Acreditam mesmo?

O artigo que me alertou para a saída do novo livro de Roger Martin, "Overcoming America’s Obsession With Economic Efficiency":

"It explains why the pursuit of efficiency stems from the notion of firms as complicated machines and attempting to maximize their efficiency, rather than as complex adaptive systems, within markets which themselves are also complex adaptive systems."

Um tema clássico deste blogue e da minha guerra profissional.

No início do livro pode ler-se:

"Professor Wassily Leontief and I almost overlapped at Harvard University. Leontief, who won the 1973 Nobel Prize for Economics,
...
To Leontief, the US economy was a very big, complicated machine, fundamentally not unlike a car. A car has many subsystems—power train, steering, cooling/heating/ventilation, entertainment, safety, and so forth—each of which can be understood independently and then pieced together to produce the desired vehicle with the desired characteristics. Across the operation of that vehicle, the input-output equations are clear. When you push the gas pedal, the car speeds up. When you slam on the brakes, the car comes to a halt. As with a car, the inputs and outputs of the various subsystems of the economy could be mapped out and understood. Because he saw the economy as an understandable and analyzable machine, Leontief was a fan of planning, and during the economically challenged 1970s he argued that national planning might be the only hope for US economic policy.[Moi ici: Enquanto lia estas linhas ao longo da marginal marítima de Gaia, no silêncio das 6h30 da manhã, visualizei um ex-governador do Banco de Portugal, Vítor Constâncio, a falar sobre as vantagens e virtudes do "socialismo científico". Recordei as minhas guerras contra os que vêem a economia como se fosse física newtoniana"]
...
While I was taking my undergraduate economics courses, I was naive as to the power of models to shape actions and the power of metaphors to drive the adoption of models. I believed that the models I was being taught were descriptions of how the economy actually works. It took me a while to figure out that those models are no more than a theory of how the economy might work, if the economy were, in fact, like a car. And it is because we are all so convinced that the US economy is like a car that we stick with models like Leontief’s even when those models no longer generate accurate predictions concerning the economic outcomes that will follow our interventions.

Though not cognizant of it at the time, I was exclusively taught “neoclassical Keynesian economics."

Como é que dizia Napoleão? Agora pensemos nos governos que se sucedem e nas fórmulas que os orientam. Pensem nos milhares de milhões que vão ser despejados na economia para, supostamente criar uma nova economia... sei que muitos pensam em aceder à gamela, mas os outros? Acreditam mesmo que uma economia se rege top-down de forma virtuosa?

Trechos retirados de “When More Is Not Better”