quinta-feira, 29 de maio de 2014

Papa pede cooperação para controlar lucro, investimento e facilitar emigração


Ai, meu Deus, acho que o Papa Francisco foi longe demais, o ranço argentino contra o "imperialismo financeiro" falou alto.

O Papa Francisco mandou uma mensagem para a Organização Internacional do Trabalho, na qual sugere nas entrelinhas que instituições internacionais controlem o lucro, os investimentos e facilitem a emigração.

O Papa disse:

It is also time to reinforce existing forms of cooperation and to establish new avenues for expanding solidarity. This calls for: a renewed insistence on the dignity of every person; a more determined implementation of international labour standards; planning for a focused development on the human person as its central actor and primary beneficiary; a re-evaluation of the responsibilities of international corporations in the countries where they operate, including the areas of profit and investment management; and a concerted effort to encourage governments to facilitate the movement of migrants for the benefit of all, thus eliminating human trafficking and perilous travel conditions. Effective cooperation in these areas will be greatly assisted by defining future sustainable development goals.

Bom, controle de lucro por instituições internacionais é uma péssima ideia e não é essa a tradição católica sobre economia. Muito pelo contrário, a Igreja Católica, na sua Doutrina, tem desconfiança até de governos imagine em relação à instituições internacionais, por isso defende o que se chama subsidiaridade (procurar ao máximo deixar que a comunidade resolva seus problemas locais).

Controle de investimentos vai no mesmo sentido.

Facilitar emigração é mais complexo. A Igreja Católica, como se deveria esperar, protege e acolhe os emigrantes. Quanto a isso, o que eu tenho a dizer é que a Igreja Católica deveria também reconhecer os problemas e riscos da emigração. Basta olhar para as ruas das cidades europeias. Há bairros em cidades europeias hoje em dia que só podem andar muçulmanos. Há países, como a Espanha, que têm mais mesquitas do que igrejas católicas.

Você pode até dizer que na verdade o Papa não disse que instituições internacionais devem controlar o lucro e os investimentos e sim pediu uma "reavaliação das responsabilidades das corporações internacionais sobre o lucro e investimento". Mas quem irá fazer esta avaliação? Não pode ser as próprias empresas, pois elas mostrarão a planilha de gastos e falarão de como o lucro está baixo. Para bom entendedor, meia palavra basta. E a OIT entendeu o recado.

O texto todo, em geral, tem o foco correto, preocupações com o ser humano, mas o Papa deveria ver o que dizem as encíclicas de seus predecessores, antes de apontar para soluções erradas e avessas à própria doutrina da Igreja.


(Agradeço o texto do Papa ao site PewSitter)

quarta-feira, 28 de maio de 2014

Brasileiro: Povo que vive do Estado.


O que acontece no Brasil não é muito diferente do que ocorre na Europa, o inchamento astronômico do Estado, só que aqui as coisas são piores. Costumo dizer que o Brasil (ou a América Latina) tem um pecado original que pende mais para o pecado. As coisas boas do mundo aqui são pioradas e as coisas ruins também.

Hoje, li no site do jornal Estado de São Paulo, que 30% dos salários pagos no país são pagos pelo governo. Este número já é enorme. Mas se considerarmos todos no Brasil que o governo brasileiro sustenta: 1) população que vive de ajuda do Estado (bolsa família, etc), que inclui jovens e crianças; 2) aposentados que trabalham no governo ou em empresas estatais; 3) militares e 4) empresas que o Estado domina, como Petrobras e Vale, a população que vive do governo deve ultrapassar com certeza os 50% da população, eu diria que deve se aproximar dos 70%.

Um dos meus primeiros empregos, como economista formado, foi em uma indústria de sucesso. Era uma empresa privada, mas ela só tinha um cliente, apenas um: a Petrobras. Pode-se dizer que esta indústria também vivia de governo.

Quantas empresas vivem encostadas no governo. O que seriam das construtoras do Brasil se não fossem os gastos públicos? Quanta valeria a Odebrecht, por exemplo?

Pense, quantos da sua família vive do governo, é servidor público, pensionista, etc?


terça-feira, 27 de maio de 2014

Eficiência do Mercado? Não pague o que deve e ganhe dinheiro.


Texto da Bloomberg de hoje mostra que empresas com péssimos balanços têm maior valorização que as 500 melhores da bolsa.

Bom, hoje em dia o que menos tem pesado nas bolsas do mundo são os fundamentos macroeconômicos e os balanços das firmas. O mercado está sendo movido pelo dinheiro baratíssimo que sai dos bancos centrais. O que por si só é uma aberração. E esta aberração gerou outra, as piores empresas são mais valorizadas.

Este tipo de assunto sempre me remete à minha tese de doutorado, na qual fiz critica à ideia de mercado eficiente.

Vejam parte texto da Bloomberg (agradeço o gráfico acima ao site Zero Hedge).

Bad Credit No Problem as Balance-Sheet Bombs Rally 94%.
By Joseph Ciolli


In the U.S. equity market, the worse a company’s finances, the better it’s doing.
Stocks with the weakest balance sheets have climbed more than 8 percent in 2014 and 94 percent since the end of 2011, generating almost twice the gain in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index (SPX)over that period, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Shares in the category this year are beating those that most investors consider the bull market’s leaders, such as small caps and biotechnology, which tumbled in March.
Gains are being sustained by speculation that the corporations whose finances put them most at risk will thrive as the economy improves. Helped by rising bond issuance and falling defaults, stocks from Tenet Healthcare Corp. to Frontier Communications Corp. are advancing even as Federal Reserve policy makers take steps to end unprecedented economic stimulus.
Weaker Finances
basket of 50 companies that rank lowest in measures comparing equity to total liabilities and earnings to assets, compiled in a gauge known as the Altman Z-Score, has increased 8.3 percent in 2014 after climbing 50 percent last year. The highest-rated group is up 3 percent since December after rallying 28 percent in 2013, according to data compiled by Goldman Sachs.
Shares with weaker finances have benefited as the Federal Reserve held interest rates near zero for the past six years and bought $3.6 trillion of bonds to stimulate the economy, spurring an unprecedented wave of debt financing. Companies in the S&P 500 that issued junk bonds -- securities deemed the riskiest by credit raters -- in the past year have seen their stocks climb 26 percent over that period, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That compares with a one-year increase of 15 percent for the full S&P 500, which closed at a record on May 23.


segunda-feira, 26 de maio de 2014

Historiadores são Perigosos. Especialmente os pagos por Governos.


Texto magnífico de Dominic Selwood sobre a Reforma Protestante na Inglaterra. Sobre como o reinado de Henrique VII iniciou uma matança tanto de milhares de católicos como da própria história da Inglaterra.

Eu, apesar de não ser inglês, gosto muito da Inglaterra, já morei lá, e, ao estudar a história do país, me assustei em ver tamanha diferença nas descrição dos fatos. A mentira parecia dominar muitos historiadores. Engraçado é que mesmo esquerdistas não confiam na história de reis e rainhas do país, especialmente após Henrique VIII. E alguns historiadores simplesmente deixam fatos absurdos sem comentário algum, como a mortes de Lady Jane e Thomas More.

Gosto também do tema pois reúne teologia com história de mártires, e mostra como a história pode ser deturpada por reis e historiadores puxa sacos.

É um texto longo, mas merece ser lido por inteiro, abaixo vai apenas parte deste sensacional artigo:

How a Protestant spin machine hid the truth about the English Reformation


By  

Today, May 23, is the anniversary of King Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon —­ the event which started the English Reformation.
In 2003, Charles Clarke, Tony Blair’s Secretary of State for Education and Skills, expressed strong views on the teaching of British history.
I don’t mind there being some medievalists around for ornamental purposes, but there is no reason for the state to pay for them.
In response, Michael Biddiss, professor of medieval history at Reading University, suggested that Mr Clarke’s view may have been informed by Khrushchev’s notion that historians are dangerous people, capable of upsetting everything.­­­­­
In many ways, Khrushchev was correct. Historians can be a distinct threat —­ both those who create “official” history, and those who work quietly to unpick it, filling in the irksome and unhelpful details.
Rulers in all ages have tried to control how history sees them, and have gone to great lengths to have events recorded the way they want. The process is as old as authority itself.
The result is that generations of people learn something at school, only to find out later that it was not so. For instance, children brought up in the communist countries of the 20th century have little idea of the indiscriminately murderous mechanics at the heart of their founding revolutions. More recently, in the United States, anyone young enough not to have lived through the two recent Iraq wars might, if they only read political memoirs, actually believe that the wars were fought to root out al Qaeda.
So what about England? Has our constitutional monarchy and ancient tradition of parliamentary democracy protected our history from political manipulation? Can we rely on what we are taught and told, or are there myths we, too, have swallowed hook, line, and sinker?
Where better to start than with that most quintessentially English of events ­— the break with Rome that signalled the birth of modern England?
For centuries, the English have been taught that the late medieval Church was superstitious, corrupt, exploitative, and alien. Above all, we were told that King Henry VIII and the people of England despised its popish flummery and primitive rites. England was fed up to the back teeth with the ignorant mumbo-jumbo magicians of the foreign Church, and up and down the country Tudor people preferred plain-speaking, rational men like Wycliffe, Luther, and Calvin. Henry VIII achieved what all sane English and Welsh people had long desired ­– an excuse to break away from an anachronistic subjugation to the ridiculous medieval strictures of the Church.
....
The story is a tragedy.
On May 23, 1533, Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, sat in the lady chapel of Dunstable Priory to pronounce one of the most significant legal judgments in English history — infinitely more seismic than Magna Carta.
The underlying issue was that Henry VIII’s marriage of 16 years had produced no boys. But his mistress, the Marquess of Pembroke, was pregnant, so time was ticking. The usual legal channels had failed to grant Henry a divorce, so the Archbishop of Canterbury stepped up to the mark.
In order to give Archbishop Cranmer the unprecedented legal authority to do what he was about to do, Henry’s slippery hard man, Thomas Cromwell, drafted and rushed The Act in Restraint of Appeals 1532 through Parliament. Cromwell’s Act suspended all the usual laws in this regard, and give Cranmer full authority to give judgment. (Interestingly, to do this, Cromwell claimed that Cranmer had full authority because England was an empire. At the same time, his spin machine was working overtime, pumping out fantastical ancient histories linking the English empire to Troy, therefore making it older than, and so independent from, Rome.)
Therefore, in the hope that the King’s mistress was carrying a boy, Cranmer solemnly declared King Henry VIII divorced from Catherine of Aragon.
In the event, Henry’s mistress, Anne Boleyn, gave birth to a girl (and would, with Cromwell’s help, be beheaded within three years). But the deed was done. Cromwell had divorced Henry from Catherine, and England from Rome.
The whole affair was radical.
Since time immemorial, canon law had reserved appeals on marriage and divorce to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s boss, the Pope. English kings­, like all monarchs in Latin Christendom, had always observed this ancient legal structure. Henry had happily used it himself, when he had needed a dispensation to marry Catherine of Aragon (his brother’s widow) in the first place.
The reason Cromwell had pushed for a break with Rome was that everyone knew Henry had no legal basis for divorcing Catherine.

Henry’s argument (which he worked out himself, and was proud of) insisted that the Bible forbade a man from marrying his brother’s widow, and therefore his marriage to Catherine had all been a dreadful mistake and was, regrettably, invalid. However, all canon lawyers in England and Europe (apart from Henry’s circle of advisers) knew it was a hopeless argument, as there was a well-recognised exception to this rule. In a “levirate” marriage (Deuteronomy 25:5–10), a man was required to marry his brother’s widow if she had no children, which was the case here, and why Henry had been permitted to marry Catherine and seal a vital bond between England and Spain.
Therefore, to no one’s surprise, the Pope said no to the divorce.
Until this point, Henry had been an ardent Catholic. When he first read Luther’s works, he had been so outraged by Luther’s attack on the Church that he wrote a book (in Latin) systematically taking Luther’s arguments apart. He published it in 1521 with a dedication to the Pope. In it, he referred to “the pest of Martin Luther’s heresy … a deadly venom … infecting all with its poison.” He continued:
But, O immortal God! what bitter language! What so hot and inflamed force of speaking can be invented, sufficient to declare the crimes of that most filthy villain [Luther], who has undertaken to cut in pieces the seamless coat of Christ, and to disturb the quiet state of the church of God!
Henry made his personal position very clear:
Convinced that, in our ardour for the welfare of Christendom, in our zeal for the Catholic faith and our devotion to the Apostolic See, we had not yet done enough, we determined to show by our own writings our attitude towards Luther and our opinion of his vile books; to manifest more openly to all the world that we shall ever defend and uphold, not only by force of arms but by the resources of our intelligence and our services as a Christian, the Holy Roman Church. (King Henry VIII, Defence of the Seven Sacraments)
In grateful recognition, the Pope awarded Henry the personal title “Defender of the Faith”. (Since the break with Rome, Parliament has, slightly strangely, conferred this title on all British monarchs.)
However, when the Pope refused to allow Henry to divorce, Thomas Cromwell came up with a corker of a solution ­– break with Rome; turn the country Protestant; and, at the same time, solve the problem of the empty royal coffers by trousering all the wealth in the country’s innumerable abbeys and parish churches.
Like King Philip IV of France two centuries earlier surveying the wealth of the Templars, the temptation for Henry was just too much to resist.
The only problem was that although Cromwell’s plan suited Henry and his circle (who would all get very rich off the scheme), there was the small matter of the English people.
To change a country’s religion lock, stock, and barrel was no easy task. In the end, it took Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Elizabeth I. The strategy was fairly predictable for a medieval monarchy, and again, it has striking similarities with how Philip IV took out the Templars. Cromwell’s plan only needed three steps: outlaw everything to do with Catholicism; denigrate and malign it at every opportunity in official pronouncements and sermons; and execute anyone who objects.
One example of the type of propaganda deployed must stand for many. Turning a blind eye to the hundreds of English Catholics executed by Henry VIII, Elizabeth I’s administration came up with the notion of convincing people that religious executions had been invented by Elizabeth's older sister, Mary I. Despite the fact that images were banned in churches, they ordered a copy of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, hot off the press with the ink still wet, placed in every collegiate church in the land, where all people could be appalled by its 150 gruesome woodcut illustrations showing the Protestant martyrs executed by Mary. What it failed to show, of course, were those Catholic victims that Henry had consigned to identical deaths before Mary’s reign, and the hundreds that Elizabeth was now ruthlessly persecuting in exactly the same way. But, of course, that is the nature of propaganda. Elizabeth forbade the printing of any Catholic materials in her kingdom, leaving her full control of all books and pamphlets.
The Tudor violence meted out to enforce the break with Rome was extreme, designed to deter by shock. For instance, one of Henry’s earliest victims was Sister Elizabeth Barton, a Benedictine nun. When she criticised Henry’s desire to marry Anne Boleyn, he had her executed, and her head spiked on London Bridge ­— the first and only woman ever to have suffered this posthumous barbarity.
Henry and his inner circle of politicians and radical clerics put to death hundreds of dissenters, pour encourager les autres. None of these people were plotting to kill him or destabilise his rule. Their “treason” was to oppose the destruction of their religion or the despoiling of their property. The brutal strangulation, emasculation, disembowelling, beheading, and quartering they endured as traitors was hideous, as was the total absence of any form of due process or justice.
Take the death of Richard Whiting, the elderly abbot of Glastonbury, England’s greatest abbey. Thomas Cromwell’s administrative diary entry about him reads starkly:
Item. The Abbot, of Glaston to be tryed at Glaston and also executyd there with his complycys.
Whiting was, in fact, a member of the House of Lords, and entitled to be arraigned before Parliament if he was to be charged with any crime. But that was much too cumbersome for Cromwell, who just wanted the abbot out of the way in order to seize the abbey’s wealth and line his own pockets with it. Whiting was therefore dragged on a hurdle to the summit of Glastonbury Tor, where he was subjected to the full horrors of a traitor’s death. And he was not alone. Similar summary executions took place up and down the land to clear the way for Cromwell’s commissioners, who boxed up every last cross and candlestick they could find, and shipped them back to London to be melted down and pumped into their personal accounts.
The evidence shows that it actually took the Tudors around 45 years to eradicate all memory of this country’s Catholic past.
Henry started it all, from 1533–47. His reforms were harsh on the people, yet he rather hypocritically remained a practising Catholic himself. He had a newfound hostility towards the Pope, born of his divorce debacle, but he continued to hear Mass regularly. Although he presided over the looting of the abbeys and a good deal of local church vandalism, he nevertheless exercised certain restraining influences over Thomas Cromwell, Archbishop Cranmer and the other zealots. Things therefore only really kicked off once Henry was dead and the reformers were able to take the nine-year-old King Edward VI on a radical six-year Calvinist journey (1547–53). This was the period of the harshest destruction of English religious art and culture, when even the smallest church in the kingdom was ransacked and all its valuables seized. For several generations, people said that they had suffered under Henry’s reforms, but they dated the utter desecration of the English church to Edward’s reign.
When Mary I briefly returned England to Catholicism from 1553–8, many churches and parishioners cautiously took out the few treasured saints’ statues and missals they had recklessly managed to hide, and they set up their churches again, happy for normality to have returned.
But when Mary unexpectedly died and Elizabeth began the persecutions again, people started slowly to give up. By the end of Elizabeth’s reign, no one remembered religious life before Henry. The memories were gone, and so was the will to fight the regime any more.
Amid the turmoil of the English Reformation – with its wanton destruction of communities, their imaginations, and centuries of their books and art – the one thing that stands out most is the sheer scale of the undertaking.
Under the influence of Calvin and Zwingli’s puritan doctrines, Edward VI ordered his commissioners to:
Take away, utterly extinct and destroy all shrines, coverings of shrines, candlesticks, pictures, paintings and all other monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry and superstition so that there remain no memory of the same in walls, glasses, windows or elsewhere within their churches or houses.
And following Edward’s reign, Elizabeth I repeated the command and finished what he had started. The result was the wholesale destruction of a millennium of irreplaceable English craftsmanship in windows, statues, frescoes, and paintings. The Tate recently estimated that over 90 per cent of all English art was trashed in the period, and scarcely a handful of books survived the burning of the great monastic and university libraries. Oxford’s vast Bodleian, for instance, was left without a single book.
Anyone who doubts there was a political aspect to the destruction needs look no further than the shrine of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury. It was England’s most popular pilgrimage destination, and Becket’s cult had international reach, with mosaics, icons, and relics of him venerated as far afield as Sicily and the Holy Land. Henry ordered his tomb pulverised, his bones scattered, and his name effaced from history. The reason for this special harshness is not hard to see. Becket’s claim to fame was as a churchman who stood up to royal interference in the Church. Becket was therefore a natural rallying symbol for anyone thinking of challenging Henry’s reforms. Becket represented the sanctity of dissent, and Henry could absolutely not have that.
In the process of all the destruction, it was not just traditional day-to-day spiritual life, the free medical and social care provided by the monasteries, and a country full of creative thought and art that were obliterated. The reformers hacked out and discarded an entire slice of England’s history, alienating the English from an especially vibrant part of their own amazing past.
So Khrushchev was right — historians are dangerous. In the case of the Reformation, generations have perpetuated the artful story spun by the Tudor machine, with the result that we fail to acknowledge that medieval religion in this country was, for a thousand years, as English as tea, warm beer, Maypole dancing, and cricket. As has been said many times: within three generations, England went from being one of Europe’s most Catholic countries to one of its most anti-Catholic.
The medieval world was quite capable of outrageous smears. One needs only think of the blood libel against the Jews. Yet it seems that we, too, are the victims of politicised and twisted history because we are still living with the radical agenda of a small group of Tudor reformers who seized upon a king’s marital needs in order to effect a change they (not the country) desired, and at the same time treated themselves to undreamed of personal wealth.
We are the only European country to use the phrase “the Dark Ages” for the medieval period, and in large measure it is because we have retrospectively made it dark. Henry VIII started it by denigrating and destroying the intellectual, artistic, and spiritual output of ten centuries, emptying out cathedrals and library shelves, leaving them barren and devoid of any human ingenuity or beauty. It is no wonder that, looking at the slim remnants of English medieval life, it appears dark to us. To compound matters, rather than recognise the Tudor sack of our culture, we have collectively stuck to their breathtakingly arrogant claim that England was a backward, gloom-filed wasteland until Henry brought the searing flame of enlightenment.
Our complicity in this myth is partly because the sectarian language of the Tudor court and its clerics’ sermons has proved immensely durable and is now so deeply ingrained that we continue to be blinded to the vitality and unique Englishness of our pre-Reformation culture. Instead of celebrating our nation’s vivid and exuberant history, we swallow Henry’s spin and damn it all as nothing more than the output of an infested ragbag of “corrupt abominations”, “papistical superstitions”, and “unsavery teaching”. The result is a gross distortion, and equates to the theft of our past. Happily, it is a wrong that historians are now, in increasing numbers, eloquently addressing.
Perhaps the final word should go to Robert Peckham, who died in Rome in 1569 during the reign of Elizabeth I:
Here lies Robert Peckham, Englishman and Catholic, who, after England’s break with the Church, left England because he could not live in his country without the Faith, and, having come to Rome, died there because he could not live apart from his country.

sexta-feira, 23 de maio de 2014

Catolicismo e o Livre Mercado


Este é um assunto que muito me interessa. Samuel Gregg fala no jornal National Catholic Register sobre como o catolicismo tem história na defesa do livre mercado.

Leiam parte do texto do National Catholic Register abaixo:

Cultivating Capitalism’s Compatibility With Catholicism

BY TRENT BEATTIE

May 20 is the feast of St. Bernardine of Siena, a 15th-century Franciscan priest. The fact that he cared for the sick, especially those suffering from the plague, doesn’t come as a surprising course of action from a Franciscan, nor does the fact that he preached against luxury and immodest clothing. However, many people are unaware that St. Bernardine endorsed free markets.

The humble Franciscan knew the importance of personal initiative, identifying four gifts that the successful entrepreneur would make use of: efficiency, responsibility, diligence and risk-taking.

Despite his rejection of excess, St. Bernardine supported the right to private property, one of the topics addressed in his book On Contracts and Usury.
None of this comes as a surprise to Samuel Gregg, director of research at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty. He has been teaching about the morality of free markets for years. Australian-born, Gregg earned a doctorate in moral philosophy and political economy from the University of Oxford in 1998. He has since spoken around the world and has written numerous books, the most recent being Tea Party Catholic: The Catholic Case for Limited Government, a Free Economy, and Human Flourishing.

Gregg, who currently lives in Ann Arbor, Mich., with his wife and daughter, recently took time to share economic insights with Register correspondent Trent Beattie.

How did you first become interested in economics?
I become interested in economics in an indirect manner. My initial entryway into the topic was natural-law theory. Through reading St. Thomas Aquinas and some of the later scholastic thinkers, it became very clear that, for hundreds of years, much natural-law thinking concerned matters that we would regard as “economic” today: questions such as the nature and ends of money, the justice of economic exchange, how prices are determined, the role of the state in the economy, etc.
One reason for this is that capitalism first developed in the medieval world — which was, after all, a Catholic world. The other reason is that, in thinking through such questions, scholastic writers had to get to know the world of commerce, money, business and trade in ways that few Christian thinkers had previously done. And what you find in these thinkers are very clear anticipations of many, if not most, of the key insights that were contained in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.
This in turn made me wonder if it would be possible to re-integrate the discipline of economics into Catholic thought — not to produce a “Catholic economics,” since there is no such thing, just as there is no “Catholic physics” — but, rather, so that the insights of economics could inform Catholic moral and social reflection, while economics could become reacquainted with the full truth about man that we find in natural law and Divine Revelation.

How did you get started with the Acton Institute?
It became obvious to me in the mid-1990s that Acton was truly unique, inasmuch as it was trying to re-create that conversation between economics and the Christian faith, and that one of the mediums through which it was doing so was natural-law thinking.
That is extremely difficult work, because many Catholics and other Christians are intensely suspicious of economics, seeing it as simply applied utilitarianism, while many economists operate upon highly secular assumptions about the world — assumptions that run quite counter to the Christian vision of the person — and which aren’t always that friendly to convinced religious believers.
Yet both the Church and the world of economics certainly need each other. The Church needs to take seriously the insights of economics, especially when it comes to addressing poverty, while economics as a discipline needs people to remind it of all the moral and spiritual realities that don’t fit well into the models employed by most mainstream economists. So when I was offered a chance to work at Acton, I was very happy to accept it.

....

St. Bernardine of Siena was a Franciscan priest who extensively defended the business entrepreneur. Do you find that most Catholics are unaware of his teachings on the free market?
Most Catholics are unaware of the broad Catholic intellectual and institutional contributions to the development of market economies in general, especially during their early phases in the Middle Ages. Too often, we buy into the “Dark Ages” mythology about this period. So the fact that St. Bernardine of Siena — and many other Franciscans — were among the first to grasp the importance of the entrepreneur as a key catalyst for economic growth, or that they made clear and important distinctions between money-as-sterile and money-as-capital, get missed alongside all the other things that happened in the so-called “Dark Ages.”
I also think that many people have an imaginary understanding of St. Francis and the Franciscan orders that followed in his wake. They weren’t all poor mendicants. Lots of them were very intellectually serious men who lived, worked and often taught in urban centers, and thus experienced what some scholars have called the Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages. They didn’t try to resist it. Rather, they sought to understand it so that they could guide the faithful in the “how” of living a Christian life in the midst of this new world.

Who are some of the other saints who have explained how free markets are conducive to virtue?
 There is an excellent book by the Australian priest and theologian Father Anthony G. Percy called Entrepreneurship in the Catholic Tradition. He details the fact that many of the Church Fathers had high praise for merchants and underscored the importance of commerce, both in terms of the material wealth it produced and also the opportunities for all-round human flourishing that become available through business activity.
Those Church Fathers include St. Augustine, St. John Cassian, St. Leo the Great and St. John of Damascus. Aquinas also had good things to say about merchants and the potential to cultivate particular virtues in business. Now, keep in mind, they also warned of the very real temptations that exist in a market place and commerce more generally. But to say they were somehow “anti-commerce” is simply untrue.



quinta-feira, 22 de maio de 2014

A Péssima Produtividade do Brasil só Piora


Eu fui convidado para dar aula de matemática de segundo grau para alunos em universidades. Meu filho de quinze anos, que estuda em uma boa escola (graças a Deus) acharia a disciplina ridícula. Olham para a taxa de desemprego caindo no Brasil e dizem: "a taxa de desemprego está caindo, porque as pessoas estão estudando mais". Eu respondo: "estudando o quê?"

Vejamos parte do texto de hoje do Valor Econômico, de onde eu tirei a tabela acima:

Brasil cai 4 posições, entre piores em ranking de competitividade


Por Vanessa Jurgenfeld | De São Paulo

O Brasil caiu quatro posições no ranking de competitividade e está entre as sete piores economias do Índice de Competitividade Mundial 2014 (World Competitiveness Yearbook - WCY), que será divulgado hoje pelo Institute for Management Development (IMD) e pela Fundação Dom Cabral. O país agora ocupa o 54 ºlugar, somente à frente de Eslovênia, Bulgária, Grécia, Argentina, Croácia e Venezuela.
Publicado anualmente desde 1989, o guia avalia 60 países. No ano anterior, o Brasil estava em uma posição um pouco melhor, ocupava o 51 ºlugar.

De acordo com Carlos Primo Braga, professor do IMD e diretor do grupo Evian, o mais importante a constatar é que há uma tendência de declínio do Brasil porque pelo quarto ano consecutivo ele apresenta piora na sua classificação. Braga explica que eventualmente de um ano para o outro há casos de pioras pontuais na posição relativa de um país, mas no caso brasileiro já se constata a deterioração em um horizonte de longo prazo. Em quatro anos, o país perdeu 16 posições. Em 2010, quando a pesquisa avaliava 58 países, como comparação, o Brasil ocupava o 38 º lugar.
Segundo Braga, houve piora principalmente do ambiente de negócios, destacou ele, citando, entre vários fatores que contribuem para isso, a baixa produtividade do trabalho, pela pouca qualificação da mão de obra.
O ranking tem quatro pilares para mensuração dos resultados: performance econômica, eficiência do governo, eficiência dos negócios e infraestrutura. São ao todo 338 critérios dos quais dois terços são relacionados a informações estatísticas (os indicadores usados referem-se a 2013) e um terço é elaborado a partir de questionários com empresários.
A pesquisa mostra que o Brasil manteve no ranking de 2014 uma má performance em itens como: infraestrutura, considerada precária; abertura da economia, avaliada como pequena por Braga e ruim para o crescimento do país; e pela sua estrutura institucional-regulatória, tida como ineficiente. Entre outros problemas do país também está o "aumento significativo de preços".
Em relação à eficiência do governo, o Brasil está desde 2011 entre os cinco piores países...


quarta-feira, 21 de maio de 2014

Graduação em Relações Internacionais em 5 minutos.


Stephen Halt resolveu escrever sobre os cinco principais conhecimentos em relações internacionais que deve-se saber, dizendo que se você conseguir lembrar deste cinco pontos você pode-se considerar graduado em relações internacionais.

Ele lembra de um quadro do programa Saturday Night Live em que o "padre Guido Sarducci" (foto acima) dizia que ensinaria em 5 minutos tudo que você lembraria de uma ciência depois de 5 anos formado.

Economia seria reduzida a oferta e demanda e Teologia a "Deus ama você".

Eu diria, como economista e leitor voraz de teologia, que os 5 minutos de economia podem até reduzir economia (apesar de que hoje eu acho que a ideia de egoísmo é bem mais importante que as leis de oferta e demanda), mas o "Deus ama você" não reduz teologia, pois deve-se saber que deus é esse, e quem é esse você. Se fosse 'Deus ama quem crê nele", talvez reduzisse melhor. Pois por exemplo, Alá não ama os infiéis (o Deus cristão, ama).

Eu tenho doutorado em Relações Internacionais, de forma geral, concordo sim com o que diz Halt, especialmente com o item 4.

Aqui vão as 5 coisas mais importantes que você deve lembrar para Relações Internacionais, segundo Halt (leia o texto completo clicando no link).

No. 1: Anarchy
You don't have to be a realist to recognize that what makes international politics different from domestic politics is that it takes place in the absence of central authority. 

No. 2: The Balance of Power (or for extra credit, the balance of threats)
Given anarchy (see above), states worry about who is stronger, who is catching up or falling behind, and what steps can each take to avoid permanent inferiority. The balance of power tells you a lot about how states identify potential allies, and whether war is becoming more or less likely. 
No. 3: Comparative Advantage (a.k.a. "gains from trade")
If you never took a course in international economics, then you need to grasp the basic notion of comparative advantage, which underlies the entire liberal theory of free trade. The idea is simple: states will be better off if they all specialize in producing items in which they have some relative advantage, and then exchange these goods with the good produced by others whose relative advantage lies in producing something else. 
No. 4: Misperception and Miscalculation
A wise friend of mine likes to say that most of international politics can be summed up in three words: fear, greed, and stupidity.We've already covered the first two (anarchy and the balance of power are about fear, and free trade is about the benevolent effects of greed). But the third one -- stupidity -- is equally important: you can't really understand international politics and foreign policy without recognizing that national leaders (and sometimes whole countries) frequently misunderstand each other and often do remarkably stupid things.
No. 5: Social Construction
I'm not a constructivist, but even I acknowledge that the interactions of states and other human institutions are often shaped by changing norms and identities, and that these norms and identities are themselves are neither divinely ordained nor fixed. On the contrary, they are themselves the product of human interaction: what we do on a daily basis but also how we talk or write and how our ideas and beliefs evolve over time.

terça-feira, 20 de maio de 2014

Rússia e China excluem Dólar de negócios.


É o começo do fim do dólar como moeda de reserva para transações internacionais? Como diz o texto do Zero Hedge (onde eu peguei o gráfico acima), nada é eterno mesmo.

Mas o governo Obama fez de tudo para destruir a força do dólar na economia mundial. Obama tem um completo desprezo pela história e força econômica do país que (mal) administra.

Vejamos o que diz parte do texto do RT news:

VTB, Russia’s second biggest lender, has signed a deal with Bank of China, which includes an agreement to pay each other in domestic currencies.
“Under the agreement, the banks plan to develop their partnership in a number of areas, including cooperation on ruble and renminbi settlements, investment banking, inter-bank lending, trade finance and capital-markets transactions,” says the official VTB statement.
The deal underlines VTB Group’s growing interest in Asian markets and will help grow trade between Russia and China that are already close trading partners, said VTB Bank Management Board Vasily Titov.
An Agreement on Cooperation was signed by Titov and Bank of China President Chen Siqing in Shanghai on Tuesday in the presence of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
VTB Group is Russia’s second biggest financial institution with more than 30 banks and financial firms in more than 20 countries. Its assets were estimated at 8.8 billion rubles as of 2013, with a profit of 100.5 billion rubles.

Growing trade and investment

The agreement comes as a part of Russia’s larger scale pivot to Asia, as Western economies threaten sanctions over the turmoil in Ukraine. Sanctions by the US and the EU have been mostly limited to visa bans and asset freezes on some leading Russian officials, and so far only threatening a so-called third round of real economic sanctions against Russian businesses.
In the first day of a two-day trip to China Russia’s President Vladimir Putin said the two countries will be increasing their bilateral trade to reach a new level.
“Our countries have done a huge job to reach a new historic landmark…. China has firmly settled in a position of our key trade partner,” Putin said.
...
In Shanghai Russia and China also agreed to set up a Committee on Investment Cooperation that will enable consultations between the countries’ first vice premiers and representatives of state and private companies.
“Together it’ll be possible to discuss investment in various projects much more efficiently and clearly,” as Interfax quotes Kirill Dmitriyev the head of Russia’s Direct Investment Fund.
In terms of concrete deals the Russia-China Investment Fund (RCIF) and Vcanland, a leading Chinese tourism developer, have agreed to invest $800 million in development of tourism and social projects.

segunda-feira, 19 de maio de 2014

Plágio na CNN (de novo). Empresa demite editora.


Outro dia, eu comentei aqui que o plágio é uma praga cada vez maior nas universidades, inclusive em Harvard. Ontem, eu li que a CNN demitiu a editora Marie-Louise Gumuchian, que cobria assuntos internacionais, porque foi comprovado pelo menos 50 plágios!

É o segundo problema de plágio da CNN, o primeiro foi do tão celebrado pela esquerdas Fared Zakaria, que copiou um artigo da revista New Yorker.

Vejam o que diz o texto do site Breibart.

CNN has discovered multiple instances of plagiarism by Marie-Louise Gumuchian, a former CNN news editor. She wrote frequently about international news, writing and reporting about Africa, Europe, and the Middle East from our London bureau.
This is the second instance of a CNN staffer plagiarizing in as many years. In August of 2012, CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria was suspended by the left-wing cable news network after he was caught copying from a New Yorker article.

E no Brasil? Imagino milhares de plágios em jornais e telejornais do Brasil. E milhões de plágios nas universidades do país.


(Agradeço a informação do Breibart ao site Weasel Zippers)


sábado, 17 de maio de 2014

Voto Não decide a Verdade seja em Ciência ou em Política

É muito comum ambientalistas, muitas vezes sem nenhuma formação científica, dizer que a "ciência está determinada, o homem é o grande causador da mudança climática".

Um texto de William Briggs coloca as coisa nos eixos. 1) A ciência não está determinada, nem nunca estará; 2) Há inúmeras evidências que o ser humano não é o grande causador da mudança climática; e 3) Nem a ciência, nem mesmo a política é decidida no voto.

Vou colocar aqui parte do texto de Briggs.  Leiam o resto clicando no link.

The Consensus Fallacy


Here is the word-for-word opening in the Vox “explanatory journalism” tidbit “John Oliver shows how to debate climate deniers“:
That climate change is occurring, and that humans are the primary cause, is beyond dispute at this point. Surveys have found that 97-98 percent of climate researchers and 97 percent of climate papers expressing a position on the subject agree with the consensus view that human-generated greenhouse gas emissions are causing climate change.
If one wants to claim the proposition “That humans are the primary cause of global warming is beyond dispute” is true, one immediately defeats oneself by saying only 97% of climate researchers agree. If 3%, or 2%, or 1%, or even just one solitary climate researcher, disagrees that humans are the primary cause of global warming, the proposition is not “beyond dispute”. It is, in stark opposition,actively disputed.
I am one of the climate researchers who disputes the proposition. Again, therefore, the proposition is not “beyond” dispute. Dispute is not only a live option, it is a respectable scientific position to take. It is not, of course, a politically correct position; no small point.
Because why? Because there is good evidence that the Vox tidbit writer meant his argument to be taken politically and not scientifically. For one, the writer has absolutely no scientific credentials and appears to believe that voting in science, like in politics, decides truth. For two, he badly summarizes the science: not one word on the more than two decades of failed forecasts, ample evidence that the theory which drove these predictions is probably false.
...
Voting does not decide truth, not in science nor in politics. Nor anywhere.
Now even if no climate researcher disagreed with the proposition above, it would still not be beyond dispute, because all experience shows empirically derived, which is to say scientific, theories are subject to updates, corrections, and even complete refutations. A theory as complex as global warming will almost surely be modified as time passes, not the least because it needs to fix its blush-inducing forecasts.
...
Votes are useful in deciding actions or settling conflicts in the face of uncertainty and differing priorities, but only where there is shared foundation underlying the disputes. Votes are useless, and even dangerous, to fix foundational truths. Desire is only coincident to truth, not its definition.
A failing society, by the way, is one which has lost its grasp of shared truth and begins to resettle questions which cannot be resettled by voting…by voting.