El problema con los economistas

Ya salió un paper explicando porque la mayoría de los economistas no previeron la crisis.

La hipotesis no es nueva:"The economics profession appears to have been unaware of the long build-up to the current worldwide financial crisis and to have significantly underestimated its dimensions once it started to unfold. In our view, this lack of understanding is due to a misallocation of research efforts in economics. We trace the deeper roots of this failure to the profession’s insistence on constructing models that, by design, disregard the key elements driving outcomes in real-world markets. The economics profession has failed in communicating the limitations, weaknesses, and even dangers of its preferred models to the public. This state of affairs makes clear the need for a major reorientation of focus in the research economists undertake, as well as for the establishment of an ethical code that would ask economists to understand and communicate the limitations and potential misuses of their models.......We believe that economics has been trapped in a sub-optimal equilibrium in which much of its research efforts are not directed towards the most prevalent needs of society. Paradoxically self-reinforcing feedback effects within the profession may have led to the dominance of a paradigm that has no solid methodological basis and whose empirical performance is, to say the least, modest. Defining away the most prevalent economic problems of modern economies and failing to communicate the limitations and assumptions of its popular models, the economics profession bears some responsibility for the current crisis. It has failed in its duty to society to provide as much insight as possible into the workings of the economy and in providing warnings about the tools it created. It has also been reluctant to emphasize the limitations of its analysis. We believe that the failure to even envisage the current problems of the worldwide financial system and the inability of standard macro and finance models to provide any insight into ongoing events make a strong case for a major reorientation in these areas and a reconsideration of their basic premises."

Justin Wolfers comenta sobre el paper en el blog de Freakonomics:"The claim is that academic macroeconomists have become mired in a particularly fruitless equilibrium, in which each is engaged in the search for ever-greater levels of formal elegance, at the expense of empirical relevance. There’s definitely something to this.Today’s macroeconomists write for other macroeconomists. If you aren’t using the right tools, you aren’t part of the club."

En otras palabras se convirtió en jueguito de status para ver quien sabe es mas formal, mas elegante matemáticamente. Hay que tener en cuenta que ese jueguito puede tener graves consecuencias para la sociedad (un magister en economía ( y MBA y Phd en estadística) fue el creador de la "formula que mató a Wall Street")

El problema tambien parece que tiene que ver con el "sesgo de publicación":

"The more I look at empirical results, the closer appear the flaws of a data-centric worldview. Data never speak for themselves, and the process of their interpretation is every bit as political as other forms of analysis. But when you analyze data, you focus on the minutae of your dataset, so you're further divorced for the subject matter. You can make all sorts of crazy claims that would never slide if you were forced to present your views in a clear manner in front of a lay-audience remotely familiar with the subject matter.

The problem is that empirical claims are generally accepted or rejected on the basis of statistical tests meeting a certain treshold. But creating such a treshold gives researchers a pole to vault; when they manage to do so, they publish, when they don't, they do not publish. Instead of statistical tests revealing anything about the state of the world, they only reveal what researchers could torture the data into saying.

Brad DeLong makes the case that virtually all economic hypotheses are wrong, and the results from other meta-analyses are also worrying."


El economista James Galbraith (hijo de John Kenneth) es aún mas duro en su crítica:

"So what is modern economics about? It seems to be, mainly, about itself: The AEA meets to celebrate the importance of its members, their presence in high public positions, their influence in foreign lands, and the winning of the Nobel Prize. Female and black members have won the right to organize sessions about gender and race--thus domesticating some of those who might otherwise complain. Radicals and Keynesians, on the other hand, appeared only on panels organized separately, by an alphabet soup of splinter associations. What was therefore most conspicuously missing from this meeting of America's premier social science organization, was any actual discussion of economic ideas.....Leading active members of today's economics profession, the generation presently in their 40s and 50s, have joined together into a kind of politburo for correct economic thinking. As a general rule--as one might expect from a gentleman's club--this has placed them on the wrong side of every important policy issue, and not just recently but for decades. They predict disaster where none occurs. They deny the possibility of events that then happen. They offer a "rape is like the weather" fatalism about an "inevitable" problem (pay inequality) that then starts to recede. They oppose the most basic, decent, and sensible reforms, while offering placebos instead. They are always surprised when something untoward (like a recession) actually occurs."

Sin embargo, me parece que la mejor crítica viene de Nassim Taleb:

"We are good at fitting explanations to the past, all the while living in the illusion of understanding the dynamics of history.

My claim is about the severe overestimation of knowledge in what I call the " ex post" historical disciplines, meaning almost all of social science (economics, sociology, political science) and the humanities, everything that depends on the non-experimental analysis of past data. I am convinced that these disciplines do not provide much understanding of the world or even their own subject matter; they mostly fit a nice sounding narrative that caters to our desire (even need) to have a story. The implications are quite against conventional wisdom. You do not gain much by reading the newspapers, history books, analyses and economic reports; all you get is misplaced confidence about what you know. The difference between a cab driver and a history professor is only cosmetic as the latter can express himself in a better way.

There is convincing but only partial empirical evidence of this effect. The evidence can only be seen in the disciplines that offer both quantitative data and quantitative predictions by the experts, such as economics. Economics and finance are an empiricist's dream as we have a goldmine of data for such testing. In addition there are plenty of "experts", many of whom make more than a million a year, who provide forecasts and publish them for the benefits of their clients. Just check their forecasts against what happens after. Their projections fare hardly better than random, meaning that their "stories" are convincing, beautiful to listen to, but do not seem to help you more than listening to, say, a Chicago cab driver. This extends to inflation, growth, interest rates, balance of payment, etc. (While someone may argue that their forecasts might impact these variables, the mechanism of "self-canceling prophecy" can be taken into account). Now consider that we depend on these people for governmental economic policy!......

If you look closely at the data to check the reasons of this inability to see things coming, you will find that these people tend to guess the regular events (though quite poorly); but they miss on the large deviations, these " unusual" events that carry large impacts. These outliers have a disproportionately large contribution to the total effect.
Now I am convinced, yet cannot prove it quantitatively, that such overestimation can be generalized to anything where people give you a narrative-style story from past information, without experimentation. The difference is that the economists got caught because we have data (and techniques to check the quality of their knowledge) and historians, news analysts, biographers, and "pundits" can hide a little longer."

La ideología "desarrollista" de los economistas

Recientemente escribí sobre el desarrollismo y coincidencialmente me encontré hoy con esta excelente reflexión de Murray Rothbard:

" In recent years economists and journalists alike have been heavily emphasizing a new concept—“growth,” and much eco­nomic writing is engaged in a “numbers game” on what per­centage, or “rate of growth,” “we” should have next year or in the next decade. The discussion is replete with comparisons of the higher rate of country X which “we” must hurriedly counter, etc. Amidst all the interest in growth, there are many grave prob­lems which have hardly been touched upon. First and foremost is the simple query: “What is so good about growth?” The econ­omists, discoursing scientifically about growth, have illegitimately smuggled an ethical judgment into their science—an ethical judg­ment that remains unanalyzed, as if it were self-evident. But why should growth be the highest value for which we can strive? What is the ethical justification? There is no doubt about the fact that growth, taken over as another dubious metaphor from biology, “sounds” good to most people, but this hardly constitutes an ade­quate ethical analysis. Many things are considered as good, but on the free market every man must choose between different quantities of them and the price for those forgone. Similarly, growth, as we shall presently see, must be balanced and weighed against competing values. Given due consideration, growth would be considered by few people as the only absolute value. If it were, why stop at 5 percent or 8 percent growth per year? Why not 50 percent?

It is completely illegitimate for the economist qua economist simply to endorse growth. What he can do is to contrast what growth means in various social conditions. In a free market, for example, every person chooses how much future growth he wants as compared to present consumption. “Growth,” i.e., a rise in future living standards, can be achieved, as we have implicitly made clear throughout this volume, only in a few definable ways. Either more and better resources can be found, or more and better people can be born, or technology improved, or the capital goods structure must be lengthened and capital multiplied. In practice, since resources need capital to find and develop them, since technological improvement can be applied to production only via capital investment, since entrepreneurial skills act only through investments, and since an increased labor supply is rela­tively independent of short-run economic considerations and can backfire in Malthusian fashion by lowering per capita output, the only viable way to growth is through increased saving and investment. On the free market, each individual decides how much he wants to save—to increase his future living standards —as against how much he wants to consume in the present. The net resultant of all these voluntary individual decisions is the na­tion’s or world’s rate of capital investment. The total is a reflec­tion of the voluntary, free decisions of every consumer, of every person. The economist, therefore, has no business endorsing “growth” as an end; if he does so, he is injecting an unscien­tific, arbitrary value judgment, especially if he does not present an ethical theory in justification. He should simply say that, in a free market, everyone gets as much “growth” as he chooses to obtain; and that, furthermore, the people as a whole benefit greatly from the voluntary savings of others who do the saving and investing."

He notado que un gran número de economistas aún los que se las dan de mas cientificos y alejados de ideologías, típicamente asumen que el "crecimiento económico" no es un valor mas sino que es algo deseado por TODOS los individuos dentro de una sociedad.

Pocas veces realizan un análisis realmente objetivo sin que recomienden aquello que en su opinión llevará a un mayor crecimiento.

Esta es la ideología que me gusta llamar "desarrollismo" aunque este termino es usado para nombra una teoría económica del subdesarrollo tercermundista.

Esta el Estado declinando?

Eso dice Martin van Creveld, profesor de historia de la Herew University y autor de el libro "The Rise and Decline of the State":

"Somewhere between 1945 and 1975, the type of political construct known as the state and characterized, above all, by the separation between the ruler and the organization peaked and may have gone into decline. As previously, this process was not the making of individual rulers, however powerful and...benevolent. It was not as if the people at the top suddenly became less power-hungry or more willing to let the people at the bottom do their own thing. Once again, the well-nigh global character of the changes indicates that they were produced by anonymous forces over which scarcely anybody could exercise any control. And in relation to which, indeed, the entire question of morality becomes almost irrelevant.

Perhaps the most important factor, and one that is taken so much for granted that it is often overlooked, was the introduction and subsequent proliferation of nuclear weapons. For the first time in history, nuclear weapons permitted those who possessed them to annihilate each other and, of course, those who did not possess them as well. To date all attempts to change this fact by discovering some kind of antidote have failed; indeed they scarcely even got off the ground. Nor do I think that the current plans to build a ballistic missile defense system are going to make a difference in this respect. While this is not the place to argue the case in detail, against so-called "rogue states" such as North Korea, Iraq and Iran it is not needed. Against a first or even second class power with a full nuclear arsenal at its disposal it is useless.

The proliferation of nuclear weapons has affected war, and large scale war as waged by the state in particular, in two opposed ways. First, to the extent that the opponent also possessed a second strike capability it turned warfare into suicide, thus negating Clausewitz’s definition of it as a continuation of policy with an admixture of other means. It used to be that states went to war in order to extend or defend their interests. By definition, though, the interests of a state are less important than its existence--indeed it is only that which exists that can have interests in the first place. To put it in a less abstract way, it is hard if not impossible to think of an "interest" that will justify putting Washington D.C., or New York, or Moscow, or Beijing, or New Delhi, or Tel Aviv, at risk of instant and complete annihilation. As Bernard Brodie wrote as long ago as 1946, nuclear weapons cannot, should not, be used. If they have to be used, then they have already failed in their purpose which can only be to deter. As a result, whereas during the centuries before 1945 war was a major instrument used by states to increase their power at the expense of other states, since then it has been waged almost exclusively between, or against, non-nuclear states; in other words, such states as were not first or even second rate players in the international system.

The second reason why nuclear weapons have had a dampening effect on major interstate war is psychological. As the late Moshe Dayan once said, nothing is more exciting for men than war; as he well knew but did not say, nobody is more likely to command the admiration of women than warriors. In so far as nuclear weapons make it impossible to resist and can indeed eliminate entire societies in the twinkling of an eye, however, there is nothing exciting about them. By the speed with which it kills and destroys even more than by its sheer power, nuclear war simply does not offer any room for the exercise and display of such qualities as pride, honor, courage, determination, endurance, and self sacrifice. Briefly, it does not provide scope for heroism; whereas from the time that the first woman gave birth to the first baby (thus demonstrating to men how useless they really are) heroism has been what war is all about.

Concomitant with the retreat of major interstate war states also began dismantling some of the systems with which, since 1850 or so, they have built up in order to hold their populations in check and secure their loyalty. To a large extent, their doing so was a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict which brought on the Energy Crisis and plunged the world into a recession. Recession and unemployment overburdened the welfare system. This in turn led to inflation; and inflation in turn meant that the state had to rob some of its citizens in order to maintain payments to the rest. Even where rising oil prices did not constitute a major problem, Austrian economics--and here I agree with the ideas presented by the Mises Institute--would have predicted that the very success of the welfare state in creating more extensive education systems, more expensive health services, more old people, and more single mothers would cause its size to increase and its cost to skyrocket. By 1980 even Switzerland, that bastion of sound money, had a budget deficit amounting to more than 5 percent of GNP."

No estoy convencido de esta teoría sobre el declive del Estado. Las causas que menciona Van Creveld aunque importante no me parece que tengan la suficiente fuerza para generar un proceso descentralización que lleve a un declive del Estado.

Incluso creo que lo peor del dominio del Estado en realidad esta por venir.

Links variados

1. Las triquinuelas de Obama I

2. Las contradicciones del Estado Colombiano (por un lado pico y placa y mayores impuestos de rodamiento, por otro lado subsidios para prestamos de compra de vehiculos)

3. Una nueva palabra en el diccionario: Obamatons

4. Un cambio estructural detras de la perdida masiva de empleos en Estados Unidos?

5. Mutualismo.org, blog libertario anti-capitalista

La prosperidad es cuestión de valores?

Eso parece concluir la regresión dibujada en estas gráficas publicadas por el economista William Easterly (experto en desarrollo):


Sin embargo, la existencia de "valores individualistas" no implica necesariamente la existencia de menos estado. De hecho, la evidencia histórica sugiere que todos los paises que se desarrollaron tuvieron cierto tipo de intervencionismo estatal. Aunque claramente no al estilo sovietico o cubano.

De todas formas, la busqueda del desarrollo o del crecimiento económico es un simple argumento utilitarista que usa un tipo de "liberalismo" economicista que en realidad no interpreta la esencia del ideario liberal/libertario.

La visión liberal esta basada en la justicia, en la moral, en que la libertad es valiosa por sí misma, no como un mero instrumento para alcanzar mayor prosperidad, desarrollo (u otro objetivo si fuera el caso). Es el gran problemas del liberalismo utilitarista como lo explicaba Murray Rothbard:

"For whereas the natural-rights libertarian seeking morality and justice cleaves militantly to pure princi­ple, the utilitarian only values liberty as an ad hoc expedient. And since expediency can and does shift with the wind, it will become easy for the utilitarian in his cool calculus of cost and benefit to plump for statism in ad hoc case after case, and thus to give principle away."

Claudia Lopez quiere el centro

Claudia Lopez escribió otra columna brillante explicando que la mejor (yo diría que la menos mala) opción presidencial en el 2010 sería el centro no la derecha uribista ni la izquierda "revolucionaria" (yo la llamaría estatista-chavista).

Lo mejor es que Claudia Lopez efectivamente entiende la conformación de las diferentes fuerzas políticas y la realidad de sus posiciones:

"El Polo Democrático es una amalgama mayoritaria de socialdemócratas que se la dejaron montar de la suma del clientelismo anapista, el Moir anticapitalista y la minoría comunista. A los primeros, lo único que les importa es llenarse los bolsillos y la ambición con Bogotá, y los segundos siguen creyendo que la revolución viene en el Sumapaz y son expertos en ubicar una figura pública reputada que los represente sin asustar. Por eso reeligieron a Carlos Gaviria.

El congreso del Polo concluyó que su gran contribución política es liderar un frente anti- uribista, ni siquiera antirreeleccionista, porque les gusta la reelección de Chávez en Venezuela y la de Carlos Gaviria dentro del Polo. Un partido que se gasta tres días para llegar a esa sesuda conclusión y que elige una directiva incapaz de representar a sus mayorías internas no tiene ningún chance de representar las mayorías del país....

De otra parte, lo que llaman uribismo es una amalgama de diferentes derechas: la vieja y neoconservadora, el ala política del paramilitarismo, lo más variopinto del clientelismo y muchos que se niegan a ver o se resignan a todo lo anterior. La mayoría vive de la imagen, de la burocracia y de los contratos del gobierno Uribe, de declararse enemigos de las Farc y de recitar que adoran la seguridad democrática, haciendo caso omiso de las violaciones que se cometen en su nombre.

La captura de instituciones como el DAS por paramilitares con el resultante asesinato de dirigentes sindicales y sociales; la criminalización y persecución a la oposición, a los medios de comunicación y a las Cortes por denunciar los vínculos de miembros de la coalición de gobierno con los narcoparamilitares; y el asesinato de cientos de inocentes para presentarlos como guerrilleros muertos en combate, son algunos de los crímenes cometidos bajo la seguridad democrática, pese a lo cual hay quienes la quieren volver política de Estado, sin decir ni pío al respecto, y sin asumir responsabilidad política o judicial por esos hechos."

Me pregunto quien representa el centro o la alternativa a estas dos fuerzas: Fajardo, Rafael Pardo, Mockus?

Otra mentira de Obama

Otra mentira que le pilla al nuevo gran líder del mundo libre, Obama I

Actualización: David Brooks comenta lo que esta sucediendo con la administración de Obama:

"President Obama has concentrated enormous power on a few aides in the West Wing of the White House. These aides are unrolling a rapid string of plans: to create three million jobs, to redesign the health care system, to save the auto industry, to revive the housing industry, to reinvent the energy sector, to revitalize the banks, to reform the schools — and to do it all while cutting the deficit in half."

La hipocresía gringa sobre el TLC

La hipocresía gringa en acción.

Para los que creen que las razones de los democratas para oponerse al TLC tienen algo ver con motivos humanitarios.

Por si acaso, vale la pena aclara que ese tratado, aunque tiene sus aspectos positivos, realmente no es libre comercio y por el contrario incrementa el proteccionismo con mas "propiedad intelectual" a medicinas por ejemplo.

Creo que en últimas es mejor oponerse a ese tratado, mal llamado de "libre comercio".

Pensamientos liberales del dia

"... as all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a constant kind of warfare between the governing & governed: the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power carries its point, the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever ..."

-- Benjamin Franklin


"The greatest danger to liberty today comes from the men who are most needed and most powerful in modern government, namely, the efficient expert administrators exclusively concerned with what they regard as the public good."

-- Fredrich August von Hayek

Links variados

1. Tio Sam necesita que el dragón le siga prestando

2. La receta del desastre: la formula que mató a Wall Street

3. Keynes no era Keynesiano

4. El origen del termino capitalismo

Recordatorio del dia

"Banks, at least the behemoths, were public-private partnerships before the crisis. Deposit insurance, access to the Fed's lending, and the implicit (now explicit) government guarantee for banks "too big to fail" all constituted a system of financial corporatism. It must be ended not extended."

GERALD P. O'DRISCOLL JR en el Wall Street Journal

Que es lo que esta haciendo Obama y la Fed?

Jeffrey Sachs lo explica de manera fácil:

"President Barack Obama’s economic team is now calling for an unprecedented stimulus of large budget deficits and zero interest rates to counteract the recession. These policies may work in the short term but they threaten to produce still greater crises within a few years. Our recovery will be faster if short-term policies are put within a medium-term framework in which the budget credibly comes back to balance and interest rates come back to moderate sustainable levels. "

Pero en realidad solo se esta aplicando "continuismo de políticas" como lo explica el mismo Sachs:

"Looking back to the late 1990s, there is little doubt that unduly large swings in macroeconomic policies have been a major contributor to our current crisis. The lessons of the high inflation of the 1970s had supposedly chastened policy makers against trying to fine-tune the economy. The quest for never-ending full employment had contributed to high inflation in that decade, which required years of economic pain to wring out of the system. Monetary policies thereafter were supposed to be “steady as she goes,” not trying to smooth out every fluctuation and business cycle in the economy.

During the decade from 1995 to 2005, then-Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan over-reacted to several shocks to the economy. When financial turbulence hit in 1997 and 1998—the Asian crisis, the Russian ruble collapse and the failure of Long-Term Capital Management—the Fed increased liquidity and accidentally helped to set off the dot-com bubble. The Fed eased further in 1999 in anticipation of the Y2K computer threat, which of course proved to be a false alarm. When the Fed subsequently tightened credit in 2000 and the dot-com bubble burst, the Fed quickly turned around and lowered interest rates again. The liquidity expansion was greatly amplified following 9/11, when the Fed put interest rates down to 1 percent and thereby helped to set off the housing bubble, which has now collapsed.

We need to avoid reckless short-term swings in policy. Massive deficits and zero interest rates might temporarily perk up spending but at the risk of a collapsing currency, loss of confidence in the government and growing anxieties about the government’s ability to pay its debts. That outcome could frustrate rather than speed the recovery of private consumption and investment. Deficit spending in a recession makes sense, but the deficits should remain limited (less than 5 percent of GNP) and our interest rates should be kept far enough above zero to avoid wild future swings...................

Most important, we should stop panicking. One of the reasons we got into this mess was the Fed’s exaggerated fear in 2002 and 2003 that the U.S. was following Japan into a decade of stagnation caused by deflation (falling prices). To avoid a deflation the Fed created a bubble. Now the bubble has burst, and we’ve ended up with the deflation we feared! Panics end badly, even panics of policy; more moderate policies will be safer in the medium term. "

Una nueva crisis o la prolongación de la actual se esta gestando con las medidas que se han venido tomando en ya casi dos años.

"Hecha la ley.........."

"Hecha una ley estupida....hecha la trampa"

El Estado con sus permanentes prohibiciones solo termina convirtiendonos en "delincuentes" que creamos negocios clandestinos, "underground", en el "mercado negro".

Las prohibiciones absurdas son el refugio de una clase política autoritaria y sin imaginación.

Palabras anti-Farc del dia

Nada menos que del auto-proclamado marxista Jose Saramago, premio nobel de paz:

"Que si el secuestro y la muerte son los métodos para cambiar la sociedad, las Farc no nos ofrecen más que lo que el poder ha venido haciendo siempre, a lo largo de la historia: ejercer fuerza contra los débiles. Actuar como en las guerras medievales, como en todas las guerras, en las que mueren los soldados rasos de un lado y otro y arrasan por donde van pasando, no es ninguna buena señal de futuro. Con esta base, ¿qué garantía de respeto por el ser humano presentan? Si en el futuro tuvieran capacidad para gobernar el Estado, ¿lo harían manteniendo el secuestro y la muerte como línea de actuación? ¿Para eso es necesaria una revolución? ¿No es eso lo que el poder hace en tantos lugares del mundo? ¿No actúan de forma tan criminal como Bush? ¿Qué diferencia hay entre los secuestros de Guantánamo, las guerras preventivas contra Irak, las torturas de las cárceles secretas y lo que ellos hacen? ¿Que unos son estado y otros grupos militarizados? A los muertos, secuestrados y arrasados, ¿cómo se les explica que uno es terrorismo de estado y otro terrorismo revolucionario? Yo no puedo."

Sobre los sistemas de aseguramiento de salud

"As John Stossel goes over in Bad Medecine (21 SEP 2007, NY Sun), insurance is the worst way to pay for medical care invented. Prior to the war-time subsidies via tax-code, Americans looked after their own health care directly. Most individuals went uninsured and some purchased forms of what today would be considered 'catastrophic care' plans, although most would fall under the 'accidental death and dismemberment' concept of insurance. Health insurance, itself, while not unknown was not widely used and the need for individuals to understand their own health limited the utilization of health practitioners and medications to chronic diseases or immediate ailments. It should be noted that even the Influenza Epidemic did not cause a rush to 'health insurance', even with the death toll that came with it. By requiring individuals to pay their own way, health care costs were minimized and, yes, often at the expense of long-term health. This did not prevent overall life expectancy to continue to rise even without 'health insurance'. Today the cost of overhead to the 'health insurance' system is entirely due to the 'insurance' part and not the health part. Actual costs to the individual for actual doctor treatment time and not paying for paperwork has changed very little in America. What has changed is the need to keep and manage health insurance records, fill out forms, undergo third party governance of what is and is not good for one's health and, generally, time and effort spent in trying to keep track of all of this. That overhead has now changed the system itself to a document management system that, as a minor function, also delivers a little health care."

Nunca había caido en cuenta del fenomeno que menciona la ultima parte que de este texto.

Indudablemente nuestros sistemas de aseguramiento en salud requieren tal nivel de burocracia y papeleo que el objetivo parece haberse distorsionado.

Pensamiento liberal del dia

"When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed."

Ayn Rand

Sobre el individualismo

El individualismo frecuentemente es confundido con egoísmo o con vivir de forma asocial o incluso anti-social.

No es el caso. Individualismo simplemente implica respecto por la dignidad del individuo, por sus derechos.

En realidad es el colectivismo el que es anti-social. Como lo explica Charles Johnson:

"Individualism is not a philosophical rationale for antisocial attitudes or for indifference or hostility toward your fellow creatures. It is the collectivist, not the individualist, who sees human beings as naturally truculent creatures who don’t care enough about each other to get along peacefully and who need to have plans for collaboration forced on them from the top. Promising social harmony and security, collectivism delivers dissonance and violence.

Individualists believe in individualism precisely because we believe that human beings can and should be both social and civilized to each other at the same time—that community and social life don’t require shoving people around or bullying them into following one big plan. What Brooks fails to see is how—individually—we can peacefully, freely, and naturally form communities, institutions, and invisible social bonds as we make our way through the world."

Los tres mayores problemas económicos del pais

Alejandro Gaviria en la revista Dinero resume los que el cree son los tres mayores problemas económicos del pais: falta de empleo, mala calidad de la salud pese a aumento de gasto y rezago en la infraestructura y/o falta de ejecución del gobierno en ese frente.

A mi juicio las posibles causas de estos tres problemas (no entró a juzgar sin en realidad son los tres mayores) son respectivamente:

1. Para la falta de empleo:

• Distorsiones en el mercado laboral que crean barreras de entrada para la mano de obra no calificada, encarecen los costos de contratación muy por encima de la productividad real e imponen rigideces en la contratación.
  
• Subsidios impositivos al capital que incentivan la sustitución de trabajo
• Aumento del salario real por encima de la productividad debido a factores como la devaluación del dolar (que ya se revirtió) y aumentos del salario mínimo por encima de la inflación (aunque en el último año no sucedió así)
• Aumento demográfico en las ciudades debido al desplazamiento de campesino por la violencia en el campo
  

2. Para el mal sistema de salud:

• Sistema capitalista (es decir que promueve la concentración de capital) corporativista semi estatal, semi-privado, que entrega enorme poder de negociación al Estado y a las EPS privadas con respecto a profesionales de la salud y pacientes.
• Poco poder de negociación de pacientes impide mejoras reales en productividad y calidad
• Corte Constitucional activista solo busca aumentar el gasto y solucionar el problema vía coerción sin tener en cuenta productividad, restricciones presupuestales. Salud como un "derecho"
• Dada la falta de empleo, sistema contribuitivo esta subfinanciado lo que hace que regimen subsidiado tenga que financiarse con mas dinero del presupuesto

3. Rezago en infraestructura y falta de ejecución:

• "Rezago en infraestructura" se percibe ahora como un problema y no antes debido a necesidad reciente de competitividad en comercio exterior. Políticas economicas proteccionistas y de sustitución de importaciones en decadas pasadas (al menos desde los años 30) propiciaban desarrollo "hacia adentro" a las zonas de alta concentración demográfica (Bogota, valle de aburra, cali y valle del cauca). Productos de exportación como cafe y petroleo tenían en el caso del cafe una ventaja de marca y en el caso del petroleo si se construyó la infraestructura (oleoductos). Flores tambien tienen ventaja geográfica (sabana de bogota especialmente apta) y se transportan por avión.
• Dueños del capital no quieren trasladar estructuras productivas cerca de las costas por los costos que implica. Prefieren "socializar costos" de infraestructura trasladandoselos al Estado, es decir a los contribuyentes
• Estado colombiano apenas esta contruyendo capacidad técnica de ejecución de obras de infraestructura. Antes no se requería.
• Luego de la venta de gran parte empresas públicas, del fin del seguro social, de la privatización de empresas de infraestructura (electricidad,agua,telefonía) clientelismo y corrupción se ha concentrado en presupuesto de obras y en los puestos de los organismos de control. Construcción de infraestructura sigue politizada y poco técnica.
  

"Por que lloran los niños?"

"Bienaventurados los niños porque ellos heredaran la deuda nacional":

La mejor defensa de mercado...

que he leído hoy:

"A lot of global growth during the boom came in countries where the government owned or influenced the domestic banking sector and thus influenced the domestic allocation of credit. And policies that kept exchange rates lower than they otherwise would also indirectly encouraged private investment in those countries export sectors as well as discouraging investment in the export sectors of other countries. Governments were playing a significant role in the allocation of capital even before there was any talk of nationalizing the financial sector of key G-7 countries. Those who attribute the growth of the past several years solely to the market miss the large role the state played in many of the world’s fast growing economies. Conversely, those who attribute all the excesses of the past few years to the market miss the role that governments played in financing many of those excesses"

Bueno en realidad es una verdad que los propagandistas del estatismo no quieren reconocer: la crisis actual no se ha originado en un mercado libre sino en un mercado intervenido por el Estado o donde este ha actuado asignado recursos y tomando decisiones económicas.