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Expectativa e Realidade

Fato da Semana: 800 da Magna Carta (semana 24 de 2015)

Fato da Semana: Este é o fato de oito séculos. O documento que é considerado o marco da moderna democracia completou 800 anos. O rei inglês foi obrigado a submeter a uma série de regras dos seus súditos, no caso os nobres. O soberano deveria estar sujeito as leis.

Qual a relevância disto? Apesar de muitos aspectos do documento ser específico da época em que foi produzido, o artigo 39 diz que “nenhum homem livre será preso ou privado de sua propriedade ou considerado fora da lei, a não ser por julgamento legal”. Assim, a vontade do rei não mais prevalecia. Notamos numa postagem do blog que o documento também falava da padronização das medidas.

Positivo ou Negativo? – Positivo saber que ocorreu uma grande evolução histórica. E 800 anos depois possamos afirmar que o mundo de hoje é muito melhor, e mais democrático, do que aquele da época feudal.

Desdobramentos – Somos otimistas. Acreditamos que normas devem ser cumpridas por todos. Isto inclui governantes, que devem respeitar as normas, incluindo LRF, princípios de justiça, moralidade etc.

Arte da rua

NeSpoon

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Entrevista com Alvin Roth

(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Stanford University’s Alvin Roth is a very rare thing: An economist who saves lives.

The co-recipient of the 2012 economics Nobel got his prize, in part, for helping to fix a long-standing problem with the market for kidney donations. Often family and friends were willing donors for someone who needed a kidney. But for medical reasons they weren’t a compatible match.

Building on previous work in which he had reshaped the National Resident Matching Program, which matches medical-school graduates with hospital internships, Roth devised an algorithm that would help match willing kidney donors to compatible recipients with whom they had no other connection.

That system became the cornerstone of one of the country’s first kidney exchange clearinghouses. Roth estimates his work has resulted in roughly 4,000 kidney transplants that might never had happened if not for the system he worked to build.

The market for donated kidneys is an example of what economists call a “matching market.” These markets govern everything from corporate hiring decisions to how we meet spouses, but they obey laws more complex than the simple balancing of supply and demand with prices.

While Roth’s early research focused on somewhat abstract areas of economics including game theory, over time he has transformed himself into something of a matching market guru. Roth swung by Quartz’s New York offices recently to chat about his new book, Who Gets What—and Why, which explains how matching markets work, why almost everyone makes it illegal to buy kidneys, and why it’s increasingly rare for people to marry their high-school sweethearts. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation.

Quartz: One of the ways we usually think about markets is in terms of the market for, say, crude oil or Apple stock. But you deal with “matching markets.” Can you briefly explain what those are?

Alvin Roth: Once you start looking at marketplaces one of the things you notice is that not all marketplaces are set up so that their job is merely to find a price at which supply equals demand. Those are the commodity markets. But lots of markets, even when they have prices as very important parts of the market, don’t set the price so that supply equals demand.

Labor markets don’t do that. Quartz doesn’t hire people by lowering the wage until [only] just enough people want to come work here. Instead, presumably you get to interview bunches of people who would like to work here and you get to hire some of them. But you have to compete.

The name of the book is Who Gets What—and Why. After reading it, I thought you could have added “and When” to the title. There’s this timing component of markets that’s really fascinating. You spend a lot of time on it.

Lots of markets clear very early—before lots of information is available. Book publishing is a good example. Publishers buy books before the books are written and they don’t really know what they’re getting.

If you’re graduating from law school, you get hired long before you graduate. Before firms really know what they’re getting. Before you might know what kind of law you really want to do.

Doctors used to be hired two years before graduation and that’s eventually one of the things that eventually led to the centralized clearinghouse for doctors [in the US], the National Resident Matching Program.

[...]

 

You started in a sort-of arcane area of economics, game theory. But it seems that early on you also start looking for opportunities to put these ideas into practice. You seem really interested in finding ways to help people. And I’m wondering if you think that should be the goal of economics? And, if so, what are the value of abstract models?

 Abstract models are very, very useful for organizing your thoughts and learning some things that you can’t learn without them. So I wouldn’t want to say that the goal of economics should be building concrete [things] in the world. But that should certainly be one of the goals.

Think about biology, broadly, with medicine as one part. Not all biologists should be doctors. But it is important to have doctors too.

And it’s important to have medicine that learns from biology. And you want biology and medicine to work together so that abstract, abstruse concerns with things like genes and DNA and proteins should eventually be translated into medical care and better health.

 

Continua aqui

 

O mito da educacao e o crescimento economico

[...]

Education’s importance is incontrovertible – teaching is my day job, so I certainly hope it is of some value. But whether it constitutes a strategy for economic growth is another matter. What most people mean by better education is more schooling; and, by higher-quality education, they mean the effective acquisition of skills (as revealed, say, by the test scores in the OECD’s standardized PISA exam). But does that really drive economic growth? 

In fact, the push for better education is an experiment that has already been carried out globally. And, as my Harvard colleague Lant Pritchett has pointed out, the long-term payoff has been surprisingly disappointing.

In the 50 years from 1960 to 2010, the global labor force’s average time in school essentially tripled, from 2.8 years to 8.3 years. This means that the average worker in a median country went from less than half a primary education to more than half a high school education. 

How much richer should these countries have expected to become? In 1965, France had a labor force that averaged less than five years of schooling and a per capita income of $14,000 (at 2005 prices). In 2010, countries with a similar level of education had a per capita income of less than $1,000. 

In 1960, countries with an education level of 8.3 years of schooling were 5.5 times richer than those with 2.8 year of schooling. By contrast, countries that had increased their education from 2.8 years of schooling in 1960 to 8.3 years of schooling in 2010 were only 167% richer. Moreover, much of this increase cannot possibly be attributed to education, as workers in 2010 had the advantage of technologies that were 50 years more advanced than those in 1960. Clearly, something other than education is needed to generate prosperity.

[...]

And there is more bad news for the “education, education, education” crowd: Most of the skills that a labor force possesses were acquired on the job. What a society knows how to do is known mainly in its firms, not in its schools. At most modern firms, fewer than 15% of the positions are open for entry-level workers, meaning that employers demand something that the education system cannot – and is not expected – to provide. 

When presented with these facts, education enthusiasts often argue that education is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for growth. But in that case, investment in education is unlikely to deliver much if the other conditions are missing. After all, though the typical country with ten years of schooling had a per capita income of $30,000 in 2010, per capita income in Albania, Armenia, and Sri Lanka, which have achieved that level of schooling, was less than $5,000. Whatever is preventing these countries from becoming richer, it is not lack of education.

A country’s income is the sum of the output produced by each worker. To increase income, we need to increase worker productivity. Evidently, “something in the water,” other than education, makes people much more productive in some places than in others. A successful growth strategy needs to figure out what this is.

Make no mistake: education presumably does raise productivity. But to say that education is your growth strategy means that you are giving up on everyone who has already gone through the school system – most people over 18, and almost all over 25. It is a strategy that ignores the potential that is in 100% of today’s labor force, 98% of next year’s, and a huge number of people who will be around for the next half-century. An education-only strategy is bound to make all of them regret having been born too soon.

Autor:

Ricardo Hausmann is Director of Harvard's Center for International Development and Professor of the Practice of Economic Development at the Kennedy School of Government. His research interests include issues of growth, macroeconomic stability, international finance, and the social dimensions of development. He holds a PhD in economics from Cornell University.

Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/education-economic-growth-by-ricardo-hausmann-2015-05#q6cc6rzUoKt6CYFB.99

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