Financiar as infraestruturas adequadas à economia do século XX

O livro "The Power of Pull", a certa altura altura refere a obra de Carlota Perez "Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages".

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"she examines the patterns associated with the deployment of new technologies in society - including the steam engine, electricity, and automobiles - Carlota Perez outlines three phases of change that must occur.

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First, there is the innovation of the technological building blocks themselves. Second, the innovation causes a society to engage in a rethinking of the infrastructures required to deliver these new technologies most effectively to everyone.

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As infrastructures begin to harness the power of the new technology, the third phase of change kicks in. In this phase, the rest of societyworks on discovering the best way to use the new technology in their professional and personal lives.

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In the twentieth century, the Great Depression ended up being a key catalyst for change.

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The twentieth-century firm scaled rapidly as a result of these efforts. ... They were built on the premise that the primary role of the firm was to arrive at lower costs by getting bigger - to make the most of the scale economies available through the new infrastructures of the day, what we call "Scalable efficiency."

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Thanks to the long reach of the railroad, and, later, contanerized shipping and airfreight, large-scale manufacturing operations could be centralized and concentrated into fewer facilities and deliver lower-cost products on a national and eventually a global scale. The scale of manufacturing operations led inevitably to efforts to build comparable scale in marketing operations: If companies were going to mass-produce products, then they needed mass markets to consume them. The rise of the mass media in the forms of magazines, radio, and television helped to make mass marketing a viable proposition.

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These push programs proved enormously successful and spread rapidly across the business landscape."

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Não pude deixar de recordar este trecho quando li acerca disto "Barack Obama anuncia plano de investimentos em infra-estruturas para combater o desemprego nos EUA":

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"O Presidente norte-americano, Barack Obama, anunciou ontem um ambicioso plano de investimento em infra-estruturas,"
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"Obama revelou que o programa prevê a recuperação ou construção de 240 mil quilómetros de estradas, a construção ou manutenção de 6400 quilómetros de vias férreas e a reabilitação de 240 quilómetros de pistas em aeroportos, bem como a modernização de todo o sistema de controlo do tráfego aéreo."

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Não acredito nestes programas para criação de emprego sustentado, mas adiante, o meu ponto aqui é que Obama está a financiar as infraestruturas adequadas à economia do século XX... e nós já estamos, graças a Deus, a abandonar a ditadura da escala, da eficiência, da massa.

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Quais serão as infraestruturas da economia do século XXI?