quinta-feira, junho 17, 2004
Mitos Derrubados
Excerto do artigo de Arnold Kling na Tech Central Station.
The view that only large industrial enterprises matter seems preposterous now. If Galbraith had been right, then the industrial structure of the 1960's would still exist today. Instead of what Alvin Toffler in 1980 called the "third wave," a Galbraithian economy would still be dominated by automobile and steel manufacturing. Galbraith would never have predicted Wal-Mart, Federal Express, Apple, Microsoft, eBay or Amazon, much less the tens of thousands of less spectacular entrepreneurial enterprises that have had a large cumulative impact on our economy.
The view that the Soviet Union was morally and economically equivalent to the United States also now seems misguided. Certainly, there is no economist who is not aware of the enormous GDP gap between Communist countries and similarly-situated capitalist countries, such as North Korea vs. South Korea.
Most importantly, the idea that government planning of the economy is rational has been dealt a series of mortal blows, including:
the failure of wage-price controls in the United States and other countries in the 1970's
the poor performance of state-run enterprises in Europe and the success of Margaret Thatcher's privatization initiative in the United Kingdom in the 1980's
Japan's "lost decade" of the 1990's, which ended the last myth of rational central planning, as Japanese industrial policy foundered in stagnation
the ability of computers on the Internet to self-organize in the 1990's, demonstrating that Friedrich Hayek's concept of "spontaneous order" is valid. It was Hayek who argued strenuously that the market's ability to process local information makes it more efficient than central planning.
posted by Miguel Noronha 3:22 da tarde
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