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"Portugal sempre teve um problema de consciência com os lucros: como se fosse mal tê-los. Quando, há dias, a Caixa Geral de Depósitos apresentou os piores lucros dos últimos anos, revelou-os quase mostrando alívio. Como a Galp, que os viu cair para metade. A EDP, a campeã dos resultados líquidos (mais de mil milhões), repetiu ontem à exaustão que em Portugal os lucros não cresceram, só no estrangeiro."
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"Mas o definhamento do lucro em Portugal não é um acto de justiça social, é uma condenação do futuro. A saída para outros países está a ser a oportunidade, a aventura, mas também o escape. Haja lucro, concorrência, investimento, e haverá economia e emprego. Daqui toda a gente sai viva. O pior é quem fica."
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Veio-me à memória o pensador que melhor me explicou o conceito e a importância do lucro: Joseph Scumpeter.
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O lucro e o custo do futuro. Se não há lucro como ter dinheiro para o custo do futuro? Se não há lucro onde arranjar dinheiro para investir num futuro melhor?
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Nas palavras do homem que mudou a minha vida e me deu a conhecer Schumpeter:
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"As soon, however, as one shifts from the axiom of an unchanging, self-contained, closed economy to Schumpeter's dynamic, growing, moving, changing economy, what is called profit is on longer immoral. It becomes a moral imperative. Indeed, the question then is no longer the question that agitated the classicists and still agitated Keynes: How can the economy be structured to minimize the bribe of the functionless surplus called profit that has to be handed over to the capitalist to keep the economy going?
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The question in Schumpeter's economics is always, Is there sufficient profit? Is there adequate capital formation to provide for the costs of the future, the costs of staying in business, the costs of "creative destruction"?
This alone makes Schumpeter's economic model the only one that can serve as the starting point for the economic policies we need. Clearly the Keynesian - or classicist - treatment of innovation as being "outside," and in fact peripheral to, the economy and with minimum impact on it, can no longer be maintained (if it ever could have been). The basic question of economic theory and economic policy, especially in highly developed countries, is clearly: How can capital formation and productivity be maintained so that rapid technological change as well as employment can be sustained? What is the minimum profit needed to defray the costs of the future? What is the minimum profit needed, above all, to maintain jobs and to create new ones?"
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The question in Schumpeter's economics is always, Is there sufficient profit? Is there adequate capital formation to provide for the costs of the future, the costs of staying in business, the costs of "creative destruction"?
This alone makes Schumpeter's economic model the only one that can serve as the starting point for the economic policies we need. Clearly the Keynesian - or classicist - treatment of innovation as being "outside," and in fact peripheral to, the economy and with minimum impact on it, can no longer be maintained (if it ever could have been). The basic question of economic theory and economic policy, especially in highly developed countries, is clearly: How can capital formation and productivity be maintained so that rapid technological change as well as employment can be sustained? What is the minimum profit needed to defray the costs of the future? What is the minimum profit needed, above all, to maintain jobs and to create new ones?"
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BTW, "And it is a total fallacy that, as Keynes implies, optimising the short term creates the right long-term future."
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