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sexta-feira, 21 de dezembro de 2012

A Literary Ambassador: Ampuero book on political orphans of socalism

A Literary Ambassador

The Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2012
Mexico City

Roberto Ampuero, an exile from the bloody Chilean coup of 1973, had recently arrived in East Germany, a country he thought represented the utopian future. But a German girlfriend soon disabused him of his illusions. In whispered pillow talk, she told him he was an idiot for having gone east when it was every East German's hope to go west.

At the time, Mr. Ampuero was an earnest young Communist, studying Marxist-Leninism at Karl Marx University in Leipzig. He would shortly marry the daughter of Fidel Castro's attorney general, and spend a decade in East Germany and Cuba.
Today, Mr. Ampuero, 59, is the ambassador to Mexico of Chile's center-right government. He is also a best-selling novelist and the creator of Cayetano Brulé, one of Spanish-language crime fiction's most traveled modern private eyes. Now, Riverhead-Penguin has published an English-language translation of his detective novel "The Neruda Case," and plans to publish more of his books.
Mr. Ampuero's life of exile is representative of the experiences of a now-graying generation of idealists who lived through Latin America's heady decades of revolutions, coups and guerrilla wars, only to be shipwrecked on the shoals of history, living Robinson Crusoe-like lives in the wreckage of socialist island paradises. He draws heavily on his own time spent in East Germany, Cuba and Chile to create the characters that populate his books.
Brulé, the neophyte detective in "The Neruda Case," could be a fun-house mirror image of his creator. The detective is a Cuban-American émigré who falls in love with a revolutionary Chilean student he meets in Miami, and follows her to Chile just in time to experience the bloody 1973 coup against socialist President Salvador Allende.
Just before the coup, Brulé takes on his first case on behalf of Pablo Neruda, the Nobel Prize-winning poet and Communist Party politician. In the book, Neruda is dying of cancer and wants to find a loved one who has been missing for decades.
Brulé will travel from Havana to Berlin to La Paz, Bolivia and back to Chile's capital of Santiago before he finds the answer. During the harrowing last hours of the Allende government, as jets strafe the presidential palace, Brulé dodges army patrols scouring Santiago's streets, in an attempt to bring peace of mind to the dying poet.
Chile's coup ended with Mr. Allende's suicide, and the beginning of a military dictatorship under Gen. Augusto Pinochet that lasted until 1990. The coup, and the dark night that followed it, represents for Brulé a "loss of illusion," and a realization of the costs when political dialogue collapses, says Mr. Ampuero. Brulé, he says, "is skeptical of political utopias that produce nightmares."
Mr. Ampuero, who was 20, remembers the coup well. He rushed to his university, where fellow members of the Communist Youth burned their party ID cards. For the next three months, he used his Austin Mini Cooper to ferry militants on the run from safe house to safe house until he himself was spirited out of Chile by an East German agent.
Brulé is a man of the tropics who, lured by romance and revolution, goes to the Andes. His creator, Mr. Ampuero, went in the other direction. Once in East Germany, after he married, he left for Havana, which for many leftists represented a fresh take on their dreams of a revolutionary utopia, unencumbered by Soviet guns and dogma.
But before long, the young Communist became disillusioned, finding Cuba to be a warm-weather version of the same Cold War Stalinism. In Havana, he fell out with fellow Chilean Communist exiles over the persecution of Cuban poet Heberto Padilla, a seminal case which led many leading intellectuals around the world to break with the Castro regime. After four years in Cuba, his options limited by scant travel documents, Mr. Ampuero returned to East Germany. All in all, he spent a decade living under Communist regimes before crossing to West Germany in 1983.
His autobiographical novel "Nuestros Años Verde Olivo," or "Our Olive Green Years," a reference to Cuban military fatigues, chronicled Cuba's reality of scarcity and secret-police paranoia, and became a sensation in Latin America.
The novel, published in 1999, is one of a handful of texts by disillusioned Latin American leftists critical of Cuba and communism in general. "Latin Americans who knew real socialism from the inside or saw how it fell apart, mostly opted for silence," says Mr. Ampuero.
The book put Mr. Ampuero on Havana's black list. "Neither Ampuero or anybody who remotely looks like Ampuero will ever be able to travel to Cuba," the Cuban ambassador in Chile said after the book was published, according to the writer.
Mr. Ampuero's latest novel, which translates as "Salvador Allende's Last Tango," has been on Chile's best-seller list since April. He is in the final edit of another Brulé novel.
A version of this article appeared December 21, 2012, on page D5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Literary Ambassador.

Previsoes imprevisiveis para 2012: prestando contas...

Ahah, ahah!
Ganhei!
Depois de ter postado minhas previsões para 2013, fui verificar o meu desempenho nas previsões de um ano atrás feitas para este belíssimo ano de 2012, o qual, aliás, passei metade fora deste país maravilhoso, e imprevisível.
Desafio qualquer inimigo deste blog (e eles são muitos, talvez dezenas de masoquistas) a apontar qualquer erro meu nas minhas previsões para o ano que vai encerrar-se dentro em pouco.
Ganhei, ganhei!
Se tivesse apostado contra mim mesmo, em algum bookmaker inglês, teria perdido gloriosamente.
Mas se tivesse apostado a favor, teria ganho ingloriosamente, já que ninguém gosta de desgraça, não é mesmo?
Mas, enfim, o que se há de fazer?
O Brasil não ajuda em previsões certeiras, e otimistas...
Em todo caso, seguem as minhas previsões de um ano atrás.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
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Previsões imprevisíveis para 2012

Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Postado no blog Diplomatizzando
2012 vai ser um grande ano, como todos sabem. A começar que é bissexto, assim que teremos um dia a mais para não fazer nada, espichar na praia, ficar na rede, ou pensar em adotar um novo feriado nacional, desses idiotas que o Congresso aprova todo ano, homenageando categorias profissionais, evangélicos ou qualquer heroi da pátria.
Aliás, começamos o ano comemorando -- se é o caso de dizer -- os cem anos da morte de um verdadeiro heroi da pátria, o Barão do Rio Branco, que teve a má sorte de morrer pouco antes do Carnaval de 1912. Como lembra meu amigo e historiador (mas uma coisa não está relacionada à outra) Luis Cláudio Villafañe Gomes Santos, autor de um excelente "O dia em que adiaram o Carnaval" (Unesp, 2011), o presidente Hermes da Fonseca resolveu adiar o Carnaval, em homenagem ao Barão, de fevereiro para abril. Não deu outra: o povo pulou carnaval duas vezes naquele ano: em fevereiro (que ninguém é de ferro) e em abril também, uma justa homenagem ao Barão (podia ser com "b" minúsculo, pois só tem um).
Bem, uma vez passado o Carnaval, e lembrando que continuaremos atrasados nos preparativos para a Copa, para as Olimpíadas, para os 200 anos de independência, em 2022, e que continuaremos atrasados para quase tudo, bem, como eu dizia, independentemente disso tudo, cabe, como é a tradição, e como é meu hábito, ainda assim registrar a passagem de mais um ano perdido para o futuro do Brasil por meio de previsões otimistas para o ano que se aproxima (ou que se abaterá sobre nós, conforme é sua disposição).
Como sabem muitos, todo final de ano eu faço minhas previsões para o ano que se aproxima, com esta pequena peculiaridade que minhas previsões NÃO SÃO para acontecer, são exatamente de coisas que não têm a mínima chance de se materializarem, de se transformarem em realizações práticas, uma vez que essa coisa de cumprir boas promessas não entra simplesmente nos hábitos nacionais.
Não, não vou prometer coisas simples como emagrecer ou arrumar meus livros, jogar papéis velhos fora, ou escrever aquele livro longamente planejado.
Minhas promessas, ou previsões, são grandiosas, elas atingem nada mais nada menos do que o orgulho nacional, daí a razão de expô-las em público, como faço agora:

1) O governo vai finalmente reduzir as despesas públicas abaixo do crescimento do PIB e da inflação.
2) Os deputados e senadores passarão a trabalhar mais de um dia e meio por semana.
3) Os mesmos deixarão de aumentar seus próprios salários até o limite constitucionalmente estabelecido (mas que representa apenas uma pequena parte do dinheiro que passa pelos gabinetes...).
4) O Brasil vai deixar de ser protecionista.
5) Um ex-presidente vai deixar de subir em palanques reais e virtuais e parar de ofender a inculta e bela.
6) O MST não vai mais invadir terras públicas e fazendas privadas.
7) Os estudantes da Fefelech vão parar de fumar maconha no campus.
8) Juízes vão reconhecer que ganham desproporcionalmente (inversamente) à sua produtividade.
9) Professores vão começar a dar aulas.
10) Um partido de espertos vai parar de fazer conferências nacionais sobre qualquer coisa e parar de pedir a "democratização da mídia."

Por fim, uma promessa pessoal, imprevisível, como tantas outras: prometo que vou parar de escrever besteirol neste blog.
Bom 2012 a todos...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Este blog sobreviveu ao fim do mundo, mas...

...talvez não consiga sobreviver ao acúmulo de bobagens que se disseminam rápida e perigosamente por todas as partes do Brasil, e em várias outras partes do mundo, também.

Não tenho medo de catástrofes, mesmo as mais terriveis, mas tenho alergia, horror, terror do besteirol, das estupidezes que vejo, ouço, contemplo um pouco em todos os lados para os quais olho.
Seja na TV, no rádio, nos jornais e revistas, na internet, enfim, por todos os veículos aos quais tenho acesso ou que literalmente "caem" sobre mim todos os dias, tudo o que tenho em volta me deixa preocupado, e me sinto cercado por um exército de bárbaros, seja de qual setor for, do governo, na imprensa, das escolas (inclusive superiores), na TV, tantas são as bobagens repetidas, velhas e novas, que brotam como champignons depois da chuva.
Estou cercado, num quilombo de resistência intelectual contra o besteirol costumeiro que circula no país.
Será que vou ter de pedir socorro, me asilar, virar um eremita?
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

PIB: tirar o G da equacao melhora o calculo - Mises Daily

Governos, como se sabe, não produzem um centavo de riqueza. Podem até ajudar a criar, se forem bem comportados (o que não é o caso do nosso), mas costumam cobrar um preço pesado por isso.
Está na hora de tirar o G da equação do PIB, onde nunca deveria ter entrado.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida


NationalAccounts

by Robert Higgs
Mises Daily,December 20, 2012

In the 1930s and 1940s, when the modern system of national income and product accounts (NIPA) was being developed, the scope of national product was a hotly debated issue. No issue stirred more debate than the question, Should government product be included in gross product? Simon Kuznets (Nobel laureate in economic sciences, 1971), the most important American contributor to the development of the accounts, had major reservations about including all government purchases in national product. Over the years, others have elaborated on these reasons and adduced others.
Why should government product be excluded? First, the government’s activities may be viewed as giving rise to intermediate, rather than final products, even if the government provides such valuable services as enforcement of private property rights and settlement of disputes. Second, because most government services are not sold in markets, they have no market-determined prices to be used in calculating their total value to those who benefit from them. Third, because many government services arise from political, rather than economic motives and institutions, some of them may have little or no value. Indeed, some commentators—including the present writer—ultimately went so far as to assert that some government services have negative value: given a choice, the people victimized by these “services” would be willing to pay to be rid of them.
When the government attained massive proportions during World War II, this debate was set aside for the duration of the war, and the accounts were put into a form that best accommodated the government’s attempt to plan and control the economy for the primary purpose of winning the war. This situation of course dictated that the government’s spending, which grew to constitute almost half of the official GDP during the peak years of the war, be included in GDP, and the War Production Board, the Commerce Department, and other government agencies involved in calculating the NIPA recruited a large corps of clerks, accountants, economists, and others to carry out the work.
After the war, the Commerce Department, which carried forward the national accounting to which it had contributed during the war (since 1972 within its Bureau of Economic Analysis [BEA]), naturally preferred to continue the use of its favored system, which treats all government spending for final goods and services as part of GDP. Economists such as Kuznets, who did not favor this treatment, attempted for a while to continue their work along their own, different lines, but none of them could compete with the enormous, well-funded statistical organization the government possessed, and eventually almost all of them gave up and accepted the official NIPA.[1]
Thus did government spending become lodged in the definition and measurement of GDP in a way that ensuing generations of economists, journalists, policy makers, and others considered appropriate and took for granted. Nonetheless, the issues that had been disputed at length in the 1930s and 1940s did not disappear. They were simply disregarded as if they had been resolved, even though they had not been resolved intellectually, but simply swept under the Commerce Department’s expansive (and expensive) rug. In particular, the inclusion of government spending in GDP remained extremely problematic.
Generations of elementary economics students since World War II have come away from Economics 101 having learned, if anything, that gross domestic product is defined as
GDP = C + I + G + (X - M).
That is, GDP for a given period, usually a year, is the sum of spending for final goods and services by domestic private consumers, domestic private investors, and governments at all levels, plus foreign purchases of U.S. exports minus American purchases of U.S. imports.
This sort of accounting supplies the basic framework for the Keynesian models that swept the economics profession in the 1940s and 1950s, from which a key policy conclusion was derived—that the government can vary its spending to offset shortfalls or excesses of private spending and thereby stabilize the economy’s growth while maintaining “full employment.” From the beginning, the most emphasized part of this conclusion was that increases in government spending can offset declines in private spending and thereby prevent or moderate macroeconomic contractions.
Much of the increase in government spending in recent decades has taken the form of increased transfer payments—payments for which the government receives no current good or service in return—such as Social Security pensions, disability benefits, and payments via Medicare or Medicaid to subsidize program beneficiaries’ health-care services. In 2000, such payments amounted to 56 percent of all federal spending; in 2011, they were more than 61 percent. Transfer payments do not enter the computation of national income and product; only purchases of final goods and services do so. Keynesian economists argue, however, that government may use increases in transfer payments to cushion business slumps in the same way that it may use increases in its purchases of final goods and services because increases in transfer payments augment personal income and stimulate greater consumption spending, hence greater investment spending, and therefore, from both sources, an increase in GDP.
The foregoing issues have taken on special cogency during the past five years, as the federal government has greatly increased its total spending. Real total federal outlays increased by 32 percent, from $2,729 billion to $3,603 billion (in chained 2005 dollars), between fiscal years 2007 and 2011. Although much of this increase has taken the form of increases in transfer payments, the part that is included in GDP has also risen substantially—at the federal level, it increased by 15.6 percent (in real dollars) between 2007 and 2011. Some of this increase was offset by a decrease in state and local government purchases of final goods and services, which fell by 3 percent during this period. (Data come from BEA, Table 1.1.6, Real Gross Domestic Product, Chained Dollars.)
As the basic Keynesian model implies, the recent increases in government spending appear to have prevented an even greater decline in real GDP during the recession that began in the winter of 2007-2008. But however that may be, because so much of this spending may have had little or no value—or even negative value—in itself, the question remains as to whether, despite what the official GDP figures show, the population’s true economic well-being might have suffered a greater contraction than mainstream economists, journalists, policy makers, and others for the most part believe.
To resolve this question, I have computed what I call gross domestic private product (GDPP), which is simply the standard real GDP minus the government purchases part of it. (Data come from BEA, Table 1.1.6, Real Gross Domestic Product, Chained Dollars.) The figure shows the movement of this variable from 2000 to 2011, the most recently completed year.
Real Gross Domestic Private Product (billions of chained 2005 dollars)
If real GDPP had grown at its long-run average rate of about 3 percent per year during the period from 2000 to 2011, it would have increased by about 38 percent. In reality, however, GDPP increased during this period by only 18 percent, or by about 1.5 percent per year on average. (Real GDP, by comparison, increased by about 1.6 percent per year on average, producing a small increase in the government share of GDP.) So, during this period of more than a decade, private product grew at only about half of its historical average rate. Between 2002 and 2007, while the housing bubble was giving rise to seemingly buoyant growth even beyond the housing sector, the good times appeared to have returned, but the inevitable bust from 2007 to 2009 and the slow recovery since 2009 pulled the intermediate-run growth rate for 2000-2011 back to an anemic level. The recovery of the period 2009-2011 brought the GDPP back only to its 2007 level, signifying four years in which no net gain had been made and much suffering had occurred between the beginning and the end of the period.
Perhaps the most positive statement we can make about the private economy’s performance during this twelve-year period is that it has been somewhat better than complete stagnation. But private product has lost ground relative to total official GDP. Moreover, many of the measures taken to deal with the contraction—the government’s huge run-up in its spending and debt; the Fed’s great expansion of bank reserves, its allocation of credit directly to failing companies and struggling sectors, and its accommodation of the federal government’s gigantic deficits; and the government’s enactment of extremely unsettling regulatory statutes, especially Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank Act—have served to discourage the private investment needed to hasten the recovery and lay the foundation for more rapid economic growth in the long run. To find a similar perfect storm of counter-productive government fiscal, monetary, and regulatory policies, we must go back to the 1930s, when the measures taken under Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt turned what probably would have been an ordinary, short-lived recession into the Great Depression.[2] If the government and the Fed persist in the kind of destructive policies they have undertaken since 2007, the potential for another great depression will remain. Even without such a catastrophe, the U.S. economy presents at best the prospect of weak performance for many years to come.
Notes:
[1] Robert Higgs, Depression, War, and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 64-68; and Ellen O’Brien, “How the ‘G’ Got into the GNP,” in Perspectives on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 10, Method, Competition, Conflict and Measurement in the Twentieth Century, ed. Karen I. Vaughn. (Aldershot, England: Edward Elgar, 1994), p. 242.
[2] Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 159-95; Higgs, Depression, War, and Cold War, pp. 3-29.


quinta-feira, 20 de dezembro de 2012

F. Hayek: O Uso do Conhecimento na Sociedade (1945)

Uma transcrição longa, mas altamente relevante:

Hayek, Friedrich A. (1899-1992)
"The Use of Knowledge in Society"
American Economic Review. XXXV, No. 4, September 1945, pp. 519-30. American Economic Association
Available at: Library of Economics and Liberty, link: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html

The Use of Knowledge in Society
AER, 1945
I
H.1
What is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic order? On certain familiar assumptions the answer is simple enough. If we possess all the relevant information, if we can start out from a given system of preferences, and if we command complete knowledge of available means, the problem which remains is purely one of logic. That is, the answer to the question of what is the best use of the available means is implicit in our assumptions. The conditions which the solution of this optimum problem must satisfy have been fully worked out and can be stated best in mathematical form: put at their briefest, they are that the marginal rates of substitution between any two commodities or factors must be the same in all their different uses.
H.2
This, however, is emphatically not the economic problem which society faces. And the economic calculus which we have developed to solve this logical problem, though an important step toward the solution of the economic problem of society, does not yet provide an answer to it. The reason for this is that the "data" from which the economic calculus starts are never for the whole society "given" to a single mind which could work out the implications and can never be so given.
H.3
The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is thus not merely a problem of how to allocate "given" resources—if "given" is taken to mean given to a single mind which deliberately solves the problem set by these "data." It is rather a problem of how to secure the best use of resources known to any of the members of society, for ends whose relative importance only these individuals know. Or, to put it briefly, it is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.
H.4
This character of the fundamental problem has, I am afraid, been obscured rather than illuminated by many of the recent refinements of economic theory, particularly by many of the uses made of mathematics. Though the problem with which I want primarily to deal in this paper is the problem of a rational economic organization, I shall in its course be led again and again to point to its close connections with certain methodological questions. Many of the points I wish to make are indeed conclusions toward which diverse paths of reasoning have unexpectedly converged. But, as I now see these problems, this is no accident. It seems to me that many of the current disputes with regard to both economic theory and economic policy have their common origin in a misconception about the nature of the economic problem of society. This misconception in turn is due to an erroneous transfer to social phenomena of the habits of thought we have developed in dealing with the phenomena of nature.
II
H.5
In ordinary language we describe by the word "planning" the complex of interrelated decisions about the allocation of our available resources. All economic activity is in this sense planning; and in any society in which many people collaborate, this planning, whoever does it, will in some measure have to be based on knowledge which, in the first instance, is not given to the planner but to somebody else, which somehow will have to be conveyed to the planner. The various ways in which the knowledge on which people base their plans is communicated to them is the crucial problem for any theory explaining the economic process, and the problem of what is the best way of utilizing knowledge initially dispersed among all the people is at least one of the main problems of economic policy—or of designing an efficient economic system.
H.6
The answer to this question is closely connected with that other question which arises here, that of who is to do the planning. It is about this question that all the dispute about "economic planning" centers. This is not a dispute about whether planning is to be done or not. It is a dispute as to whether planning is to be done centrally, by one authority for the whole economic system, or is to be divided among many individuals. Planning in the specific sense in which the term is used in contemporary controversy necessarily means central planning—direction of the whole economic system according to one unified plan. Competition, on the other hand, means decentralized planning by many separate persons. The halfway house between the two, about which many people talk but which few like when they see it, is the delegation of planning to organized industries, or, in other words, monopoly.
H.7
Which of these systems is likely to be more efficient depends mainly on the question under which of them we can expect that fuller use will be made of the existing knowledge. And this, in turn, depends on whether we are more likely to succeed in putting at the disposal of a single central authority all the knowledge which ought to be used but which is initially dispersed among many different individuals, or in conveying to the individuals such additional knowledge as they need in order to enable them to fit their plans with those of others.
III
H.8
It will at once be evident that on this point the position will be different with respect to different kinds of knowledge; and the answer to our question will therefore largely turn on the relative importance of the different kinds of knowledge; those more likely to be at the disposal of particular individuals and those which we should with greater confidence expect to find in the possession of an authority made up of suitably chosen experts. If it is today so widely assumed that the latter will be in a better position, this is because one kind of knowledge, namely, scientific knowledge, occupies now so prominent a place in public imagination that we tend to forget that it is not the only kind that is relevant. It may be admitted that, as far as scientific knowledge is concerned, a body of suitably chosen experts may be in the best position to command all the best knowledge available—though this is of course merely shifting the difficulty to the problem of selecting the experts. What I wish to point out is that, even assuming that this problem can be readily solved, it is only a small part of the wider problem.
H.9
Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge. But a little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place. It is with respect to this that practically every individual has some advantage over all others because he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active coöperation. We need to remember only how much we have to learn in any occupation after we have completed our theoretical training, how big a part of our working life we spend learning particular jobs, and how valuable an asset in all walks of life is knowledge of people, of local conditions, and of special circumstances. To know of and put to use a machine not fully employed, or somebody's skill which could be better utilized, or to be aware of a surplus stock which can be drawn upon during an interruption of supplies, is socially quite as useful as the knowledge of better alternative techniques. And the shipper who earns his living from using otherwise empty or half-filled journeys of tramp-steamers, or the estate agent whose whole knowledge is almost exclusively one of temporary opportunities, or the arbitrageur who gains from local differences of commodity prices, are all performing eminently useful functions based on special knowledge of circumstances of the fleeting moment not known to others.
H.10
It is a curious fact that this sort of knowledge should today be generally regarded with a kind of contempt and that anyone who by such knowledge gains an advantage over somebody better equipped with theoretical or technical knowledge is thought to have acted almost disreputably. To gain an advantage from better knowledge of facilities of communication or transport is sometimes regarded as almost dishonest, although it is quite as important that society make use of the best opportunities in this respect as in using the latest scientific discoveries. This prejudice has in a considerable measure affected the attitude toward commerce in general compared with that toward production. Even economists who regard themselves as definitely immune to the crude materialist fallacies of the past constantly commit the same mistake where activities directed toward the acquisition of such practical knowledge are concerned—apparently because in their scheme of things all such knowledge is supposed to be "given." The common idea now seems to be that all such knowledge should as a matter of course be readily at the command of everybody, and the reproach of irrationality leveled against the existing economic order is frequently based on the fact that it is not so available. This view disregards the fact that the method by which such knowledge can be made as widely available as possible is precisely the problem to which we have to find an answer.
IV
H.11
If it is fashionable today to minimize the importance of the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place, this is closely connected with the smaller importance which is now attached to change as such. Indeed, there are few points on which the assumptions made (usually only implicitly) by the "planners" differ from those of their opponents as much as with regard to the significance and frequency of changes which will make substantial alterations of production plans necessary. Of course, if detailed economic plans could be laid down for fairly long periods in advance and then closely adhered to, so that no further economic decisions of importance would be required, the task of drawing up a comprehensive plan governing all economic activity would be much less formidable.
H.12
It is, perhaps, worth stressing that economic problems arise always and only in consequence of change. So long as things continue as before, or at least as they were expected to, there arise no new problems requiring a decision, no need to form a new plan. The belief that changes, or at least day-to-day adjustments, have become less important in modern times implies the contention that economic problems also have become less important. This belief in the decreasing importance of change is, for that reason, usually held by the same people who argue that the importance of economic considerations has been driven into the background by the growing importance of technological knowledge.
H.13
Is it true that, with the elaborate apparatus of modern production, economic decisions are required only at long intervals, as when a new factory is to be erected or a new process to be introduced? Is it true that, once a plant has been built, the rest is all more or less mechanical, determined by the character of the plant, and leaving little to be changed in adapting to the ever-changing circumstances of the moment?
H.14
The fairly widespread belief in the affirmative is not, as far as I can ascertain, borne out by the practical experience of the businessman. In a competitive industry at any rate—and such an industry alone can serve as a test—the task of keeping cost from rising requires constant struggle, absorbing a great part of the energy of the manager. How easy it is for an inefficient manager to dissipate the differentials on which profitability rests, and that it is possible, with the same technical facilities, to produce with a great variety of costs, are among the commonplaces of business experience which do not seem to be equally familiar in the study of the economist. The very strength of the desire, constantly voiced by producers and engineers, to be allowed to proceed untrammeled by considerations of money costs, is eloquent testimony to the extent to which these factors enter into their daily work.
H.15
One reason why economists are increasingly apt to forget about the constant small changes which make up the whole economic picture is probably their growing preoccupation with statistical aggregates, which show a very much greater stability than the movements of the detail. The comparative stability of the aggregates cannot, however, be accounted for—as the statisticians occasionally seem to be inclined to do—by the "law of large numbers" or the mutual compensation of random changes. The number of elements with which we have to deal is not large enough for such accidental forces to produce stability. The continuous flow of goods and services is maintained by constant deliberate adjustments, by new dispositions made every day in the light of circumstances not known the day before, by B stepping in at once when A fails to deliver. Even the large and highly mechanized plant keeps going largely because of an environment upon which it can draw for all sorts of unexpected needs; tiles for its roof, stationery for its forms, and all the thousand and one kinds of equipment in which it cannot be self-contained and which the plans for the operation of the plant require to be readily available in the market.
H.16
This is, perhaps, also the point where I should briefly mention the fact that the sort of knowledge with which I have been concerned is knowledge of the kind which by its nature cannot enter into statistics and therefore cannot be conveyed to any central authority in statistical form. The statistics which such a central authority would have to use would have to be arrived at precisely by abstracting from minor differences between the things, by lumping together, as resources of one kind, items which differ as regards location, quality, and other particulars, in a way which may be very significant for the specific decision. It follows from this that central planning based on statistical information by its nature cannot take direct account of these circumstances of time and place and that the central planner will have to find some way or other in which the decisions depending on them can be left to the "man on the spot."
V
H.17
If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them. We cannot expect that this problem will be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a central board which, after integrating all knowledge, issues its orders. We must solve it by some form of decentralization. But this answers only part of our problem. We need decentralization because only thus can we insure that the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place will be promptly used. But the "man on the spot" cannot decide solely on the basis of his limited but intimate knowledge of the facts of his immediate surroundings. There still remains the problem of communicating to him such further information as he needs to fit his decisions into the whole pattern of changes of the larger economic system.
H.18
How much knowledge does he need to do so successfully? Which of the events which happen beyond the horizon of his immediate knowledge are of relevance to his immediate decision, and how much of them need he know?
H.19
There is hardly anything that happens anywhere in the world that might not have an effect on the decision he ought to make. But he need not know of these events as such, nor of all their effects. It does not matter for him why at the particular moment more screws of one size than of another are wanted, why paper bags are more readily available than canvas bags, or why skilled labor, or particular machine tools, have for the moment become more difficult to obtain. All that is significant for him is how much more or less difficult to procure they have become compared with other things with which he is also concerned, or how much more or less urgently wanted are the alternative things he produces or uses. It is always a question of the relative importance of the particular things with which he is concerned, and the causes which alter their relative importance are of no interest to him beyond the effect on those concrete things of his own environment.
H.20
It is in this connection that what I have called the "economic calculus" proper helps us, at least by analogy, to see how this problem can be solved, and in fact is being solved, by the price system. Even the single controlling mind, in possession of all the data for some small, self-contained economic system, would not—every time some small adjustment in the allocation of resources had to be made—go explicitly through all the relations between ends and means which might possibly be affected. It is indeed the great contribution of the pure logic of choice that it has demonstrated conclusively that even such a single mind could solve this kind of problem only by constructing and constantly using rates of equivalence (or "values," or "marginal rates of substitution"), i.e., by attaching to each kind of scarce resource a numerical index which cannot be derived from any property possessed by that particular thing, but which reflects, or in which is condensed, its significance in view of the whole means-end structure. In any small change he will have to consider only these quantitative indices (or "values") in which all the relevant information is concentrated; and, by adjusting the quantities one by one, he can appropriately rearrange his dispositions without having to solve the whole puzzle ab initio or without needing at any stage to survey it at once in all its ramifications.
H.21
Fundamentally, in a system in which the knowledge of the relevant facts is dispersed among many people, prices can act to coördinate the separate actions of different people in the same way as subjective values help the individual to coördinate the parts of his plan. It is worth contemplating for a moment a very simple and commonplace instance of the action of the price system to see what precisely it accomplishes. Assume that somewhere in the world a new opportunity for the use of some raw material, say, tin, has arisen, or that one of the sources of supply of tin has been eliminated. It does not matter for our purpose—and it is very significant that it does not matter—which of these two causes has made tin more scarce. All that the users of tin need to know is that some of the tin they used to consume is now more profitably employed elsewhere and that, in consequence, they must economize tin. There is no need for the great majority of them even to know where the more urgent need has arisen, or in favor of what other needs they ought to husband the supply. If only some of them know directly of the new demand, and switch resources over to it, and if the people who are aware of the new gap thus created in turn fill it from still other sources, the effect will rapidly spread throughout the whole economic system and influence not only all the uses of tin but also those of its substitutes and the substitutes of these substitutes, the supply of all the things made of tin, and their substitutes, and so on; and all this without the great majority of those instrumental in bringing about these substitutions knowing anything at all about the original cause of these changes. The whole acts as one market, not because any of its members survey the whole field, but because their limited individual fields of vision sufficiently overlap so that through many intermediaries the relevant information is communicated to all. The mere fact that there is one price for any commodity—or rather that local prices are connected in a manner determined by the cost of transport, etc.—brings about the solution which (it is just conceptually possible) might have been arrived at by one single mind possessing all the information which is in fact dispersed among all the people involved in the process.
VI
H.22
We must look at the price system as such a mechanism for communicating information if we want to understand its real function—a function which, of course, it fulfils less perfectly as prices grow more rigid. (Even when quoted prices have become quite rigid, however, the forces which would operate through changes in price still operate to a considerable extent through changes in the other terms of the contract.) The most significant fact about this system is the economy of knowledge with which it operates, or how little the individual participants need to know in order to be able to take the right action. In abbreviated form, by a kind of symbol, only the most essential information is passed on and passed on only to those concerned. It is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to watch merely the movement of a few pointers, as an engineer might watch the hands of a few dials, in order to adjust their activities to changes of which they may never know more than is reflected in the price movement.
H.23
Of course, these adjustments are probably never "perfect" in the sense in which the economist conceives of them in his equilibrium analysis. But I fear that our theoretical habits of approaching the problem with the assumption of more or less perfect knowledge on the part of almost everyone has made us somewhat blind to the true function of the price mechanism and led us to apply rather misleading standards in judging its efficiency. The marvel is that in a case like that of a scarcity of one raw material, without an order being issued, without more than perhaps a handful of people knowing the cause, tens of thousands of people whose identity could not be ascertained by months of investigation, are made to use the material or its products more sparingly; i.e., they move in the right direction. This is enough of a marvel even if, in a constantly changing world, not all will hit it off so perfectly that their profit rates will always be maintained at the same constant or "normal" level.
H.24
I have deliberately used the word "marvel" to shock the reader out of the complacency with which we often take the working of this mechanism for granted. I am convinced that if it were the result of deliberate human design, and if the people guided by the price changes understood that their decisions have significance far beyond their immediate aim, this mechanism would have been acclaimed as one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind. Its misfortune is the double one that it is not the product of human design and that the people guided by it usually do not know why they are made to do what they do. But those who clamor for "conscious direction"—and who cannot believe that anything which has evolved without design (and even without our understanding it) should solve problems which we should not be able to solve consciously—should remember this: The problem is precisely how to extend the span of our utilization of resources beyond the span of the control of any one mind; and therefore, how to dispense with the need of conscious control, and how to provide inducements which will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do.
H.25
The problem which we meet here is by no means peculiar to economics but arises in connection with nearly all truly social phenomena, with language and with most of our cultural inheritance, and constitutes really the central theoretical problem of all social science. As Alfred Whitehead has said in another connection, "It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them." This is of profound significance in the social field. We make constant use of formulas, symbols, and rules whose meaning we do not understand and through the use of which we avail ourselves of the assistance of knowledge which individually we do not possess. We have developed these practices and institutions by building upon habits and institutions which have proved successful in their own sphere and which have in turn become the foundation of the civilization we have built up.
H.26
The price system is just one of those formations which man has learned to use (though he is still very far from having learned to make the best use of it) after he had stumbled upon it without understanding it. Through it not only a division of labor but also a coördinated utilization of resources based on an equally divided knowledge has become possible. The people who like to deride any suggestion that this may be so usually distort the argument by insinuating that it asserts that by some miracle just that sort of system has spontaneously grown up which is best suited to modern civilization. It is the other way round: man has been able to develop that division of labor on which our civilization is based because he happened to stumble upon a method which made it possible. Had he not done so, he might still have developed some other, altogether different, type of civilization, something like the "state" of the termite ants, or some other altogether unimaginable type. All that we can say is that nobody has yet succeeded in designing an alternative system in which certain features of the existing one can be preserved which are dear even to those who most violently assail it—such as particularly the extent to which the individual can choose his pursuits and consequently freely use his own knowledge and skill.
VII
H.27
It is in many ways fortunate that the dispute about the indispensability of the price system for any rational calculation in a complex society is now no longer conducted entirely between camps holding different political views. The thesis that without the price system we could not preserve a society based on such extensive division of labor as ours was greeted with a howl of derision when it was first advanced by von Mises twenty-five years ago. Today the difficulties which some still find in accepting it are no longer mainly political, and this makes for an atmosphere much more conducive to reasonable discussion. When we find Leon Trotsky arguing that "economic accounting is unthinkable without market relations"; when Professor Oscar Lange promises Professor von Mises a statue in the marble halls of the future Central Planning Board; and when Professor Abba P. Lerner rediscovers Adam Smith and emphasizes that the essential utility of the price system consists in inducing the individual, while seeking his own interest, to do what is in the general interest, the differences can indeed no longer be ascribed to political prejudice. The remaining dissent seems clearly to be due to purely intellectual, and more particularly methodological, differences.
H.28
A recent statement by Professor Joseph Schumpeter in his Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy provides a clear illustration of one of the methodological differences which I have in mind. Its author is pre-eminent among those economists who approach economic phenomena in the light of a certain branch of positivism. To him these phenomena accordingly appear as objectively given quantities of commodities impinging directly upon each other, almost, it would seem, without any intervention of human minds. Only against this background can I account for the following (to me startling) pronouncement. Professor Schumpeter argues that the possibility of a rational calculation in the absence of markets for the factors of production follows for the theorist "from the elementary proposition that consumers in evaluating ('demanding') consumers' goods ipso facto also evaluate the means of production which enter into the production of these goods."*1
H.29
Taken literally, this statement is simply untrue. The consumers do nothing of the kind. What Professor Schumpeter's "ipso facto" presumably means is that the valuation of the factors of production is implied in, or follows necessarily from, the valuation of consumers' goods. But this, too, is not correct. Implication is a logical relationship which can be meaningfully asserted only of propositions simultaneously present to one and the same mind. It is evident, however, that the values of the factors of production do not depend solely on the valuation of the consumers' goods but also on the conditions of supply of the various factors of production. Only to a mind to which all these facts were simultaneously known would the answer necessarily follow from the facts given to it. The practical problem, however, arises precisely because these facts are never so given to a single mind, and because, in consequence, it is necessary that in the solution of the problem knowledge should be used that is dispersed among many people.
H.30
The problem is thus in no way solved if we can show that all the facts, if they were known to a single mind (as we hypothetically assume them to be given to the observing economist), would uniquely determine the solution; instead we must show how a solution is produced by the interactions of people each of whom possesses only partial knowledge. To assume all the knowledge to be given to a single mind in the same manner in which we assume it to be given to us as the explaining economists is to assume the problem away and to disregard everything that is important and significant in the real world.
H.31
That an economist of Professor Schumpeter's standing should thus have fallen into a trap which the ambiguity of the term "datum" sets to the unwary can hardly be explained as a simple error. It suggests rather that there is something fundamentally wrong with an approach which habitually disregards an essential part of the phenomena with which we have to deal: the unavoidable imperfection of man's knowledge and the consequent need for a process by which knowledge is constantly communicated and acquired. Any approach, such as that of much of mathematical economics with its simultaneous equations, which in effect starts from the assumption that people's knowledge corresponds with the objective facts of the situation, systematically leaves out what is our main task to explain. I am far from denying that in our system equilibrium analysis has a useful function to perform. But when it comes to the point where it misleads some of our leading thinkers into believing that the situation which it describes has direct relevance to the solution of practical problems, it is high time that we remember that it does not deal with the social process at all and that it is no more than a useful preliminary to the study of the main problem.

Notes for this chapter
1.
J. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York; Harper, 1942), p. 175. Professor Schumpeter is, I believe, also the original author of the myth that Pareto and Barone have "solved" the problem of socialist calculation. What they, and many others, did was merely to state the conditions which a rational allocation of resources would have to satisfy and to point out that these were essentially the same as the conditions of equilibrium of a competitive market. This is something altogether different from knowing how the allocation of resources satisfying these conditions can be found in practice. Pareto himself (from whom Barone has taken practically everything he has to say), far from claiming to have solved the practical problem, in fact explicitly denies that it can be solved without the help of the market. See his Manuel d'économie pure (2d ed., 1927), pp. 233-34. The relevant passage is quoted in an English translation at the beginning of my article on "Socialist Calculation: The Competitive 'Solution,' " in Economica, New Series, Vol. VIII, No. 26 (May, 1940), p. 125.

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MLA Style
Hayek, Friedrich A., "The Use of Knowledge in Society." 1945. Library of Economics and Liberty. 20 December 2012. <http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw.html>.

APA Style
Hayek, Friedrich A. "The Use of Knowledge in Society." 1945. Library of Economics and Liberty. Retrieved December 20, 2012 from the World Wide Web: http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw.html

Turabian Style
Hayek, Friedrich A. "The Use of Knowledge in Society." American Economic Review. XXXV, No. 4. pp. 519-30. American Economic Association. 1945. Library of Economics and Liberty [Online] available from http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw.html; accessed 20 December 2012; Internet.

A indigencia teorica dos companheiros dos companheiros - Carlos Alberto Sardenberg

O título acima é meu, não do conhecido jornalista da Globo e da CBN, e articulista do jornal O Globo.
Não se trata nem de "roubar a favor do povo", mas de construir um sistema totalitário com base na falcatrua, na corrupção, na mentira, na fraude, no roubo explícito, enfim em toda sorte de crimes, inclusive os mais escabrosos, como eliminação de recalcitrantes e "desviantes".
Companheiros de viagem tentam emprestar sua indigência intelectual ao que é apenas crime.
Só se pode sentir asco dessa gente, de todos, os que cometem crimes e os que tentam justificar.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Roubar pelo povo
Carlos Alberto Sardenberg
O Globo, 20/12/2012

Intelectuais ligados ao PT estão flertando com uma nova tese para lidar com o mensalão e outros episódios do tipo: seria inevitável, e até mesmo necessário, roubar para fazer um bom governo popular.

Trata-se de uma clara resposta ao peso dos fatos. Tirante os condenados, seus amigos dedicados e os xiitas, ninguém com um mínimo de tirocínio sente-se confortável com aquela história da  ”farsa da mídia e do Judiciário”.

Se, ao contrário, está provado que o dinheiro público foi roubado      e que apoios políticos foram comprados, com dinheiro público, restam duas opções: ou desembarcar de um projeto heroico que virou bandidagem ou, bem, aderir  à tese de que todo governo rouba, mas os de esquerda roubam menos e o fazem para incluir os pobres.

Vimos duas manifestações recentes dessa suposta nova teoria. Na Folha, Fernanda Torres, em defesa de José  Dirceu,  buscou inspiração em Shakespeare para especular: talvez seja impossível governar sem violar a lei.

No Valor, Renato Janine Ribeiro escreveu duas colunas para concluir: comunistas revolucionários não roubam; esquerdistas reformistas roubam quando chegam ao governo, mas “talvez” tenham de fazer isso para garantir as políticas de inclusão social.

Tirante a falsa sofisticação teórica, trata-se da atualização de coisa muito velha. Sim, o leitor adivinhou: o pessoal está recuperando o “rouba mas faz”, criado pelos ademaristas  nos anos 50. Agora é o “rouba mas distribui”.

Nem é tão surpreendente assim. Ainda no período eleitoral recente, Marilena Chauí havia colocado Maluf no rol dos prefeitos paulistanos realizadores de obras, no grupo de Faria Lima, e fora da turma dos ladrões.

Fica assim, pois: José Dirceu não é corrupto, nem quadrilheiro – mas participou da corrupção e da quadrilha porque, se não o fizesse, não haveria como aplicar o programa popular do PT.

Como se chega a esse incrível quebra-galho teórico? Fernanda Torres oferece uma pista quando comenta que o PT se toma como o partido do povo brasileiro. Ora, segue-se, se as elites são um bando de ladrões agindo contra o povo, qual o problema de roubar “a favor do povo”?

Renato Janine Ribeiro trabalha na mesma tese, acrescentando casos de governos de esquerda bem sucedidos, e corruptos. Não fica claro se são bem sucedidos “apesar” de corruptos ou, ao contrário, por serem corruptos. Mas é para esta ultima tese que o autor se inclina.

Não faz sentido, claro. Começa que não é verdade que todo governo conservador é contra o povo e corrupto. Thatcher e Reagan, exemplos máximos da direita, não roubavam e trouxeram grande prosperidade e bem estar a seus povos. Aqui entre nós, e para ir fundo, Castello Branco e Médici também não roubavam e suas administrações trouxeram crescimento e renda.

Por outro lado, o PT não é o povo. Representa parte do povo, a majoritária nas últimas três eleições presidenciais. Mas, atenção, nunca ganhou no primeiro turno e  os adversários sempre fizeram ao menos 40%. E no primeiro turno de 2010, Serra e Marina fizeram 53% dos votos.

Por isso, nas democracias  o governo não pode tudo, tem que respeitar a minoria e isso se faz pelo respeito às leis, que incluem a proibição de roubar. E pelo respeito à opinião pública, expressa, entre outros meios, pela imprensa livre.

Por não tolerar essas limitações, os partidos autoritários, à direita e à esquerda, impõem ou tentam impor ditaduras, explícitas ou disfarçadas. Acham que, por serem a expressão legítima do povo, podem tudo.

Assim, caímos de novo em velha tese: os fins justificam os meios, roubar e assassinar.

Renato Janine Ribeiro diz que os regimes comunistas cometeram o pecado da extrema violência física, eliminando milhões de pessoas. Mas eram eticamente puros, sustenta: gostavam de limusines e dachas, mas não colocavam dinheiro público no bolso. (A propósito, anotem aí: isto é uma prévia para uma eventual defesa de Lula, quando começam a aparecer sinais de que o ex-presidente e sua família abusaram de mordomias mais do que se sabe).

Quanto aos comunistas, dizemos nós, não eram “puros” por virtude, mas por impossibilidade. Não havia propriedade privada, de maneira que os corruptos não tinham como construir patrimônios pessoais. Roubavam dinheiro de bolso e se reservavam parte do aparelho do estado, enquanto o povo que representavam passava fome. Puros?

Reparem: na China, misto de comunismo e capitalismo, os líderes e suas famílias amealharam, sim, grandes fortunas pessoais.

Voltando ao nosso caso brasileiro, vamos falar francamente: ninguém precisa ser ladrão de dinheiro público para distribuir Bolsa Família e aumentar o salário mínimo.