Rir é o melhor remédio

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Rir é o melhor remédio

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Quanto ganha um trader em Londres?

Um trader no mercado financeiro em Londres ganha em média salários anuais de 100 mil euros e bônus de 42 mil libras. Acho que os números abaixo estão subestimados.

Fonte: aqui

10 anos do Contabilidade Financeira

Hoje é aniversário do blog. Estamos comemorando 10 anos. Não preparamos nada porque a instabilidade da economia e do mercado tem demandado a nossa atenção. Vou, durante o dia, repostar algumas das homenagens que recebemos em outros momentos para não deixar a data passar em branco.

Passei o dia inteiro lendo sobre impeachment e acompanhando a votação. Confesso estar cansada e com sono. Sabemos que nada muda do dia para a noite e tenho esperança que punir aqueles que desrespeitam regras orçamentárias e a Lei de Responsabilidade Fiscal já seja uma boa mudança nos ares.

Quando leciono a minha maior motivação é ajudar ao menos um aluno. Se a vida de alguém mudar para melhor e eu tiver feito parte disso, fico satisfeita e orgulhosa. O blog nos traz essa oportunidade constantemente. Geralmente postamos por prazer, por gostar de falar sobre aquele assunto... mas em outras frequentes ocasiões nos preocupamos com os leitores que querem aprender, que podem ter contato com opiniões e temáticas distintas daquela vista em sua faculdade. E uma das nossas celebrações é essa. Ensinar e ajudar.

Há dez anos o professor César abriu mão de um blog pessoal e criou o contabilidade financeira no blogspot. Foi o começo de uma era... Foi também uma atitude visionária. Não acredito que naquela época havia a quantidade de blogs que temos hoje (apesar de ainda serem poucos, muitos são abandonados ou raramente atualizados).

Sei que estou me repetindo. Mas o blog é muito especial para mim. Eu falo tanto dele no dia a dia... Mas é uma paixão! É uma forma de aprender, repassar conhecimento, crescer com feedbacks. É uma oportunidade de observar como outros autores lidam com certos assuntos e ampliar a nossa visão. É uma experiência sensacional e sempre me sinto grata e sortuda por estar aqui.

Essa não é uma postagem digna dos 10 anos de história e espero fazer isso durante o dia. Mas antes de dormir precisei deixar um: Feliz aniversário, blog! Muitos cooperaram para que chegasse-mos aqui. Estamos muito felizes com essa conquista! Que venham mais dez, depois mais dez e ainda mais dez com prosperidade, criatividade, iniciativa, conteúdo relevante e paixão por tudo que é produzido.

Economia: pseudociência bem remunerada

Em geral, o autor critica o que as pessoas chamam de "Macroeconomia". As críticas são válidas e o artigo é muito bom. Mas ele esqueceu de falar que tem uma parte da Economia que funciona no mundo real, principalmente microeconomia aplicada, como por exemplo, desenho de mecanismos e teoria de leilões. 

Qual é a relação disso com Contabilidade? Tem total importância , pois muitas das discussões normativas contábeis são baseadas na teoria econômica. Além disso, boa parte da pesquisa contábil é feita sob pressupostos e métodos oriundos da Economia.

Since the 2008 financial crisis, colleges and universities have faced increased pressure to identify essential disciplines, and cut the rest. In 2009, Washington State University announced it would eliminate the department of theatre and dance, the department of community and rural sociology, and the German major – the same year that the University of Louisiana at Lafayette ended its philosophy major. In 2012, Emory University in Atlanta did away with the visual arts department and its journalism programme. The cutbacks aren’t restricted to the humanities: in 2011, the state of Texas announced it would eliminate nearly half of its public undergraduate physics programmes. Even when there’s no downsizing, faculty salaries have been frozen and departmental budgets have shrunk.

But despite the funding crunch, it’s a bull market for academic economists. According to a 2015 sociological study in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, the median salary of economics teachers in 2012 increased to US 103,000 – nearly US 30,000 more than sociologists. For the top 10 per cent of economists, that figure jumps to US 160,000, higher than the next most lucrative academic discipline – engineering. These figures, stress the study’s authors, do not include other sources of income such as consulting fees for banks and hedge funds, which, as many learned from the documentary Inside Job (2010), are often substantial. (Ben Bernanke, a former academic economist and ex-chairman of the Federal Reserve, earns US 200,000-US 400,000 for a single appearance.)

Unlike engineers and chemists, economists cannot point to concrete objects – cell phones, plastic – to justify the high valuation of their discipline. Nor, in the case of financial economics and macroeconomics, can they point to the predictive power of their theories. Hedge funds employ cutting-edge economists who command princely fees, but routinely underperform index funds. Eight years ago, Warren Buffet made a 10-year, US1 million bet that a portfolio of hedge funds would lose to the S&P 500, and it looks like he’s going to collect. In 1998, a fund that boasted two Nobel Laureates as advisors collapsed, nearly causing a global financial crisis.

The failure of the field to predict the 2008 crisis has also been well-documented. In 2003, for example, only five years before the Great Recession, the Nobel Laureate Robert E Lucas Jr told the American Economic Association that ‘macroeconomics […] has succeeded: its central problem of depression prevention has been solved’. Short-term predictions fair little better – in April 2014, for instance, a survey of 67 economists yielded 100 per cent consensus: interest rates would rise over the next six months. Instead, they fell. A lot.

Nonetheless, surveys indicate that economists see their discipline as ‘the most scientific of the social sciences’. What is the basis of this collective faith, shared by universities, presidents and billionaires? Shouldn’t successful and powerful people be the first to spot the exaggerated worth of a discipline, and the least likely to pay for it?

In the hypothetical worlds of rational markets, where much of economic theory is set, perhaps. But real-world history tells a different story, of mathematical models masquerading as science and a public eager to buy them, mistaking elegant equations for empirical accuracy.

[...]

Romer is not the first to elaborate the mathiness critique. In 1886, an article in Science accused economics of misusing the language of the physical sciences to conceal ‘emptiness behind a breastwork of mathematical formulas’. More recently, Deirdre N McCloskey’s The Rhetoric of Economics (1998) and Robert H Nelson’s Economics as Religion (2001) both argued that mathematics in economic theory serves, in McCloskey’s words, primarily to deliver the message ‘Look at how very scientific I am.’

After the Great Recession, the failure of economic science to protect our economy was once again impossible to ignore. In 2009, the Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman tried to explain it in The New York Times with a version of the mathiness diagnosis. ‘As I see it,’ he wrote, ‘the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.’ Krugman named economists’ ‘desire… to show off their mathematical prowess’ as the ‘central cause of the profession’s failure’.

The mathiness critique isn’t limited to macroeconomics. In 2014, the Stanford financial economist Paul Pfleiderer published the paper‘Chameleons: The Misuse of Theoretical Models in Finance and Economics’, which helped to inspire Romer’s understanding of mathiness. Pfleiderer called attention to the prevalence of ‘chameleons’ – economic models ‘with dubious connections to the real world’ that substitute ‘mathematical elegance’ for empirical accuracy. Like Romer, Pfleiderer wants economists to be transparent about this sleight of hand. ‘Modelling,’ he told me, ‘is now elevated to the point where things have validity just because you can come up with a model.’

Ultimately, the problem isn’t with worshipping models of the stars, but rather with uncritical worship of the language used to model them, and nowhere is this more prevalent than in economics. The economist Paul Romer at New York University has recently begun calling attention to an issue he dubs ‘mathiness’ – first in the paper‘Mathiness in the Theory of Economic Growth’ (2015) and then in a series of blog posts. Romer believes that macroeconomics, plagued by mathiness, is failing to progress as a true science should, andcompares debates among economists to those between 16th-century advocates of heliocentrism and geocentrism. Mathematics, he acknowledges, can help economists to clarify their thinking and reasoning. But the ubiquity of mathematical theory in economics also has serious downsides: it creates a high barrier to entry for those who want to participate in the professional dialogue, and makes checking someone’s work excessively laborious. Worst of all, it imbues economic theory with unearned empirical authority.

‘I’ve come to the position that there should be a stronger bias against the use of math,’ Romer explained to me. ‘If somebody came and said: “Look, I have this Earth-changing insight about economics, but the only way I can express it is by making use of the quirks of the Latin language”, we’d say go to hell, unless they could convince us it was really essential. The burden of proof is on them.’

[...]

Economists who rationalise their discipline’s value can be convincing, especially with prestige and mathiness on their side. But there’s no reason to keep believing them. The pejorative verb ‘rationalise’ itself warns of mathiness, reminding us that we often deceive each other by making prior convictions, biases and ideological positions look ‘rational’, a word that confuses truth with mathematical reasoning. To be rational is, simply, to think in ratios, like the ratios that govern the geometry of the stars. Yet when mathematical theory is the ultimate arbiter of truth, it becomes difficult to see the difference between science and pseudoscience. The result is people like the judge in Evangeline Adams’s trial, or the Son of Heaven in ancient China, who trust the mathematical exactitude of theories without considering their performance – that is, who confuse math with science, rationality with reality.

There is no longer any excuse for making the same mistake with economic theory. For more than a century, the public has been warned, and the way forward is clear. It’s time to stop wasting our money and recognise the high priests for what they really are: gifted social scientists who excel at producing mathematical explanations of economies, but who fail, like astrologers before them, at prophecy.

Fonte: aqui

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