Sucesso Profissional e o Desespero da Vida Pessoal

Muita gente analisa o mundo apenas pelo aspecto econômico. A economia domina a análise política e social hoje em dia. Eu sou economista, mas fico extremamente triste ao observar isto. A economia surgiu do Direito que por sua vez surgiu da Filosofia e da Teologia. Mas hoje em dia a economia desapegou do Direito, não julga mais o certo ou errado, apenas procura acumular bens.

A Revista Veja, por exemplo, criticou o Papa Francisco quando ele comentou sobre os erros do capitalismo. O argumento da Veja é muito comum entre economistas e liberais: o mundo estaria muito melhor hoje por conta do avanço do capitalismo, as pessoas estariam mais felizes do que no passado pois tem mais acesso a bens. Será?

Quando eu viajo para Nova Iorque fico sempre estupefato ao ver as pessoas nas lojas brigando por objetos. Durante a chamada Black Friday há até mortes por conta de tênis.

Será que a carência humana é só para bens materiais: carros, casas, roupas, tênis, brinquedos,...? O valor dos bens materiais é tão grande que aqueles mais frágeis são mortos: as crianças nos ventres das mães.

Quantas mulheres abortaram no mundo, porque estavam pensando na vida profissional? Esta é a justificativa mais comum para matar as crianças.

Ontem, eu li um artigo que relata a vida de um casa de sucesso profissional em Nova Iorque, comecei a ler e não consegui para até chegar ao fim. Ela retrata muito bem onde estão os reais valores, e quando se perde eles, o "Diabo Dança".

O artigo saiu na Revista Regina, de autoria de Bervely Stevens. Leiam, é sensacional.

The Devil Is Dancing

At 28, I guess I would call myself successful. I have a university degree. I married my college boyfriend. We live in a rented apartment in brownstone Brooklyn. He is a computer genius, making a good salary at a Wall Street firm. I am the spokeswoman for a major American bank. We have a dog.

He is Jewish, from a non-practicing family on Long island. I also have a family on Long island, but mine is non-practicing Catholic. Although she was raised a Catholic, my mother insists that no priest has the power to forgive sins. Her sins, she says, are her own business. My father is retired; he plays golf five days a week.

Religion was not a big deal in my life, however. Marcus is an atheist. I am nothing, I guess. We were married three years ago by a Justice of the Peace, on the lawn of rented mansion in upstate New York. It was a great party.
Anyway, although I am successful, things are not great in my life.

Truth be told, my husband embarrasses me. He continues to smoke marijuana, a vice I gave up in college. He eats junk food constantly, and is in consequence vastly overweight. He chain-smokes cigarettes, and lately I have found lone butts, burnt out, standing up on our wooden dresser. There is an inch of ash on them. I clean them up without a word. It’s my job to clean the apartment; he walks the dog in Prospect Park.

In addition to all this, Marcus has now grown a beard, and has taken to wearing a black beret. He thinks he looks like Che Guevara. I just want him to grow up.

I’ve tried showing him examples, discretely, of what a grown up man our age looks like. There’s a guy at work I know, a rising young banker, who invited us out to dinner at a trendy place in the Village for a double-date with his wife, a pretty PR executive. Marcus arrived an hour late, dressed in his Che outfit, and spent the evening trying to bait the bewildered banker.

The next day, the banker asked me where I’d met my husband. 

“He’s a great guy, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that, he’s, well, not what we expected,” he said, sympathetically. “We wondered where you two had met.”

“In college,” I replied, indifferently. But inside I was burning.

That night, in a fury, I insisted that Marcus get help.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” I shouted. “But you need a shrink. Now!”

Marcus sat glumly, smoking. After an hour of parrying my demands to know what was going on, he’d thrust himself into a chair and gazed gloomily out the window.

“It’s not you,” he muttered darkly, avoiding my gaze. “It’s me. You should run away from me. Save yourself, while there’s time.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but two weeks later I found out. The therapist he’d located had insisted that I come to his office for a joint appointment.  I waited in the therapist’s chair, dressed for work and anxious, as he pulled out a piece of paper from his drawer.

“Marcus wants you to know that he is addicted to the following substances,” he said calmly, and began to read a list. The first word I heard was ‘cocaine.’ I heard ‘marijuana’ and ‘tobacco’ too, and some other drugs that I have never heard of. After that I stopped listening. 

Marcus was grinning sheepishly at me as the therapist read aloud. Pudgy, pale and nervous, he kept running his fingers through his long, unkempt hair. I looked down at my sensible navy blue pumps and the clear nail polish on my short, home-trimmed nails.

“Is this why that homeless guy walked up to me in the park the other day, when I was walking the dog?” I asked Marcus later, through clenched teeth. We were walking, hunched against the cold, to the subway. “He asked me if I knew you. Is he some ‘connection’ of yours?”

Marcus hung his head.

“Yeah, well that’s all past now,” he replied grimly. “I’m going cold turkey.”

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Marcus’s uncle Steve died a few days later. I’d actually never met this uncle; he’d been confined to a VA hospital for years. Steve had come home from Vietnam with PTSD and a hell of a heroin addiction. By 1980, he was deemed dangerous to his own life and others, as he kept nodding off with burning cigarettes in his fingers. By age 60, he was dead.

The only people at Steve’s funeral were Marcus’s mother and father and his two brothers. They’d found a rabbi on short notice, a sympathetic young man who’d agreed to say some words by the graveside.

“Just as long as the word ‘God’ isn’t mentioned,” Marcus’s father had said grimly. After the Shoah, Marcus’s whole family had ceased to believe in a God who could permit such horror to happen.

As Steve’s coffin was lowered into the snowy ground at the VA cemetery, I listened to the distress of the family around me. There was no hesitation in their grief. They sobbed hopelessly, as one. As I stood at the edge of that raw grave incised into the brown earth, I had never felt so desolate.

The young rabbi closed his book with finality, and looked at us. The family continued to cry, heedless of anything. As the only one with any wits about me, I stepped up awkwardly and shook his hand.

“Thank you, Father,” I said, without thinking, and then quickly realized my gaffe. “Oh, sorry…”

He laughed quietly, unoffended.

“I am a father,” he said, smiling. “…of two small children, if that counts.”

“Of course,” I said, shaking my head in dismay.

“You’re Catholic, I assume?” said the rabbi, as we started to walk out of the cemetery.

“Er, yes. My family is, anyway.”

“And you?”

“I, er, I don’t know what I am.” I answered him truthfully.  I gestured back at the open grave. “All I know is that this — this is not the end.”

The rabbi looked at me with surprise.

“I wish we all could be as certain as you are about such things,” he said gently. “Does this mean you believe in God?”

I thought about it for a moment.

“We love,” I replied suddenly, surprised by my own certainty. “Human beings love. We are born with that capacity. It’s innate.”

He nodded.

“You love your children, right?” I said.

He nodded again, regarding me carefully.

“That love came from somewhere.”

“Or from Someone, maybe?” he asked quietly.

Marcus and his family, immersed in their grief, did not hear our conversation.  At the cemetery gate, we all parted ways. Marcus and I drove back to the city, and he dropped me off at our apartment.

“I got a few things to do,” he said shortly, as I stepped out of the car. Ignoring my panicked expression, he drove off. He did not come back until very late that night, and he slept on the couch. He was gone without a word by the time I woke up this morning.

In my distress, I actually stopped by a church near where I work in mid-town on my lunch hour. I smelled incense as the heavy door closed behind me.  Up at the altar, far down the nave of this 19th century Gothic church, I could make out a priest in vestments. He was assisted by two grown men, one of whom was swinging an antique brass object disgorging smoke at a congregation of about 30 people.  A single voice rose up to the lofty ceilings– Gregorian chant, redolent of ancient times and old ways.

Looking around me, I saw that a light was on, above an old-fashioned confessional. There was a priest in there, safely concealed behind a screen.

The second I knelt behind that wooden door, a whole lake of tears I didn’t know was inside me welled up. Worse, before I could stop it, the dam broke and the lake poured out of me, in a continuous flow of wracking sobs.

“I-I’m s-sorry, F-Father,” I apologized, between gulps. I couldn’t speak. All I could do was cry.

“That’s all right, my dear,” said a sympathetic voice, with a soft Hispanic lilt. He pushed some Kleenex under the grille towards me, which I gratefully accepted. “Now, my daughter, you can start when you’re ready. I have time.”

It took me a few minutes to finally be able to speak, but when I did, all of my pain poured out. I told that priest about the grave, and the rabbi. About the hopelessness, and the despair. About Marcus, and his addiction. About my success, cold fury, and utter desolation.

“You are trapped by sin,” the priest said, when I had finally subsided. “Do you know what I mean by that?”

“N-no.”

“Sin is addictive. Because the Devil – you believe in him? I do. Well, the Devil, he wants us to be miserable. Hopeless. Despairing. This way he can do his dirty work more easily. If we are miserable, we are open to all kinds of bad things. And so, it goes, always downward, in a spiral. Do you understand me?”

“Y-yes,” I whispered, wondering where this was going.

“Ah, so here it is. Your husband comes from a family who is angry with God. So they deny His existence. Your husband denies His existence, too. Correct? You are with me so far?”

“Yes,” I affirmed, snuffling.

“This is very dangerous for them, because it makes them miserable. They stand at the edge of a grave and ask, why? And they receive no answer. It is only the grave that they see. Nothing more. And they know it is their end, too. An open grave is a distressing thing, no?”

“Yes,” I replied, the specter of the raw earth of the grave rising before me. I shivered involuntarily.

“So they are even more miserable. Even their rabbi cannot reach them. Though I do think there is hope for them, simply because they reached out to this rabbi. But this is not enough for your husband. His pain, his despair, sends him back to the drugs, correct?”

“Y-yes,” I nodded in the darkness.

“This is a situation where the Devil is dancing with delight. He is dancing because your husband and his family are choosing despair. Like his uncle, your husband is choosing death, over life. And this is very, very sad,” he sighed heavily.

I nodded again. This was all terribly true.

“Do you think that your husband would stop this behavior if you were not around?” he asked gently.

I thought about that.

“No,” I sighed, with finality. “I –my existence — actually doesn’t make any difference to him. If you come right down to it, I’m useful because I make money, and keep his house clean — though he doesn’t seem to care about that.”

I told him about the cigarette butts and the standing ash, left to burn down on the wooden dresser.

“Hmmm, this can cause a fire, you know,” the priest said gravely. “Your life may be in danger from this, you know.”

“Right,” I said uncomfortably. I was ashamed about this, for some reason. Ashamed to have other people know how badly Marcus acted.

“But it is more than your life, I think, that is in danger,” the priest continued in a mild, un-reproving tone of voice. “You seem pretty miserable, too. Your soul is in danger. And that makes the Devil happy.”

I shrugged, uncomprehending, in the darkness.

“But you want to know what I think?  I think the Devil was not too happy at that graveside, yesterday,” he persisted gently. “And this was because of you. You stood at the very edge of that grave, and then you turned and walked away. This was very profound.”

I waited to hear what he had to say next.

“And then what happened?” he asked me sharply.

“A-after I walked away from the grave? I-I spoke to the rabbi,” I recounted, somewhat confused.

“Yes. Then you spoke to a man of God, that rabbi. And you told him what?”

“That I couldn’t believe that the grave was the end,” I whispered back, this time with conviction. “And I still don’t believe it.”

“And this idea that you have, that you are so convinced of, is something you have received. It is a grace from God,” the priest said soberly.

“Yeah?” I replied, not knowing what to think.

“Yes. Most definitely. And these are things we cannot earn. This is faith. And it comes to us as a free gift from God. Do you understand me, my daughter?”

I wasn’t sure.

“You mean that I am somehow different from Marcus, and his family.”

“Yes, I mean that. You are different.”

I thought about this. It was true. Though I loved Marcus and his family, I was not like them. I was not an atheist. I could not live always at the edge of a raw grave. Life was too good, too full of good things. And I could not blunt the pain of this raw grave with drugs, or with anything else.

“You turned away from that grave and talked to a man of God about Life.”

“Y-yes, I did. And you’re right, Father. I am all about Life. I choose Life. I don’t choose the Grave,” I whispered fiercely.

“And what did Jesus say?” replied the priest. “He said, ‘I am the Way, and the Truth and the Life.”

“Y-yes,” I said, somewhat uncertainly. I had heard that Bible verse.

“And what does the Bible say that He said right after that? He said to the Apostles, ‘No one comes to the Father but through Me.’”

“Y-yes,” I said, still uncertain.

“I think you have come to a point in the path of your life when you must choose: Life or death. Which will it be?”

Suddenly, I understood.  I was certain of this answer.

“I choose Life, Father,” I said firmly, the tears welling up in my eyes again.

“Good for you!” The priest declared heartily. “You have chosen the right path.”

I smiled through my tears.

“But now, my daughter, I have to tell you. This is not the end of it. The Devil will not rest; he will not give up on you. This choice you have made – life over death — you must keep making this choice, over and over, until the end of your life.”

There was more, but in the end, he gave me absolution.

It’s difficult to convey how I felt when I emerged from that confessional, into that darkened church. Utterly drained, but completely at peace, with a clean heart.

I had chosen. The Devil was no longer dancing all over my life.

Now, we were at war.

Somehow, I knew that. I also knew that that confessional was the only place on earth I could have gone for the truth.

And I knew that the Truth had set me free.

(Agradeço o texto de Bervely ao site Big Pulpit)

Larry Summers vs John Taylor: Os Estados Unidos estão crescendo? O QE deve acabar?

Bom, eu digo há muito tempo o que diz John Taylor, então concordo com ele, o tal quantitative easing é um fracasso e a economia americana está estagnada. Discordo apenas da ideia que ele compartilha com Summers de que os estímulos fiscais de 2009 nos Estados Unidos foram poucos.

Discordo disso veementemente, os valores foram elevadíssimos, mas mal aplicado como os gastos fiscais de governos costumam ser, e também, como é rotina, não conseguem alavancar a economia. E discordo de Jorgenson que diz que Janet Yellen apoia o que pensa Taylor, ela está mais para Summers.

Vejam o debate revelado pelo Wall Street Journal entre Larry Summers e John Taylor.

Economists Spar Over U.S. Recovery 

PHILADELPHIA—Economists John Taylor and Larry Summers exchanged pointed words Saturday about the best approach to spurring the economic recovery.

 

The exchange came amid a discussion on “Rapid Growth or Stagnation for the United States Economy?” at the American Economic Association meeting here.

 

Mr. Taylor, of Stanford University, suggested that the slow recovery—and the economy’s downward trajectory during the 2007-2009 recession—was in part due to the movement of regulatory, monetary and fiscal policy toward “more discretion, more intervention and less predictability.”

 
As examples of unusual policy steps surrounding the crisis, Mr. Taylor cited the government’s bailouts of financial institutions as well as the Federal Reserve’s bond-buying stimulus, known as quantitative easing.

Monetary, fiscal and regulatory policy should “get back to regular order,” Mr. Taylor said, to permit growth to pick up. “Get rid of this QE stuff,” he advised, and return to “rules-based monetary policy.”

Mr. Summers, of Harvard, said that extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures and not a blind perseverance on a given course that may have worked in the past. Mr. Summers was an adviser to President Barack Obama early in his first term, when a sweeping stimulus act was passed.

Do I want my doctor to be “consistently predictable or responsive to” a particular health emergency, Mr. Summers asked. Better, he answered, to have a doctor “evaluating my condition and responding appropriately.”

Mr. Taylor acknowledged that, “It’s great to have the all-knowing doctor,” but added that history bears out that the economy does better when policy is “predictable…and rules-based.”
Messrs. Taylor and Summers were joined on the panel by Harvard’s Martin Feldstein and 2004 Nobel laureate Edward C. Prescott of Arizona State University.

Summing up the discussion, Harvard University’s Dale Jorgenson pointed out that the panelists appeared to agree that economic output is short of its potential—and that the 2009 fiscal stimulus wasn’t a bold enough step to kick-start the recovery. The panelists also appeared to agree, Mr. Jorgenson said, that the solution to faster growth lies in policy.

As far as the panel’s headline question, “We are closer to an economy that is stagnating” than growing, Mr. Jorgenson said.

He noted that things look favorable for Mr. Taylor’s preferences for monetary policy. Janet Yellen, who is expected to be confirmed as soon as Monday by the Senate as chairman of the Federal Reserve, told last year’s AEA meeting that she backs “rules-based policy,” Mr. Jorgenson said.

Mr. Feldstein injected an optimistic note into the outlook. “I think 2014 has a much better shot than we’ve had in the last several years of producing stronger growth. We don’t have the kind of fiscal drag that we had before” he said, and consumer spending is up as housing and stock markets have risen.

The prospects are so good, he added, that next year’s AEA meeting could well feature a panel asking “Do we have to worry about overheating?”

As Cervejas dos Monges

As melhores cervejas para mim (que adoro cervejas) são as cervejas trapistas, feitas por monges. Você pode achar que esta minha escolha é influenciada pelo fato de eu ser católico, claro que é. Mas regularmente elas são escolhidas por mestres cervejeiros como as melhores cervejas do mundo, especialmente a Westvletern (a escura sem rótulo acima).

Também gosto de cervejas que não são trapistas, como a Guiness e a Leffe. Mas você já experimentou uma cerveja trapista? Não têm igual a elas.

O site St.Peter List publicou a lista da 10 cervejas trapistas oficiais do mundo, é um texto que foi atualizado com a certificação de três novas trapistas: uma da Aústria, outra dos Estados Unidos e outra da Holanda. 

O site também esclarece as condições para ser trapista, como ser feita por monges e não visar o lucro mas assistência social.

Vejam texto do St.Peter List abaixo: 

The 10 Authentic Trappist Monk Beers

by SPL Staff on Dec 20, 2013

 

Logo of the International Trappist Association

International Trappist Association & Standards

In 1997, eight Trappist abbeys—six from Belgium (Orval, Chimay, Westvleteren, Rochefort, Westmalle and Achel), one from the Netherlands (Koningshoeven) and one from Germany (Mariawald) – founded the International Trappist Association (ITA) to prevent non-Trappist commercial companies from abusing the Trappist name. This private association created a logo that is assigned to goods (cheese, beer, wine, etc.) that respect precise production criteria. For the beers, these criteria are the following:

1. The beer must be brewed within the walls of a Trappist abbey, by or under control of Trappist monks.
2. The brewery, the choices of brewing, and the commercial orientations must obviously depend on the monastic community.
3. The economic purpose of the brewery must be directed toward assistance and not toward financial profit.

This association has a legal standing, and its logo gives to the consumer some information and guarantees about the produce.¹

The Authentic Trappist Product Ales

1. Westmalle

The Trappist abbey in Westmalle (officially called Abdij Onze-Lieve-Vrouw van het Heilig Hart van Jezus) was founded 6 June 1794, but the community was not elevated to the rank of Trappist abbey until 22 April 1836. Martinus Dom, the first abbot, decided the abbey would brew its own beer, and the first beer was brewed on 1 August 1836 and first imbibed on 10 December 1836. The pioneer brewers were Father Bonaventura Hermans and Albericus Kemps.

The first beer was described as light in alcohol and rather sweet. By 1856, the monks had added a second beer: the first strong brown beer. This brown beer is today considered the first double (dubbel, in Dutch). The current Dubbel is derived from a recipe first brewed in 1926. Local sales began in 1856 and the oldest registered sale was on 1 January 1861. The brewery was enlarged and rebuilt in 1865 based on the example set by the Trappists of Forges (nearby Chimay). Father Ignatius van Ham joined the brewer team. Further commercialisation and sales to traders commenced in 1921.

In 1933 a complete new brewery was built and in 1934, the brewery brewed a strong pale ale of 9.5% abv giving it the name Tripel – the first modern use of the name. The brewery was remodeled in 1991. It currently has a bottling capacity of 45,000 bottles per hour, and yearly output of 120,000 hL (in 2004). The majority of the workers in the brewery are no longer monks, but secular staff brought in from outside. There are 22 monks and 40 outside staff.²

2. Westvleteren

Trappist monks from the Catsberg monastery, located in France, founded the St Sixtus monastery in 1831. In 1838, the brewing at Westvleteren commenced. In 1850, some of the monks founded the Notre-Dame de Scourmont monastery, which also brews a Trappist beer. During World Wars I and II, the Westvleteren brewery continued to operate, albeit at a lower capacity. The brewery was the only Trappist one to retain the copper vessels throughout the wars—the other breweries had the copper salvaged by the Germans for their war efforts.

In WWI this was primarily due to the abbey not being occupied by the Germans, but instead was caring for wounded allied troops. In 1931, the abbey began selling beer to the general public, having only served beer to guests and visitors up until that time. In 1946, the St. Bernardus brewery in nearby Watou was granted a licence to brew beer under the St Sixtus name. This agreement ended in 1992; St. Bernardus still brews beers of similar styles, but under their own name. That same year, the abbey opened its new brewery to replace the older equipment.

The brewery currently employs three secular workers for various manual labour tasks, however the primary brewing is done by the monks only. It is the only Trappist brewery where the monks still do all of the brewing. Of the 26 Cistercians who reside at the abbey, five monks run the brewery, with an additional five who assist during bottling.

In June 2005, when Westvleteren 12 was again highlighted as “Best Beer in the World” in a bi-annual competition on RateBeer.com, news organizations followed this up and articles appeared in the international press, highlighting the beer ranking and the unusual business policies.

3. Achel

Achel brewery or Brouwerij der Sint-Benedictusabdij de Achelse Kluis is a Belgian Trappist brewery, and the smallest of the seven currently approved Trappist breweries. It is located in the Abbey of Saint Benedict in the Belgian municipality of Achel. It brews five trappist beers.

The history of the brewery goes back to 1648, when Dutch monks built a chapel in Achel. The chapel became an abbey in 1686, but was destroyed during the period of the French Revolution. In 1844, the ruins were rebuilt by monks from Westmalle, and various farming activities began. The first beer to be brewed on the site was the Patersvaatje in 1852, and 19 years later in 1871, the site became a Trappist monastery, with beer brewing a regular activity.

In 1914 during World War I, the monks left the abbey due to German occupation. The Germans dismantled the brewery in 1917 to salvage the approximately 700 kg of copper. In 1998 the monks decided to begin brewing again. Monks from the Trappist Abbey of Westmalle and Rochefort Abbey assisted in the building of the new brewery. In 2001, the brewery released the Achel 8° beers.

Like all other Trappist breweries, the beers are sold in order to support the monastery and charities.

4. Chimay

Chimay Brewery (“Bières de Chimay”) is a beer brewery in Chimay, southern Hainaut, Belgium. The brewery is located in the Scourmont Abbey, a Trappist monastery, and is one of the seven breweries worldwide that produce Trappist beer. They make three widely distributed ales: Chimay Rouge, Chimay Bleue, and Chimay Blanche; and they make one patersbier exclusively for the monks. The monastery also makes four varieties of cheese.

The brewery was founded inside Scourmont Abbey, in the Belgian municipality of Chimay in 1862. The brewery produces three widely distributed ales and a patersbier exclusively for the monks; they are known as Trappist beers because they are made in a Trappist monastery. It was the first brewery to use the Trappist Ale designation on its labels.

As with all other Trappist breweries, the beer is sold only for financial support of the monastery and good causes. The brewery business pays rent for use of the property within the abbey, which is used to support the monastic community. The majority of the profit from the sale of the beer is distributed to charities and for community development around the region. As of 2007, sales figures for Chimay products exceeded $50 million per year.

The water for the beers is drawn from a well located inside the monastery walls. The filtered solids from the beer mash are recycled into livestock feed which is given to the same cows that produce the milk for Chimay cheeses. The beer is transported from the monastery to the bottling plant 12 km away, which can fill 40,000 bottles per hour, of which many are returns. The beer is then refermented in the bottle for three weeks before being shipped around the world. Fifty percent of Chimay beer production is sold on the export markets.

The brewing plant was updated in 1988, and as of 2005 produced 12 megalitres annually.

5. Rochefort

The brewery is located inside the Abbey of Notre-Dame de Saint-Rémy, near the town of Rochefort, and has been brewing beer since 1595. There are approximately 15 monks resident at the monastery. The monks are very secretive about the brewing process and the brewery is not open to the public, therefore much of the information publicly known about the brewery comes from only a few sources.

Like many strong Belgian beers, those produced at Rochefort age well and can be cellared for at least five years whilst maintaining quality. Each of these beers is brewed to the same recipe, with the only difference being the alcoholic content.The water for the beers is drawn from a well located inside the monastery walls.

As with all other Trappist breweries, the beer is only sold in order to financially support the monastery and some other charitable causes. The monks will not increase production based on demand or profit motives, but only enough to support themselves, resulting in a fairly limited supply of beer. In practice, there is currently no shortage through regular channels.

6. Orval

Orval Brewery (French: Brasserie d’Orval) is a Belgian trappist brewery located within the walls of the Abbaye Notre-Dame d’Orval in the Gaume region of Belgium. The brewery produces two beers, which are marketed as trappist beer, Orval and Petite Orval.

Evidence of brewing goes back to the earliest days of the monastery. A document written by the abbot in 1628 directly refers to the consumption of beer and wine by the monks. The last of the brewers to be a monk was Brother Pierre, up until the 1793 fire. In 1931 the present day brewery was built, employing lay people and intended to provide a source of funds for the monastery reconstruction. It was designed by Henry Vaes, who also designed the distinctive Orval beer glass. The first beer was shipped from the brewery on 7 May 1932, and was sold in barrels rather than the bottles of today. Orval was the first Trappist beer to be sold nationally around Belgium.⁷

7. Koningshoeven

De Koningshoeven Brewery (Brouwerij de Koningshoeven) is a Dutch Trappist brewery founded in 1884 within the walls of the abbey Onze Lieve Vrouw van Koningshoeven in Berkel-Enschot (near Tilburg).

The abbey opened a brewery inside the monastery in 1884 in order to finance the monastery and contribute to charitable causes. Despite this goal, the brewery was run as a commercial enterprise. The abbey owned several bars in the area and produced lager under its own “Trappist” brand as well as contract brewing for several private labels. In 1969, the abbey licensed the brewing operations to the Artois Brewery (now InBev). In 1980 the deal with Artois ended, and the monks went back to brewing themselves, this time a top fermented beer which had been made in limited quantities since 1950s only. Over time the brewery introduced more varieties, first with Dubbel and Tripel in 1987, then in 1992 they introduced Blond. Between 1993 and 2000, the brewery also marketed a brand called Enkel. The brewery also produces the world’s only Trappist witbier. The brewery also used to produce the Jopen beer.The brewery started exporting in 1985, and in 1989 the brewery was modernised.

From 1980 until 1999, the brewery was largely run by the monks. Due to the difficulty of the ageing monks continuing to operate the brewery, a limited liability company was set up as a subsidiary of the large commercial brewer, Bavaria. In 1999 the new company began to take over day to day operations, renting the buildings and equipment from the abbey.

As a result of this agreement, a dispute arose with the International Trappist Association, the body that governs the labelling of goods as Trappist. They claimed that this new method of operation was against the regulations that permitted the beer to display the Authentic Trappist Product logo. Whilst the beer continued to be brewed within the abbey walls, the arrangement with Bavaria was felt to be too commercialised. As a result, the brewery withdrew their use of the logo on 1 December 1999. However, the brewery continued to label the beer as Trappistenbier.

After a lengthy study by all parties, and a review of the agreement between the abbey and brewery, the beers were granted the right to display the logo again as of September 9, 2005. As part of this settlement, the monks have taken a more active control of the brewery day to day operations, working several hours each day.

This post was updated on December 20, 2013 to include three new additions to the official list of Trappist Ales. The list was originally posted August 11, 2011.

8. Stift Engelszell

In 2012, the Abbey of Engelszell in Engelhartszell, Austria started a their own brewery and began production of their unique Trappist ales: Gregorius and Benno. The Austrian abbey received permission to use the “Authentic Trappist Product” logo the same year. According to the official website, the first brew was the Gregorius and is a dark triple sitting at 9.7% Alc. Production on the Gregorius began in June 1, 2012 with the second variety following on May, 30, 2013. The second beer, Benno, is a bright Dubbel style beer sitting at 6.9% Alc.

The abbey was founded in 1293 by Bernhard of Prambach, Bishop of Passau, as a Cistercian monastery. In 1786, Engelszell was dissolved by Emperor Joseph II and the buildings were subsequently put to several secular uses, including as a factory and as a residence.

In 1925, Engelszell was occupied and re-founded as a Trappist monastery by refugee German monks expelled after World War I from Oelenberg Abbey in Alsace. These monks had found temporary shelter in Banz Abbey but were looking for a permanent home. Initially established as a priory, in 1931 it was elevated to the rank of an abbey, and the former prior, Gregorius Eisvogel, appointed abbot, in which office he was dedicated by Johannes Maria Gföllner, Bishop of Linz, at a ceremony in Wilhering Abbey. On 2 December 1939, the abbey was confiscated by the Gestapo and the community, numbering 73, evicted. Four monks were sent to Dachau Concentration Camp, while others were imprisoned elsewhere or drafted into the Wehrmacht. At the end of the war in 1945, only about a third of the previous community returned. They were augmented, however, by the refugee German Trappists expelled from Mariastern Abbey, Banja Luka, Bosnia, under their abbot Bonaventura Diamant.

The monastery lives mostly from its agricultural produce. It has become known both for its liqueurs and for its cheese, Engelszeller Trappistenkäse. In May 2012, the International Trappist Association approved Engelszell to be the 8th producer of Trappist beer, and only the second outside of Belgium.

9. St. Joseph’s Abbey

St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts is the first American monastery to produce an official Trappist Ale and the first outside of Europe. The abbey was awarded the right to use the “Authentic Trappist Product” logo in 2013.

“At a meeting yesterday of the International Trappist Association in Brussels, the Spencer Trappist Ale was awarded the ‘Authentic Trappist Product’ designation,” François de Harenne, Commercial Director of the Orval Trappist brewery, told the Belgian Beer Specialist on Dec. 11.“The decision was made after several controls made on the premises during the last weeks…We also were lucky enough to taste the beer.”

According to the official website of the brewery, “Our recipe was inspired by the traditional refectory ales known as patersbier (“fathers’ beer” in Flemish). These sessionable beers are brewed by the monks for their dinner table and are typically only available at the monastery. Spencer is a full-bodied, golden-hued ale with fruity accents, a dry finish and light hop bitterness. The beer is unfiltered and unpasteurized, preserving live yeast that naturally carbonates the beer in the bottle and keg, and contributes to the beer flavor and aroma.” The beer will sit at 6.5% Alc.

10. Abdij Maria Toevlucht

The Maria Toevlucht Trappist Abbey received permission in December 2013 to use the “Authentic Trappist Product” logo alongside the Trappist Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts.

The official website does confirms a brewery has been constructed and the monastery has been accepted into the “Trappist market.”

Greenspan quer modelar o Espírito Animal

Alan Greenspan escreveu para a Foreign Affairs. O que penso do que ele escreveu foi muito bem resumido pelo site Zero Hedge: Alan Greenspan não aprendeu nada. Ele diz que a culpa dos erros dos modelos econômicos é a irracionalidade humana, até aí tudo bem, tudo certo. Mas a solução que ele oferece é modelar esta irracionalidade. Aí, realmente ele não aprende nada.

Coloquei em negrito esta contradição do argumento de Greenspan, leiam abaixo:

Never Saw It Coming

Why the Financial Crisis Took Economists By Surprise
by Alan Greenspan

It was a call I never expected to receive. I had just returned home from playing indoor tennis on the chilly, windy Sunday afternoon of March 16, 2008. A senior official of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board of Governors was on the phone to discuss the board’s recent invocation, for the first time in decades, of the obscure but explosive Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act. Broadly interpreted, that section empowered the Federal Reserve to lend nearly unlimited cash to virtually anybody: in this case, the Fed planned to loan nearly $29 billion to J.P. Morgan to facilitate the bank’s acquisition of the investment firm Bear Stearns, which was on the edge of bankruptcy, having run through nearly $20 billion of cash in the previous week.

The demise of Bear Stearns was the beginning of a six-month erosion in global financial stability that would culminate with the failure of Lehman Brothers on September 15, 2008, triggering possibly the greatest financial crisis in history. To be sure, the Great Depression of the 1930s involved a far greater collapse in economic activity. But never before had short-term financial markets, the facilitators of everyday commerce, shut down on a global scale. As investors swung from euphoria to fear, deeply liquid markets dried up overnight, leading to a worldwide contraction in economic activity.

The financial crisis that ensued represented an existential crisis for economic forecasting. The conventional method of predicting macroeconomic developments -- econometric modeling, the roots of which lie in the work of John Maynard Keynes -- had failed when it was needed most, much to the chagrin of economists. In the run-up to the crisis, the Federal Reserve Board’s sophisticated forecasting system did not foresee the major risks to the global economy. Nor did the model developed by the International Monetary Fund, which concluded as late as the spring of 2007 that “global economic risks [had] declined” since September 2006 and that “the overall U.S. economy is holding up well . . . [and] the signs elsewhere are very encouraging.”

On September 12, 2008, just three days before the crisis began, J.P. Morgan, arguably the United States’ premier financial institution, projected that the U.S. GDP growth rate would accelerate during the first half of 2009. The pre-crisis view of most professional analysts and forecasters was perhaps best summed up in December 2006 by The Economist: “Market capitalism, the engine that runs most of the world economy, seems to be doing its job well.”

What went wrong? Why was virtually every economist and policymaker of note so blind to the coming calamity? How did so many experts, including me, fail to see it approaching? I have come to see that an important part of the answers to those questions is a very old idea: “animal spirits,” the term Keynes famously coined in 1936 to refer to “a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction.” Keynes was talking about an impulse that compels economic activity, but economists now use the term “animal spirits” to also refer to fears that stifle action. Keynes was hardly the first person to note the importance of irrational factors in economic decision-making, and economists surely did not lose sight of their significance in the decades that followed. The trouble is that such behavior is hard to measure and stubbornly resistant to any systematic analysis. For decades, most economists, including me, had concluded that irrational factors could not fit into any reliable method of forecasting.

Financial firms believed that if a crisis developed, the insatiable demand for exotic products would dissipate only slowly. They were mistaken.

But after several years of closely studying the manifestations of animal spirits during times of severe crisis, I have come to believe that people, especially during periods of extreme economic stress, act in ways that are more predictable than economists have traditionally understood. More important, such behavior can be measured and should be made an integral part of economic forecasting and economic policymaking. Spirits, it turns out, display consistencies that can help economists identify emerging price bubbles in equities, commodities, and exchange rates -- and can even help them anticipate the economic consequences of those assets’ ultimate collapse and recovery.

SPIRITS IN THE MATERIAL WORLD

 The economics of animal spirits, broadly speaking, covers a wide range of human actions and overlaps with much of the relatively new discipline of behavioral economics. The study aims to incorporate a more realistic version of behavior than the model of the wholly rational Homo economicus used for so long. Evidence indicates that this more realistic view of the way people behave in their day-by-day activities in the marketplace traces a path of economic growth that is somewhat lower than would be the case if people were truly rational economic actors. If people acted at the level of rationality presumed in standard economics textbooks, the world’s standard of living would be measurably higher.

From the perspective of a forecaster, the issue is not whether behavior is rational but whether it is sufficiently repetitive and systematic to be numerically measured and predicted. The challenge is to better understand what Daniel Kahneman, a leading behavioral economist, refers to as “fast thinking”: the quick-reaction judgments on which people tend to base much, if not all, of their day-to-day decisions about financial markets. No one is immune to the emotions of fear and euphoria, which are among the predominant drivers of speculative markets. But people respond to fear and euphoria in different ways, and those responses create specific, observable patterns of thought and behavior.

Perhaps the animal spirit most crucial to forecasting is risk aversion. The process of choosing which risks to take and which to avoid determines the relative pricing structure of markets, which in turn guides the flow of savings into investment, the critical function of finance. Risk taking is essential to living, but the question is whether more risk taking is better than less. If it were, the demand for lower-quality bonds would exceed the demand for “risk-free” bonds, such as U.S. Treasury securities, and high-quality bonds would yield more than low-quality bonds. It is not, and they do not, from which one can infer the obvious: risk taking is necessary, but it is not something the vast majority of people actively seek.

The bounds of risk tolerance can best be measured by financial market yield spreads -- that is, the difference between the yields of private-sector bonds and the yields of U.S. Treasuries. Such spreads exhibit surprisingly little change over time. The yield spreads between prime corporate bonds and U.S. Treasuries in the immediate post‒Civil War years, for example, were similar to those for the years following World War II. This remarkable equivalence suggests long-term stability in the degree of risk aversion in the United States.

Another powerful animal spirit is time preference, the propensity to value more highly a claim to an asset today than a claim to that same asset at some fixed time in the future. A promise delivered tomorrow is not as valuable as that promise conveyed today. Investors experience this phenomenon mostly through its most visible counterparts: interest rates and savings rates. Like risk aversion, time preference has proved remarkably stable: indeed, in Greece in the fifth century BC, interest rates were at levels similar to those of today’s rates. From 1694 to 1972, the Bank of England’s official policy rate ranged from two to ten percent. It surged to 17 percent during the inflationary late 1970s, but it has since returned to single digits.

Time preference also affects people’s propensity to save. A strong preference for immediate consumption diminishes a person’s tendency to save, whereas a high preference for saving diminishes the propensity to consume. Through most of human history, time preference did not have a major determining role in the level of savings, because prior to the late nineteenth century, most people had to consume virtually all they produced simply to stay alive. There was little left over to save even if people were innately inclined to do so. It was only when the innovation and productivity growth of the Industrial Revolution freed people from the grip of chronic starvation that time preference emerged as a significant -- and remarkably stable -- economic force. Consider that although real household incomes have risen significantly since the late nineteenth century, average savings rates have not risen as a consequence. In fact, during periods of peace in the United States since 1897, personal savings as a share of disposable personal income have almost always stayed within a relatively narrow range of five to ten percent.

THE JESSEL PARADOX

In addition to the stable and predictable effects of time preference, another animal spirit is at work in these long-term trends: “conspicuous consumption,” as the economist Thorstein Veblen labeled it more than a century ago, a form of herd behavior captured by the more modern idiom “keeping up with the Joneses.” Saving and consumption reflect people’s efforts to maximize their happiness. But happiness depends far more on how people’s incomes compare with those of their perceived peers, or even those of their role models, than on how they are doing in absolute terms. In 1995, researchers asked a group of graduate students and staff members at the Harvard School of Public Health whether they would be happier earning $50,000 a year if their peers earned half that amount or $100,000 if their peers earned twice that amount; the majority chose the lower salary. That finding echoed the results of a fascinating 1947 study by the economists Dorothy Brady and Rose Friedman, demonstrating that the share of income an American family spent on consumer goods and services was largely determined not by its income but by how its income compared to the national average.

Surveys indicate that a family with an average income in 2011 spent the same proportion of its income as a family with an average income in 1900, even though in inflation-adjusted terms, the 1900 income would represent only a minor fraction of the 2011 figure.

Such herd behavior also drives speculative booms and busts. When a herd commits to a bull market, the market becomes highly vulnerable to what I dub the Jessel Paradox, after the vaudeville comedian George Jessel. In one of his routines, Jessel told the story of a skeptical investor who reluctantly decides to invest in stocks. He starts by buying 100 shares of a rarely traded, fly-by-night company. Surprise, surprise -- the price moves from $10 per share to $11 per share. Encouraged that he has become a wise investor, he buys more. Finally, when his own purchases have managed to bid the price up to $30 per share, he decides to cash in. He calls his broker to sell out his position. The broker hesitates and then responds, “To whom?”

Classic market bubbles take shape when herd behavior induces almost every investor to act like the one in Jessel’s joke. Bears become bulls, propelling prices ever higher. In the archetypal case, at the top of the market, everyone has turned into a believer and is fully committed, leaving no unconverted skeptics left to buy from the first new seller.

That was, in essence, what happened in 2008. By the spring of 2007, yield spreads in debt markets had narrowed dramatically; the spread between “junk” bonds that were rated CCC or lower and ten-year U.S. Treasury notes had fallen to an exceptionally low level. Almost all market participants were aware of the growing risks, but they also knew that a bubble could keep expanding for years. Financial firms thus feared that should they retrench too soon, they would almost surely lose market share, perhaps irretrievably. In July 2007, the chair and CEO of Citigroup, Charles Prince, expressed that fear in a now-famous remark: “When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.”

Financial firms accepted the risk that they would be unable to anticipate the onset of a crisis in time to retrench. However, they thought the risk was limited, believing that even if a crisis developed, the seemingly insatiable demand for exotic financial products would dissipate only slowly, allowing them to sell almost all their portfolios without loss. They were mistaken. They failed to recognize that market liquidity is largely a function of the degree of investors’ risk aversion, the most dominant animal spirit that drives financial markets. Leading up to the onset of the crisis, the decreased risk aversion among investors had produced increasingly narrow credit yield spreads and heavy trading volumes, creating the appearance of liquidity and the illusion that firms could sell almost anything. But when fear-induced market retrenchment set in, that liquidity disappeared overnight, as buyers pulled back. In fact, in many markets, at the height of the crisis of 2008, bids virtually disappeared.

FAT TAILS ON THIN ICE

Financial firms could have protected themselves against the costs of their increased risk taking if they had remained adequately capitalized -- if, in other words, they had prepared for a very rainy day. Regrettably, they had not, and the dangers that their lack of preparedness posed were not fully appreciated, even in the commercial banking sector. For example, in 2006, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, speaking on behalf of all U.S. bank regulators, judged that “more than 99 percent of all insured institutions met or exceeded the requirements of the highest regulatory capital standards.”

What explains the failure of the large array of fail-safe buffers that were supposed to counter developing crises? Investors and economists believed that a sophisticated global system of financial risk management could contain market breakdowns. The risk-management paradigm that had its genesis in the work of such Nobel Prize–winning economists as Harry Markowitz, Robert Merton, and Myron Scholes was so thoroughly embraced by academia, central banks, and regulators that by 2006 it had become the core of the global bank regulatory standards known as Basel II. Global banks were authorized, within limits, to apply their own company-specific risk-based models to judge their capital requirements. Most of those models produced parameters based only on the last quarter century of observations. But even a sophisticated number-crunching model that covered the last five decades would not have anticipated the crisis that loomed.

Mathematical models that calibrate risk are nonetheless surely better guides to risk assessment than the “rule of thumb” judgments of a half century earlier. To this day, it is hard to find fault with the conceptual framework of such models, as far as they go. The elegant options-pricing model developed by Scholes and his late colleague Fischer Black is no less valid or useful today than when it was developed, in 1973. But in the growing state of euphoria in the years before the 2008 crash, private risk managers, the Federal Reserve, and other regulators failed to ensure that financial institutions were adequately capitalized, in part because we all failed to comprehend the underlying magnitude and full extent of the risks that were about to be revealed as the post-Lehman crisis played out. In particular, we failed to fully comprehend the size of the expansion of so-called tail risk.

“Tail risk” refers to the class of investment outcomes that occur with very low probabilities but that are accompanied by very large losses when they do materialize. Economists have assumed that if people acted solely to maximize their own self-interest, their actions would produce long-term growth paths consistent with their abilities to increase productivity. But because people lacked omniscience, the actual outcomes of their risk taking would reflect random deviations from long-term trends. And those deviations, with enough observations, would tend to be distributed in a manner similar to the outcomes of successive coin tosses, following what economists call a normal distribution: a bell curve with “tails” that rapidly taper off as the probability of occurrence diminishes.

Those assumptions have been tested in recent decades, as a number of once-in-a-lifetime phenomena have occurred with a frequency too high to credibly attribute to pure chance. The most vivid example is the wholly unprecedented stock-price crash on October 19, 1987, which propelled the Dow Jones Industrial Average down by more than 20 percent in a single day. No conventional graph of probability distribution would have predicted that crash. Accordingly, many economists began to speculate that the negative tail of financial risk was much “fatter” than had been assumed -- in other words, the global financial system was far more vulnerable than most models showed.

In fact, as became clear in the wake of the Lehman collapse, the tail was morbidly obese. As a consequence of an underestimation of that risk, financial firms failed to anticipate the amount of additional capital that would be required to serve as an adequate buffer when the financial system was jolted.

MUGGED BY REALITY

The 2008 financial collapse has provided reams of new data on negative tail risk; the challenge will be to use the new data to develop a more realistic assessment of the range and probabilities of financial outcomes, with an emphasis on those that pose the greatest dangers to the financial system and the economy. One can hope that in a future financial crisis -- and there will surely be one -- economists, investors, and regulators will better understand how fat-tail markets work. Doing so will require better models, ones that more accurately reflect predictable aspects of human nature, including risk aversion, time preference, and herd behavior.

Forecasting will always be somewhat of a coin toss. But if economists better integrate animal spirits into our models, we can improve our forecasting accuracy. Economic models should, when possible, measure and forecast systematic human behavior and the tendencies of corporate culture. Modeling will always be constrained by a lack of relevant historical precedents. But analysts know a good deal more about how financial markets work -- and fail -- than we did before the 2008 crisis.

The halcyon days of the 1960s, when there was great optimism that econometric models offered new capabilities to accurately judge the future, are now long gone. Having been mugged too often by reality, forecasters now express less confidence about our abilities to look beyond the immediate horizon. We will forever need to reach beyond our equations to apply economic judgment. Forecasters may never approach the fantasy success of the Oracle of Delphi or Nostradamus, but we can surely improve on the discouraging performance of the past.

Os Primeiros Cartomantes da Economia: Irving Fishser, Moody e Babson

Este livro parece bem interessante, descreve os primeiros que tentaram racionalizar a economia ao ponto de prever o futuro. Resultado deles: medíocre.

Bom, minha tese de doutorado trata do tema, por isso achei o livro interessante. Mas leiam o artigo do Financial Times sobre o livro:

Fortune Tellers, by Walter Friedman

Review by Pietra Rivoli

Fortune Tellers: The Story of America’s First Economic Forecasters, by Walter Friedman, Princeton University Press, RRP£19.95, 288 pages
 
There are few things more terrifying than randomness, whether in the realm of mortality, meteorology or markets. Our best-laid plans fall prey to unpredictable heart attacks, tornadoes and popping bubbles in asset prices. So it is not surprising that profitable business opportunities lie in claims to reduce randomness and replace it with a sense of predictability and order. With some combination of eating our greens, weather forecasts and investment advice, we hope to know what tomorrow holds.

In Fortune Tellers, Walter Friedman, director of the Business History Initiative at Harvard Business School, brings to life the men who first created businesses based on the idea that people will pay to reduce randomness in economic life. Working in the early decades of the 20th century, each claimed to be able to find order and predictability in chaos, and each has an intellectual legacy that is visible today.

Roger Babson was a pioneer in technical analysis, a forecasting approach that seeks patterns in weather-type charts of asset prices. Irving Fisher, by contrast, saw the economy as a mechanical affair, and believed that its behaviour could be predicted through the study of money and prices. John Moody founded what would become one of the world’s largest financial information concerns, and was perhaps the first proponent of fundamental analyses, or the notion that reams of data on individual companies could predict future performance. Charles Bullock and Warren Persons built the first data-based macroeconomic models, which later evolved into widely used leading and lagging indicators.

As intellectual and business history, Fortune Tellers succeeds admirably. Friedman marshals sources of all kinds to compile detailed histories of each business: its customers, marketing strategies, business models and employees. At the same time, he is a captivating guide to the intellectual landscape, illuminating the development of the methods and ideas behind early forecasting, and comparing and contrasting the embedded assumptions of the different approaches.

The men themselves, however, are less fully formed, and appear to be portfolios of quirks rather than people we come to know. And what we do know is not terribly likeable or even interesting: they are petty in their rivalries, and prone to distasteful beliefs and strange causes such as eugenics and “calendar reform” (a movement to deal with the failure of the moon to line up neatly with months and years). The businesses and ideas are compelling reading; the characters and their personal lives, less so.

Although these pioneers left us much that is of lasting value, their records as forecasters were decidedly mediocre. None of the new ideas – the charts, the dividend forecasts, the leading indicators – worked very well in predicting the economic future; even today, macroeconomic forecasting models earn a gentleman’s C at best. Skill in predicting the worst macroeconomic outcomes – crashes and sustained slumps – appears not to have progressed at all between the crashes of 1929 and 2008. Yet forecasters continue to sell predictions about tomorrow and investors continue to buy them.

Could there be a correl­ation between the fact that the forecasters in Fortune Tellers are not terribly likeable and the fact that their predictions are so poor? I think so, but not in the way we might expect. We do not dislike these men because they have been wrong, but rather because they are so sure they are right.

Each of the men profiled in Fortune Tellers has nothing if not hubris; such overconfidence was not new then, nor is it obsolete now. It has even generated an academic literature of late, with studies finding that “high-hubris” individuals are more likely to overpay for acquisitions or commit fraud. Those who believe they have predictive power, in other words, tend to behave predictably.

There is a research group that boasts of using 2,000 variables and 1,500 equations to make 30-year (!) forecasts of US economic performance. A television talking head looks us in the eye and says things like, “We’re going to see 7.7 per cent growth in China next year.” A billion-plus people, an opaque government, swings in commodity prices, employment, birth rates, interest rates and weather – and they’ve figured it out to a tenth of a per cent? It’s a marvel, really, this hubris thing. It is also, the research shows, a mostly male thing. Just sayin’.

But Fortune Tellers is a marvel too. It is scholarship of the highest quality, without shortcuts or gimmicks. We may not be able to trust the forecasters, but when it comes to their stories we are in excellent hands.

Pietra Rivoli is a professor at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University

Os Três Es: Educação, Economia e "Everything Else"

 

O presidente da American Chesterton Society, Dale Alhquist, explicou como do capitalismo surgiu o socialismo, na visão do Distributismo.

Na palestra, Alhquist expõe o que Chesterton pensa em matéria de educação, economia e tudo mais. Fazendo isso, Alhquist detalha os fundamentos do Distributismo. Para quem deseja entender a base da Doutrina Distributista, é um exposição brilhante, como costuma ser Alhquist.

O vídeo da palestra tem 50 minutos e vale cada segundo. Fiquei pensando em traduzir algumas passagens, mas mesmo podendo ser uma ótima parte, eu correria o risco de diminuir a profundidade e abrangência da palestra. Então, torço para que você, leitor, entenda inglês.

A palestra ocorreu durante a 32a Annual Chesterton Conference no Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Eu mesmo coloquei o vídeo da palestra no Youtube, que estava disponível apenas no Vimeo.

Assista abaixo

Malthus e Adam Smith no Conto de Natal de Charles Dickens

Interessante artigo de Jerry Bowyer na Forbes, ele viu que Charles Dickens criticou a abordagem de crescimento zero da população de Thomas Malthus no Conto de Natal.

Ou melhor, eu diria, Dickens ressaltou o valor do humano no seu Conto de Natal e dessa forma viu perversidade em Malthus.

Vejam o artigo abaixo:

What Was Charles Dickens Really Doing When He Wrote 'A Christmas Carol'?

By Jerry Bowyer

 Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.” “Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.” “If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

 

That phrase–surplus population–is what first tipped me off to Dickens’ philosophical agenda. He’s taking aim at the father of the zero-growth philosophy, Thomas Malthus. Malthus’ ideas were still current in British intellectual life at the time A Christmas Carol was written. Malthus, himself, had joined the surplus generation only nine years before. But his ideas have proved more durable.

What was Dickens really doing when he wrote A Christmas Carol? Answer: He was weighing in on one of the central economic debates of his time, the one that raged between Thomas Malthus and one of the disciples of Adam Smith.

Malthus famously argued that in a world in which economies grew arithmetically and population grew geometrically, mass want would be inevitable. His Essay on Population created a school of thought which continues to this day under the banners of Zero Population Growth and Sustainability.

The threat of a “population bomb” under which my generation lived was Paul Ehrlich’s modern rehashing of the Malthusian argument about the inability of productivity to keep pace with, let alone exceed, population growth.

Jean Baptiste Say, Smith’s most influential disciple, argued on the other hand, as had his mentor, that the gains from global population growth, spread over vast expanses of trading, trigger gains from a division of labor which exceed those ever thought possible before the rise of the market order.
Guess whose ideas Charles Dickens put into the mouth of his antagonist Ebenezer Scrooge.

“And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation? … If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Interesting, isn’t it? Later in the story, the Ghost of Christmas Present reminds Scrooge of his earlier words and then adds about Tiny Tim:

“What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.

“Man,” said the Ghost, “if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child. Oh God! To hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust.”

Interesting also, that Ehrlich was not an economist, agronomist or even demographer but rather an etymologist, an expert in insect biology. Malthusianism is, indeed, the philosophy of the bug heap, of man as devouring swarm rather than ennobling angel.

The Ghost of Christmas Present is the key to understanding Dickens’ political and economic philosophy. He is the symbol of abundance. He literally and figuratively holds a cornucopia, a horn of plenty. While he wears a scabbard at his side, it is bereft of sword and neglected in care. Peace and plenty.

When Scrooge asks him how many brothers he has, the ghost replies “More than 1,800.” When Scrooge declares that this is a ‘tremendous family to provide for,” the ghost rises in anger. And then he takes Scrooge where? To the university economics department? To the socialist meeting house? No, he takes Scrooge to the market, and shows him the abundance there, especially the fruits (sometimes literal) of foreign trade:

“There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Friars… There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers’ benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, … there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, … there were Norfolk Biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner.”

Onions from Spain, grapes from the Mediterranean and citrus from the equatorial regions. How else could one eat oranges in England in winter? At the end of their Christmas feast, the poor Cratchits eat, yes, oranges. How else, other than through international trade, could the poor afford oranges? Surely, Christmas Present, and his creator Mr. Dickens, and his teacher Mr. Say, are true disciples of Mr. Smith.

Ironically, this made Scrooge a much less wealthy man than he could have been. He was a miser, not an entrepreneur, because his economic philosophy was a miserly one, not an entrepreneurial one. Look at Scrooge’s mentor Fezziwig, who had two apprentices and dozens of employees.

By contrast Scrooge, even as an old man, had no apprentices and only one employee, a low wage and low skilled one at that. Where was Scooge’s ambition? What was his plan for expansion?
 
Michael Dell is reported to have started his dream with an image of a large building filled with employees with a flag pole outside. But Scrooge didn’t even update his Scrooge and Marley sign upon the death of his partner seven years after the event, preferring to let rust simply erase the latter’s name. What entrepreneur thinks that way? Scrooge and Marley is basically a collection agency micro-business, whose proprietor did not even make the Forbes 15 List of Wealthiest Fictional Characters.

When Scrooge’s nephew Fred presses his uncle to reveal the cause of their alienation, Scrooge exclaims “Why did you marry?” This is not a change of subject; it is another bitter fruit of the old man’s anti-natal philosophy. Small wonder then, that after Scrooge’s conversion he spends Christmas day with his nephew’s family and cheerfully watches Topper court Fred’s wife’s “plump sister.”

If Scrooge has modern counterparts, they’re more likely to be found among those sad, self-sterilizing minimizers of carbon footprints than in the circles of supply-side entrepreneurs. Who, after all, could claim to a smaller carbon footprint than the man who tried to heat his office with a single piece of coal?

The question is, how did Scrooge’s economics get to be so confused? The answer is that this fictional character would have grown up during the ‘lean years’ in British history, before the supply-side tax cuts of Adam Smith had been implemented. The adult Scrooge, living in a time of growing global trade and strong economic growth, still retained the stagnation mindset of the ‘lean years,’ even when the ‘fat years’ at the prosperous end of the Laffer Curve were upon him. More on this next time.


(Agradeço a indicação do texto de Bowyer ao site American Catholic)