Ontem, durante o meu jogging, ao reflectir sobre o que tinha lido no capítulo 1 ("The Economics of Strategic Diversity") de "Astute Competition - The Economics of Strategic Diversity" de Peter Johnson, interroguei-me sobre o impacte dos economistas na economia do país.
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Que impacte terá uma classe educada, moldada, condicionada a pensar em termos de competição perfeita, monopólios, oligopólios, em suma, commodities... aqueles que conseguem, através do contacto com a realidade, partir o molde são uns heróis.
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Agora, percebo melhor a ênfase nos custos e, sobretudo, a visão redutora de olhar para um sector económico como um bloco homogéneo onde todos competem da mesma maneira, ou seja, pelo preço.
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Por isso,
Daniel Bessa e os seus pares são incapazes de perceber o real, eles falam de mercado, e na realidade o que existem são seres vivos únicos, não matematizáveis, as empresas... e como prova da sociedade de vácuo e espuma em que vivemos, apesar de falharem uma e outra vez nas previsões, continuam a ser convidados para descrever a realidade e continuar a fazer previsões.
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Por isso, o mainstream fica admirado com a resiliência da economia real e das empresas reais, e só concebe uma explicação o preço, neste caso a cotação do euro (
aqui e
aqui).
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Por isso, a tríade, como lhes chamo há muito tempo, olha para um sector económico como um
bloco homogéneo coerente, maciço... quando a
realidade é saudavelmente heterogénea. Heterogeneidade entre empresas é o equivalente à biodiversidade na biologia, nos ecossistemas. O melhor seguro contra as catástrofes!!!
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"Contemporary neoclassical economics does not provide an adequate
account of the competition between diverse businesses.
…
Nowhere though do we encounter a business as the object of
investigation in traditional economics. In other words, there is a huge gap in
the economics coverage of commercial activity. Why is this? Part of the reason
is that the focus of economists is on markets rather than on
businesses.
…
Management and strategy seem to have little importance: notionally at
least, we could optimise the production function with but a few hours of linear
programming.
…
Businesses get things done, facilitating intent and action in a way
that is fundamentally beyond the scope of the market mechanism. We can consider
businesses to be the vehicle to extract economic rents through the competitive
control of resources; they are the building blocks of heterogeneous
competition.
…
Like people, businesses are unique and the teams working in them
expect strategies to reflect the specifics of the business, not averages or
generalisations drawn across a large number of other businesses, which are each
in fact distinct. Furthermore, businesses like individuals learn and adapt, (Moi ici: Por isso, o pensamento newtoniano de causa-efeitos eternos e imutáveis não funciona) particularly in the light of generally held assumptions about how businesses
behave or conform to expectations. In talking to the key individuals in a
business, it soon becomes apparent that heterogeneity is the key to generating
returns different from those of competitors. Richard Rumelt got it right when he
said:
Similar firms facing similar strategic problems may respond
differently.
Firms in the same industry compete with substantially different
bundles of resources using disparate approaches. These firms differ because of
different histories of strategic choice (
Moi ici: A lição do espaço de Minkowsky, aqui também)
and performance and because managements
appear to seek asymmetric competitive positions. (Foss 1997: 132)
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Economics heads in the opposite direction since it is determined to
eliminate or render irrelevant the specifics of the individual situation. (Moi ici: Bem me parecia a mim, anónimo engenheiro de província, que era assim que os economistas viam a coisa, mas pensava que era defeito. Afinal é feitio) As a
result, markets are the antithesis of businesses — all the non-systematic,
business-specific information is washed away in the economists’ assumption of
efficient and deep product markets: this is what transactional cost economics
tells us happens when markets function well. The transactions are nominally the
same and as a result individual businesses are not relevant to the making of
purchasing decisions because they all offer whatever it is that the market
provides. But this emphasis on anonymity in economics goes beyond the
featureless neutrality of markets.
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The entire approach of traditional economics is to try to introduce
homogeneous elements to make a situation tractable — essentially various forms
of everything else being assumed to be the same — in order to establish a
general conclusion of the form ‘whenever we have X, then Y follows’. More fully,
though, we should say that ‘whenever we have two situations that only differ in
so far as X occurs in one and does not in the other, then Y will occur in the
situation that X occurs’. This uniformity of background assumption is generally
known as the ceteris paribus assumption e.g. same product, same production
processes, same customer needs. In real business situations, it is extremely
rare for conditions to repeat themselves, in other words, for ceteris paribus to
hold.
In a similar fashion, the force of ceteris paribus thinking extends
to the way economists think about the businesses themselves. Traditional
economic analyses of business problems show little understanding of the
heterogeneous internal structure of businesses that result from their selection
of business model.
While Michael Porter and other industrial organisation theorists
perceive the existence of cost- and value based sources of competitive
advantage, they are not able to link in a specific way these advantages to the
configuration of the firm. The typical assumption is that the differences relate
either to economies of scale and scope, or to operational efficiency.
Very little attention is given to differentiated internal structures
since this undermines the powerful underlying requirement that competing
businesses are relevantly similar, permitting the application of ceteris paribus
thinking.
.
It is easy to suspect that traditional economists cannot in fact
explain how businesses make a sustained profit. In a world of perfect
competition supernormal profits will be zero, and the suggestion of economics is
that anything other than this outcome is either inefficient, transient or
morally reprehensible. This failure to understand the source of sustained
business profits probably arises from the focus of traditional economics on only
three types of competition (monopoly, oligopoly and perfect competition — all of
which are selected and investigated because they are susceptible to mathematical
analysis) and associated rents.
…
Economists also tend to regard differentiation within a product or
service as a variant of price, when in fact price may not be a criterion that
determines purchase.
…
We find that often a reasonable price, not necessarily the best
price, is a threshold requirement for a product or service to be bought;
however, the dominant criterion that triggers a purchase decision relates to
aesthetics, ease-of-use, name recognition or some other set of
considerations.
When we turn to the basis of competition between businesses,
economists usually assume that strategic positioning problems are essentially
pricing problems, and this single price variable entirely captures the decision
criteria of the purchaser."
