A Riqueza Americana

Excelente artigo de Guy Sorman, leitura obrigatória: The entrenched rule of law, the absence of guilds, the unfettered competition, the democratic mass market, the immigration effect— Europeans took little notice of these striking American developments or of the expansion of the American economy generally. Not until the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, which brought European business delegations to the United States for the first time, did Europeans understand how far American entrepreneurs had leaped ahead of them. According to Nobel laureate Douglass North, the fair marked a turning point; from then on, the American economy was widely recognized as the global leader in per-capita income and overall output. The American drive for innovation intensified with the growing cooperation of venture capital, business, and academia in the twentieth century. The defining moment occurred in the 1950s, when Frederick Terman, a dean of engineering at Stanford University, launched the first “industrial park”—a low-rent space where start-up firms could cluster and grow. Built on Stanford’s campus, it remains in existence; many consider it the origin of Silicon Valley. The collaborative “Stanford model” has been a trademark of what New York University economist Paul Romer calls the New Growth, in which the association of capital, labor, and ideas produces economic development. New York City, hoping to spur New Growth, has just awarded Cornell University the right to open an applied-science campus on Roosevelt Island in the East River. In America, the three-sided nature of modern capitalism—capital, labor, ideas—has given the economy a sharp competitive edge. Other countries have tried to replicate the Stanford model, but they have little to show for it so far, partly because the best American universities have unique advantages in funding and in top research faculty and students. The failure to reproduce the model elsewhere has encouraged widespread infringement of American intellectual property, especially by China (see “Patently American,” Autumn 2011). But piracy, a short-term fix at best, doesn’t foster innovation. Another ingredient in America’s recent prosperity is the Federal Reserve’s success at maintaining a stable, predictable currency. Thanks to its relative independence from the government, the Fed—except during its brief Keynesian periods, such as the late seventies and the current stimulus era—has been able to protect the dollar from politically expedient inflationary pressure. That has encouraged Americans to invest in production. In parts of Europe, by contrast, a long history of inflation taught residents to grab short-term returns by speculating in money markets. Indeed, private investment is always lower in inflationary countries than in noninflationary ones; think of struggling pre-euro Italy versus booming pre-euro Germany. The American economy has also been spared the aggressions that anticapitalist ideologues, both fascist and Marxist, unleashed in Europe. True, Washington has diverged from free-market principles at times, usually by imposing high tariffs on goods at the request of industrial lobbies. But the normal, publicly accepted form of American production has always been free-market capitalism. American investors and entrepreneurs, unlike their European counterparts, have never lived with the fear that the state would nationalize their investments or factories.