De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum

Movimento popular conservador consegue vitórias nos EUA.

Engraçado como jornalista brasileiro não consegue enxergar nada popular entre conservadores aqui, ou nos EUA. Sem falar que o bordão “conservador” é sempre mal explicado.

Já que estamos em plena campanha eleitoral, nada como divulgar outro artigo científico sobre crimes. O pessoal de Law & Economics vai gostar disto.

Eis o planejador benevolente dos livros-texto.

Se você gosta desta frase, gostará disto. A Microsoft foi rápida nesta.

Embora tenha tentado convencer os eleitores durante 8 anos que sua administração buscava um lugar ao sol no cenário externo, o que se vê é uma abertura para sofrer processos na OMC em troca, claro, do descalabro fiscal que não tem atingido brasileiros anestesiados (submetidos a uma notável ilusão fiscal?).

Quem vier depois, então, paga a conta. E não falo apenas do novo presidente, mas sim das gerações futuras (que não têm passaporte italiano, por exemplo).

Custos e benefícios se alinham neste caso?

Foi um ser humano que errou e acertou na vida, como todos nós.

Poderia ter esperado um pouco mais para partir, mas não resistiu ao chamado e não cumpriu a meta que lhe dei como um incentivo: voltar logo para a sala de aula, para os alunos, para os ex-alunos e demais colegas.

Descanse em paz, Ernani. Sobre sua vida acadêmica, veja o seu lattes.

O restante, por bem ou por mal, já caiu na real.

…ainda mais em época de eleições.

Por que você deveria estudar economia?

Daniel Piza.

Os porta-vozes do Itamaraty bem poderiam responder a esta pergunta. O fato? Ah, o fato…

…em que a matriz de insumo-produto era facilmente utilizada para estudar a economia. Hoje, até para artigos simples, você precisa de noções de equilíbrio geral computável.

Recomendo fortemente a leitura disto.

A propósito, sábado passado eu e o Pedro Sette falávamos dos fracassos de nossa direita e, sabe, não nos ocorreu pensar nisto.

Eis aqui o evento, no Facebook.

Eu me pergunto se sabem, após ler isso.

A dica do Duke é ótima. Sargent entrevistado. Trechos:

Rolnick: OK, here goes. Examples of such criticisms are that modern macroeconomics makes too much use of sophisticated mathematics to model people and markets; that it incorrectly relies on the assumption that asset markets are efficient in the sense that asset prices aggregate information of all individuals; that the faith in good outcomes always emerging from competitive markets is misplaced; that the assumption of “rational expectations” is wrongheaded because it attributes too much knowledge and forecasting ability to people; that the modern macro mainstay “real business cycle model” is deficient because it ignores so many frictions and imperfections and is useless as a guide to policy for dealing with financial crises; that modern macroeconomics has either assumed away or shortchanged the analysis of unemployment; that the recent financial crisis took modern macro by surprise; and that macroeconomics should be based less on formal decision theory and more on the findings of “behavioral economics.” Shouldn’t these be taken seriously?

Sargent: Sorry, Art, but aside from the foolish and intellectually lazy remark about mathematics, all of the criticisms that you have listed reflect either woeful ignorance or intentional disregard for what much of modern macroeconomics is about and what it has accomplished. That said, it is true that modern macroeconomics uses mathematics and statistics to understand behavior in situations where there is uncertainty about how the future will unfold from the past. But a rule of thumb is that the more dynamic, uncertain and ambiguous is the economic environment that you seek to model, the more you are going to have to roll up your sleeves, and learn and use some math. That’s life.

(…)

Sargent: I have two responses to your citation of criticisms of “rational expectations.” First, note that rational expectations continues to be a workhorse assumption for policy analysis by macroeconomists of all political persuasions. To take one good example, in the spring of 2009, Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs independently wrote op-ed pieces incisively criticizing the Obama administration’s proposed PPIP (Public-Private Investment Program) for jump-starting private sector purchases of toxic assets.3 Both Stiglitz and Sachs executed a rational expectations calculation to compute the rewards to prospective buyers. Those calculations vividly showed that the administration’s proposal represented a large transfer of taxpayer funds to owners of toxic assets. That analysis threw a floodlight onto the PPIP that some of its authors did not welcome.

And second, economists have been working hard to refine rational expectations theory. For instance, macroeconomists have done creative work that modifies and extends rational expectations in ways that allow us to understand bubbles and crashes in terms of optimism and pessimism that emerge from small deviations from rational expectations. An influential example of such work is the 1978 QJE [Quarterly Journal of Economics] paper by Harrison and Kreps.4 You should also look at a fascinating paper that builds on Harrison and Kreps, written by José Scheinkman and Wei Xiong in the 2003 JPE.5 As I mentioned earlier, for policymakers to know whether and how they can moderate bubbles, we need to have well-confirmed quantitative versions of such models up and running. We don’t yet, but we are working on it.

Finalmente:

Rolnick: What about the most serious criticism—that the recent financial crisis caught modern macroeconomics by surprise?

Sargent: Art, it is just wrong to say that this financial crisis caught modern macroeconomists by surprise. That statement does a disservice to an important body of research to which responsible economists ought to be directing public attention. Researchers have systematically organized empirical evidence about past financial and exchange crises in the United States and abroad. Enlightened by those data, researchers have constructed first-rate dynamic models of the causes of financial crises and government policies that can arrest them or ignite them. The evidence and some of the models are well summarized and extended, for example, in Franklin Allen and Douglas Gale’s 2007 book Understanding Financial Crises. Please note that this work was available well before the U.S. financial crisis that began in 2007.

Tem muito mais lá. Realmente recomendo a leitura

Da série “não li, mas vou ler e…mesmo assim, já gostei!”

Há esperança para o Brasil? Anaximandro acha que há.

A discussão sobre o federalismo fiscal no Brasil, nos últimos quatro anos, apresentou um certo recuo. Só na academia ela continua séria. No debate público, ela está contaminada por um discurso de má qualidade, basicamente politiqueiro.

Mas isto não nos impede de voltar ao tema (é até um dever cívico lembrar este pessoal de suas obrigações). Portanto, eis uma nova dica.

Do Intergovernmental Grants Create Ratchets in State and Local Taxes?
Testing the Friedman-Sanford Hypothesis
Russell Sobel, George R. Crowley

Federal grants often result in states creating new programs and hiring new employees, and when the federal funding for that specific purpose is discontinued, these new state programs must either be discontinued or financed through increases in state own source taxes. Government programs tend to be difficult to cut, as goes Milton Friedman‘s famous quote about nothing being as permanent as a temporary government program, suggesting it is likely that temporary federal grants create permanent (future) ratchets in state taxes. Far from being purely an academic question, this argument is in practice why South Carolina‘s Governor Mark Sanford attempted to turn down federal stimulus monies for his state. In addition to examining the impact of federal grants on future state budgets, we also examine how federal and state grants affect future local government budgets. Our findings confirm that grants indeed result in future state and local tax increases of roughly 40 cents for every dollar in grant money received in prior years.

Is Federer Stronger in a Tournament Without Nadal?
An Evaluation of Odds and Seedings forWimbledon 2009

Christoph Leitner, Achim Zeileis, Kurt Hornik

Abstract: Wimbledon is one of the most popular annual sports tournament. In the Men’s Single 2009 the top seeded and defending champion Rafael Nadal withdrew from the tournament due to injury days prior to the tournament. Here, we try to analyze the effects of Nadal’s withdrawal especially on the ability/strength of the main competitor Roger Federer by using bookmakers expectancies to estimate the unknown abilities of the players and compare them for two different odds sets. The comparison shows that the bookmakers did not incorporate Nadal’s withdrawal adequately, assigning too high expected winning probabilities to Federer and Murray.

Pelo menos esta aqui.

Policarpo Militante não resistiu. Morreu hoje, após constatar que seu partido e seu presidente o tratavam como um zero à esquerda (aliás, nome engraçadinho de um antiga editora aliada dos poderosos).

É quase impossível, a esta altura, defender o impeachment do ex-presidente Collor com argumentos apaixonados, como a esquerda gosta de fazer quando sobe no palanque.

Claro, eu poderia defender o apedrejamento dos imbecis, mas aí eu me igualaria a seus aliados iranianos…

Para os que acham que todos são irracionais, mais um pouco de ciência no caldeirão.

Não para o núcleo dominante do Itamaraty Irã.