This paper discusses the long-run history of education policies in Brazil. It is suggested that the main reason for the educational backwardness was the existence of strong political interests over education. It is also defended that these interests can be empirically observed in the allocation of public resources between the different levels of education, with political choices favouring specific groups in society. It was not a matter of lack of investment in education, but of inadequate allocation of resources. This pattern of political-based policies created a strong negative path dependence of misallocation of resources in education in Brazil, particularly with significant underinvestment in secondary education.
Karl Polanyi is considered one of the most prominent social scientists of the 20th century. In his writings, an important concern was the relationship between the markets and the society (therefore, the state) as a whole; to discuss it, he introduced the concept of "embeddedness", fundamental for his study of the origins and consequences of the Industrial Revolution. An important part of his heritage is the study of the economic history of what he called "ancient societies," especially of Classical Greece. Polanyi used these studies to compare the ancient societies with his own times, in an effort to understand them all. This paper aims to relate Polanyi's work on the Athenian society with his studies about the modern times, showing that it is possible to draw lessons from Polanyi's thought on the relationship between the society, the state and the market that can help to design a political agenda for our days. In the first part, we present the most important aspects o the life and work of Polanyi, and in the second we discuss the most important aspects of his worldview. Then, in the third part, we study his view of the early Athenian economy; mainly, we focus on the coexistence of a kind of state planning and a market, showing how this understanding is crucial for the whole Polanyian legacy, with its emphasis in the comparison of different societies and times. We conclude by underlining the relevance of this interpretation advanced by Polanyi to understand the societies of our days, focusing on some proposals to extend his approach to deal with our contemporary problems.
O tema do pluralismo e da diversidade de abordagens metodológicas na ciência econômica tem sido bastante discutido no meio dos economistas nos últimos anos. Uma série de trabalhos e textos publicados em revistas especializadas vêm sendo divulgados mais recentemente, abrindo uma nova discussão sobre os limites da economia convencional neoclássica e de sua tentativa em pressupor uma espécie de defesa epistemológica de um “exclusivo saber” para os métodos teóricos baseados em uma abordagem microeconômica sustentadas na ideia de agentes representativos (expectativas racionais,por exemplo),ouem formas similares de abordagens inspiradas no individualismo metodológico.
is considered one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century in the fields of Economics, History, Anthropology and Sociology. For him, the object of Economics was to understand how human beings organize themselves as to deal with the material aspects of their lives; accordingly, he studied such subjects as the markets, trade and other economic institutions, trying to understand how they affect our lives. Born at the end of the XIX Century in Vienna, and raised in Budapest, Polanyi´s experience of the conflicts of the Central Europe of his youth, later reinforced by his years as an exiled intellectual in the England of the 1930's, led him to propose that the convulsion that was shaking that world during those years was a reaction against a new (and very problematic) form of organization of the human society: the market society. In his understanding, although markets certainly were not a novelty, they had always occupied a restricted space in human life. However, since the Industrial Revolution they had moved to the forefront and turned the society into an accessory of the markets, and the crisis begun with the First World War was a reaction against this unnatural situation. Polanyi wrote some very important books about a wide variety of subjects in economic history. In all of them is clear his concern to show, through contrasts and comparisons, the specificity of the capitalist economies. One of his books, The Great Transformation, is considered not only his main work, but also one of the most important books in the social sciences in the past century 1. Polanyi analyzes in this book, in his unique style, the social consequences of the economic organization that characterized the societies of the XIX century. Some central insights of this book represent the first formulations of the basic agreements of the substantivist school 2 , which maintains that the study of the economic aspects of any society should stress the role of its culture, its institutions and its history; or, to put it in Polanyi´s terms, should recognize that the economy is embedded in the The impact of the work of Polanyi goes well beyond his life and his work. His main insights are lively discussed nowadays 3. Contemporary scholars apply his main insights both to the research about Ancient Economies (e.g., Tandy, 2001), as well as on the contemporary ones (e.g., Adaman & Devine, 2002) 4. This paper will follow this last approach, trying to apply his basic insights to understand the evolution of Brazilian society, especially looking at the development and present situation of the of the markets for what he called the three fictitious commodities, land, labor and money. To do this, the paper is structured in three sections. In the first one, we discuss Polanyi´s worldview, searching for the main motivations of his work. In section II, we discuss the work of some scholars that in the last two decades 1 Rather surprisingly, it was included in the list "One hundred most influential books since World War II" on the Oct 6, 1995 issue of The Times...
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