O seguinte texto de Hayek uma parte bastante importante em sua obra The Fatal Conceit chamada “Utilidade Marginal vs Macroeconomia“. No texto, Hayek mostra muito bem de tudo que aprendeu como um economista austríaco, com suas influências em, entre outros, Menger e Mises. Ele explica algumas bases da economia, como o subjetivismo e a utilidade marginal, além do processo de formação dos preços, que dá a base para a crítica ao socialismo. Vale a pena dar uma conferida.
Vou dividir ele em duas partes porque alguns podem achar o texto grande, e assim fica mais fácil para ler uma parte agora e depois (embora o texto seja um contínuo). O texto será em inglês mesmo. Eu o considero realmente muito importante para se entender as bases da Escola Austríaca e o problema do socialismo. E aviso que não é um texto simples e requer atenção na leitura.
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Conteúdos:
- Marginal Utility and Price Formation
- Foundations of Austrian Economics, Subjectivism and the Problem of Socialism
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Marginal Utility and Price Formation
An increase of value – crucial in exchange and trade – is indeed different from increases in quantity observable by our senses. Increase in value is something for which laws governing physical events, at least as understood within materialist and mechanistic models, do not account. Value indicates the potential capacities of an object or action to satisfy human needs, and can be ascertained only by the mutual adjustment through exchange of the respective (marginal) rates of substitution (or equivalence) which different goods or services have for various individuals. Value is not an attribute or physical property possessed by things themselves, irrespective of their relations to men, but solely an aspect of these relations that enables men to take account, in their decisions about the use of such things, of the better opportunities others might have for their use. Increase in value appears only with, and is relevant only with regard to, human purposes. As Carl Menger made clear, value ‘is a judgement economising men make about the importance of goods at their disposal for the maintenance of their lives and well-being’. Economic value expresses changing degrees of the capacity of things to satisfy some of the multiplicity of separate, individual scales of ends.
Each person has his own peculiar order for ranking the ends that he pursues. These individual rankings can be known to few, if any, others, and are hardly known fully even by the person himself. The efforts of millions of individuals in different situations, with different possessions and desires, having access to different information about means, knowing little or nothing about one another’s particular needs, and aiming at different scales of ends, are coordinated by means of exchange systems. As individuals reciprocally align with one another, an undesigned system of a higher order of complexity comes into being, and a continuous flow of goods and services is created that, for a remarkably high number of the participating individuals, fulfils their guiding expectations and values.
The multiplicity of different ranks of different ends produces a common, and uniform, scale of intermediate or reflected values of the material means for which these ends compete. Since most material means can be used for many different ends of varying importance, and diverse means can often be substituted for one another, the ultimate values of the ends come to be reflected in a single scale of values of means – i.e., prices – that depends on their relative scarcity and the possibility of exchange among their owners.
Since changing factual circumstances require constant adaptation of particular ends to whose service particular kinds of means must be assigned, the two sets of scales of value are bound to change in different manners and at different rates. The several orders of ranking of individual ultimate ends, while different, will show a certain stability, but the relative values of the means toward whose production those individuals’ efforts are directed will be subject to continuous fortuitous fluctuations that cannot be anticipated and whose causes will be unintelligible to most people.
That the hierarchy of ends is relatively stable (reflecting what many may regard as their constant or ‘lasting’ value), whereas the hierarchy of means fluctuates so much, leads many idealistic persons to prize the former and disdain the latter. To serve a constantly changing scale of values may indeed seem repulsive. This is perhaps the fundamental reason why those most concerned about ultimate ends nonetheless often, contrary to their own objectives, attempt to thwart the procedure by which they can best contribute to their realisation. Most people must, to achieve their own ends, pursue what are merely means for themselves as well as for others. That is, they must engage at some point in a long chain of activities which will eventually lead to the satisfaction of an unknown need at some remote time and place, after passing through many intermediate stages directed to different ends. The label which the market process attaches to the immediate product is all the individual can know in most instances. No person engaged in some stage of the process of making metallic screws, for instance, can possibly rationally determine when, where, or how the particular piece on which he is working will or ought to contribute to the satisfaction of human needs. Nor do statistics help him to decide which of many potential uses to which it (or any other similar item) could be put, should be satisfied, and which not.
But also contributing to the feeling that the scale of values of means, i.e., prices, is common or vulgar, is apparently that it is the same for all, while different scales of ends are distinctive and personal. We prove our individuality by asserting our particular tastes or by showing our more discriminating appreciation of quality. Yet only because of information, through prices, about the relative scarcity of different means are we able to realise as many of our ends as we do.
The apparent conflict between the two kinds of hierarchies of values becomes conspicuous in the extended order, in which most people earn their living by providing means for others unknown to them, and equally obtain the means they require for their own purposes from still others also unknown to them. The only common scales of values thus become those of means, whose importance does not chiefly depend on effects perceived by those who use a particular item but are readily substitutable for one another. Owing to demands for a great variety of ends by a multiplicity of individuals, the concrete uses for which a particular thing is wanted by others (and therefore the value each will put on it) will not be known. This abstract character of the merely instrumental value of means also contributes to the disdain for what is felt to be the ‘artificial’ or ‘unnatural’ character of their value.
Adequate explanations of such puzzling and even alarming phenomena, first discovered scarcely a hundred years ago, were disseminated as the work of William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, and Leon Walras was developed, especially by the Austrian school following Menger, into what became known as the ‘subjective’ or ‘marginal utility’ revolution in economic theory. If what has been said in the preceding paragraphs sounds unfamiliar as well as difficult, this suggests that the most elementary and important discoveries of this revolution have even now not reached general awareness. It was the discovery that economic events could not be explained by preceding events acting as determining causes that enabled these revolutionary thinkers to unify economic theory into a coherent system. Although classical economics, or what is often called ‘classical political economy’, had already provided an analysis of the process of competition, and particularly of the manner in which international trade integrated national orders of cooperation into an international one, only marginal utility theory brought real understanding of how demand and supply were determined, of how quantities were adapted to needs, and of how measures of scarcity resulting from mutual adjustment guided individuals. The whole market process then became understood as a process of transfer of information enabling men to use, and put to work, much more information and skill than they would have access to individually.
Foundations of Austrian Economics, Subjectivism and the Problem of Socialism
That the utility of an object or action, usually defined as its capacity to satisfy human wants, is not of the same magnitude to different individuals, now seems so obvious that it is difficult to understand how serious scientists should ever have treated utility as an objective, general and even measurable attribute of physical objects. That the relative utilities of different objects to different persons can be distinguished does not provide the least basis for comparisons of their absolute magnitude. Nor, although people may agree how much they are individually prepared to contribute to the costs of different utilities, does ‘collective utility’ denote a discoverable object: it exists as little as a collective mind, and is at best a metaphor. Nor does the fact that we all occasionally decide that some object is more or less important to another person than to ourselves provide any reason to believe in objective interpersonal comparison of utility.
Indeed, in a certain sense the activity that economics sets out to explain is not about physical phenomena but about people. Economic values are interpretations of physical facts in the light of the degrees of suitability of kinds of physical objects in particular situations for the satisfaction of needs. Thus one might describe economics (what I now prefer to call catallactics) as a metatheory, a theory about the theories people have developed to explain how most effectively to discover and use different means for diverse purposes. Under the circumstances it is not so surprising that physical scientists, on encountering such arguments, often find themselves in strange territory, or that such economists often strike them more like philosophers than ‘real’ scientists.
Marginal utility theory is, although a basic advance, one that has been obscured from the start. The most accessible early statement of the idea in the English-speaking world, by W. S. Jevons, remained after his early death, and also in consequence of the extra-academic position of his single eminent follower, Wicksteed, long disregarded due to the dominant academic authority of Alfred Marshall, who was reluctant to depart from the position of John Stuart Mill. The Austrian codiscoverer of the theory, Carl Menger, was more fortunate in finding at once two highly gifted pupils (Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk and Friedrich von Wieser) to continue his work and to establish a tradition, with the result that modern economic theory gradually came to be generally accepted under the name of the ‘Austrian School’. By its stress on what it called the ‘subjective’ nature of economic values it produced a new paradigm for explaining structures arising without design from human interaction. Yet, during the last forty years, its contributions have been obscured by the rise of ‘macro-economics’, which seeks causal connections between hypothetically measurable entities or statistical aggregates. These may sometimes, I concede, indicate some vague probabilities, but they certainly do not explain the processes involved in generating them.
But because of the delusion that macro-economics is both viable and useful (a delusion encouraged by its extensive use of mathematics, which must always impress politicians lacking any mathematical education, and which is really the nearest thing to the practice of magic that occurs among professional economists) many opinions ruling contemporary government and politics are still based on naive explanations of such economic phenomena as value and prices, explanations that vainly endeavour to account for them as `objective’ occurrences independent of human knowledge and aims. Such explanations cannot interpret the function or appreciate the indispensability of trading and markets for coordinating the productive efforts of large numbers of people.
Some habits that have crept into mathematical analysis of the market process often mislead even trained economists. For example, the practice of referring to ‘the existing state of knowledge’, and to information available to acting members of a market process either as ‘data’ or as ‘given’ (or even by the pleonasm of ‘given data’), often leads economists to assume that this knowledge exists not merely in dispersed form but that the whole of it might be available to some single mind. This conceals the character of competition as a discovery procedure. What in these treatments of the market order is represented as a ‘problem’ to be solved is not really a problem to anyone in the market, since the determining factual circumstances on which the market in such an order depends cannot be known to anyone, and the problem is not how to use given knowledge available as a whole, but how to make it possible that knowledge which is not, and cannot be, made available to any one mind, can yet be used, in its fragmentary and dispersed form, by many interacting individuals – a problem not for the actors but for the theoreticians trying to explain those actions.
The creation of wealth is not simply a physical process and cannot be explained by a chain of cause and effect. It is determined not by objective physical facts known to any one mind but by the separate, differing, information of millions, which is precipitated in prices that serve to guide further decisions. When the market tells an individual entrepreneur that more profit is to be gained in a particular way, he can both serve his own advantage and also make a larger contribution to the aggregate (in terms of the same units of calculation that most others use) than he could produce in any other available way. For these prices inform market participants of crucial momentary conditions on which the whole division of labour depends: the actual rate of convertibility (or ‘substitutability’) of different resources for one another, whether as means to produce other goods or to satisfy particular human needs. For this it is even irrelevant what quantities are available to mankind as a whole. Such ‘macro-economic’ knowledge of aggregate quantities available of different things is neither available nor needed, nor would it even be useful. Any idea of measuring the aggregate product composed of a great variety of commodities in varying combinations is mistaken: their equivalence for human purposes depends on human knowledge, and only after we have translated physical quantities into economic values can we begin to estimate such matters.
What is decisive for the magnitude of the product, and the chief determinant generating particular quantities, is how those millions of individuals who have distinctive knowledge of particular resources combine them at various places and times into assemblies, choosing among the great varieties of possibilities – none of which possibilities can by itself be called the most effective without knowing the relative scarcity of different elements as indicated by their prices.
The decisive step towards understanding the role of relative prices in determining the best use of resources was Ricardo’s discovery of the principle of comparative costs, of which Ludwig von Mises rightly said that it ought to be called the Ricardian Law of Association. Price relations alone tell the entrepreneur where return sufficiently exceeds costs to make it profitable to devote limited capital to a particular undertaking. Such signs direct him to an invisible goal, the satisfaction of the distant unknown consumer of the final product.
Lib-conservatism 