"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."

Satisficing vs Constraints

"nature evolves away from constraints, not toward goals"

Como eu gosto desta citação.
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A Natureza, que não é humana, que não reflecte, acaba sempre por encontrar uma solução, não porque se direccione para metas mas porque foge das restrições e constrangimentos.
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Acredito que muitas PME actuam da mesma forma. Apesar da massa cinzenta que têm no seu interior, são muitas vezes prisioneiras da humana preferência pela  satisficiência, em vez da maximização racionalista (o que é bom, por causa da lição dos nabateus). Ou seja, o que está na base do sucesso das PME é, quase sempre, a fuga a uma restrição que as empurrou para fora da zona de conforto e, as obrigou a mudar.
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Matt Ridley em "Waterloo or railways" faz esta concatenação interessante:

"there is a tenuous connection between Napoleon and Stephenson. If Bonaparte’s conquests and the corn laws had not driven up the price of corn, then horse feed would have been cheaper and the coal owners who employed Stephenson would not have risked so much money in letting him build a machine to try to find a less expensive way to pull wagons of coals from the pithead in Killingworth to the staithes on the Tyne."

Aprender com Darwin (parte IV)

Parte I, parte II e parte III.
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Outro exemplo monumental da vantagem da aprendizagem à Drawin "To avoid big IT catastrophes, follow Darwin":

"Unnoticed and unsung, however. this government may actually have found a way to bring the horrid history of big. public IT projects to an end.
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McKinsey found in 2012 that 17 per cent of IT projects budgeted at more than $15 million fail so badly they threaten the company's very existence.
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Instead, Mr Maude and Mr Bracken are teaching the civil service to start small, fail fast, get feedback from users early and evolve the thing as you go along.
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those who succeed allow for plenty of low-cost trial and error and incremental change. It's the mechanism Charles Darwin discovered that Mother Nature uses. Rather than a grand "creationist" plan or a big leap, natural selection incrementally discovers success through trial and failure.
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Yet government kept trying to do things by grand plan.
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Mr Maude began by centralising controls so that he had to sign off any IT contract of more than £1 million (now raised to £5 million), then built up an in-house capability to offer cheaper and. better design, and opened procurement to smaller companies. Government contracts with outside IT suppliers are now shorter and smaller. Some of the savings on over were so vast that civil servants refused to believe than. In one case, 98,5 per cent of the cost of an existing contract was saved by letting a contract to a small British business rather than an incumbent multinational IT firm, and it worked better."

Claro que isto são más notícias que têm de ser abafadas pelas redes dos anafados incumbentes. Isto não se pode fazer.

Sexo, jardineiros, intervencionistas, Taleb e Cavaco Silva (parte III)

Mantenho o título por voltar à parte do sexo.
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Ontem, ao ler o artigo "Designing Business Models for Value Co-Creation", citado em "Acerca do ecossistema da procura", encontrei a referência a "Escaping the Red Queen Effect in Competitive Strategy: Sense-testing Business Models".
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À noite, ao lê-la, fiquei logo apanhado pela relação com o sexo...

"The ‘red queen effect’ refers to the red queen’s advice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass in which she says, in order to stay in a (competitive) place you have to run very hard, whereas to get anywhere you have to run even harder. In today’s knowledge and mobile environments we know that businesses cannot survive by just running harder, but rather by running differently and ‘smarter’ than competitors."

Primeiro, recordar o comportamento dos afídeos da parte II quando as condições ambientais mudam.

"To counter direct competitive challenges, organizations often continuously learn new ways of improving their efficiency and performance. (Moi ici: Uma paisagem competitiva conhecida, um mercado conhecido, concorrentes conhecidos. Nada de extraordinário, a eficiência é suficiente para continuar a jogar. Reprodução assexuada) Having familiarized themselves over a number of years with such ways of doing business, their first reaction to discontinuous (fast-changing, disruptive) competition is to ‘‘work harder’’, (Moi ici: Esta é a parte em que os membros da tríade, de Vítor Bento e Ferraz da Costa, até João Ferreira do Amaral, acham que se reduzirmos salários, aumentarmos horários de trabalho ou voltarmos ao escudo, conseguimos ultrapassar esta diferença:Reparem, a economia portuguesa, no tempo do escudo, nunca teve de competir com diferenças desta ordem de grandeza) when what they need to do is to ‘‘unlearn’’ what they know and ‘‘work differently’’"

Na biologia, o sexo é uma espécie de ‘‘unlearn’’ what they know and ‘‘work differently’’, voltar a baralhar as cartas, os genes, para testar novas abordagens, para barrar o acesso a abordagens anteriores pelos vírus.
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Sem sexo, ou seja, sem sair fora da caixa, sem a possibilidade de falir, com acesso a bail-outs:

"Several observers have commented that even though many companies work harder to improve themselves in increasingly fierce competitive environments, results improve slowly or not at all. This is a characteristic situation that could be described as the ‘‘Red Queen effect’’. It is a competency trap where ‘‘running harder’’ becomes customary: it is of an analytic-benchmark nature, it shows short-term success and is less risky in the near horizon, but ultimately holds long-term downfall.
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Working ‘‘differently’’ seems to be an intuitively suitable approach for survival or even prosperity in the present era’s increasingly competitive business landscape. Companies need to change industry rules (the accepted way of doing business in the industry) by fundamentally questioning their tendency to conform to useful but ‘‘unoriginal’’ (copied, imitated, improved) practices, lessons, and experiences." (Moi ici: Como os afídeos, em tempo de mudança, saltar para o sexo)

Sexo, jardineiros, intervencionistas, Taleb e Cavaco Silva (parte II)

Parte I.
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Esta manhã, durante os meus 16 km de jogging debaixo de chuva, ouvi o capítulo 3 de "The Red Quenn - Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" de Matt Ridley.
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A certa altura oiço:

"sex and dispersal often seem to be linked. Thus, grass grows asexual runners to propagate locally but commits its sexually produced seeds to the wind to travel farther. Sexual aphids grow wings; asexual ones do not: The suggestion that immediately follows is that if your young are going to have to travel abroad, then it is better that they vary because abroad may not be like home.'
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Aphids multiply during the summer on a rosebush, and monogonont rotifers multiply in a street puddle. But when the summer comes to an end, the last generation of aphids or of monogonont rotifers is entirely sexual: It produces males and females that seek each other out, mate, and produce tough little young that spend the winter or the drought as hardened cysts awaiting the return of better conditions. To Williams this looked like the operation of his lottery. While conditions were favorable and predictable, it paid to reproduce as fast as possible—asexually. When the little world came to an end and the next generation of aphid or rotifer faced the uncertainty of finding a new home or waited for the old one to reappear, then it paid to produce a variety of different young in the hope that one would prove ideal."

E a minha mente voou para o paralelismo com a economia... e recordei por um lado a poesia de Hamel e Valikangas sobre a resiliência da vida na Terra e, por outro, os crentes no Grande Planeador.
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Depois, Nassim Taleb veio juntar-se à festa, foi ao sexto km, com a humildade por detrás da "via negativa"... os intervencionistas, quase sempre cheios de boa vontade, querem intervir para "ajudar" as empresas a fazerem face a uma qualquer evolução desfavorável.
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Interessante como os afídeos perante a alteração das condições, deixam de confiar na replicação dos seus genes e apostam no sexo, para criar novas combinações de genes que talvez possam enfrentar melhor o futuro.
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Os intervencionistas que intervêm, os que decidem o que salvar e o que condenar são os mesmos que não sabem fazer as contas para um simples concurso público.
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Depois dos jardineiros, lembrei-me logo da intervenção de Cavaco... outro intervencionista.

"a means to solving a problem"

Actualmente, durante o jogging, ando a ouvir "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature" de Matt Ridley. Este trecho fixou a minha atenção:

"It seems to treat evolution as some kind of imperative, as if evolving were what species exist to do - as if evolving were a goal imposed on existence.'
This is, of course, nonsense. Evolution is something that happens to organisms. It is a directionless process that sometimes makes an animal's descendants more complicated, sometimes simpler, and sometimes changes them not at all: We are so steeped in notions of progress and self-improvement that we find it strangely hard to accept this. But nobody has told the coelacanth, a fish that lives off Madagascar and looks exactly like its ancestors of 300 million years ago, that it has broken some law by not " evolving.
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Indeed, the coelacanth, far from being a flop, is rather a success: It has stayed the same—a design that persists without innovation, like a Volkswagen beetle. Evolving is not a goal but a means to solving a problem."

Aplicando esta pensamento à economia temos aquela frase de Nassim Taleb:

"Stress is information" 

 Se a cada recessão temos a intervenção keynesiana do Estado, para torrar uns milhões de euros a apoiar provisoriamente umas empresas, ou sectores escolhidos, os problemas para essas empresas são abafados, escondidos, temporariamente ... corta-se a motivação para a evolução.
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Fazendo o paralelismo com Kotter, a mudança não ocorre por causa de relatórios e razões muito racionais, a mudança ocorre por causa de se estar com uma espada contra a parede, ocorre por causa de uma "burning platfform", por causa do barco de madeira estar a arder em pleno oceano:

Assim, têm todo o interesse em contrariar Mongo

Ao ler este texto de Matt Ridley "The myth that choice overload is a cause of great misery" começo a especular...
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As empresas grandes, as empresas viciadas e habituadas ao volume, à escala, ao negócio do custo como o factor competitivo número 1, têm tudo a perder com o advento de Mongo.
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Assim, têm todo o interesse em contrariar Mongo, em contrariar o Estranhistão, em defender que escolher cansa, em defender que é tudo igual, que se escolhe entre genéricos.

O equilíbrio, nem na biologia!

Ao longo dos anos, aqui neste espaço, faço o paralelismo entre a biologia e a economia, por exemplo

• Economia e biologia, o mesmo desafio evolutivo (2008)
• Este é o tempo para repensar a estratégia (2009)
• Diferentes tipos de competição (2010)
• Diferenciar é sempre mais vantajoso (2011)

Sabem que acho que a história do equilíbrio em economia é uma treta, pois bem, e o equilíbrio em biologia? 

"Ms. Marris's book goes further, challenging the very idea of a balance of nature. In the first half of the 20th century, ecologists came to believe in equilibrium-that natural systems tended toward a steady state. So, for example, a bare patch of ground would be colonized by a succession of species-annual weeds, then grasses, then shrubs, then trees-until it reached its "climax" state. Conservation, therefore, was a matter of restoring this climax.
Academic ecologists have abandoned such a static way of thinking for something much more dynamic. For a start, they now appreciate that climate has always changed, and with it, ecology. Twenty thousand years ago the spot where I live was under a mile of ice. Then it was tundra, then birch forest, then pine forest, then alder, linden, elm and ash, then most recently oak, but beech was coming.
Which is its climax? We now know that oak seedlings rarely thrive under mature oaks (which rain caterpillars on them), so the oak climax was just a passing phase."

Trecho de Matt Ridley.

"Yet even as academic ecologists have abandoned balance-of-nature thinking, it still dominates practical conservation management."

Para este trecho só me apetece citar Upton-Sinclair:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"

Em defesa do livre comércio

Confesso que a carta nacionalista ou a carta proteccionista não faz parte do meu baralho.
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Não gosto das promoções do tipo "Compre o que é português!"
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Como cliente quero ser bem servido. Compro não para ajudar a economia nacional mas para suprir as minhas necessidades e alimentar as experiências de vida que aprecio.
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Até porque não percebo como as pessoas podem à segunda-feira ir para a rua dizer com convicção "Compre o que é português!" e, à terça-feira irem a uma feira na Alemanha ou em Espanha para tentar convencer os estrangeiros a comprar produtos portugueses, sem calçar os sapatos do outro... o outro também pode, no seu país, estar sujeito a campanhas "Compre o que é nacional, compre "Made in France" ou "Made in Germany".
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Por isso, achei e continuo a achar esta mensagem da Rádio Popular absurda.
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Não ia comentar esta afirmação "Cavaco apela ao consumo de produtos nacionais"... nem vou comentar. Deixo apenas que este artigo de Matt Ridley "The Ancient Cloud" o faça por mim:
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"And the reason we won the war against the Neanderthals, if war it was, is staring us in the face, though it remains almost completely unrecognized among anthropologists: We exchanged. At one site in the Caucasus there are Neanderthal and modern remains within a few miles of each other, both from around 30,000 years ago. The Neanderthal tools are all made from local materials. The moderns' tools are made from chert and jasper, some of which originated many miles away. That means trade.
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Evidence from recent Australian artifacts shows that long-distance movement of objects is a telltale sign of trade, not migration. We Africans have been doing this since at least 120,000 years ago. That's the date of beads made from marine shells found a hundred miles inland in Algeria. Trade is 10 times as old as agriculture.
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At first it was a peculiarity of us Africans. It gave us the edge over Neanderthals in their own continent and their own climate, because good ideas can spread through trade. New weapons, new foods, new crafts, new ornaments, new tools. Suddenly you are no longer relying on the inventiveness of your own tribe or the capacity of your own territory. You are drawing upon ideas that occurred to anybody anywhere anytime within your trading network."

The market is a bottom-up world with nobody in charge

"Like biological evolution, the market is a bottom-up world with nobody in charge.

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'Nobody planned the global capitalist system, nobody runs it, and nobody really comprehends it. This particularly offends intellectuals, for capitalism renders them redundant. It gets on perfectly well without them.'

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As islands of top-down plamming in a bottom-up sea, big companies have less and less of a future.

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merchants make wealth; chiefs nationalise it.

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Merchants and craftsmen make prosperity; chiefs, priests and thieves fritter it away.

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The dirigiste mentality that dominated the second half of the twentieth century was always asking who is in charge, looking for who decided on a policy of trade. That is not how the world works. Trade emerged from the interactions of individuals. It evolved. Nobody was in charge.

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The effect of the Phoenicians must have been to create a burst of specialisation all around the Mediterranean. Villages, towns and regions would have discovered their comparative advantages in smelting metals, manufacturing pottery, tanning hides or growing grain. Mutual dependence and gains from trade would have emerged in unexpected places.

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But in truth, was there ever a more admirable people than the Phoenicians? They knitted together not only the entire Mediterranean, but bits of the Atlantic, the Red Sea and the overland routes to Asia, yet they never had an emperor...

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Trechos retirados de "The Rational Optimist" de Matt Ridley.

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Isto no dia em que leio "Função Pública, salários e competitividade" o que me faz voltar a Matt Ridley para acrescentar:

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"governments gradually employ more and more ambitious elites who capture a greater and greater share of the society's income by interfering more and more in people's lives as they give themselves more and more rules to enforce, until they kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

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Because it is a monopoly, government brings ineficiency and stagnation to most things it runs; government agencies pursue the inflation of their budgets rather than the service of their customers; pressure groups form an unholy alliance with agencies to extract more money from taxpayers for their members."

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Recomendação...

O livro de Matt Ridley "The Rational Optmist" é um must read.

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Além de um hino permanente ao bottom-up apreende-se tanta informação sobre cultura geral que eu desconhecia...

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Em 1970 Norman Borlaug ganhou o Prémio Nobel da Paz...

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"Since 1900 the world has increased its population by 400 %; its cropland area by 30%; its average yields by 400% and its total crop harvest by 600%"

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Em 2005 a mesma área de cultivo produzia o dobro de 1968, graças, em grande parte, a Borlaug.

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Quem tem mais de 40 anos lembra-se das imagens da fome na Índia... acabou, graças, em grande parte, a Borlaug.

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Matt Ridley deve ser um proscrito dos caviares tal a defesa em contexto histórico que faz da liberdade comercial, do empreendedorismo não controlado pelo Estado. O homem chama a atenção para as cidades-estado fenícias e para as suas realizações, sem conquistas e sem reis ou imperadores.

Is Italy Too Italian?

O Carlos chamou-me a atenção para este artigo "Is Italy Too Italian?"

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No caso particular do negócio do sr. Luciano Barbera houve um tópico que me ficou a bailar na mente... será que os seus clientes não estão a migrar para outros gostos e modas?

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Uma empresa pode fazer tudo certo e, no entanto, falhar se os clientes que a suportam mudarem e desertarem.

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Quanto ao resto do artigo, sobre os corporativismos e o medo da concorrência:

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Matt Ridley no seu livro "The Rational Optimist" escreve:

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"business corporations in general are not defenders of free entreprise. On the contrary, they are one of the chief sources of danger. They are addicted to corporate welfare, they love regulations that erect barriers to entry to their small competitors in the modern world ... Most big firms are actually becoming fail, fragile and frightened - of the press, of pressure groups, of government, of their customers. So they should be. (Moi ici: uma corporação pode ser vista como uma grande empresa)

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The size of the average American company is down from 25 employees to 10 in just 25 years."

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"25 empregados em média... o que diriam os caviares?

O papel do número e da diversidade de contactos

Continuado daqui.

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Voltando ao livro de "The Rational Optimist" de Matt Ridley, é a partir da página 77 que encontro uma ideia verdadeiramente nova para mim:

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"human beings learn skills from each other by copying prestigious individuals, and they innovate by making mistakes that are very occasionally improvements - that is how culture evolves. The bigger the connected population, the more skilled the teacher, and the bigger the probability of a productive mistake. Conversely, the smaller the connected population, the greater the steady deterioration of the skill as it was passed on. Because they depended on wild resources, hunter-gatherers could rarely live in bands larger than a few hundred and could never achieve modern population densities. This had an important consequence. It meant that there was a limit to what they could invent.

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A band of a hundred people cannot sustain more than a certain number of tools, for the simple reason that both the production and the consumption of tools require a minimum size of market.

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People will only learn a limited set of skills and if there are not enough experts to learn one rare skill from, they will lose that skill. A good idea, manifest in bone, stone or string, needs to be kept alive by numbers. Progress can easily falter and turn into regress."

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"There was nothing special about the brains of the moderns; it was their trade networks that made the difference - their collective brains."

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"The lesson is stark. Self-sufficiency was dead tens of thousand years ago. Even the relatively simple lifestyle of a hunter-gatherer cannot exist without a large population exchanging ideas and skills. ... The success of human beings depends crucially, but precariously, on numbers and connections. A few hundred people cannot sustain a sophisticated technology: trade is a vital part of the story.

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Human cultural progress is a collective enterprise and it needs a dense collective brain."

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O papel do número e da diversidade de contactos para o progresso é algo que nunca tinha racionalizado.

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Daí que quando um país se fecha ...

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Daí comparar o que era o mundo há 20 anos e agora... há 20 anos eu recebia um catálogo pelo correio. Escolhia o livro, enviava um fax a pedir uma factura pro-forma. Recebia uma carta dos States com a factura pro-forma, ía ao banco e pedia um cheque. Recebia o cheque e enviava-o pelo correio para os States.... finalmente recebia o livro, ou a revista. Hoje, temos a internet, temos a Amazon, temos a biblioteca científica on-line em qualquer universidade, temos a Gigapedia, temos os blogues, temos o twitter... Lembro-me da surpresa que tive, ao folhear o primeiro número da HBR que subscrevi, em 1990 ou 1991, uma revista em que Peter Drucker respondia a cartas de leitores... Peter Drucker?! Hoje, Tom Peters faz retweets de comentários meus.

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Que aceleração espectacular da quantidade de contactos... e, a fazer fé na forma como Matt Ridley intitula o prólogo do livro, "When ideas have sex", que explosão Câmbrica de conhecimento, tecnologia, ... veremos a sair daqui?

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E isto é só o princípio:

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"I saw a two-year old kid (in diapers, in a stroller), using an iPod Touch today. Not just looking at it, but browsing menus and interacting. This is a revolution, guys."