Novas de outros blogues

Se atentarem nos links que recomendamos, deixo-os com algumas recensões sobre o que lá se escreve:

- Rua 7: ácido, corrosivo, um estilo incisivo, político.
- Exílio de Andarilho: Relações Internacionais, vistas a partir do Oriente. Entrou em período de reflexão... Não queremos que acabe... Deixem mensagens de incentivo...
- MarketingMania: o congresso dos profissionais do Marketing, no início de Novembro, ocupa o destaque. Reflexões ponderadas pela pena do presidente da APPM.
- Marketing Faculty: cada vez melhor e uma referência na área do Marketing em Portugal.
- Pateira: goza, descaradamente, com o "caso" dos cartões de representação dos administradores não executivos da Metro do Porto.
- AbsolutMartunis: fala de um novo espectáculo de dança com açucar.

Marketing Inovador

O livro "Marketing Inovador" está pronto e foi entregue na Universidade Católica Editora.
Lá para meados de Fevereiro de 2007, um pouco antes do dia dos namorados, estará numa banca perto do leitor.

Agora estamos em pleno processo de convite e recolha de prefácios de ilustres profissionais do mundo empresarial e académico.

Iremos dando notícias por aqui...

Robert Barro sobre Milton Friedman

Palestra de Robert Barro, da Universidade de Harvard, no Cato Institute, sobre Milton Friedman.
12 fabulosas páginas em formato pdf para download fácil.

http://www.cato.org/events/monconf2006/barro.pdf

Minton Friedman: obituário da Reuters

Milton Friedman Dead at 94

A sad day.

"SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Milton Friedman, the free market economist and winner of a 1976 Nobel Prize, has died, a spokeswoman for his family said on Thursday.

Friedman, who preached free enterprise in the face of government regulation and advocated a monetary policy that called for steady growth in money supplies, was 94."

Be sure to check out these two recent interviews w/ Milton Friedman, by Dr. Russ Roberts.

EconTalk, Friedman on Capitalism and Freedom: "Russ Roberts talks to Milton Friedman about the radical ideas he put forward almost 50 years ago in Capitalism and Freedom. Listen to the most influential economist of the past 50 years discuss the principles of liberty, social responsibility of business, the inertia behind bad legislation and his career as economist and public intellectual."

EconTalk, Milton Friedman on Money: "Russ Roberts talks with Milton Friedman about his research and views on inflation, the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, and what the future holds."

Retirado de http://amateureconomist.blogspot.com

Frases célebres de Milton Friedman: cortesia do The amateur economist blogue

"One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programmes by their intentions rather than their results."
-- Milton Friedman


"There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you're doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I'm not so careful about the content of the present, but I'm very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else's money on myself. And if I spend somebody else's money on myself, then I'm sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else's money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else's money on somebody else, I'm not concerned about how much it is, and I'm not concerned about what I get. And that's government. And that's close to 40% of our national income."
-- Milton Friedman


"If an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can only gain at the expense of another."
-- Milton Friedman


"I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible. The reason I am is because I believe the big problem is not taxes, the big problem is spending. The question is, "How do you hold down government spending?" Government spending now amounts to close to 40% of national income not counting indirect spending through regulation and the like. If you include that, you get up to roughly half. The real danger we face is that number will creep up and up and up. The only effective way I think to hold it down, is to hold down the amount of income the government has. The way to do that is to cut taxes."
-- Milton Friedman


Retirado de http://amateureconblog.blogspot.com/

Frases célebres de Milton Friedman

"There's no such thing as a free lunch"
and
"Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon"

Minton Friedman - parte 4- notícia da Associated Press

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: November 17, 2006

Filed at 12:54 a.m. ET

Milton Friedman

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who championed individual freedom, influenced the economic policies of three presidents and befriended world leaders, died Thursday, a spokesman for the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Center in Indianapolis said. He was 94.

In numerous books, a Newsweek magazine column and a PBS show, Friedman championed individual freedom in economics and politics. The longtime University of Chicago professor pioneered a school of thought that became known as the Chicago school of economics. His work is still widely influential in the business world, academia and politics.

Friedman's theory of monetarism was adopted in part by the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations. It opposed the traditional Keynesian economics that had dominated U.S. policy since the New Deal. He was a member of Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board.

His work in consumption analysis, monetary history and stabilization policy earned him the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976.

Friedman favored a policy of steady, moderate growth in the money supply, opposed wage and price controls and criticized the Federal Reserve when it tried to fine-tune the economy.

He argued that government should allow the free market to operate to solve inflation and other economic problems. But he also urged adoption of a ''negative income tax'' in which people who earn less than a certain amount would get money back from national coffers.

Minton Friedman - parte 3 - notícia do Guardian

Mark Tran
Thursday November 16, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

Milton Friedman, the Nobel prize-winning economist and Margaret Thatcher's monetarist guru, died today at the age of 94.

Mr Friedman died of heart failure after being taken to hospital near his home in San Francisco, his daughter, Janet Martell, said today.

His wife, Rose Friedman, who co-wrote many of his books, survives him.

A great believer in unfettered markets, Mr Friedman was the leader of the Chicago School of monetary economics. The central tenet of the school was that the money supply determined inflation.

As the flipside to his belief in the central role of markets, Mr Friedman, who won the Nobel prize in 1976, thought the role of government should be as limited as possible.

That view made him highly popular with free market devotees such as Margaret Thatcher and Chile's Augusto Pinochet, who relied on his advice as they put his ideas into practice.

Mr Friedman, however, later distanced himself from Mrs Thatcher's policy of cutting public-sector borrowing at a time of recession.

In 2003, he publicly declared in the Financial Times that monetarist policy had failed. "The use of quantity of money as a target has not been a success ... I'm not sure I would as of today push it as hard as I once did," he said.

Mr Friedman took his free market approach to its logical conclusion on various social issues, advocating the decriminalisation of drugs and prostitution.

An active Republican, Mr Friedman served as an informal economic adviser to Senator Barry Goldwater in his unsuccessful campaign for the presidency in 1964, to Richard Nixon in his successful 1968 campaign and to Ronald Reagan in his 1980 campaign.

His books included A Theory of the Consumption Function, The Optimum Quantity of Money and Other Essays, and (with A J Schwartz) A Monetary History of the United States, Monetary Statistics of the United States, and Monetary Trends in the United States and the United Kingdom. He was also a columnist for Newsweek magazine.

Minton Friedman - notícia do óbito na Business Week

The death of Milton Friedman at age 94 ends, after more than 60 years, the greatest rivalry in modern economics—the one between the conservative great Friedman and the liberal great Paul Samuelson. Samuelson lives on, at age 91, and remembers his intellectual foe with respect.

"Milton Friedman was a giant," Samuelson said in a Nov. 16 interview from his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "No 20th-century economist had his importance in moving the American economic profession rightward from 1940 to the present."

More than anyone else, Milton Friedman was responsible for challenging the worldview of British economist John Maynard Keynes, who believed in the power of government to guide and stimulate economic growth. As an alternative to Keynesianism, he put forth a more laissez-faire philosophy known as monetarism—the doctrine that the best thing the government can do is supply the economy with the money it needs and stand aside.

Friedman blamed inflation on tinkering by governments and central banks. Along with Edmund Phelps of Columbia University, who won the 2006 Nobel prize, Friedman showed that central banks can't buy permanently lower unemployment with slightly higher inflation. Wrote Friedman: "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon, in the sense that it cannot occur without a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output."

Promoting Monetarism

Friedman won the Nobel prize in economics in 1976. Among his achievements, the Nobel committee cited the monumental book he wrote with Anna Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, which explained how missteps by the Federal Reserve deepened and prolonged the Great Depression of the 1930s.

While Friedman taught and researched at the University of Chicago, making it into a bastion of conservative, monetarist thinking, fellow Nobelist Samuelson held forth in the more liberal environs of MIT, where Keynesianism continued to have a foothold. Friedman's students helped spread free-market thinking around the world, including to Chile; Samuelson wrote the best-selling economics textbook, Economics, published by The McGraw-Hill Companies (MHP) (publisher of BusinessWeek), which influenced generations of undergraduates.

At times, the rivalry was right out in the open. From 1966 to the 1980s, Samuelson and Friedman had alternating columns in Newsweek magazine. But their competition was always collegial.

Says Samuelson: "I've known Milton and Rose Friedman for 65 years [Rose Director Friedman, his wife and co-author, survives her husband]. We have had considerable differences on policy. We have had considerable agreement on analytical matters. Knowing that differences on policy and ideology often poison and taint personal relations, I think we should both be admired for the friendship and civility we maintained over all these years."

Friedman was more the traditional economist, harking back to the wisdom of Alfred Marshall, while Samuelson was the innovator. But Friedman's views hold up remarkably well from today's vantage point.

Economists now generally reject heavy-handed Keynesian intervention and agree with Friedman that inflation is a monetary phenomenon. Friedman backed away from the crudest version of monetarism, which said that central banks should do little but set a target for the growth rate of the money supply. For example, he had high praise for former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, even though Greenspan paid little attention to the size of the money supply when setting short-term interest rates.

Theory of Consumption

According to his autobiography for the Nobel prize, Friedman was born on July 31, 1912, in Brooklyn, N.Y., and grew up in Rahway, N.J. He wrote: "Financial crisis was a constant companion. Yet there was always enough to eat, and the family atmosphere was warm and supportive."

He received his bachelor's degree from Rutgers University, studied economics at the University of Chicago, and got his PhD from Columbia University. During the Depression, Friedman worked in Washington on a large consumer-budget study that later led to one of his best-known achievements, the so-called "theory of the consumption function," which says that people's spending is determined by their expectations of future or "permanent" income, not just their current income.

Friedman spent most of his academic career in Chicago, then became a senior research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University. In the 1970s he and his wife created a PBS documentary series called Free to Choose, which later became a book.

He was a member of President Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board and received from Reagan the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In his final years, he and his wife established the Milton & Rose D. Friedman Foundation, devoted to promoting parental choice in schooling through vouchers.

Coy is BusinessWeek's Economics Editor.

Morreu Milton Friedman - parte 1

David Olive on The Star
Um artigo crítico sobre a vida do homem mais influente da segunda metade do século XX

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Milton Friedman, guiding spirit of economic conservatives worldwide in the post-World War II era, died yesterday of heart failure at a hospital near his San Francisco home. He was 94. A relentless champion of unfettered free markets and minimalist government, Friedman died just six months after the death of his chief intellectual antagonist, the Canadian-born U.S. economist John Kenneth Galbraith, an unapologetic liberal to the end who promoted an activist role for government in assisting the disadvantaged. Friedman and his wife, Rose, a noted economist in her own right, have for more than a quarter century been chief mascots of the modern conservative movement that has dominated public policy making in the West since the 1980s. The Vancouver-based Fraser Institute, an influential libertarian think tank, was perhaps unrivalled in the zeal with which it adopted the Friedmans as ideological patrons almost since the institute's inception in 1974. Friedman was an adviser to U.S. president Ronald Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. He took criticism from human-rights advocates for counselling Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and from anti-communists on the right for his lectures on free-market principles to government officials and students in the Soviet Union, China and Vietnam. Recalling the protestors who accosted him in Santiago, Friedman said he was resigned to being followed about the globe by demonstrators who made "a concerted effort to tar and feather me." In contrast to Galbraith, whose undiluted liberalism has been out of style since the early 1980s, Friedman went out on a high, his dismissal of government as an effective agent of social progress having ruled as the dominant economic theology for the past quarter-century. That makes the Friedman legacy something of an oddity. For his maxims, so revered in conservative salons in London, Washington and elsewhere, are contradicted by the facts on the ground, and his life story is at odds with some of his most fundamental beliefs. This leading exponent of the private sector's superior acumen over government did not ever toil in the private sector, but for taxpayer-financed government agencies and universities. Criticizing the Depression-era New Deal would consume much of Friedman's thinking and lectures in the 1960s. But unable to find work during the Depression, he regarded the job he secured with one of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal agencies "a lifesaver." Later, on encountering anti-Semitism during a brief teaching stint at the University of Wisconsin, Friedman returned to government work in the federal Treasury department, where, of all things, he played the lead role in devising the current withholding system of collecting income-tax revenue. Friedman railed against corporate philanthropy, insisting that the exclusive role of business is to generate wealth, not engage in social engineering. Yet Friedman's own academic home of longest duration, the University of Chicago, was willed into existence by Standard Oil monopolist John D. Rockefeller. Friedman's influence derived from his prophetic 1960s warning that runaway government spending and spiralling wage costs would someday culminate in a toxic co-existence of moribund economic growth, double-digit inflation and soaring unemployment — a phenomenon dubbed "stagflation" by fellow economist Paul Samuelson, a centrist, when it manifested itself in the 1970s. Friedman's was hardly the only voice raising the alarm, only the most persistent and well-credentialed. During his long tenure as an economics professor at the University of Chicago, Friedman's tutelage of like-minded young economists, some half-dozen of whom went on to become Nobel laureates, earned Friedman the distinction of having appeared to create a movement, namely the "Chicago School," for which there is no liberal counterpart. Friedman himself won Nobel honours in 1976.Friedman earned a reputation as a contrarian for rebelling against government pump-priming in tough economic times, which was advocated by John Maynard Keynes, the greatest economist of the 20th century. But the stagflation that earned Friedman celebrity status, a PBS television series and a Newsweek column, was not caused by those practices. The economic malaise of the 1970s was caused by reckless U.S. spending on Vietnam, two oil shocks in the space of a decade (a barrel of oil cost less than $2 U.S. before the first shock in 1973), and a managerial class in both the public and private sectors content to pass wage increases on to customers rather than stand up to union leaders. All of that was abhorrent to Keynes, who preached fiscal responsibility and balanced budgets in good times in order to bulk up government treasuries for the inevitable bad times. The influence of Friedman and his acolytes is exaggerated, although this is rarely acknowledged by either adherents or opponents of "Friedmanism." It's seldom remarked upon, for instance, that both Reagan and Thatcher used traditional Keynsian methods of increased government spending, along with tax cuts about which Keynes would have been less enthusiastic, to spur the economic boom of the 1980s. Current U.S. President George W. Bush followed an identical strategy in response to the U.S. recession of 2001-02. The era of big government continues apace, with the massive Medicare and other entitlement programs of Lester Pearson and Lyndon Johnson still in place, embellished recently by the creation of the U.S. homeland security department — the biggest expansion in the U.S. bureaucracy since the creation of the Pentagon shortly after World War II. Corporate philanthropy is arcing toward a new zenith, surpassing the largesse of the Rockefeller clan and Andrew Carnegie. "These days, billionaires try to outdo each other not just in how much they give away, but in how effective they can be in tackling problems," writes Slate editor Jacob Weisberg, whose online magazine now sponsors an annual conclave of the world's big business donors. Attending this year's donorfest were Bill Gates, whose foundation has $30 billion (U.S.) to dispense, and, of perhaps more interest, Google Inc. co-founder Larry Page. As an ideology, Friedmanism is widely subscribed to; in practice, it is stillborn. Viable leadership today comes with promises of frugality and doing more with less. But then, inevitably, come the hiring and acquisition binges, the corporate-welfare handouts and renewed farm subsidies, the extravagant public expenditure. Galbraith sought attention while Friedman affected to shun it. "I'm much more interested in having people thinking about the ideas, rather than the person," Friedman insisted. He might have meant it, too. But his legacy would not be well served by a careful examination of either the efficacy of the ideas he fought for, or a true measure of how widely they have been genuinely implemented.

Zune versus Ipod

Chegou o Zune. Mais feio, com menos atributos, mais barato que o Ipod.

Mas tal como o Windows 3 destronou o MAC também não devemos negligenciar o potencial dano que o Zune, com prováveis versões melhoradas no futuro, venha a ser um rival à altura...

Lusofonia e os jogos lusos

Mais um artigo muito interessante do professor arnaldo gonçalves, desde Macau. Saído na edição online do jornal de negócios.

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O reduzido eco dos primeiros Jogos da Lusofonia, que tiveram lugar em Macau entre 7 e 15 de Outubro, na imprensa portuguesa é sintoma claro do divórcio entre as boas intenções na política externa e o afunilamento da agenda na política doméstica. Significa, também, que os responsáveis políticos não conseguem estruturar as prioridades da acção externa de Portugal consentindo em ir a reboque das estratégias dos outros.

Os primeiros Jogos da Lusofonia juntaram 700 atletas oriundos de onze países, de quatro continentes e representando oito modalidades desportivas. Os jogos tiveram lugar por iniciativa da Região Administrativa Especial de Macau contando com o apoio institucional do governo chinês. Os Jogos visaram, segundo os promotores, celebrar o espaço da lusofonia como comunidade de afinidades construídas em redor de uma mesma língua, o português. Os Jogos custaram 160 milhões de patacas (cerca de dezasseis milhões de euros) o que corresponde a 0,55 por cento das receitas brutas totais dos casinos de Macau, registadas nos primeiros sete meses do ano.

Estes números dão bem sinal da pujança do crescimento económico do pequeno enclave, administrado até 1999 por Portugal, mas os Jogos têm uma outra leitura: a utilização pela China do conceito da lusofonia, para propósitos de política externa.

Porquê este súbito interesse da China em potenciar a ideia da lusofonia, da presença portuguesa no Oriente, quando seria natural que tudo fizesse para fazer esquecer a presença portuguesa de 440 anos?

Trata-se de um exemplo de pragmatismo chinês, resultante das reformas económicas lançadas por Deng Xiao Ping na década de 80 explicável por duas razões principais. Em primeiro lugar, a emergência da China como grande potência mundial impondo à China que se afirme como potência pacífica, cosmopolita, aberta ao mundo e apoiante da multiculturalidade. Em segundo lugar, porque as enormes carências energéticas do seu modelo de desenvolvimento, da sua rede de infraestruturas, lhe recomenda que olhe para África, dada a sua riqueza em recursos naturais, como fornecedor alternativo de crude.

De uma forma muito chinesa os responsáveis políticos de Pequim preferem não pôr "os ovos no mesmo cesto", isto é, ficar dependentes de um único parceiro comercial e estratégico, seja a Rússia, a União Europeia ou os países do Médio Oriente. Isso poderia sair muito caro na eventualidade de uma crise internacional como a que se alimenta com a deriva nuclear do Irão.

Este reavivado interesse pelos países que foram parte do império português no continente africano prossegue, também, dois desígnios adicionais: conseguir o reforço da balança comercial com os países africanos e com o Brasil e a tomada de posições em empresas africanas a quem cabe a exploração de recursos naturais estratégicos. Sendo o país com maiores reservas cambiais no mundo a China é o país que qualquer fornecedor de matérias-primas gostaria de ter como parceiro.

Um outro aspecto merece referência. Em reunião do recente fórum para a cooperação económica e comercial entre a China e os Países de Língua Portuguesa que teve lugar, em Setembro passado, em Macau, foi estabelecido que o comércio entre a China e os sete países que constituem aquele possa atingir, em 2009, os 45 a 50 mil milhões de dólares americanos. O que a acontecer corresponderá ao dobro do valor actual do comércio entre a China e aqueles países.

Portugal tem, neste particular, uma posição pouco mais que modesta. Em 2005, as trocas comerciais entre a China e Portugal cifraram-se em mil milhões de dólares norte-americanos, com um défice para Portugal de 300 milhões de dólares. O valor global do comércio China-Países de Língua Portuguesa (I&E) é de 32 mil milhões de dólares a valores de 2005.

A confirmarem-se tais previsões económicas e as intenções chinesas quanto aos mercados africanos, Portugal pode ver reduzido, ainda mais, a sua influência em África.

Resta perceber até que ponto a nomeação do secretário-geral do MNE, embaixador Rui Quartin Santos como próximo embaixador em Pequim pode ajudar a inverter uma tendência de divórcio continuado de Portugal das oportunidades colocadas pelo mercado chinês.

A minha irmã tem trissomia 21 e não foi "abortada"

Não resisto a publicar um texto que o Jaime, meu ex-aluno, publicou nos jornais.

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Os olhos azuis da minha irmã

No último Prós e Contras, a eurodeputada Edite Estrela considerou que o aborto poderia ser legítimo, caso a mãe descobrisse que a criança era portadora de trissomia 21.

Eu tenho uma irmã com olhos azuis. Chama-se Mónica, tem 22 anos e tirou o curso profissional de Serviços Básicos de Hospitalidade.

Trabalha hoje numa pastelaria de Lisboa. Os olhos dela são lindos e ela é educada, feminina, anda sempre perfumada...

A Mónica é a minha irmã e irmã de mais três. Gostamos muito dela e ela é muito feliz. Dá unidade à família, está atenta sempre a todos e a cada um.

A sra. eurodeputada não tem os olhos azuis mas tem uns olhos tão bonitos como os da Mónica. Tem os talentos e as virtudes de avó e de mãe. E tem dificuldades; certamente também chora e se alegra, é mais uma das pessoas deste nosso planeta que acorda todas as manhãs e lava os dentes.

De certeza que já viu um pobre na rua e lhe estendeu a mão direita (a esquerda) ou as duas, ou olhou para uma prostituta e sentiu pena. De certeza que já ajudou alguém em apuros.

Gostávamos que viesse a nossa casa, provasse os muffins que a Mónica faz e visse o gosto com que ela põe a mesa. E descobrisse que esta menina de olhos azuis tem... trissomia 21.

E ficaria bem contente por ela ter nascido. Tal como nós. Tal como qualquer pessoa.

Jaime Bilbao
Destak - 03/11/2006