Eu tenho muito mais dúvidas do que certezas (parte IV)

Parte I, parte II e parte III.

Ao ler "Universities brace for huge losses as foreign students drop out" pensei: outra vítima silenciosa deste evento pandémico. Tal como o turismo, ou o negócio do desporto de massas, quando a quarentena acabar não voltarão ao que eram.

Ontem, encontrei este texto, "Chapter 1: The problem of ‘freezing’ an economy in a pandemic":

"We put the economy in the freezer under the clear expectation that we will at some stage take it back out again.
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Our argument is straightforward. Governments cannot freeze an economy, thaw it out a few months later and expect it to come back to life. Economies do not hibernate for the winter like a sleepy but otherwise unharmed and intact bear.
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As much as economists might like to think that they have knowledge and experience in kickstarting economies, we are less sanguine.
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This is an economy: a constantly, inevitably evolving, shifting pattern of relationships. We each know our part of it – our consumer desires, our business and employment relationships – but cannot, as Fredrich Hayek most powerfully said, truly know much more than that. We cannot understand all the diverse inputs that make up our cereal and our pencils and our pins, let alone how our local florist relies on its bank (and our florists bank relies on it). Even if we could know that impossibly large amount of information, that knowledge would not remain up to date for long. Ultimately every part of the economy is reliant, in some small and impossible to determine way, on every other part – networked through relationships of sustainable specialisation and trade, creating an complex overlapping pattern of economic activity. And now we are trying to freeze that pattern in place.
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A lot of the current economic policy advice being offered to governments about the cost of shutting down and then restarting the economy is almost entirely focused on the direct economic cost of the freeze as the opportunity cost of the time offline. This is invariably estimated as the quantum of GDP lost, or some factorisation of that such as jobs lost, businesses closed, capital liquidated, or public subsidy required. There is no cost attributed to the restart that is not identical with the stimulus model of replacing missing spending, whether in consumption, investment or net exports. This is mainstream economic thinking and it largely ignores the entrepreneurial costs of economic discovery and adaptation to changed circumstances. It is our view that this is actually the more critical consideration, even if it does not loom as large as a direct money cost measured in terms of spending.
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1. Economic patterns are resistant to freezing. An economy is an extremely complex pattern, and most of that complexity lies in its connective structure. Small changes in inputs or contractual linkages, as disruptions to parts of a complex system, can ramify through an interconnected network causing significant unpredictable changes in outputs. The globalised world brings us remarkable prosperity through specialisation and trade but those patterns, being so highly refined, are easy to break. Modern economies, and especially global supply chains, are therefore more fragile, and less robust, than is often appreciated. It is not possible to fix these patterns in place. But a frozen economy – where entire teams are furloughed with little to do until the crisis passes – will suffer the erosion of connections and relationships brought by time.
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2. Our economic relationships and preferences will change during the freeze. A frozen economy will thaw into a changed world. In the interim period, even as little as three to six months, a significant number of parametric and environmental conditions will have changed. Most obviously, people will come back wanting different things (maybe fewer holidays on cruise ships), having new priorities (increased appreciation for health), possessing new skills (such as cooking, or with new digital competences), revaluing assets (perhaps wanting a larger house, or a bolthole in the country), and perhaps rethinking their jobs or family situation (e.g. divorces are predicted to spike). So the demand side of the economy will be different. But so too will the supply side, as many firms will close down, and many capital goods and assets will be liquidated. And also new business plans will be developed, and old plans abandoned, and all of these intermeshed plans will need to be recoordinated. Also the regulatory and legislative environment will change, and perhaps even the physical environment, owing to the reduced levels of production and natural resource use. And tragically, there will be a shifted demographic profile. A frozen economy will thaw into a changed world, and will need to adapt to that. Because of these changes there will also be new opportunities to discover entrepreneurial opportunities that were not present when the economy was frozen.
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3. Both the freezing and thawing will invariably be uneven. Going into the freezer, there is a presumption that unessential parts will be frozen while essential parts of the economy remain unfrozen. But in most cases those have been political not market decisions about what constitutes essential.
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Furthermore, upon unfreezing some parts will already be dead, whether staying frozen to collect welfare, or because the component factors have reassembled into new forms.
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Taking all of these problems together, an unfrozen economy will emerge in a massively disequilibrium state. There will be disequilibrium trading, where some prices are wrong yet it will be unclear which ones. This will produce chaos across all markets. It will occur in commodity markets, asset markets, financial markets, labour markets. All of them. And at a higher level there will also therefore be disequilibrium entrepreneurship, as entrepreneurs and businesses try to see opportunities and make decisions to enter or exit markets, but all based on disequilibrium prices.
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The unfreezing problem is a rapid adaptation problemWhen we take the economy out of the freezer and thaw it out, it will need to rapidly take on a new form. When the economy is unfrozen and seeks to reanimate, it will need to quickly recover its connections, or make new ones. For this to happen quickly and efficiently, institutional barriers and constraints will need to be as loose and relaxed as possible. It will need to adapt quickly.[Moi ici: Uma desvantagem terrível para a economia portuguesa que nunca deixou de ser salazarista e aspira a ser nacionalizada]  This will require a period of both disequilibrium trading and re-contracting. Entrepreneurs will need to rediscover the patterns of prices, contracts and other relationships to better coordinate resources in the post-COVID-19 world."

E aqui leio e choro pelo meu país, socialista-salazarista até ao tutano, adepto de conferências de imprensa onde em vez de se transmitir informação, faz-se uma feira de vaidades toda cheia de Excelentíssima Senhora Doutora, Excelentísimo Senhor Doutor. Um país onde ter lucro é pecado, um país onde só se pode fazer o que está na lei, o que não está na lei é proibido. Um país sempre à espera de ordens. Um país do "fiquem em casa crianças, nós os adultos, que sabemos o que é o melhor para todos, vamos resolver isto". Um país habituado a ser pedinte internacional sem vergonha, e que quer acreditar que quando o capital se transforma em dívida não é preciso fazer sacrifícios para a pagar:

"If regulations don’t make sense in a crisis, do they make sense afterwards? Today we are presented the opportunity to rebuild the institutions and organisations of our modern economy. If we do this right, through a process of entrepreneurial discovery and bottom-up solutions, then we will emerge with a political-economic system that acts as an engine for prosperity, and one that is more resilient and robust to future shocks. In this book we tackle those questions and fill some of the current void of ideas and thinking about economic and political recovery. We develop a framework and principles for an institutional re-build, presenting a path to recovery based on the ideas of private governance, permissionless innovation and entrepreneurial dynamism."