terça-feira, 26 de janeiro de 2010

1. Seminário sobre a Escola Austríaca no Brasil


PREPARE-SE PARA UM EVENTO INÉDITO NO BRASIL
Pela primeira vez na história, o Brasil terá um seminário exclusivo sobre a Escola Austríaca de Economia. De 11 a 12 de abril de 2010, no Hotel Sheraton, Porto Alegre receberá estudantes e profissionais de todo o país para discutirem os desafios da Ciência Econômica  no século XXI.
O I Seminário de Economia Austríaca é um evento realizado pelo Instituto Ludwig von Mises Brasil, associação voltada à produção e à disseminação de estudos econômicos e de ciências sociais que promovam os princípios de livre mercado e de uma sociedade livre.  O seminário reunirá, pela primeira vez na história do Brasil, os principais nomes da corrente econômica de livre mercado conhecida como Escola Austríaca ("EA").
Entre os palestrantes estarão alguns dos principais nomes da Escola Austríaca, como Lew Rockwell, Joseph Salerno, Mark Thornton, Tom Woods e Walter Block. Entre os nomes nacionais, Ubiratan Iorio, Rodrigo Constantino, Fábio Barbieri e Antony Mueller. Eles irão conversar com uma plateia de 300 pessoas composta por jovens profissionais, estudantes e interessados em economia e liberdade.
Os debates englobarão os princípios da EA aplicados aos principais temas econômicos da atualidade. O papel do Federal Reserve na atual crise econômica, os problemas gerados em decorrência das constantes intervenções de governos na economia, o cálculo econômico socialista, a privatização de ruas e estradas e a Teoria Austríaca dos Ciclos Econômicos (TACE), são alguns dos assuntos que serão discutidos durante o I Seminário de Economia Austríaca.
Não perca essa oportunidadede de interagir com os maiores nomes da Escola Austríaca de Economia!

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terça-feira, 12 de janeiro de 2010

Os capitalistas do passado

Ludwig von Mises: "The early industrialists were for the most part men who had their origin in the same social strata from which their workers came. They lived very modestly, spent only a fraction of their earnings for their households and put the rest back into the business." - Human Action

A moderna forma de publicar

Stephan Kinsella relata a historia do lançamento dos "Libertarian Studies":
Libertarian Papers was launched a year ago, in late January 2009. I assessed our first half-year a few months ago. At this time I'd like to explain how Libertarian Papers came to be. The timing is especially suitable, since Libertarian Papers was born one year ago today, in a 15-minute IM chat between Jeff Tucker and me.
Leia mais sobre este projeto que se tornou em um grande sucesso:
http://mises.org/daily/4028

Conseqüências do intervencionismo

Homens sem mulheres.
A política de China de reduzir a taxa crescimento populacional deixa 24 milhões de homens sem mulheres para formar uma família:
BEIJING (AFP) – More than 24 million Chinese men of marrying age could find themselves without spouses in 2020, state media reported on Monday, citing a study that blamed sex-specific abortions as a major factor.
The study, by the government-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, named the gender imbalance among newborns as the most serious demographic problem for the country's population of 1.3 billion, the Global Times said.
"Sex-specific abortions remained extremely commonplace, especially in rural areas," where the cultural preference for boys over girls is strongest, the study said, while noting the reasons for the gender imbalance were "complex."
 http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100111/wl_asia_afp/chinapopulationmenmarriage

segunda-feira, 11 de janeiro de 2010

Experimento problemático

Eric E. Johnson examina os riscos da pesquisa com o LHC da CERN e pergunta se tem limites para experimentos nas ciências:
"... Underneath the countryside of Switzerland and France is the largest
machine ever built.1 Seventeen miles around2 and requiring as much electricity
as a medium-sized city,3 it is designed to create conditions hotter than any star
in our galaxy.4 The thousands of scientists hovering over the device hope that
when it reaches full power it will create particles that have not existed since the
time of the Big Bang.5 Modestly named the “Large Hadron Collider” (“LHC”),
the machine will be the most ambitious scientific experiment in humanity’s history.
The physics community is abuzz. Scientists everywhere are hoping to see
something they have never seen before. Some are expecting to find the elusive
Higgs boson.6 Others are looking for the dark matter that holds together the
cosmos.7 Still others hope to see, in the tracers of subatomic shrapnel, the
telltale signs of a microscopic black hole as it evaporates into nothingness.8
Not everyone, however, is giddy with excitement. In particular, it is that
last bit—about black holes—that has some people worried. An unhappy few
are concerned that black holes produced by the LHC might not vanish, as
expected.9 Instead, it is feared, they might linger.10 And grow.
Our planet, and everyone on it, detractors say, could be reduced to an
infinitesimal lightless speck.11
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0912/0912.5480.pdf

Trabalho livre

CAIRO (Reuters) – New tombs found in Giza support the view that the Great Pyramids were built by free workers and not slaves, as widely believed, Egypt's chief archaeologist said on Sunday.
Films and media have long depicted slaves toiling away in the desert to build the mammoth pyramids only to meet a miserable death at the end of their efforts.
"These tombs were built beside the king's pyramid, which indicates that these people were not by any means slaves," Zahi Hawass, the chief archaeologist heading the Egyptian excavation team, said in a statement.
"If they were slaves, they would not have been able to build their tombs beside their king's."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100110/sc_nm/us_egypt_antiquities_tombs

sábado, 9 de janeiro de 2010

Como manipular a taxa de mortalidade infantil

Yuri N. Maltsev explains: "... the United States has one of the highest rates of the industrialized world only because it counts all dead infants, including premature babies, which is where most of the fatalities occur.
Most countries do not count premature-infant deaths. Some don’t count any deaths that occur in the first 72 hours. Some countries don’t even count any deaths from the first two weeks of life. In Cuba, which boasts a very low infant-mortality rate, infants are only registered when they are several months old, thereby leaving out of the official statistics all infant deaths that take place within the first several months of life..."
Soviet Medicine

Como atuar com contingência

How to cope with continengencies
Nassim Taleb explains how to rid the world of black swans:
Ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world
By Nassim Nicholas Taleb
1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become too big to fail. Evolution in economic life helps those with the maximum amount of hidden risks – and hence the most fragile – become the biggest.
2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains. Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalised; whatever does not need a bail-out should be free, small and risk-bearing. We have managed to combine the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France in the 1980s, the socialists took over the banks. In the US in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal.
3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus. The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.
4. Do not let someone making an “incentive” bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks. Odds are he would cut every corner on safety to show “profits” while claiming to be “conservative”. Bonuses do not accommodate the hidden risks of blow-ups. It is the asymmetry of the bonus system that got us here. No incentives without disincentives: capitalism is about rewards and punishments, not just rewards.
5. Counter-balance complexity with simplicity. Complexity from globalisation and highly networked economic life needs to be countered by simplicity in financial products. The complex economy is already a form of leverage: the leverage of efficiency. Such systems survive thanks to slack and redundancy; adding debt produces wild and dangerous gyrations and leaves no room for error. Capitalism cannot avoid fads and bubbles: equity bubbles (as in 2000) have proved to be mild; debt bubbles are vicious.
6. Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning . Complex derivatives need to be banned because nobody understands them and few are rational enough to know it. Citizens must be protected from themselves, from bankers selling them “hedging” products, and from gullible regulators who listen to economic theorists.
7. Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence”. Cascading rumours are a product of complex systems. Governments cannot stop the rumours. Simply, we need to be in a position to shrug off rumours, be robust in the face of them.
8. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains. Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial. The debt crisis is not a temporary problem, it is a structural one. We need rehab.
9. Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible “expert” advice for their retirement. Economic life should be definancialised. We should learn not to use markets as storehouses of value: they do not harbour the certainties that normal citizens require. Citizens should experience anxiety about their own businesses (which they control), not their investments (which they do not control).
10. Make an omelette with the broken eggs. Finally, this crisis cannot be fixed with makeshift repairs, no more than a boat with a rotten hull can be fixed with ad-hoc patches. We need to rebuild the hull with new (stronger) materials; we will have to remake the system before it does so itself. Let us move voluntarily into Capitalism 2.0 by helping what needs to be broken break on its own, converting debt into equity, marginalising the economics and business school establishments, shutting down the “Nobel” in economics, banning leveraged buyouts, putting bankers where they belong, clawing back the bonuses of those who got us here, and teaching people to navigate a world with fewer certainties.
Then we will see an economic life closer to our biological environment: smaller companies, richer ecology, no leverage. A world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks and companies are born and die every day without making the news.
In other words, a place more resistant to black swans.

The writer is a veteran trader, a distinguished professor at New York University’s Polytechnic Institute and the author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Link

sexta-feira, 8 de janeiro de 2010

Life tips

Nassim Taleb’s 10 life tips

Taleb’s top life tips

– “1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.
6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants… or (again) parties.

9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.” –

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article4022091.ece?print=yes&randnum=1212326634830

quinta-feira, 7 de janeiro de 2010

Por que mudanças acontecem

Why Change Happens: Ten Theories
Tuesday 13 May 2008
by: Sara Robinson
The Campaign for America's Future

One of the grandest - and most frustrating - things about carrying on the great democratic conversation via blog is finding out how many of your fellow citizens (including many who are nominally on your side) turn out to be looking at the world from a completely different set of assumptions than you are. In fact, there's simply nothing like the Internet if you want to be thrown together with people who have ordered their entire lives around fundamental propositions that would never have occurred to you if you lived to be 100. Behold your fellow earthlings, in all their bizarre and twisted glory....

A lot of these disconnects have to do with all the weird and wonderful theories people have about why change happens. Because we each have our own pet theories of how the world works, different people can look at the same situation, and come to completely different conclusions about what's likely to happen next. Since these often unspoken understandings are among the things futurists are trained to look for, I thought I'd offer a short taxonomy of the various assumptions people bring to their thinking about what drives social change.

Professional futurists have, through the years, boiled down all the various change theories down to about ten basic classifications. (There may be others: the list changes with new information, and we're always open to suggestions.) But, as a practical working thesis, almost any theory you can name can be sorted into one (or, occasionally, more) of these bins:

1. Progress. Change happens because humans want to improve their condition, and apply ingenuity and good problem-solving to create progress. The people with the best handle on the future are the optimists, though individuals have a lot of control over what will happen. Over the next 20 years, the social and economic conditions of the world will consistently get better, just as they have improved on a ever-rising linear path throughout history.

2. Development. Change happens because people want to build a decent life, which naturally leads societies toward increased specialization and complexity. Individuals don't have much control over this process. The real change masters are social engineers - mostly experts, academics and political leaders of various sorts - who direct the pace of development. Improvement occurs when people build relationships; over the next 20 years, we will continue to see networks of expert change agents emerge to manage increasing complexity.

3. Technology. Change happens because humans are motivated to solve problems, which requires the creation of new technologies, which in turn drive progress and social change. The real masters of the future are the scientists and technologists who will solve our current problems; and people participate in this change to the extent that they adopt and apply these solutions. Progress depends utterly on the amount of support we give to research and development efforts. Over the next 20 years, biotechnology and new sustainable "green" technologies will create the biggest changes in how we live.

4. Ideas. Change happens when culture changes through the dissemination of new ideas. One good idea has the potential to change the world. The real power to create change belongs to the media, which edits, frames, and disseminates ideas. As individuals adopt these ideas, they participate in the creation of change, and experience personal growth as well. Progress depends on how effectively we work to change people's thinking. Over the next 20 years, better ideas will be promoted by greatly improved media. The world will become more enlightened as human consciousness grows.

5. Markets. Change happens because people seek to acquire creature comforts - desires which push entrepreneurs and industries to innovate. Industry leaders and economists are the leading experts here, but consumers and their choices are the main change drivers. Progress depends on encouraging people to produce, trade, and consume freely. Over the next 20 years, the world will generally continue to become more consumer-driven as standards rise in less-developed countries (though there may be bumps along the way).

6. Cycles. Change happens according to predictable patterns, which can be discerned by studying history. These patterns are usually seen as cycles or waves, with periods of great change alternating with periods of rest and recovery. ("History doesn't repeat itself - but it rhymes," said Twain.) In this view, change is viewed as a natural process, with a lifecyle that includes birth, maturity, and death; and people have limited influence on how this cycle plays out. The greatest insight into these patterns belongs to historians and theorists who have studied them. Progress depends on our ability to learn from the past, and use that knowledge to surf the change waves as they come. Over the next 20 years, long-wave theories call for very large energy, technology, and political shifts.

7. Conflict. Change happens when groups of people engage in a struggle to improve their lot. Those who understand change best are Marxists, union leaders, political organizers and activists, and social justice advocates. People succeed in creating change only if they're willing to fight for it, and progress occurs when we pursue our own interests to the fullest. The next 20 years will be dominated by conflicts over resources, and by smaller countries who will try to assert growing independence from the US-led order.

8. Power. Change happens when powerful people and groups decide to alter the status quo to further increase their power. Nobody really understands the future unless they're part of this elite; and the majority of us will have no say in their machinations. (Some Power theories argue that it's better just to let these well-connected people make the decisions anyway.) Over the next 20 years, they will continue to consolidate their control over nations and industries.

9. Evolution. Change happens when the physical environment changes, and organisms adapt in response to those changes. Ecologists have the deepest understanding of change; the rest of us are co-participants, but nobody really knows what will ultimately come of our efforts. Our best chance of progress lies with our ability to understand the world around us, and find the most appropriate ways of responding to emerging issues. Over the next 20 years, we will either come to terms with our responsibility to nature, or risk extinction. Global warming, mass extinction, and the rise of virulent, drug-resistant organisms are among the biggest concerns.

10. Chaos, Complexity, and Criticality. These are three different theories that have all arisen in the past 40 years as our understanding of systems theory has grown. What they have in common is that they describe system behavior that appears to be non-rational and random; but becomes somewhat comprehensible when you understand the larger system at work. Nobody can really understand all the variables at work; but those who take the time to study a system and its interactions may get an upper hand - or, at least, be prepared for the extreme behavior the system can deliver.

Each of these basic change models has its appropriate uses, its explanatory strengths, and its limits. You can go through almost any comment thread on any blog and find several of these assumptions at work. Most of them aren't mutually exclusive (and some, like Conflict and Power, are two ends of the same conversation); but we shouldn't be afraid to have reasoned debates about which model most accurately fits the situation we're discussing. In fact, making sure we're working off the right change model is critical if we want to make plans that will actually get us where we want to be.

And many of the political debates we have - with each other and with conservatives - are, at their core, conversations between competing theories. Market theory, left in a vacuum, looks pretty good. Put it alongside the limits of nature, and it looks like a recipe for disaster. Evolutionary thinking explains much about nature, and Richard Dawkins argues persuasively that it may also work for cultural ideas; but when you apply it to social issues, you can easily end up with social Darwinism (which is implicit in the Power model). Not good. And so on. If you're going to make good guesses about the future, you need to choose your model carefully, stay mindful of its drawbacks, and be sure it actually fits the circumstances of the scenario at hand.

It can also be very instructive to spend some time thinking about the theories that make the most sense to you, personally. Most of us have two or three dominant ones that we think explain just a whole lot about the world; another couple we're quite comfortable with; and at the other end, one or two that we find genuinely unpalatable. I've noticed that whenever I write about my own views on change (which pick and choose from the whole menu, though I'm particularly partial to Ideas and Cycle theories and think that #1, linear progress, was pretty much refuted by the Dark Ages), I'm sure to hear from partisans of other theories.

Part of the strength of the liberal worldview lies in our diverse views of how change happens. Progressives tend to gravitate toward Development, Ideas, and Conflict (though a few forward-thinking ones also like Technology and the "Three C's" of #10); but most of us are broad-minded enough to entertain other theories, if only as thought exercises. Conservatives agree with us wholeheartedly on Ideas - and that conviction is at the heart of their passion for full-on culture War. Other pet theories on the right include Markets and Power, both of which have been deeply embedded into their ideology. They've also got some very different ideas about the potential and appropriate uses of Technology; and both the religious right and the neoliberal economists offers visions of the future that can probably best be classified as (dystopian or utopian, respectively) Progress theories.

I'm offering this in the hope that it will give us another way of thinking about our hopes, fears, and disagreements - both when it's just progressives talking, and also when we're trying to figure out where in the hell the other side is coming from. It's tempting to dismiss people as clueless idiots who just don't get the point, when all they're really doing is interpreting events through a different change assumption. And maybe yours is better, and maybe theirs is wrong; but that's a discussion reasonable people should be able to have.

Link