Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 25, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 25, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

In Delaware, Corporations Are Dangerously Close to Acquiring the Right to Vote 

[Jacobin, via Naked Capitalism 6-22-2023]

As GOP states across the country aim to limit voter participation, Delaware’s Democratic-controlled legislature has been considering a bill to allow the expansion of the franchise to businesses. The Republican legislation would explicitly permit the city of Seaford, Delaware, “to authorize artificial entities, limited liability corporations’ partnerships and trusts to vote in municipal elections.”

The legislature has until June 30, when the legislative session ends, to vote on the bill.

With hundreds of thousands of corporations officially headquartered in a small Wilmington warehouse, Delaware has long been known for its business fealty. The state’s new legislation would allow corporations to upend the balance of power in Seaford, a small eight thousand–person city twenty miles north of Salisbury, Maryland. Just 340 people voted in the most recent election on April 15 — and the bill would potentially provide as many as 234 votes to businesses in the community.

The State That May Let Corporations Vote In Elections

Matthew Cunningham-Cook, June 20, 2023 [The Lever]

No, We Haven’t Lived with Diseases for Millions of Years. 

Jessica Wildfire [via Naked Capitalism 6-21-2023]

You hear this a lot: Apparently humans have lived with germs and diseases for millions of years. There’s no need for masks or vaccines. Nobody needs clean air. Natural immunity works just fine.

It’s wrong.

It couldn’t be more wrong.

We’ve never been able to live with diseases, not like we do now. Most westerners have no idea. Before medicine, life looked different.

You couldn’t even drink the water.

As an article in Scientific American points out, “water was unsafe to drink for most of human history.” According to Paul Lukacs, humans had to drink wine. It wasn’t fun, either. Ancient texts describe wine as “wretched, horrible, vinegary, foul.” The only thing worse was plain water. You often had no idea if it was safe to drink. For thousands of years, humans opted for beer and wine instead. There was just enough alcohol to kill germs….

Scientists and historians from all disciplines agree on this point: For most of our history, our lives were short. Average life expectancy remained well below 50 for millennia. We didn’t get eaten by tigers.

We got eaten by plagues.

When you look at the last 2,000 years across the world, you see the same thing. About half of all children died before reaching adulthood. Scientists confirm this trend all the way back to the stone age. As Oxford scholar Max Roser says, “Whether in Ancient Rome, in hunter-gatherer societies, in the pre-Columbian Americas, in Medieval Japan or Medieval England, in the European Renaissance, or in Imperial China, every second child died.”

Epidemics have upended countless civilizations, from Rome to the Akkadian Empire. These societies didn’t just live with it. Death and grief played a central role in their cultures, because it happened all the time. It was a different world that most people today can’t wrap their heads around.

They didn’t shrug it off.

They chased answers.

History is full of doctors and scientists who devoted their entire lives trying to treat and cure diseases that plagued us. It’s also full of quacks and charlatans who made fortunes by selling fake miracle cures. There’s a reason why historical novels and movies feature apothecaries and snake oil salesmen. Almost everyone was sick or scared of getting sick and dying….

Diseases have always hit the poor worse than everyone else. Throughout history, the rich have invested in sanitation for themselves first while leaving everyone else behind and blaming them for their own deaths….

 [TW: The role of government in fighting disease is central, One indication is to scan the list of Nobel Laureates affiliated with or funded by the USA National Institutes of Health.

“To date, 169 scientists either at NIH or whose research is supported by NIH funds have been the sole or shared recipients of 101 Nobel Prizes.”

And, then there is the fight for clean water supplies.
Chronology of American Waterworks from 1649 to 1865
Chronology of American Waterworks from 1866 to 1880 ]

Conservative charade of poising as economic populists

[TW: The next few links are about the new conservative manifesto just published by American Compass, which has been carefully written to reflect working Americans’ economic angst. The liberal response so far is frighteningly inadequate. There is a good chance conservatives using this new manifesto can steal the thunder of the Democratic Party and much of “the left” to make significant electoral gains. But as I discuss later, liberals are philosophically incapable of defending against this new conservative manifesto. It is best refuted by appealing to core principles of civic republicanism. ]

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 18, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 18, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

 

MY FIFTY YEARS WITH DAN ELLSBERG 

Seymour Hersh [via Naked Capitalism 6-17-2023]

 

Climate and environmental crises

WTF is Happening? An Overview 

[Watching the World Go Bye, via Naked Capitalism 6-14-2023]

As of June 10, 2023, worldwide data showed the remarkable concurrence of three dramatic climate events.

The first WTF is in the Antarctic, where sea-ice extent is setting record lows daily, now fully over 2 million kilometers below the 1991-2020 mean.…

For the second WTF we are going to move from the ocean to land and consider global 2-meter surface temperatures, where on June 10, for the third consecutive day temperatures breached the 1.5°C barrier (above the 1850-1900 IPCC baseline)….

And the third WTF is perhaps the furthest from any notion of normalcy. WTF is happening to the world’s oceans, and in particular the North Atlantic? Ocean temperatures have been setting unprecedented daily records, spiking to highs that are shocking climate scientists, as they look for possible reasons….

Narrowing the scope of the 1972 Clean Water Act 

[Angry Bear, via Naked Capitalism 6-13-2023]

How Arizona squeezes tribes for water 

[High Country News, via Naked Capitalism 6-15-2023]

 

Strategic Political Economy

The AMLO Project 

[New Left Review, via Naked Capitalism 6-12-2023]

The Mexican political system was shaken on 1 July 2018, when Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and his new party MORENA achieved a resounding electoral victory, winning 53% of the votes in a four-way race – a thirty-point lead over his closest contender….

The idiosyncrasies of AMLO’s left-populist presidency have pitted him not only against the neoliberal right, but also against the ‘progressive’ cosmopolitan intelligentsia and neozapatista-adjacent autonomists. These groups have variously accused him of ‘turning the country into Venezuela’, peddling ‘conservativism’ and acting as a ‘henchman of capital’. Yet as his six-year term reaches its final lap, a closer look at AMLO’s record reveals a much more complex picture. His overarching project has been to move away from neoliberalism towards a model of nationalist-developmentalist capitalism. To what extent has he succeeded, and what can the left learn from this endeavour?

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 11, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 11, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

What Happens When Corporations are Taxed at 50% - Like Before the Reagan Revolution?

Thom Hartmann, June 5, 2023 [DailyKos]

The main benefit of raising the top personal income tax bracket back up to nosebleed levels is that it causes CEOs and business owners (people who can essentially determine their own pay) to restrain themselves from draining the corporate coffers just to buy a new super-yacht, jet, private island, or a fourth 70-room mansion in the Swiss Alps.

Back in the 1933-1981 era, instead of behaving like spendthrift wastrels, CEOs and business owners would take income up to the edge of the top tax bracket and then stop (with the most prosperous CEOs maxing out at around 30 times average worker income), leaving the rest of the money in the company….

The second, though, is really the most important: taxes are used to incentivize behaviors that are good for the nation and discourage behaviors that are destructive to the nation.

What Happens When You Tax Billionaires at 90 Percent?

Thom Hartmann, June 3, 2023 [DailyKos]

[TW: Ian explained the damage tax cuts inflict on real investment in a January 2008 post on FireDogLake, which is now longer even archived. It was entitled, “Why Financial Crises Will Keep Happening” and I saved this excerpt of it: 

At this point to wring the excesses out of the system and to stop the systemic incentives to keep blowing bubbles is going to require doing something to make it so it doesn’t pay. There are two parts to any solution. The first and simplest way is to put a very progressive tax on all income no matter how or where earned that probably comes in at over 95% of all income over, say, $500,000 or a million at the most. Suddenly, needing to actually keep the companies sound, and knowing that in 7 years when the loans go bad, they’ll still be there taking the heat for it, will tend to concentrate the mind not on "can I make enough money to be in a yacht in 3 years" but into "does this deal make sense over the longrun".

-TW ]

The economic consequences of major tax cuts for the rich (PDF)

[LSE Research Online, via Naked Capitalism 6-8-2023]

The Abstract: “This paper uses data from 18 OECD countries over the last five decades to estimate the causal effect of major tax cuts for the rich on income inequality, economic growth, and unemployment. First, we use a new encompassing measure of taxes on the rich to identify instances of major reduction in tax progressivity. Then, we look at the causal effect of these episodes on economic outcomes by applying a nonparametric generalization of the difference-in-differences indicator that implements Mahalanobis matching in panel data analysis. We find that major reforms reducings taxes on the rich lead to higher income inequality as measured by the top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The effect remains stable in the medium term. In contrast, such reforms do not have any significant effect on economic growth and unemployment.”

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 4, 2023

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – June 4, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

Why elites are misanthropic

Billionaires and the Evolution of Overconfidence

[The Garden of Forking Paths, via The Big Picture 5-31-2023]

To understand billionaires, you need to understand horizontal inequality, illusory control, self-selection bias, quantified self-worth, and the evolution of overconfidence.

What would you do if you suddenly had a billion dollars?

The way you answer that question will tell you something about how likely you are to become a billionaire in the first place.

For most of us—myself included—the answer to that question gets split into two parts: logistics and philanthropy. First, for logistics, you might consider: what would you change about your life once I never have to worry about money ever again? This is the “would you quit your job?” or “would you move somewhere else?” part of the question. Second, if you’re a decent person, you’d probably consider who you’d help and how you’d allocate a substantial portion of your obscene, newfound wealth to people who need support. To us, money is for something, it’s not a goal in itself.

That means we probably won’t become billionaires.

When billionaires first become billionaires, they have a different answer to the question of what they’d do if they reached a billion dollars: “I’d figure out how to make two billion.” This is a trait that pretty much every billionaire has….

I’ve spent much of my career studying powerful people, interviewing more than 500 leaders all over the world, from America to Zambia, Belarus to Thailand, Madagascar to Tunisia. As part of my research, I’ve met many billionaires. And the most important lesson I learned in those interactions was that these people were not normal. I don’t mean that in a nasty way (though often they deserved it). I mean it in a statistical way — they were abnormal outliers….

Now, consider other social systems such as power and wealth. If you want to become powerful, you usually have to want power. We have a word for that: “power-hungry,” and it’s not a compliment. It quite literally means someone who seeks power — and rarely do you get power without seeking it. The most powerful people in our societies are therefore those who, by self-selection bias, seek power — and then have managed to get power and stay in power.

But now, unlike the spelling bee, there’s a bit of conceptual leakage. What we want is someone who is good at wielding power for the benefit of us all. But what we’re actually selecting for in our political systems is someone who wants power, is good at getting it, and then never letting go. Our systems select for the wrong thing. It’s as though you were to hold a spelling bee but then choose then winners based on who is best at convincing you that they can spell, rather than who can actually spell.

The same is true for wealth. In an ideal world, the people most rewarded financially in our social systems would be those who generate the most shared wealth and prosperity, or those who innovate and help humanity the most; or those who are the wisest and most selfless and could therefore use their wealth for its maximal impact.

But that’s not what our modern economies select for at all. Many of the smartest people on the planet are not driven by money, so they’re not even in the running to become a billionaire — just as many of the people who would make the best politicians are those who least want political power. They’re not in the game, so they can’t win. Many theoretical physicists are geniuses; none of them are billionaires.

By contrast, few billionaires are geniuses, but all of them think they are…. when someone becomes a billionaire, it’s the ultimate validation of their overconfidence.... 

This leads to a dangerous delusion known as illusory control, in which a person mistakenly thinks they can shape outcomes to their liking even when they can’t. This occurs frequently when someone who has been successful in one domain chalks that success up purely to talent rather than to a more accurate assessment of their abilities and knowledge. They then assume that everything they touch will turn to gold and are surprised when it doesn’t….

The problem is worsened by a phenomenon known as horizontal inequality. We measure ourselves not against society as a whole, but relative to those closest to us. Billionaires often live near other billionaires and socialize with them (this is why yacht clubs exist), so their benchmarks shift. They compete with each other, so assessments of their wealth are transferred within the 0.000033 percent of the population, rather than relative to the 99.999967 percent of the population they’re above…. because of their obsession with horizontal inequality, a billion dollars is never enough for a billionaire. They just keep angling for that next billion, in a Quixotic quest to entrench their status and outcompete their peers….

Rather, these lessons are a call to action. The billionaire class is the visible manifestation of a broken system, which attracts and promotes the wrong kind of people into wealth and rewards them in a way that is very unlike a meritocratic spelling bee. The good news is that, like all systems, these systems can be changed, to create stronger overlap between who we hope to reward—those who help society and improve our world—and who we actually reward too often: greedy overconfident narcissists who can never get enough of their grotesque wealth.

The Man Who Knows What the World’s Richest People Want (and How To Get It)

[Vice, via The Big Picture 6-3-2023]

Rey Flemings has become one of the premiere fixers for the global elite. More than that, though, he gives the rich a place to admit what they can’t say publicly: that they need help finding happiness.