Predições

A propósito das estimativas recentemente divulgadas por várias fontes quanto à evolução da economia portuguesa nos próximos anos, escrevi que a vontade de guiar a economia até aos valores considerados como os correctos (ou justos) pelos políticos, sindicalistas ou membros de outros grupos de interesses, leva a pressões sobre o poder legislativo para que produza mais regulamentação. Este caminho tem levado a uma maior intervenção estatal, que usa os recursos cobrados sob a forma de impostos para influenciar a actuação e os rendimentos dos agentes económicos. No fim, tempo passado sobre a escolha do valor indicativo a atingir, chega-se à conclusão que nada do que se legislou e se tentou executar, obteve os resultados planeados. Quando muito, novas ineficiências foram detectadas. Surgem novas estimativas e mais pressões para que o estado intervenha. O ciclo repete-se.

Don Boudreaux escreve sobre o que ele chama de "Crystal-ball truths", comentando as predições económicas e os efeitos económicos da regulamentação que normalmente é usada para guiar a economia, visando certos efeitos nesse indicadores (algumas das ideias, apenas - recomenda-se a leitura integral do original):

Economists often are asked to predict -- predict tomorrow's price of gold, the future course of the Dow Jones industrial average, next month's unemployment rate and on and on.
My honest answer to everyone who asks my predictions of such things is: "Your guess is as good as mine." (...)
I can and do, however, make what the late Nobel economist F.A. Hayek called "pattern predictions." (...)
Here are some pattern predictions that I'm willing to make, recognizing (as I do) that the world is a deceptively complex place:
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- No country ever will be economically harmed by free trade. Or, put differently, every country that frees its consumers to buy from abroad will prosper as a consequence.
- Government K-12 schools, as now run everywhere in the U.S., will never excel at educating students. The reason is that each school gets its students and its budget without having to compete for them. (...)
- Price controls never will work. Goods and services in short supply -- say, because of a natural disaster -- will only be harder for ordinary people to get if government prevents sellers from raising prices to "abnormally" high levels
- France, Germany and other countries whose citizens seem fervently to believe that job security exists only if mandated by the government will suffer unusually high rates of unemployment unless and until they stop believing this myth. Whenever government raises employers' costs of firing workers -- say, by making the firing of workers very difficult -- it raises employers' cost of hiring workers. Fewer workers are hired.
- (...)When government artificially raises the cost of hiring workers -- by mandating high minimum wages or by increasing the amount of red tape firms must endure in order to fire workers -- the workers that remain unhired are those who are least productive.(...)By pricing the lowest-skilled workers out of the labor market, European regulations ensure that only relatively high-skilled workers get jobs. So measures of average worker productivity will tend to show that workers in restrictive countries such as France and Germany are more productive than are workers in America. But this statistical outcome is a deceptive artifact of lamentable labor-market regulations whose burdens fall disproportionately on Europe's poorest peoples.
- Finally, I predict that people everywhere will continue to be assaulted with economic misinformation. We will continue to be told that giving monopoly power to domestic producers is the road to wealth and told that government officials possess some special talent to make choices for each of us on how we live our lives.