A
Bloomberg lembrou hoje do pai da Contabilidade, que foi professor de matemática de Leonardo da Vinci, além de ter escrito a primeira enciclopédia de matemática da Europa, demonstrando a álgebra, o frei franciscano
Fra Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli.
Ficou muito bom o texto.
How a Medieval Friar Forever Changed Finance
Consider some headlines from
the past week. China
announced its gross domestic product
had slowed to a three-year low of 7.6 percent in the latest
quarter. The
International Monetary Fund cut its global
growth forecasts to 3.9 percent for 2013. And Citigroup
Inc. announced its net income was down 12 percent.
The system that generates these 21st-century
accounting figures -- the numbers that run our nations and
corporations -- was first codified by a Renaissance friar
named Fra Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli. He was at one time
more famous, as a mathematician, than his collaborator
Leonardo da Vinci.
Pacioli is remembered today, if he’s remembered at
all, as the father of accounting. He wrote the first
mathematical encyclopedia of
Europe, which made two
critical contributions to modern science and commerce: It
was the first printed book to explain Hindu-Arabic
arithmetic and its offshoot, algebra, and it contained the
first printed treatise on Italian accounting.
Algebra would underpin the Scientific Revolution;
Italian accounting, the Industrial Revolution.
Double Entry
As his encyclopedia was going to press in
Venice in
1494, Pacioli added a 27-page summary of a new form of
accounting that had first emerged in
Italy around 1300 and
been perfected by the merchants of Venice. He called the
addition a “special treatise which is much needed” to help
merchants keep their accounts in an orderly way.
Known in the 15th century as accounting “alla
Veneziana,” the system is now called double-entry
bookkeeping and is standard practice throughout the world.
In 1494, it was exceptional -- and in his treatise Pacioli
recommended it above all others.
In their ledgers, Venetian merchants separated debits
and credits, dividing them into two columns. As Pacioli
wrote: “All the creditors must appear in the Ledger at the
right-hand side, and all the debtors at the left. All
entries made in the Ledger have to be double entries --
that is, if you make one creditor, you must make someone
debtor.”
Pacioli’s system was revolutionary because it allowed
merchants to calculate increases and decreases in their
wealth, recorded in their capital account. In other words,
it allowed them to determine that driver of capitalism:
profit (or loss). Pacioli wrote that the purpose of every
business was to make a lawful and reasonable profit, which
could be tallied with Venetian bookkeeping. And thus the
seed of capitalism was planted.
Because Pacioli used the recently invented printing
press to record and disseminate Venetian double entry, the
system swept across Europe during the next two centuries
and then to the U.S.
By the 18th century, Italian bookkeeping had become so
pervasive that it had spread beyond the realm of commerce
and into culture. Daniel Defoe famously applied it in his
1719 novel “Robinson Crusoe” when the shipwrecked Crusoe
uses double entry to assess his life, drawing up his “State
of Affairs” and comparing “very impartially, like Debtor
and Creditor, the Comforts I’d enjoyed, against the
Miseries I suffered.”
A New Profession
Fittingly, it was in the economic heart of the
Industrial Age --
Great Britain -- that Venetian
bookkeeping came into its own. The rise of factories and
the flourishing of the joint-stock company transformed
double-entry bookkeeping into a brand new profession:
accounting.
The huge amounts of capital expenditure required to
build railways -- raised from private investors on
stock
exchanges and managed by joint-stock companies -- brought
new issues of accounting and accountability. By the 1860s,
accountants were legally required in Britain at every phase
of a company’s life: at its formation, during its operation
and at its liquidation.
Although financial statements had been an incidental
product of a company’s bookkeeping in 1800, they had become
its raison d’etre by 1900. Venetian bookkeeping proved to
be the perfect mechanism for generating these financial
statements. It could accurately record capital and income
as required by law and investors, it could distinguish
between private expenses and corporate costs, and it could
produce data that helped evaluate past investment
decisions.
Venetian double entry thus became essential to the
modern corporation. In the 20th century, it became equally
essential to the nation state. With the crash of the
New
York Stock Exchange in 1929, and the Great Depression that
followed, the laissez-faire principles that had previously
informed government approaches to economic affairs suddenly
seemed insufficient. At sea in their response to the
crisis, the administrations of
Herbert Hoover and
Franklin D. Roosevelt commissioned comprehensive estimates of the
income of the U.S. to guide their policies.
Soon after Roosevelt succeeded Hoover as president and
began the New Deal, the British economist
John Maynard Keynes travelled to the U.S. to see the policies in action.
In
Washington, Keynes said: “Here, not in Moscow, is the
economic laboratory of the world.”
Theory, Practice
This signified a momentous change in government
practice, and in economic theory. If Roosevelt’s response
to the Depression was the New Deal, then Keynes’s was his
“theory of effective demand.” Published in 1936, it
provided a theoretical basis for the measurement of
national income, consumption, investment and savings.
Both Roosevelt’s program and Keynes’s theory entailed
the creation of national accounting systems, a massive
undertaking that was carried out using the principles of
double-entry bookkeeping.
At Keynes’s instigation, the first British accounts
were made during World War II. Following the war, national
accounts were created in countries across Europe as part of
the framework of the
Marshall Plan. And under the aegis of
the newly created
United Nations, national accounts were
subsequently adopted by almost every nation on Earth.
Today, we depend on the numbers generated by the
accounts of nations and corporations to direct our
governments, businesses and societies. And so it happened
that a medieval Italian accounting system codified by a
friar in 1494 now governs the global economy.
