A sad week for the economics profession – 02/24/2024 – Samuel Pessôa

Last week, the profession lost Affonso Celso Pastore and Mauro Boianovsky. I remembered Pastore in a text published on Wednesday (21). In October 2021, I wrote about his latest book.

Today, I want to remember Mauro. A professor at UnB, he was a researcher in the history of economic thought. He had an extensive production of very high quality. He was one of the most internationally respected researchers in his field.

Mauro, who dealt with monetary issues for much of his career, changed his focus in the last 15 years to the history of economic thought regarding development and underdevelopment. As if recognizing that, with the Real Plan, inflation lost its importance and here the focus became the theme of development.

Two articles by Mauro stood out to me. His text “A vision of the tropics: Celso Furtado and the theory of economic development in the 1950s”, published in History of Political Economy in 2010, is one of the best reads I know of the work of our most important economist.

Organizes the construction of Furtado into four pillars. The first is the idea that economic development is a historical phenomenon. The specific conditions of technology and scale of production condition the choices and possibilities of societies at different times.

The second pillar is international trade. For Brazil, there are clearly two moments. In the first, until 1930, growth was led by the export of commodities, mainly coffee, which, with wage labor, established the beginning of the construction of a domestic market for consumer goods.

In the second moment, after the Great Depression of 1930, there was the internalization, according to Furtado, of the industry, with the strategy of import substitution.

The ability to import — it is difficult to obtain currency to finance the import of capital goods — constrains growth.

The third pillar is the Furtadean belief in growth led by capital accumulation. Underemployment generated the workforce needed to fill the new jobs that were generated by the investment.

The idleness of work, underemployment, was the fourth pillar of Furtade’s construction, according to Mauro. He documents how, at the end of the 1960s, Furtado became much more pessimistic about our possibilities.

The investment-driven growth machine with underemployment is choking. In this view, the high consumption standards of our elites, which imitate the preferences of rich countries, reduce the domestic savings capacity, limiting Brazil’s growth possibilities.

In 2021, Mauro publishes a study on the thoughts of Paul Anthony Samuelson and the difficulties of growth in Latin America. Samuelson was a professor at MIT from 1940 until 2009, when he left us at age 94. He was the main synthesizer of economic thought in the second half of the 20th century and wrote the textbook that trained professionals for at least five decades.

Mauro’s article —”Samuelson on populist democracy, fascist capitalism and the vicissitudes of South American economic development (1948–1997)”— elaborates Samuelson’s interpretation of the difficulties of democracy in an environment of great inequality to sustain economic growth. Side theme in Samuelson’s writings, but of profound importance to us.

Mauro, aged 64, left us too soon. The consolation is that his ability to work and his talent left us with a gigantic work, which greatly helps us organize our thoughts.

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