terça-feira, dezembro 22, 2015

"Prosperity emerged despite, not because of, human policy"

Já li 3 ou 4 livros de Matt Ridley, "The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves" e "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" são excelentes.
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Este ano publicou "The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge":
"Depending on whose estimate you choose, and how you correct for inflation, the average person alive in the world today earns in a year between ten and twenty times as much money, in real terms, as the average person earned in 1800. Or rather, he or she can afford ten or twenty times as many goods or services. Call it, as the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey does, the ‘great enrichment’.
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Surprising as it may seem, the cause of the great enrichment is still unknown. That is to say, there are plenty of theories about why incomes started growing so rapidly in some parts of the world in the early nineteenth century, and this then spread to the rest of the world, and – despite repeated predictions that it would stop – they just keep on growing today. But none of these theories commands universal allegiance. Some credit institutions, others ideas, others individuals, others the harnessing of energy, yet others luck. They all agree on two things, however: no body planned this, and nobody expected it. Prosperity emerged despite, not because of, human policy. It developed inexorably out of the inter action of people by a form of selective progress very similar to evolution....
The great enrichment was an evolutionary phenomenon.
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So becoming more prosperous means the same as becoming more productive – growing more wheat, making more tools, serving more customers. And the ‘greatest improvement in the productive power of labour’, Smith argued, ‘seems to have been the effects of the division of labour’. ... Specialisation, accompanied by exchange, is the source of economic prosperity.
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The greater the specialisation among producers, the greater is the diversification of consumption:
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The more people trade and the more they divide labour, the more they are working for each other. The more they work for each other, the higher their living standards. The consequence of the division of labour is an immense web of cooperation among strangers: it turns potential enemies into honorary friends.
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The more open and free the market, the less opportunity there is for exploitation and predation, because the easier it is for consumers to boycott the predators and for competitors to whittle away their excess profits. In its ideal form, therefore, the free market is a device for creating networks of collaboration among people to raise each other’s living standards, a device for coordinating production and a device for communicating information about needs through the price mechanism. Also a device for encouraging innovation. It is the very opposite of the rampant and selfish individualism that so many church men and others seem to think it is. The market is a system of mass cooperation. You compete with rival producers, sure, but you cooperate with your customers, your suppliers and your colleagues. Commerce both needs and breeds trust.
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The central feature of commerce, and the thing that distinguishes it from socialist planning, is that it is decentralised. No central direction is required to tell the economy how many woollen coats, laptops or cups of coffee are needed. Indeed, when somebody does try to do so, the result is a miserable mess.
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In this way, prosperity, when it grows at all, grows entirely organically, without any direction from above."

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