud et cherche à encaisser des "Crédits Carbone" !
Les Amis de la Terre ont publié en octobre 2009, dans un dossier particulièrement riche intitulé "Scandale : le soja GM détruit l’Amérique du Sud et cherche à encaisser des "Crédits Carbone" !". Le sous-titre est, lui aussi éclairant "Quel rôle jouent certaines ONG ?" Ce dossier édité en Anglais a été traduit, en Français, par Christian Berdot http://www.amisdelaterre.org/Scanda... Christian Berdot présente ainsi l’ensemble : "Depuis des années, les lobbies de l’agrobusiness s’activent dans les coulisses des négociations sur le climat ! Alors que la quinzième Conférence des Parties (COP 15) sur les Climats, organisée par les Nations Unies à Copenhague, approche, un nouvel accord doit être signé pour la période post-2012. Il est de plus en plus évident que l’agrobusiness essaye de tirer profit de l’énorme marché des crédits carbone. Sous le terme d’ « agriculture de conservation », Monsanto et ses autres alliés des biotechnologies ont infiltré la FAO (l’Organisation pour l’Agriculture et l’Alimentation) et la Convention Cadre sur les Changements Climatiques des Nations Unies (UNFCCC) dans le but d’obtenir des crédits carbone pour l’agrobusiness. La certification volontaire pour le soja Roundup Ready « responsable » sponsorisé par le WWF et une nouvelle méthodologie pour les Mécanismes de Développement Propre sont deux étapes importantes pour accéder à ce marché de trois milliards de dollars"
> 7 pistes pour attraper le carbone
Terraeco, qui se définit comme "le média du développement durable", énumère "7 pistes pour attraper le carbone" http://www.planete-terra.fr/spip.ph...
> Des escrocs investissent le marché du carbone
Un article publié dans Le Monde du 27 août 2009 intitulé "Des escrocs investissent le marché du carbone". Les auteurs y décrivent parfaitement comment s’est organisée la fraude à la TVA sur ce marché. Faut-il rappeler qu’il n’y a rien là d’anormal dans une organisation de l’économie qui nous est imposée, mais au contraire le constat d’une "parfaite" conjonction : livrer le carbone aux marchés en faisant semblant de croire qu’ils font réduire ses émissions, et tolérer une concurrence fiscale.
> Rapport banque mondiale 2010
Le "World development report", que la Banque mondiale a publié officiellement à l’occasion de l’assemblée annuelle qui s’est tenue, cette fois, à Istanbul début octobre, est consacré au climat et à la manière de le sauver.
Sans surprise, et malgré une description sans concession des désastres constatés, la Banque réaffirme sa foi dans les marchés. Une présentation/analyse du rapport.
> L’Europe face au changement climatique
Pour une régulation commerciale climat-compatible
Le gouvernement français a émis en novembre 2006 l’idée d’introduire une taxe carbone sur les importations en provenance des pays refusant de s’engager en faveur du protocole de Kyoto. Cette initiative française se fondait sur le fait que la non-application de ce protocole en dehors de l’Europe donnerait lieu à un désavantage compétitif dont souffriraient les exportations de cette région. Cela d’autant plus que le Conseil européen des 8 et 9 mars 2007 avait engagé l’Europe sur un objectif unilatéral de réduction des émissions de gaz à effet de serre (GES) de 20 % en 2020, objectif qui serait porté à 30 % dans le cadre d’un accord international post-Kyoto. Le Conseil européen des 11 et 12 décembre 2008 a confirmé cet objectif tout en introduisant un système de dérogations entre les membres.
Mehdi Abbas, LEPII, Grenoble Université, CNRS.
Décembre 2008
> Une taxe carbone en trompe-l’œil
Après la disgrâce, l’engouement pour l’impôt ? Le gouvernement français a annoncé l’étude d’une taxe nationale carbone et a réuni pour cela un groupe d’experts. Qu’en est-il de cette proposition ? Au moment où ces lignes sont écrites, le rapport des experts n’est pas encore public mais plusieurs textes préparatoires, notamment le Livre blanc sur la contribution climat-énergie (taxe carbone) (http://www.contributionclimatenergie.fr/), en donnent les balises.
Geneviève Azam, Conseil scientifique d’Attac
> Le climat dans la tourmente des marchés
La négociation climatique en vue de Copenhague patine, voire recule. A moins de se ranger à une écologie qui serait affaire d’experts (et d’intérêts économiques), il est essentiel de saisir ce qui est en jeu, pour que les changements écologiques imposés par la nécessité et la contrainte, puissent devenir les supports d’un changement souhaitable, guidé par des choix collectifs de justice et de solidarité.
Geneviève Azam, Conseil scientifique d’Attac
> Climat, le marché ou les citoyens ?
Tribune "Climat, le marché ou les citoyens ?", Jacques Cossart, Hors Série Politis, Octobre-Novembre 2009.
La quinzième conférence des parties, COP 15, qui se tiendra à Copenhague en décembre 2009 mobilise la planète entière, tant les services et agences publiques que les ONG et le secteur privé. Cette mobilisation considérable est, en soi, un vrai succès pour la régulation publique en matière climatique et la Conférence sur le changement climatique des Nations Unies.
Jacques Cossart, Conseil scientifique d’Attac
> Écologie et solidarité internationale
Gustave Massiah, économiste membre du Conseil scientifique d’Attac-France, dans un article intitulé "Ecologie et solidarité internationale", dresse une fresque des combats anciens et nouveaux dans le monde qui vient. Il y dessine, en particulier, la place de l’écologie qui impose de nouvelles exigences aux mouvements écologistes. L’ambition de ce document et d’alimenter le débat indispensable à la culture des droits qui y est évoquée.
Gustave Massiah, Conseil scientifique d’Attac
Pour en savoir plus (rapports et données "officiels")
> Adaptation des pays du Sud au changement climatique
Dans une étude publiée le 30 septembre 2009, la Banque mondiale estime de 75 à 100 milliards de dollars par an le coût de l’adaptation des pays du Sud au changement climatique. La Banque estime que ce coût est insupportable pour les pays pauvres mais peut parfaitement être financé par les pays riches. A cet égard, rappelons que les calculs du Conseil scientifique d’Attac-France estime à 1 500 milliards de dollars annuels le produit des taxes globales...
> Incompatibilité entre diminution des émissions de GES et mécanismes de marché
Attac-France, et beaucoup de mouvements altermondialistes ou syndicaux, ont déjà démontré à plusieurs reprises, la parfaite incompatibilité entre diminution des émissions de GES et mécanismes de marché. En revanche, il est plus rare d’entendre des critiques venant de ceux-là même qui vivent de ce marché ! Quand cette critique vient du saint des saints capitaliste, elle mérite attention. Cette fois c’est le responsable mondial du département "management des actifs", de la Deutsche Bank, l’une des premières banques dans le monde, qui demande, sans beaucoup de retenue, une puissante intervention publique !
Toutes les lettres du Conseil scientifique
Em todo caso, vou comentar, em próxima oportunidade, suas posições absolutamente malthusianas sobre os problemas do meio ambiente, assim que me liberar de outros encargos urgenges.
Aqueles que desejam ler os trabalhos da Attac, podem clicar aqui.
Attac - La lettre du Conseil Scientifique
La Lettre du Conseil scientifique d’Attac - numéro spécial Copenhague
Procédure d’urgence pour la planète en danger
Geneviève Azam (Attac), Annick Coupé (Solidaires), Laurent Hutinet (Amis de la Terre), Gus Massiah (CRID), Pierre Tartakowsky (LDH), Sophie Zafari (FSU), ont publié, dans le Hors-série d’octobre-novembre de Politis intitulé "Le chaos climatique", un analyse intitulée "Procédure d’urgence pour la planète en danger". On pourra la lire ici.
Voir l'intégralité de l'édito
Copenhague
> Pour une justice écologique, libérons le climat des marchés financiers
Attac a fait de l’urgence climatique et de la justice climatique une de ses priorités de campagne et d’éducation populaire. Elle a publié une brochure au contenu duquel on peut accéder ici http://www.france.attac.org/spip.ph...
Cette brochure s’inscrit dans la continuité des travaux de l’association et de ses combats et s’attache à montrer et expliciter les enjeux du financement du changement climatique, enjeux écologiques, économiques, sociaux et politiques. C’est une démarche essentielle pour s’approprier des débats qui ne peuvent être laissés seulement à des experts et pour pouvoir conjuguer écologie et solidarité, écologie et justice, écologie et démocratie. Il serait suicidaire d’oublier que la question climatique, devenue une des priorités planétaires incontestables, est d’abord et avant tout le fruit d’alertes et de travaux remarquables de la communauté scientifique académique au premier chef, mais aussi de travaux permanents de contre-expertises indépendantes et citoyennes contrebalançant les discours des gouvernements et des transnationales de tous les secteurs peu enclins à remettre à plat nos modèles de développement.
> Our world is not for sale (OWINFS)
L’ONG, "Our world is not for sale" (OWINFS) http://www.ourworldisnotforsale.org/fr se présente de la manière suivante "Notre monde n’est pas à vendre (OWINFS) est un réseau mondial d’organismes, de militants et de mouvements sociaux qui s’opposent aux ententes commerciales et aux accords d’investissement qui favorisent les intérêts des sociétés les plus puissantes du monde au détriment des personnes et de l’environnement". A l’occasion de Copenhague, OWINFS publie sur son site plusieurs textes ; on pourra lire, en particulier :
"Changez le commerce, pas notre climat !" http://www.ourworldisnotforsale.org...
"La grande rupture" http://www.ourworldisnotforsale.org...
> Les propositions de la FASE
L’importante ONG brésilienne FASE, née au tout début des années 1960 http://www.fase.org.br/v2/ qui, avec 160 autres organisations, participe au mouvement "Climate justice now" http://climatjustice.org/ En octobre 2009, FASE a défini sa position en huit points stratégiques (libre traduction de Jacques Cossart)
> Scandale : le soja GM détruit l’Amérique du Sud et cherche à encaisser des "Crédits Carbone" !
Les Amis de la Terre ont publié en octobre 2009, dans un dossier particulièrement riche intitulé "Scandale : le soja GM détruit l’Amérique du Sud et cherche à encaisser des "Crédits Carbone" !". Le sous-titre est, lui aussi éclairant "Quel rôle jouent certaines ONG ?" Ce dossier édité en Anglais a été traduit, en Français, par Christian Berdot http://www.amisdelaterre.org/Scanda... Christian Berdot présente ainsi l’ensemble : "Depuis des années, les lobbies de l’agrobusiness s’activent dans les coulisses des négociations sur le climat ! Alors que la quinzième Conférence des Parties (COP 15) sur les Climats, organisée par les Nations Unies à Copenhague, approche, un nouvel accord doit être signé pour la période post-2012. Il est de plus en plus évident que l’agrobusiness essaye de tirer profit de l’énorme marché des crédits carbone. Sous le terme d’ « agriculture de conservation », Monsanto et ses autres alliés des biotechnologies ont infiltré la FAO (l’Organisation pour l’Agriculture et l’Alimentation) et la Convention Cadre sur les Changements Climatiques des Nations Unies (UNFCCC) dans le but d’obtenir des crédits carbone pour l’agrobusiness. La certification volontaire pour le soja Roundup Ready « responsable » sponsorisé par le WWF et une nouvelle méthodologie pour les Mécanismes de Développement Propre sont deux étapes importantes pour accéder à ce marché de trois milliards de dollars"
> 7 pistes pour attraper le carbone
Terraeco, qui se définit comme "le média du développement durable", énumère "7 pistes pour attraper le carbone" http://www.planete-terra.fr/spip.ph...
> Des escrocs investissent le marché du carbone
Un article publié dans Le Monde du 27 août 2009 intitulé "Des escrocs investissent le marché du carbone". Les auteurs y décrivent parfaitement comment s’est organisée la fraude à la TVA sur ce marché. Faut-il rappeler qu’il n’y a rien là d’anormal dans une organisation de l’économie qui nous est imposée, mais au contraire le constat d’une "parfaite" conjonction : livrer le carbone aux marchés en faisant semblant de croire qu’ils font réduire ses émissions, et tolérer une concurrence fiscale.
> Rapport banque mondiale 2010
Le "World development report", que la Banque mondiale a publié officiellement à l’occasion de l’assemblée annuelle qui s’est tenue, cette fois, à Istanbul début octobre, est consacré au climat et à la manière de le sauver.
Sans surprise, et malgré une description sans concession des désastres constatés, la Banque réaffirme sa foi dans les marchés. Une présentation/analyse du rapport.
> L’Europe face au changement climatique
Pour une régulation commerciale climat-compatible
Le gouvernement français a émis en novembre 2006 l’idée d’introduire une taxe carbone sur les importations en provenance des pays refusant de s’engager en faveur du protocole de Kyoto. Cette initiative française se fondait sur le fait que la non-application de ce protocole en dehors de l’Europe donnerait lieu à un désavantage compétitif dont souffriraient les exportations de cette région. Cela d’autant plus que le Conseil européen des 8 et 9 mars 2007 avait engagé l’Europe sur un objectif unilatéral de réduction des émissions de gaz à effet de serre (GES) de 20 % en 2020, objectif qui serait porté à 30 % dans le cadre d’un accord international post-Kyoto. Le Conseil européen des 11 et 12 décembre 2008 a confirmé cet objectif tout en introduisant un système de dérogations entre les membres.
Mehdi Abbas, LEPII, Grenoble Université, CNRS.
Décembre 2008
> Une taxe carbone en trompe-l’œil
Après la disgrâce, l’engouement pour l’impôt ? Le gouvernement français a annoncé l’étude d’une taxe nationale carbone et a réuni pour cela un groupe d’experts. Qu’en est-il de cette proposition ? Au moment où ces lignes sont écrites, le rapport des experts n’est pas encore public mais plusieurs textes préparatoires, notamment le Livre blanc sur la contribution climat-énergie (taxe carbone) (http://www.contributionclimatenergie.fr/), en donnent les balises.
Geneviève Azam, Conseil scientifique d’Attac
> Le climat dans la tourmente des marchés
La négociation climatique en vue de Copenhague patine, voire recule. A moins de se ranger à une écologie qui serait affaire d’experts (et d’intérêts économiques), il est essentiel de saisir ce qui est en jeu, pour que les changements écologiques imposés par la nécessité et la contrainte, puissent devenir les supports d’un changement souhaitable, guidé par des choix collectifs de justice et de solidarité.
Geneviève Azam, Conseil scientifique d’Attac
> Climat, le marché ou les citoyens ?
Tribune "Climat, le marché ou les citoyens ?", Jacques Cossart, Hors Série Politis, Octobre-Novembre 2009.
La quinzième conférence des parties, COP 15, qui se tiendra à Copenhague en décembre 2009 mobilise la planète entière, tant les services et agences publiques que les ONG et le secteur privé. Cette mobilisation considérable est, en soi, un vrai succès pour la régulation publique en matière climatique et la Conférence sur le changement climatique des Nations Unies.
Jacques Cossart, Conseil scientifique d’Attac
> Écologie et solidarité internationale
Gustave Massiah, économiste membre du Conseil scientifique d’Attac-France, dans un article intitulé "Ecologie et solidarité internationale", dresse une fresque des combats anciens et nouveaux dans le monde qui vient. Il y dessine, en particulier, la place de l’écologie qui impose de nouvelles exigences aux mouvements écologistes. L’ambition de ce document et d’alimenter le débat indispensable à la culture des droits qui y est évoquée.
Gustave Massiah, Conseil scientifique d’Attac
Pour en savoir plus (rapports et données "officiels")
> Adaptation des pays du Sud au changement climatique
Dans une étude publiée le 30 septembre 2009, la Banque mondiale estime de 75 à 100 milliards de dollars par an le coût de l’adaptation des pays du Sud au changement climatique. La Banque estime que ce coût est insupportable pour les pays pauvres mais peut parfaitement être financé par les pays riches. A cet égard, rappelons que les calculs du Conseil scientifique d’Attac-France estime à 1 500 milliards de dollars annuels le produit des taxes globales...
> Incompatibilité entre diminution des émissions de GES et mécanismes de marché
Attac-France, et beaucoup de mouvements altermondialistes ou syndicaux, ont déjà démontré à plusieurs reprises, la parfaite incompatibilité entre diminution des émissions de GES et mécanismes de marché. En revanche, il est plus rare d’entendre des critiques venant de ceux-là même qui vivent de ce marché ! Quand cette critique vient du saint des saints capitaliste, elle mérite attention. Cette fois c’est le responsable mondial du département "management des actifs", de la Deutsche Bank, l’une des premières banques dans le monde, qui demande, sans beaucoup de retenue, une puissante intervention publique !
Toutes les lettres du Conseil scientifique
1567) Trabalhos publicados mais recentes...
...mas eles não têm diretamente a ver com a política externa brasileira...
932. “Evolução do regionalismo econômico e político da América do Sul: dilemas atuais e perspectivas futuras”. In: Danilo Nolasco Cortes Marinho (org.). Brasil e América Latina: colaboração e conflito (São Paulo: Francis, 2009, 152 p.; ISBN: 978-85-89362-98-6; p. 35-94).
931. “L’intégration de l’Amérique du Sud: une perspective historique et un bilan”. In: Christian Girault (éd.). Intégrations em Amérique du Sud (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2009, 286 p.; ISBN: 978-2-87854-473-2; p. 23-37). Relação de Originais n. 1972.
930. “Outro mundo possível: alternativas históricas da Alemanha, antes e depois do muro de Berlim”, Revista Espaço Acadêmico (ano 9, n. 102, Novembro 2009, ISSN: 1519-6196, p. 25-29). Revista digital Espaço da Sophia (ano 3, n. 32, novembro 2009; ISSN: 1981-318X). Relação de Originais n. 2048.
929. “Lula: orateur par excellence”, Décideurs: Stratégie Finance Droit (Paris: n. 109, octobre 2009, p. 13; ISSN: 1764-6774). Relação de Originais n. 2043.
932. “Evolução do regionalismo econômico e político da América do Sul: dilemas atuais e perspectivas futuras”. In: Danilo Nolasco Cortes Marinho (org.). Brasil e América Latina: colaboração e conflito (São Paulo: Francis, 2009, 152 p.; ISBN: 978-85-89362-98-6; p. 35-94).
931. “L’intégration de l’Amérique du Sud: une perspective historique et un bilan”. In: Christian Girault (éd.). Intégrations em Amérique du Sud (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2009, 286 p.; ISBN: 978-2-87854-473-2; p. 23-37). Relação de Originais n. 1972.
930. “Outro mundo possível: alternativas históricas da Alemanha, antes e depois do muro de Berlim”, Revista Espaço Acadêmico (ano 9, n. 102, Novembro 2009, ISSN: 1519-6196, p. 25-29). Revista digital Espaço da Sophia (ano 3, n. 32, novembro 2009; ISSN: 1981-318X). Relação de Originais n. 2048.
929. “Lula: orateur par excellence”, Décideurs: Stratégie Finance Droit (Paris: n. 109, octobre 2009, p. 13; ISSN: 1764-6774). Relação de Originais n. 2043.
1566) Trabalhos PRA sobre relacoes internacionais e politica externa do Brasil: indulging with myself
Bem, sem querer fazer muita publicidade em torno dos meus próprios trabalhos, mas fazendo, relaciono abaixo uma lista recente de trabalhos em torno da diplomacia brasileira, ou de modo amplo: relações internacionais e política externa do Brasil.
A razão de fazer essa pequena lista (sem um ordenamento maior do que a simples compilação de títulos que me pareceram mais permanentes, ou mais estruturados) de trabalhos publicados nos últimos anos foi a demanda de vários estudantes ou pesquisadores, brasileiros e estrangeiros, por comentários meus, respostas a questionários, pedidos de artigos ou textos diversos sobre esses temas, o que sempre me obriga a interromper o que estou fazendo para atender a esses pedidos de terceiros.
Creio ter colocado apenas aqueles publicados, ou seja, aqueles que podem efetivamente ser citados com base em fontes primárias: revistas, capítulos de livros ou mesmo blogs ou outras publicações digitais independentes, à exceção de vários escritos inéditos (acabados ou em preparação, que um dia poderão ser publicados).
Creio que a listagem aqui abaixo transcrita atende a essa demanda, e me dispensa de atender aos pedidos em caráter individual. Aqueles que não possuirem links, ou não forem imediatamente disponíveis em meu site (www.pralmeida.org), podem ser pedidos em caráter ad hoc, em particular (meu site possui um instrumento de comunicação).
Sem querer dar indigestão em ninguém, boa leitura.
Trabalhos de Paulo Roberto de Almeida sobre a diplomacia brasileira
Livros:
O Estudo das Relações internacionais do Brasil – Um dialogo entre a diplomacia e a academia (2. ed. rev. e ampl. Brasília: LGE, 2006)
Relações internacionais e política externa do Brasil: história e sociologia da diplomacia brasileira (2ª ed.; Porto Alegre: Editora da UFRGS, 2004)
Relações Brasil-Estados Unidos: assimetrias e convergências, Almeida, Paulo Roberto de; Barbosa, Rubens Antonio (orgs.) (São Paulo: Saraiva, 2005).
Capítulos de livros:
- “Brazil in the International Context” In: Evans, Joam (org.), Brazilian Defence Policies: Current Trends and Regional Implications (London: Dunkling Books, 2009, p. 11-26).
- “O Brasil e as relações internacionais no pós-Guerra Fria”; In: Ladwig, Nilzo Ivo; Costa, Rogério Santos da (orgs.), Vinte anos após a queda do muro de Berlim: um debate interdisciplinar (Palhoça-SC: Editora da Unisul, 2009).
- “Bases conceituais de uma política externa nacional”, In: Martins, Estevão C. de Rezende; Saraiva, Miriam G. (orgs.) Brasil-União Europeia-América do Sul: Anos 2010-2020 (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Konrad Adenauer, 2009, p. 228-243).
- “Brazil's Candidacy for Major Power Status”, with Miguel Diaz. In: Schiffer, Michael; Shorr, David (eds.). Powers and Principles: International Leadership in a Shrinking World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009, p. 225-251).
- “Lula’s Foreign Policy: Regional and Global Strategies”. In: Love, Joseph L.; Baer, Werner (eds.), Brazil under Lula: Economy, Politics, and Society under the Worker-President (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009, p. 167-183).
- “Brazil”, with Denise Gregory. In: Wahlers, Gerhard et alii. Growth and Responsibility: The positioning of emerging powers in the global governance system (Berlin: Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, 2009, p. 11-30).
- “Brazil and the G8 Heiligendamm Process”, with Denise Gregory. In: Cooper, Andrew F.; Antkiewicz, Ágata (orgs.). Emerging Powers in Global Governance: Lessons from the Heiligendamm Process (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008, p. 137-161).
- “A ordem política e econômica mundial no início do século XXI: Questões da agenda internacional e suas implicações para o Brasil”. In Brant, Leonardo Nemer Caldeira (coord.), III Anuário Brasileiro de Direito Internacional (Belo Horizonte: Centro de Direito Internacional, v. 3, n. 2, 2008; p. 151-189).
- “Uma nova ‘arquitetura’ diplomática?: Interpretações divergentes sobre a política externa do Governo Lula (2003-2006)”, in Menezes, Wagner (org.). Estudos de Direito Internacional (Curitiba: Juruá, 2006, v. VIII, p. 196-213).
“A política internacional do PT e a diplomacia do governo Lula” in Albuquerque, José Augusto Guilhon de; Seitenfus, Ricardo; Nabuco de Castro, Sergio Henrique (orgs.). Sessenta Anos de Política Externa Brasileira (1930-1990) (2. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Lumen Juris, 2006, p. 537-559).
- “O Brasil e o processo de formação de blocos econômicos: conceito e história, com aplicação aos casos do Mercosul e da Alca”, in Gomes, Eduardo B.; Reis, Tarcísio H. (orgs.). Globalização e o Comércio Internacional no Direito da Integração (São Paulo: Editora Aduaneiras, 2005; p. 17-38).
- “La politique internationale du Parti des Travailleurs: de la fondation du parti à la diplomatie du gouvernement Lula”. In: Rolland, Denis; Chassin, Joelle (orgs.), Pour Comprendre le Brésil de Lula (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004, p. 221-238).
Artigos:
- “Brazilian Foreign Relations with South America and USA”, The Brazilian Economy: Economy, Politics and Policy Issues (FGV, Brazilian Institute of Economics: vol. 1, n. 8, September 2009, p. 30-33).
- “O Brasil no contexto da governança global”, Cadernos Adenauer IX (2008) n. 3, Governança Global (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Konrad Adenauer, 2009, p. 199-219).
- “Obsolescência de uma velha senhora?: a OEA e a nova geografia política latino-americana”, Interesse Nacional (vol. 2, n. 6, Jul-Set de 2009, p. 58-69).
- “Mercosul e América do Sul na visão estratégica brasileira: revisão histórica e perspectivas para o futuro”, Asteriskos (Corunha; IGESIP, vol. 4, ns. 7-8, 2009, p. 155-185).
- “A integração na América do Sul em perspectiva histórica: um balanço”, Espaço da Sophia (Tomazina, vol. 2, n. 23, p. 1-17, fev de 2009).
- “To Be or Not the Bric”, Inteligência (Rio de Janeiro: vol. 11, 4º tr.; 12/2008, p. 22-46).
- “Evolução histórica do regionalismo econômico e político da América do Sul: Um balanço das experiências realizadas”, Cena Internacional (vol. 10, n. 2, 2008, p. 72-97).
- “O Brasil como ator regional e global: estratégias de política externa na nova ordem internacional”, Cena Internacional (Brasília: UnB-IREL, vol. 9, n. 1, 2007, p. 7-36); “Brazil as a regional player and as an emerging global power: Foreign policy strategies and the impact on the new international order”, Briefing Paper, series Dialogue on Globalization (Berlin: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, July 2007).
- “¿Una nueva ‘arquitectura’ diplomática? Interpretaciones divergentes sobre la política exterior del Gobierno Lula (2003-2006)”, Entelequia: revista interdisciplinar (n. 2, Oct. 2006. p. 21-36).
- “Uma política externa engajada: a diplomacia do governo Lula”, Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional (Brasília: IBRI, ano 47, nº 1, 2004, p. 162-184).
(Deve ter mais por aí, e outras em preparação: preciso compilar...)
A razão de fazer essa pequena lista (sem um ordenamento maior do que a simples compilação de títulos que me pareceram mais permanentes, ou mais estruturados) de trabalhos publicados nos últimos anos foi a demanda de vários estudantes ou pesquisadores, brasileiros e estrangeiros, por comentários meus, respostas a questionários, pedidos de artigos ou textos diversos sobre esses temas, o que sempre me obriga a interromper o que estou fazendo para atender a esses pedidos de terceiros.
Creio ter colocado apenas aqueles publicados, ou seja, aqueles que podem efetivamente ser citados com base em fontes primárias: revistas, capítulos de livros ou mesmo blogs ou outras publicações digitais independentes, à exceção de vários escritos inéditos (acabados ou em preparação, que um dia poderão ser publicados).
Creio que a listagem aqui abaixo transcrita atende a essa demanda, e me dispensa de atender aos pedidos em caráter individual. Aqueles que não possuirem links, ou não forem imediatamente disponíveis em meu site (www.pralmeida.org), podem ser pedidos em caráter ad hoc, em particular (meu site possui um instrumento de comunicação).
Sem querer dar indigestão em ninguém, boa leitura.
Trabalhos de Paulo Roberto de Almeida sobre a diplomacia brasileira
Livros:
O Estudo das Relações internacionais do Brasil – Um dialogo entre a diplomacia e a academia (2. ed. rev. e ampl. Brasília: LGE, 2006)
Relações internacionais e política externa do Brasil: história e sociologia da diplomacia brasileira (2ª ed.; Porto Alegre: Editora da UFRGS, 2004)
Relações Brasil-Estados Unidos: assimetrias e convergências, Almeida, Paulo Roberto de; Barbosa, Rubens Antonio (orgs.) (São Paulo: Saraiva, 2005).
Capítulos de livros:
- “Brazil in the International Context” In: Evans, Joam (org.), Brazilian Defence Policies: Current Trends and Regional Implications (London: Dunkling Books, 2009, p. 11-26).
- “O Brasil e as relações internacionais no pós-Guerra Fria”; In: Ladwig, Nilzo Ivo; Costa, Rogério Santos da (orgs.), Vinte anos após a queda do muro de Berlim: um debate interdisciplinar (Palhoça-SC: Editora da Unisul, 2009).
- “Bases conceituais de uma política externa nacional”, In: Martins, Estevão C. de Rezende; Saraiva, Miriam G. (orgs.) Brasil-União Europeia-América do Sul: Anos 2010-2020 (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Konrad Adenauer, 2009, p. 228-243).
- “Brazil's Candidacy for Major Power Status”, with Miguel Diaz. In: Schiffer, Michael; Shorr, David (eds.). Powers and Principles: International Leadership in a Shrinking World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009, p. 225-251).
- “Lula’s Foreign Policy: Regional and Global Strategies”. In: Love, Joseph L.; Baer, Werner (eds.), Brazil under Lula: Economy, Politics, and Society under the Worker-President (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009, p. 167-183).
- “Brazil”, with Denise Gregory. In: Wahlers, Gerhard et alii. Growth and Responsibility: The positioning of emerging powers in the global governance system (Berlin: Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, 2009, p. 11-30).
- “Brazil and the G8 Heiligendamm Process”, with Denise Gregory. In: Cooper, Andrew F.; Antkiewicz, Ágata (orgs.). Emerging Powers in Global Governance: Lessons from the Heiligendamm Process (Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008, p. 137-161).
- “A ordem política e econômica mundial no início do século XXI: Questões da agenda internacional e suas implicações para o Brasil”. In Brant, Leonardo Nemer Caldeira (coord.), III Anuário Brasileiro de Direito Internacional (Belo Horizonte: Centro de Direito Internacional, v. 3, n. 2, 2008; p. 151-189).
- “Uma nova ‘arquitetura’ diplomática?: Interpretações divergentes sobre a política externa do Governo Lula (2003-2006)”, in Menezes, Wagner (org.). Estudos de Direito Internacional (Curitiba: Juruá, 2006, v. VIII, p. 196-213).
“A política internacional do PT e a diplomacia do governo Lula” in Albuquerque, José Augusto Guilhon de; Seitenfus, Ricardo; Nabuco de Castro, Sergio Henrique (orgs.). Sessenta Anos de Política Externa Brasileira (1930-1990) (2. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Lumen Juris, 2006, p. 537-559).
- “O Brasil e o processo de formação de blocos econômicos: conceito e história, com aplicação aos casos do Mercosul e da Alca”, in Gomes, Eduardo B.; Reis, Tarcísio H. (orgs.). Globalização e o Comércio Internacional no Direito da Integração (São Paulo: Editora Aduaneiras, 2005; p. 17-38).
- “La politique internationale du Parti des Travailleurs: de la fondation du parti à la diplomatie du gouvernement Lula”. In: Rolland, Denis; Chassin, Joelle (orgs.), Pour Comprendre le Brésil de Lula (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004, p. 221-238).
Artigos:
- “Brazilian Foreign Relations with South America and USA”, The Brazilian Economy: Economy, Politics and Policy Issues (FGV, Brazilian Institute of Economics: vol. 1, n. 8, September 2009, p. 30-33).
- “O Brasil no contexto da governança global”, Cadernos Adenauer IX (2008) n. 3, Governança Global (Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Konrad Adenauer, 2009, p. 199-219).
- “Obsolescência de uma velha senhora?: a OEA e a nova geografia política latino-americana”, Interesse Nacional (vol. 2, n. 6, Jul-Set de 2009, p. 58-69).
- “Mercosul e América do Sul na visão estratégica brasileira: revisão histórica e perspectivas para o futuro”, Asteriskos (Corunha; IGESIP, vol. 4, ns. 7-8, 2009, p. 155-185).
- “A integração na América do Sul em perspectiva histórica: um balanço”, Espaço da Sophia (Tomazina, vol. 2, n. 23, p. 1-17, fev de 2009).
- “To Be or Not the Bric”, Inteligência (Rio de Janeiro: vol. 11, 4º tr.; 12/2008, p. 22-46).
- “Evolução histórica do regionalismo econômico e político da América do Sul: Um balanço das experiências realizadas”, Cena Internacional (vol. 10, n. 2, 2008, p. 72-97).
- “O Brasil como ator regional e global: estratégias de política externa na nova ordem internacional”, Cena Internacional (Brasília: UnB-IREL, vol. 9, n. 1, 2007, p. 7-36); “Brazil as a regional player and as an emerging global power: Foreign policy strategies and the impact on the new international order”, Briefing Paper, series Dialogue on Globalization (Berlin: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, July 2007).
- “¿Una nueva ‘arquitectura’ diplomática? Interpretaciones divergentes sobre la política exterior del Gobierno Lula (2003-2006)”, Entelequia: revista interdisciplinar (n. 2, Oct. 2006. p. 21-36).
- “Uma política externa engajada: a diplomacia do governo Lula”, Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional (Brasília: IBRI, ano 47, nº 1, 2004, p. 162-184).
(Deve ter mais por aí, e outras em preparação: preciso compilar...)
domingo, 13 de dezembro de 2009
1565) Morte de um keynesiano irredutivel: Paul Samuelson
Para quem estudou economia nos velhos manuais, o nome de Paul Samuelson era inevitável e incontornável...
-----------------
Paulo Roberto Almeida
Paul A. Samuelson, Groundbreaking Economist, Dies at 94
By MICHAEL M. WEINSTEIN
The New York Times, December 14, 2009
Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics and the foremost academic economist of the 20th century, died Sunday at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 94.
His death was announced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which Mr. Samuelson helped build into one of the world’s great centers of graduate education in economics.
In receiving the Nobel Prize in 1970, Mr. Samuelson was credited with transforming his discipline from one that ruminates about economic issues to one that solves problems, answering questions about cause and effect with mathematical rigor and clarity.
When economists “sit down with a piece of paper to calculate or analyze something, you would have to say that no one was more important in providing the tools they use and the ideas that they employ than Paul Samuelson,” said Robert M. Solow, a fellow Nobel laureate and colleague.of Mr. Samuelson’s at M.I.T.
Mr. Samuelson attracted a brilliant roster of economists to teach or study at the Cambridge, Mass., university, among them Mr. Solow as well as such other future Nobel laureates as George A. Akerlof, Robert F. Engle III, Lawrence R. Klein, Paul Krugman, Franco Modigliani, Robert C. Merton and Joseph E. Stiglitz.
Mr. Samuelson wrote one of the most widely used college textbooks in the history of American education. The book, “Economics,” first published in 1948, was the nation’s best-selling textbook for nearly 30 years. Translated into 20 languages, it was selling 50,000 copies a year a half century after it first appeared.
“I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws — or crafts its advanced treatises — if I can write its economics textbooks,” Mr. Samuelson said.
His textbook taught college students how to think about economics. His technical work — especially his discipline-shattering Ph.D. thesis, immodestly titled “The Foundations of Economic Analysis” — taught professional economists how to ply their trade. Between the two books, Mr. Samuelson redefined modern economics.
The textbook introduced generations of students to the revolutionary ideas of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who in the 1930s developed the theory that modern market economies could become trapped in depression and would then need a strong boost from government spending or tax cuts, in addition to lenient monetary policy, to get back on track. No student would ever again rest comfortable with the 19th-century nostrum that private markets would cure unemployment without need of government intervention.
That lesson was reinforced in 2008, when the international economy slipped into the steepest downturn since the Great Depression, when Keynesian economics was born. Back then, governments stood pat or made matters worse by trying to balance fiscal budgets and erecting trade barriers. But 80 years later, having absorbed the Keynesian preaching of Mr. Samuelson and his followers, most industrialized countries took corrective action, raising government spending, cutting taxes, keeping exports and imports flowing and driving short-term interest rates to near zero.
Lessons for President Kennedy
Mr. Samuelson explained Keynesian economics to American presidents, world leaders, members of Congress and the Federal Reserve Board, not to mention other economists. He was a consultant to the United States Treasury, the Bureau of the Budget and the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.
His most influential student was John F. Kennedy, whose first 40-minute class with Mr. Samuelson, after the 1960 election, was conducted on a rock by the beach at the family compound at Hyannis Port, Mass. Before class, there was lunch with politicians and Cambridge intellectuals aboard a yacht offshore. “I had expected a scrumptious meal,” Mr. Samuelson said. “We had franks and beans.”
As a member of the Kennedy campaign brain trust, Professor Samuelson headed an economic task force for the candidate and held several private sessions on economics with him. Many would have a bearing on decisions made during the Kennedy administration.
Though Professor Samuelson was President Kennedy’s first choice to become chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, he refused, on principle, to take any government office because, he said, he did not want to put himself in a position in which he could not say and write what he believed.
After the 1960 election, he told the young president-elect that the nation was heading into a recession and that Mr. Kennedy should push through a tax cut to head it off. Mr. Kennedy was shocked.
“I’ve just campaigned on a platform of fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets and here you are telling me that the first thing I should do in office is to cut taxes?” Professor Samuelson recalled, quoting the president.
Kennedy eventually accepted the professor’s advice and signaled his willingness to cut taxes, but he was assassinated before he could take action. His successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, carried out the plan, however, and the tax cut reinvigorated the economy.
Adding a Bite to Academia
In the classroom, Mr. Samuelson was a lively, funny, articulate teacher. On theories that he and others had developed to show links between the performance of the stock market and the general economy, he famously said: “It is indeed true that the stock market can forecast the business cycle. The stock market has called nine of the last five recessions.”
His speeches and his voluminous writing had a lucidity and bite not usually found in academic technicians. He tried to give his economic pronouncements a “snap at the end,” he said, “like Mark Twain.” When women began complaining about career and salary inequities, for example, he said in their defense, “Women are men without money.”
Remarkably versatile, Mr. Samuelson reshaped academic thinking about nearly every economic subject, from what Marx could have meant by a labor theory of value to whether stock prices fluctuate randomly. Mathematics had already been employed by social scientists, but Mr. Samuelson brought the discipline into the mainstream of economic thinking, showing how to derive strong theoretical predictions from simple mathematical assumptions.
His early work, for example, presented a unified mathematical structure for predicting how businesses and households alike will respond to changes in economic forces, how changes in wage rates will affect employment, and how tax rate changes will affect tax collections.
His relentless application of mathematical analysis gave rise to an astonishing number of groundbreaking theorems, resolving debates that had raged among theorists for decades, if not centuries.
Early in his career, Mr. Samuelson developed the rudimentary mathematics of business cycles with a model, called the multiplier-accelerator, that captured the inherent tendency of market economies to fluctuate. The model showed how markets magnify the impact of outside shocks and turn, say, an initial one-dollar increase in foreign investment into a several-dollar increase in total domestic income, to be followed by a decline.
The Stolper-Samuelson Theorem
Mr. Samuelson provided a mathematical structure to study the impact of trade on different groups of consumers and workers. In a famous theorem, known as Stolper-Samuelson, he and a co-author showed that competition from imports of clothes and similar goods from underdeveloped countries, where producers rely on unskilled workers, could drive down the wages of low-paid workers in industrialized countries.
The theorem provided the intellectual scaffold for opponents of free trade. And late in his career, Mr. Samuelson set off an intellectual commotion by pointing out that the economy of a country like the United States could be hurt if productivity rose among the economies with which it traded.
Yet Mr. Samuelson, like most academic economists, remained an advocate of open trade. Trade, he taught, raises average living standards enough to allow the workers and consumers who benefit to compensate those who suffer, and still have some extra income left over. Protectionism would not help, but higher productivity would.
Mr. Samuelson also formulated a theory of public goods — that is, goods that can be provided effectively only through collective, or government, action. National defense is one such public good. It is non-exclusive; the Navy, for example, exists to protect every citizen. It also eliminates rivalry among its many consumers; that is, the amount of security that any one citizen derives from the Navy subtracts nothing from the amount of security that any other citizen derives.
The features of public goods, Mr. Samuelson taught, stand in direct contrast to those of ordinary goods, like apples. An apple eaten by one consumer is not available to any other. Public goods, he concluded, cannot be sold in private markets because individuals have no incentive to pay for them voluntarily. Instead they hope to get a free ride off the decisions of others to make the public goods available.
‘Correspondence Principle’
Mr. Samuelson pushed mathematical analysis to new levels of sophistication. His “correspondence principle” showed that information about the stability or instability of a theoretical economic system — whether, after a disruption, the economy returns to fixed levels of prices and output or, instead, flies out of control — could be used to predict the aggregate outcome of decisions taken by consumers and business firms. He showed, for example, that only a stable economic system would undergo ordinary business cycles like those captured by Mr. Samuelson’s multiplier-accelerator model.
He analyzed the evolution of economies with a mathematical model, called an overlapping generations model, that scholars have since used to study, for example, the functioning over time of the Social Security System and the management of public debt.
He also helped develop linear programming, a mathematical tool used by corporations and central planners to calculate how to produce pre-set levels of various goods and services at the least cost.
Late in his career, Mr. Samuelson laid out the mathematics of stock price movements, an analysis that became the basis for Nobel-prize-winning research by his student Mr. Merton and Myron S. Scholes. They designed formulas that Wall Street analysts use to trade options and other complicated securities known as derivatives.
But beyond his astonishing array of scientific theorems and conclusions, Mr. Samuelson wedded Keynesian thought to conventional economics. He developed what he called the Neoclassical Synthesis. The neoclassical economists in the late 19th century showed how forces of supply and demand generate equilibrium in the market for apples, shoes and all other consumer goods and services. The standard analysis had held that market economies, left to their own devices, gravitated naturally toward full employment.
Economists clung to this theory even in the wake of the Great Depression of the 1930s. But the need to explain the market collapse, as well as unemployment rates that soared to 25 percent, gave rise to a contrary strain of thought associated with Lord Keynes.
Mr. Samuelson’s resulting “synthesis” amounted to the notion that economists could use the neoclassical apparatus to analyze economies operating near full employment, but switch over to Keynesian analysis when the economy turned sour.
Midwestern Roots
Paul Anthony Samuelson was born on May 15, 1915 in Gary, Ind., the son of Frank Samuelson, a pharmacist, and the former Ella Lipton. His family, he said, was “made up of upwardly mobile Jewish immigrants from Poland who had prospered considerably in World War I, because Gary was a brand new steel town when my family went there.”
But after his father lost much of his money in the years after the war, the family moved to Chicago. Young Paul attended Hyde Park High School, where as a freshman he began studying the stock market. At one point he helped his algebra teacher select stocks to buy in the boom of the 1920s.
“Hupp Motors and other losers,” he remembered in an interview in 1996. “Proof of the fallibility of systems,” he explained.
He left high school at age 16 to enter the University of Chicago. “I was born as an economist on Jan. 2, 1932,” he said. That was the day he heard his first college lecture, on Thomas Malthus, the 18th-century British economist who studied the relation between poverty and population growth. Hooked, he began taking economics courses.
The University of Chicago developed the century’s leading conservative economic theorists, under the later guidance of Milton Friedman. But Mr. Samuelson regarded the teaching at Chicago as “schizophrenic.” This was at the height of the Depression, and courses about the business cycle naturally talked about unemployment, he said. But in economic-theory classes, joblessness was not mentioned.
“The niceties of existence were not a matter of concern,” he recalled, “yet everything around was closed down most of the time. If you lived in a middle-class community in Chicago, children and adults came daily to the door saying, ‘We are starving, how about a potato?’ I speak from poignant memory.”
After receiving his bachelor’s degree from Chicago in 1935, he went to Harvard, where he was attracted to the ideas of the Harvard professor Alvin Hansen, the leading exponent of Keynesian theory in America.
As a student at Chicago and later at Cambridge, Paul Samuelson had at first reacted negatively to Keynes. “What I resisted most was the notion that there could be equilibrium unemployment” — that some level of unemployment would be impossible to eliminate and have to be tolerated. “I spent four summers of my college career on the beach at Lake Michigan,” he explained. “It was pointless to look for work. I didn’t even have to test the market because I had friends who would go to 350 potential employers and not be able to get any job at all.”
Eventually he was converted. “Why do I want to refuse a paradigm that enables me to understand the Roosevelt upturn from 1933 to 1937?” he asked himself.
A Bold Dissertation
Mr. Samuelson was perceived at the outset of his career as a brilliant mathematical economist. He shot to academic fame as a 22-year-old l’enfant terrible at Harvard when he began a boldly sweeping and highly technical doctoral dissertation, published in 1947 by Harvard University Press.
At Harvard, as at Chicago, he was not shy about critiquing his professors — “respecting neither age nor rank,” according to James Tobin, a Nobel laureate of Yale University. The young Mr. Samuelson’s chief complaint against economists was that they preoccupied themselves with finer economic principles while all around them people were being thrown into bread lines.
His attitudes did not endear him to the austere chairman of the economics department at Harvard, Harold Hitchings Burbank, with whom he had a rocky relationship.
But the publication of his dissertation was an immediate success. It won him the John Bates Clark Medal awarded by the American Economic Association to the economist showing the most scholarly promise before the age of 40; it would eventually help him win his Nobel Prize, and it was frequently reprinted despite the heavy resistance of Professor Burbank, selling to economists around the world for more than 20 years. (“Sweet revenge,” Mr. Samuelson said.)
Among Mr. Samuelson’s fellow students was Marion Crawford. They married in 1938. Mr. Samuelson earned his master’s degree from Harvard in 1936 and a Ph.D. in 1941. He wrote his thesis between 1937 and 1940 as a member of the prestigious Harvard Society of Junior Fellows. In 1940, Harvard offered him an instructorship, which he accepted, but a month later M.I.T. invited him to become an assistant professor.
Harvard made no attempt to keep him, even though he had by then developed an international following. Mr. Solow said of the Harvard economics department at the time: “You could be disqualified for a job if you were either smart or Jewish or Keynesian. So what chance did this smart, Jewish, Keynesian have?”
Indeed, American university life before World War II was anti-Semitic in a way that hardly seemed possible later, and Harvard, along with Yale and Princeton, was a flagrant example.
During World War II, Mr. Samuelson worked in M.I.T.’s Radiation Laboratory, developing computers for tracking aircraft, and was a consultant for the War Production Board. After the war, having resumed teaching, he and his wife started a family. When she became pregnant the fourth time, she gave birth to triplets, all boys.
Marion Samuelson died in 1978. Mr. Samuelson is survived by his second wife, Risha Clay Samuelson; six children from his first marriage: Jane Raybould, Margaret Crawford-Samuelson, William and the triplet sons Robert, John and Paul; a brother, Robert Summers, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and 15 grandchildren.
A Keynesian Textbook
The birth of the triplets doubled the number of children in the Samuelson household, which soon found itself sending 350 diapers to the laundry per week. His friends suggested that Mr. Samuelson needed to write a book to earn more money.
He decided on writing an economics textbook, but one that would not only be compelling for students but also sophisticated and complete. And he wanted to center it on the still poorly understood Keynesian revolution. President Herbert Hoover, he noted, had never referred to Keynes other than as “the Marxist Keynes.”
“I never quite understood that venom, Mr. Samuelson said.
He said he “sweated blood” writing his book, employing detailed charts, color graphics and humor. He wrote: “Economists are said to disagree too much but in ways that are too much alike: If eight sleep in the same bed, you can be sure that, like Eskimos, when they turn over, they’ll all turn over together.”
It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of “Economics.” Business Week, taking note of the textbook’s publication in Greek, Punjabi, Hebrew, Russian, Serbo-Croatian and other languages, once said that it had “gone a long way in giving the world a common economic language.” Students were attracted to its lively prose and relevance to their everyday lives. Many textbook authors began to copy its presentation.
“Economics,” together with shrewd investing, made Mr. Samuelson a millionaire many times over.
Friendship and Rivalry With Friedman
A historian could well tell the story of 20th-century public debate over economic policy in America through the jousting between Mr. Samuelson and Milton Friedman, who won the Nobel prize in 1976. Mr. Samuelson said the two had almost always disagreed with each other but had remained friends. They met in 1933 at the University of Chicago, when Mr. Samuelson was an undergraduate and Mr. Friedman a graduate student.
Unlike the liberal Mr. Samuelson, the conservative Mr. Friedman opposed active government participation in most areas of the economy except national defense and law enforcement. He thought private enterprise and competition could do better and that government controls posed risks to individual freedoms.
Both men were fluid speakers as well as writers, and they debated often in public forums, in testimony before congressional committees, in op-ed articles and in columns each of them wrote for Newsweek magazine. But Professor Samuelson said he always had fear in his heart when he prepared for combat with Professor Friedman, a formidably engaging debater.
“If you looked at a transcript afterward, it might seem clear that you had won the debate on points,” he said. “But somehow, with members of the audience, you always seemed to come off as elite, and Milton seemed to have won the day.”
Mr. Samuelson said he had never regarded Keynesianism as a religion, and he criticized some of his liberal colleagues for seeming to do so, earning himself, late in life, the label l’enfant terrible, emeritus. The experience of nations in the second half of the century, he said, had diminished his optimism about the ability of government to perform miracles.
If government gets too big, and too great a portion of the nation’s income passes through it, he said, government becomes inefficient and unresponsive to the human needs “we do-gooders extol,” and thus risks infringing on freedoms.
But, he said, no serious political or economic thinker would reject the fundamental Keynesian idea that a benevolent democratic government must do what it can to avert economic trouble in areas the free markets cannot. Neither government alone nor the markets alone, he said, could serve the public welfare without help from the other.
As nations became locked in global competition, and as the computerization of the workplace created daunting employment problems, he agreed with the economic conservatives in advocating that American corporations must stay lean and efficient and follow the general dictates of the free market.
But he warned that the harshness of the market place had to be tempered and that corporate downsizing and the reduction of government programs “must be done with a heart.”
Despite his celebrated accomplishments, Mr. Samuelson preached and practiced humility. The M.I.T. economics department became famous for collegiality, in no small part because no one else could play prima donna if Mr. Samuelson refused the role, and, of course, he did. Economists, he told his students, as Churchill said of political colleagues, “have much to be humble about.”
=======
O MIT o=postou o seguinte obituario:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/obit-samuelson
-----------------
Paulo Roberto Almeida
Paul A. Samuelson, Groundbreaking Economist, Dies at 94
By MICHAEL M. WEINSTEIN
The New York Times, December 14, 2009
Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics and the foremost academic economist of the 20th century, died Sunday at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 94.
His death was announced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which Mr. Samuelson helped build into one of the world’s great centers of graduate education in economics.
In receiving the Nobel Prize in 1970, Mr. Samuelson was credited with transforming his discipline from one that ruminates about economic issues to one that solves problems, answering questions about cause and effect with mathematical rigor and clarity.
When economists “sit down with a piece of paper to calculate or analyze something, you would have to say that no one was more important in providing the tools they use and the ideas that they employ than Paul Samuelson,” said Robert M. Solow, a fellow Nobel laureate and colleague.of Mr. Samuelson’s at M.I.T.
Mr. Samuelson attracted a brilliant roster of economists to teach or study at the Cambridge, Mass., university, among them Mr. Solow as well as such other future Nobel laureates as George A. Akerlof, Robert F. Engle III, Lawrence R. Klein, Paul Krugman, Franco Modigliani, Robert C. Merton and Joseph E. Stiglitz.
Mr. Samuelson wrote one of the most widely used college textbooks in the history of American education. The book, “Economics,” first published in 1948, was the nation’s best-selling textbook for nearly 30 years. Translated into 20 languages, it was selling 50,000 copies a year a half century after it first appeared.
“I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws — or crafts its advanced treatises — if I can write its economics textbooks,” Mr. Samuelson said.
His textbook taught college students how to think about economics. His technical work — especially his discipline-shattering Ph.D. thesis, immodestly titled “The Foundations of Economic Analysis” — taught professional economists how to ply their trade. Between the two books, Mr. Samuelson redefined modern economics.
The textbook introduced generations of students to the revolutionary ideas of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who in the 1930s developed the theory that modern market economies could become trapped in depression and would then need a strong boost from government spending or tax cuts, in addition to lenient monetary policy, to get back on track. No student would ever again rest comfortable with the 19th-century nostrum that private markets would cure unemployment without need of government intervention.
That lesson was reinforced in 2008, when the international economy slipped into the steepest downturn since the Great Depression, when Keynesian economics was born. Back then, governments stood pat or made matters worse by trying to balance fiscal budgets and erecting trade barriers. But 80 years later, having absorbed the Keynesian preaching of Mr. Samuelson and his followers, most industrialized countries took corrective action, raising government spending, cutting taxes, keeping exports and imports flowing and driving short-term interest rates to near zero.
Lessons for President Kennedy
Mr. Samuelson explained Keynesian economics to American presidents, world leaders, members of Congress and the Federal Reserve Board, not to mention other economists. He was a consultant to the United States Treasury, the Bureau of the Budget and the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.
His most influential student was John F. Kennedy, whose first 40-minute class with Mr. Samuelson, after the 1960 election, was conducted on a rock by the beach at the family compound at Hyannis Port, Mass. Before class, there was lunch with politicians and Cambridge intellectuals aboard a yacht offshore. “I had expected a scrumptious meal,” Mr. Samuelson said. “We had franks and beans.”
As a member of the Kennedy campaign brain trust, Professor Samuelson headed an economic task force for the candidate and held several private sessions on economics with him. Many would have a bearing on decisions made during the Kennedy administration.
Though Professor Samuelson was President Kennedy’s first choice to become chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, he refused, on principle, to take any government office because, he said, he did not want to put himself in a position in which he could not say and write what he believed.
After the 1960 election, he told the young president-elect that the nation was heading into a recession and that Mr. Kennedy should push through a tax cut to head it off. Mr. Kennedy was shocked.
“I’ve just campaigned on a platform of fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets and here you are telling me that the first thing I should do in office is to cut taxes?” Professor Samuelson recalled, quoting the president.
Kennedy eventually accepted the professor’s advice and signaled his willingness to cut taxes, but he was assassinated before he could take action. His successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, carried out the plan, however, and the tax cut reinvigorated the economy.
Adding a Bite to Academia
In the classroom, Mr. Samuelson was a lively, funny, articulate teacher. On theories that he and others had developed to show links between the performance of the stock market and the general economy, he famously said: “It is indeed true that the stock market can forecast the business cycle. The stock market has called nine of the last five recessions.”
His speeches and his voluminous writing had a lucidity and bite not usually found in academic technicians. He tried to give his economic pronouncements a “snap at the end,” he said, “like Mark Twain.” When women began complaining about career and salary inequities, for example, he said in their defense, “Women are men without money.”
Remarkably versatile, Mr. Samuelson reshaped academic thinking about nearly every economic subject, from what Marx could have meant by a labor theory of value to whether stock prices fluctuate randomly. Mathematics had already been employed by social scientists, but Mr. Samuelson brought the discipline into the mainstream of economic thinking, showing how to derive strong theoretical predictions from simple mathematical assumptions.
His early work, for example, presented a unified mathematical structure for predicting how businesses and households alike will respond to changes in economic forces, how changes in wage rates will affect employment, and how tax rate changes will affect tax collections.
His relentless application of mathematical analysis gave rise to an astonishing number of groundbreaking theorems, resolving debates that had raged among theorists for decades, if not centuries.
Early in his career, Mr. Samuelson developed the rudimentary mathematics of business cycles with a model, called the multiplier-accelerator, that captured the inherent tendency of market economies to fluctuate. The model showed how markets magnify the impact of outside shocks and turn, say, an initial one-dollar increase in foreign investment into a several-dollar increase in total domestic income, to be followed by a decline.
The Stolper-Samuelson Theorem
Mr. Samuelson provided a mathematical structure to study the impact of trade on different groups of consumers and workers. In a famous theorem, known as Stolper-Samuelson, he and a co-author showed that competition from imports of clothes and similar goods from underdeveloped countries, where producers rely on unskilled workers, could drive down the wages of low-paid workers in industrialized countries.
The theorem provided the intellectual scaffold for opponents of free trade. And late in his career, Mr. Samuelson set off an intellectual commotion by pointing out that the economy of a country like the United States could be hurt if productivity rose among the economies with which it traded.
Yet Mr. Samuelson, like most academic economists, remained an advocate of open trade. Trade, he taught, raises average living standards enough to allow the workers and consumers who benefit to compensate those who suffer, and still have some extra income left over. Protectionism would not help, but higher productivity would.
Mr. Samuelson also formulated a theory of public goods — that is, goods that can be provided effectively only through collective, or government, action. National defense is one such public good. It is non-exclusive; the Navy, for example, exists to protect every citizen. It also eliminates rivalry among its many consumers; that is, the amount of security that any one citizen derives from the Navy subtracts nothing from the amount of security that any other citizen derives.
The features of public goods, Mr. Samuelson taught, stand in direct contrast to those of ordinary goods, like apples. An apple eaten by one consumer is not available to any other. Public goods, he concluded, cannot be sold in private markets because individuals have no incentive to pay for them voluntarily. Instead they hope to get a free ride off the decisions of others to make the public goods available.
‘Correspondence Principle’
Mr. Samuelson pushed mathematical analysis to new levels of sophistication. His “correspondence principle” showed that information about the stability or instability of a theoretical economic system — whether, after a disruption, the economy returns to fixed levels of prices and output or, instead, flies out of control — could be used to predict the aggregate outcome of decisions taken by consumers and business firms. He showed, for example, that only a stable economic system would undergo ordinary business cycles like those captured by Mr. Samuelson’s multiplier-accelerator model.
He analyzed the evolution of economies with a mathematical model, called an overlapping generations model, that scholars have since used to study, for example, the functioning over time of the Social Security System and the management of public debt.
He also helped develop linear programming, a mathematical tool used by corporations and central planners to calculate how to produce pre-set levels of various goods and services at the least cost.
Late in his career, Mr. Samuelson laid out the mathematics of stock price movements, an analysis that became the basis for Nobel-prize-winning research by his student Mr. Merton and Myron S. Scholes. They designed formulas that Wall Street analysts use to trade options and other complicated securities known as derivatives.
But beyond his astonishing array of scientific theorems and conclusions, Mr. Samuelson wedded Keynesian thought to conventional economics. He developed what he called the Neoclassical Synthesis. The neoclassical economists in the late 19th century showed how forces of supply and demand generate equilibrium in the market for apples, shoes and all other consumer goods and services. The standard analysis had held that market economies, left to their own devices, gravitated naturally toward full employment.
Economists clung to this theory even in the wake of the Great Depression of the 1930s. But the need to explain the market collapse, as well as unemployment rates that soared to 25 percent, gave rise to a contrary strain of thought associated with Lord Keynes.
Mr. Samuelson’s resulting “synthesis” amounted to the notion that economists could use the neoclassical apparatus to analyze economies operating near full employment, but switch over to Keynesian analysis when the economy turned sour.
Midwestern Roots
Paul Anthony Samuelson was born on May 15, 1915 in Gary, Ind., the son of Frank Samuelson, a pharmacist, and the former Ella Lipton. His family, he said, was “made up of upwardly mobile Jewish immigrants from Poland who had prospered considerably in World War I, because Gary was a brand new steel town when my family went there.”
But after his father lost much of his money in the years after the war, the family moved to Chicago. Young Paul attended Hyde Park High School, where as a freshman he began studying the stock market. At one point he helped his algebra teacher select stocks to buy in the boom of the 1920s.
“Hupp Motors and other losers,” he remembered in an interview in 1996. “Proof of the fallibility of systems,” he explained.
He left high school at age 16 to enter the University of Chicago. “I was born as an economist on Jan. 2, 1932,” he said. That was the day he heard his first college lecture, on Thomas Malthus, the 18th-century British economist who studied the relation between poverty and population growth. Hooked, he began taking economics courses.
The University of Chicago developed the century’s leading conservative economic theorists, under the later guidance of Milton Friedman. But Mr. Samuelson regarded the teaching at Chicago as “schizophrenic.” This was at the height of the Depression, and courses about the business cycle naturally talked about unemployment, he said. But in economic-theory classes, joblessness was not mentioned.
“The niceties of existence were not a matter of concern,” he recalled, “yet everything around was closed down most of the time. If you lived in a middle-class community in Chicago, children and adults came daily to the door saying, ‘We are starving, how about a potato?’ I speak from poignant memory.”
After receiving his bachelor’s degree from Chicago in 1935, he went to Harvard, where he was attracted to the ideas of the Harvard professor Alvin Hansen, the leading exponent of Keynesian theory in America.
As a student at Chicago and later at Cambridge, Paul Samuelson had at first reacted negatively to Keynes. “What I resisted most was the notion that there could be equilibrium unemployment” — that some level of unemployment would be impossible to eliminate and have to be tolerated. “I spent four summers of my college career on the beach at Lake Michigan,” he explained. “It was pointless to look for work. I didn’t even have to test the market because I had friends who would go to 350 potential employers and not be able to get any job at all.”
Eventually he was converted. “Why do I want to refuse a paradigm that enables me to understand the Roosevelt upturn from 1933 to 1937?” he asked himself.
A Bold Dissertation
Mr. Samuelson was perceived at the outset of his career as a brilliant mathematical economist. He shot to academic fame as a 22-year-old l’enfant terrible at Harvard when he began a boldly sweeping and highly technical doctoral dissertation, published in 1947 by Harvard University Press.
At Harvard, as at Chicago, he was not shy about critiquing his professors — “respecting neither age nor rank,” according to James Tobin, a Nobel laureate of Yale University. The young Mr. Samuelson’s chief complaint against economists was that they preoccupied themselves with finer economic principles while all around them people were being thrown into bread lines.
His attitudes did not endear him to the austere chairman of the economics department at Harvard, Harold Hitchings Burbank, with whom he had a rocky relationship.
But the publication of his dissertation was an immediate success. It won him the John Bates Clark Medal awarded by the American Economic Association to the economist showing the most scholarly promise before the age of 40; it would eventually help him win his Nobel Prize, and it was frequently reprinted despite the heavy resistance of Professor Burbank, selling to economists around the world for more than 20 years. (“Sweet revenge,” Mr. Samuelson said.)
Among Mr. Samuelson’s fellow students was Marion Crawford. They married in 1938. Mr. Samuelson earned his master’s degree from Harvard in 1936 and a Ph.D. in 1941. He wrote his thesis between 1937 and 1940 as a member of the prestigious Harvard Society of Junior Fellows. In 1940, Harvard offered him an instructorship, which he accepted, but a month later M.I.T. invited him to become an assistant professor.
Harvard made no attempt to keep him, even though he had by then developed an international following. Mr. Solow said of the Harvard economics department at the time: “You could be disqualified for a job if you were either smart or Jewish or Keynesian. So what chance did this smart, Jewish, Keynesian have?”
Indeed, American university life before World War II was anti-Semitic in a way that hardly seemed possible later, and Harvard, along with Yale and Princeton, was a flagrant example.
During World War II, Mr. Samuelson worked in M.I.T.’s Radiation Laboratory, developing computers for tracking aircraft, and was a consultant for the War Production Board. After the war, having resumed teaching, he and his wife started a family. When she became pregnant the fourth time, she gave birth to triplets, all boys.
Marion Samuelson died in 1978. Mr. Samuelson is survived by his second wife, Risha Clay Samuelson; six children from his first marriage: Jane Raybould, Margaret Crawford-Samuelson, William and the triplet sons Robert, John and Paul; a brother, Robert Summers, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and 15 grandchildren.
A Keynesian Textbook
The birth of the triplets doubled the number of children in the Samuelson household, which soon found itself sending 350 diapers to the laundry per week. His friends suggested that Mr. Samuelson needed to write a book to earn more money.
He decided on writing an economics textbook, but one that would not only be compelling for students but also sophisticated and complete. And he wanted to center it on the still poorly understood Keynesian revolution. President Herbert Hoover, he noted, had never referred to Keynes other than as “the Marxist Keynes.”
“I never quite understood that venom, Mr. Samuelson said.
He said he “sweated blood” writing his book, employing detailed charts, color graphics and humor. He wrote: “Economists are said to disagree too much but in ways that are too much alike: If eight sleep in the same bed, you can be sure that, like Eskimos, when they turn over, they’ll all turn over together.”
It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of “Economics.” Business Week, taking note of the textbook’s publication in Greek, Punjabi, Hebrew, Russian, Serbo-Croatian and other languages, once said that it had “gone a long way in giving the world a common economic language.” Students were attracted to its lively prose and relevance to their everyday lives. Many textbook authors began to copy its presentation.
“Economics,” together with shrewd investing, made Mr. Samuelson a millionaire many times over.
Friendship and Rivalry With Friedman
A historian could well tell the story of 20th-century public debate over economic policy in America through the jousting between Mr. Samuelson and Milton Friedman, who won the Nobel prize in 1976. Mr. Samuelson said the two had almost always disagreed with each other but had remained friends. They met in 1933 at the University of Chicago, when Mr. Samuelson was an undergraduate and Mr. Friedman a graduate student.
Unlike the liberal Mr. Samuelson, the conservative Mr. Friedman opposed active government participation in most areas of the economy except national defense and law enforcement. He thought private enterprise and competition could do better and that government controls posed risks to individual freedoms.
Both men were fluid speakers as well as writers, and they debated often in public forums, in testimony before congressional committees, in op-ed articles and in columns each of them wrote for Newsweek magazine. But Professor Samuelson said he always had fear in his heart when he prepared for combat with Professor Friedman, a formidably engaging debater.
“If you looked at a transcript afterward, it might seem clear that you had won the debate on points,” he said. “But somehow, with members of the audience, you always seemed to come off as elite, and Milton seemed to have won the day.”
Mr. Samuelson said he had never regarded Keynesianism as a religion, and he criticized some of his liberal colleagues for seeming to do so, earning himself, late in life, the label l’enfant terrible, emeritus. The experience of nations in the second half of the century, he said, had diminished his optimism about the ability of government to perform miracles.
If government gets too big, and too great a portion of the nation’s income passes through it, he said, government becomes inefficient and unresponsive to the human needs “we do-gooders extol,” and thus risks infringing on freedoms.
But, he said, no serious political or economic thinker would reject the fundamental Keynesian idea that a benevolent democratic government must do what it can to avert economic trouble in areas the free markets cannot. Neither government alone nor the markets alone, he said, could serve the public welfare without help from the other.
As nations became locked in global competition, and as the computerization of the workplace created daunting employment problems, he agreed with the economic conservatives in advocating that American corporations must stay lean and efficient and follow the general dictates of the free market.
But he warned that the harshness of the market place had to be tempered and that corporate downsizing and the reduction of government programs “must be done with a heart.”
Despite his celebrated accomplishments, Mr. Samuelson preached and practiced humility. The M.I.T. economics department became famous for collegiality, in no small part because no one else could play prima donna if Mr. Samuelson refused the role, and, of course, he did. Economists, he told his students, as Churchill said of political colleagues, “have much to be humble about.”
=======
O MIT o=postou o seguinte obituario:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/obit-samuelson
1564) O petroleo do Iraque e a teoria da conspiracao americana...
Uma das "teorias" que procurava "explicar" a invasao americana do Iraque, era a de que a intencao americana era a de se assegurar a posse, exclusivamente para os EUA, do oleo barato do Iraque para as companhias americanas.
Bem, quanto ao "petroleo barato" nao é preciso elaborar, em vista dos 150 dolares o barril de 2008.
Quanto ao dominio exclusivo, esta materia do Washington Post deste domingo se encarrega de enterra-lo...
-------------
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
U.S. firms lag in bids for Iraqi oil
Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso
The Washington Post, Sunday, December 13, 2009
Russians, Europeans and Chinese win most contracts for developing major fields
BAGHDAD -- Chinese, Russian and European companies won the right this weekend to develop major oil fields in Iraq, while U.S. firms made a paltry showing at auctions that represent the first major incursion of foreign oil companies into Iraq in four decades.
The companies that secured 10 contracts in auctions held over the weekend and in June stand to profit handsomely, but they are taking a significant gamble.
Iraq has the third-largest proven crude reserves in the world, but the country remains perilous; it suffers from chronic corruption and acrimonious politics that have prevented the passing of new laws to regulate the sector.
Of the seven U.S. companies that registered for the auctions, only one emerged as the leading partner in a consortium that won a contract. Another U.S. company has a minority stake in a contract.
China's state-owned oil company has a major stake in two contracts. Russian firms are parties in two others.
European firms made a strong showing. Royal Dutch Shell, Italy's Eni, British Petroleum and Norway's Statoil got deals.
Companies from Malaysia and Angola were parties to five winning bids.
Oil analysts say the outcome was surprising, considering that U.S. oil companies have long yearned to work in Iraq.
The analysts said it is ironic that U.S. companies do not appear poised to cash in on the aftermath of a war that many in the United States and the Middle East argued was motivated by a desire to tap into Iraq's oil reserves.
After the invasion, the United States paid oil executives to advise Iraq's Oil Ministry and set up large military and civilian task forces to boost the country's ailing energy sector.
"American oil executives provided free training to the ministry," said Ben Lando, bureau chief of Iraq Oil Report, a trade news outlet. "It is quite strange that after wanting access to Iraqi oil for so long, U.S. companies have largely remained on the sidelines."
Security concerns, underscored by coordinated bombings Tuesday, and the threat of political instability as the U.S. military withdraws probably gave American oil executives pause, analysts said.
In some cases, U.S. companies were at a disadvantage because their rivals, particularly the Chinese and Russians, have lower labor costs and do not answer to shareholders, which might allow them to take more risks.
"U.S. companies report back to their shareholders, not to public opinion," said Ruba Husari, editor of Iraq Oil Forum, another trade news site. Nonetheless, she said, "their low profile is intriguing," considering that the auctions are widely seen as the last major opportunity for years for international oil firms wanting to do business in Iraq.
U.S. Ambassador Christopher R. Hill called the opening of Iraq's oil industry to foreign investment an achievement of "historical significance" and said he was encouraged by how transparent the process had been.
Hill said the embassy advised U.S. companies as they weighed the pros and cons of doing business in Iraq, as diplomats do around the world.
"I'm not in a position to express disappointment," he said of the American showing at the auctions. "They had to make a decision based on what they're prepared to pay."
Exxon Mobil was the only U.S. company that led a winning consortium. Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum Inc. got roughly a 25 percent share in another.
The state-owned Chinese National Petroleum Corp. bid on more contracts than any other company.
In marked contrast to the Americans, Chinese diplomats in Baghdad have kept a low profile in recent years, working out of a hotel and drawing little public attention. But Iraqi officials say they have been struck by the caliber of Chinese diplomats, many of whom speak flawless Arabic and have developed a nuanced understanding of Iraqi politics.
"We all know that China is on track to become a major economic as well as technological power," said Assam Jihad, a spokesman for the Oil Ministry.
Under the 20-year service contracts, the Iraqi government will pay companies a set fee for each barrel produced above the current output level at each field.
The contracts also position the companies to play major roles in Iraq if the government loosens restrictions on foreign investment. The contracts awarded at the auctions are service contracts, which do not give companies a share of profits.
This weekend's auction was far more successful than the one in June, when the ministry awarded one contract out of the 10 on the auction block. Two other deals from that auction were reached later.
Of the 10 fields up for grab in the second round, the ministry awarded seven contracts.
Iraq's oil revenue, the backbone of its economy, has dipped below target this year as a result of lower prices and export volumes. Officials hope the refurbished fields could pump as much as 11 million barrels per day in eight years. The country currently pumps 2.4 million a day.
A dispute over federalism between politicians in Baghdad and their counterparts in the autonomous Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq is one of the biggest challenges oil companies entering Iraq are likely to face.
The chairman of the Iraqi parliament's oil and gas committee, a Kurd, has warned executives that the contracts are illegal. He has called for the resignation of Oil Minister Hussain Shahristani.
"These companies should think twice before signing contracts," said the lawmaker, Ali Hussein Belo.
Meanwhile, deals the Kurds have signed with foreign companies for fields in northern Iraq have come under fire in Baghdad, which banned those companies from participating in the auctions.
The fight could draw oil companies into one of the most protracted battles over power in Iraq. "We have faith in the government," Mounir Bouaziz, a vice president for Shell, said after his company won a coveted field. "The government is behind these contracts."
Special correspondents K.I. Ibrahim and Aziz Alwan contributed to this report.
Assinar:
Comentários (Atom)
Postagem em destaque
Livro Marxismo e Socialismo finalmente disponível - Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Meu mais recente livro – que não tem nada a ver com o governo atual ou com sua diplomacia esquizofrênica, já vou logo avisando – ficou final...
-
Uma preparação de longo curso e uma vida nômade Paulo Roberto de Almeida A carreira diplomática tem atraído número crescente de jovens, em ...
-
FAQ do Candidato a Diplomata por Renato Domith Godinho TEMAS: Concurso do Instituto Rio Branco, Itamaraty, Carreira Diplomática, MRE, Diplom...
-
Países de Maior Acesso aos textos PRA em Academia.edu (apenas os superiores a 100 acessos) Compilação Paulo Roberto de Almeida (15/12/2025) ...
-
Mercado Comum da Guerra? O Mercosul deveria ser, em princípio, uma zona de livre comércio e também uma zona de paz, entre seus próprios memb...
-
Reproduzo novamente uma postagem minha de 2020, quando foi publicado o livro de Dennys Xavier sobre Thomas Sowell quarta-feira, 4 de março... -
Itamaraty 'Memórias', do embaixador Marcos Azambuja, é uma aula de diplomacia Embaixador foi um grande contador de histórias, ...
-
Israel Products in India: Check the Complete list of Israeli Brands! Several Israeli companies have established themselves in the Indian m...
-
Pequeno manual prático da decadência (recomendável em caráter preventivo...) Paulo Roberto de Almeida Colaboração a número especial da rev...
-
O Brics vai de vento em popa, ao que parece. Como eu nunca fui de tomar as coisas pelo seu valor de face, nunca deixei de expressar meu pen...
