The politics of envy or something more worthy?

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Marshall2One of the most successful memes of the right in the last decade or so is that redistribution is the politics of envy. Of course politicians have to appeal to the emotions, and they have to appeal to all denominators including the lowest common ones. Well they don’t have to and there are limits, but if you’re in favour of progressive taxation it’s asking too much of a democratic politician to expect them not to point out to those at the bottom of the pile that those further up are doing better than them.

But it seems that so high minded am I that I never thought of this as the politics of envy. I thought of it as part of a long and distinguished sensibility of modern reform which, as it turns out is supported with remarkable uniformity by the great economists, from Smith through Mill, Marshall, Pigou and Keynes. That world is disdainful of the value of the “baubles” of power and wealth. Smith was particularly vigorous on the subject, indeed, making irrational hankering of the rich and powerful for baubles one of the major engines of the decentralisation of economic and political power in Europe.

But for all of them, the utility benefits of income encountered strongly diminishing returns once a degree of comfort had set in. As Marshall and Pigou were at pains to point out a dollar to a poor person meets more urgent needs than a dollar to a wealthy one, or to put it another way (which Marshall and Pigou did), other things being equal, dollars going to the poor are a more efficient use of dollars – in achieving the ultimate output (which got called ‘utility’) than dollars going to the wealthy.  (Oh, and of course they would have understood the point that other things are not equal, and that paying money to poor people can have incentive effects, so then one would pursue some joint optimisation problem of optimising utility subject to undesired incentive effects.)

This whole perspective was one that was shared by many reformers in my father’s generation. For me one of the touchstones of it in individual conduct is attitudes to classes on airlines. Why would you want to sit in business class?  Well the seats and food are nicer, but for three times the price of an economy fare? Are they that nicer? Further there’s something a tad awkward about lording it over others by sitting at the front of the plane. Some people who could clearly afford it don’t fancy it. The great billionaire philanthropist Chuck Feeney doesn’t like flying up the front of the plane as he travels the world giving his money away. That’s not like Cardinal Pell, the apostle of Christ for whom business class is not adequate. He travels first.

And in the 1980s and even the 90s I think there were a few politicians who travelled economy class. I think Peter Walsh was one of them. I wonder if any do today. How do the Greens travel?  Even by the time I got to the Productivity Commission – then the Industry Commission in 1993 – I’d say maybe 15 odd per cent of the staff entitled to travel business class travelled economy class. I doubt there’d be many there now, but I hope I’m wrong. I recall one Commission meeting where we were encouraged to travel business class.

In any event I came across this post on Alfred Marshall today and its quotes from Marshall reminded me of some of his own aspirations about wealth, and they’re worth sharing here: Continue reading →

Google Glass, Google Class

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Google Glass

Something I picked up recently in San Francisco. OK I don’t own it, but got to play with one waiting in a queue and talking to a developer waiting to get into a function at the conference I was attending. I was impressed. It looks a bit weird, but you ignore it until you want to look at it, at which point you look up and to the right a little and there, apparently a foot or so from your head is a little TV screen.

I liked the way they’d set up the interface which, as we’ve known ever since the Mac is the secret source of a great IT product like this. You talk to it and ask it to look stuff up, show you stuff, take pictures etc. And you can gesture to it by running your finger along the side of the black plastic near the eye-piece. This works like a scroll bar or dial and you can replay your day and generally use it to help you access files.  One of the people in the queue said that it would likely replace a lot of smartphone use. One’s phone would stay in one’s pocket and you could use Google Glass to consult it most of the time, and you would then take out your smartphone when it was particularly apposite. I don’t know if that will happen, but I could see why he thought that.

Anyway, I was impressed. I doubt I want to be a leading edge user, but when they get it (even) better and cheaper, I might well be in for my chop.

Worth a Look

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Jeff Sparrow on ‘the Imbecilic Andrew Bolt’ and Unseen Academicals:

…“My problem is not,” [writes Alecia Simmonds], “that our public sphere harbours ill-educated members (like the imbecilic Andrew Bolt who never made it past first-year uni).”

Sorry? Anyone who doesn’t possess a university degree is an imbecile? That would be some 60 per cent of the working population, casually dismissed as moronic. Going to uni might not, in and of itself, make you a member of an elite. But class, ethnicity and geography still play a major role in determining access to higher education. It behoves progressives – particularly those in academia – to remember that there’s plenty of very, very bright people out there who never attended a university but who nonetheless might have something to say…

…Take the passage above. Andrew Bolt an imbecile? It might console those on the Left to think so but the notion’s entirely ludicrous.

In reality, Bolt’s a talented prose writer, adept in the tabloid genre. He’s a powerful speaker (as anyone who has seen him ruthlessly destroy academic critics in public debates would know) and an extraordinarily effective populariser of ideas. Andrew Bolt is conservative and many of his ideas are repellent. But it’s ridiculous to call him stupid on the basis of how many university degrees he does or doesn’t possess.

Now compare Simmonds’ description of Australian academics.

“Academics may also not want to enter public debate. And I can understand why. Firstly, they receive no rewards in terms of career advancement for writing for the public. And secondly, many may not want to engage with a knife-drawn public prone to Goldstein-style Two-Minute Twitter Hate Rituals. Academics are often timorous folk who specialise in showing the complexity of issues, not offering tweet-sized solutions. Social media doesn’t democratise debate. It limits it to the resilient. Snark triumphs over insight, and commentary is reserved for those with voluminous folds of scar-tissue. Sensitive thinkers rarely fit this bill.”

Academics don’t want to engage with public debate because it won’t advance their careers – and also because people might say mean things about them. They’re sensitive, don’t you know!

Does this not perfectly exemplify the problem with the liberal Left? Rather than fighting the Right, liberal academics want to be treated like philosopher kings: protected from snark and richly rewarded any time they deign to comment on public events.

Instead of dismissing polemicists like Bolt, the Left might do better to ask why we lack anyone of a similar calibre…

If I weren’t plagued with ruminations at the moment I might have a few things to add on this subject myself.

Thoughts on Gonski and education reform.

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With the Gonski reforms expected to be rolled out across Australia in the coming 5 years, it is handy to reflect on what actually are the basic challenges for school reform in Australia. A view of the underlying issues helps one to judge the likely outcomes of the current reforms and others one might think of.

One can see the main learning challenges in Australian schools as related to the quality of what is taught, the quality of who is teaching, and the quality of the school as a whole. Three main issues then come to mind:

  1. The curriculum is often too influenced by political concerns and of low quality.
  2. Teachers are relatively low paid, and have seen their relative wages drop over many decades, leading to the newer cohorts of teachers to be less good as the old ones.
  3. Failing schools are kept going rather than replaced, effectively leading to whole neighbourhoods being bereft of good educational opportunities.

On top of this, the sector has governance issues, like a large education bureaucracy both inside schools and outside of them, but since we are here ultimately interested in the transmission of knowledge, let us focus on the problems at the coal-face and talk about the governance issues when they arise.

Now, on point 1, I am optimistic about the role of the National Curriculum that was recently introduced. It will make it visible what the educational problems are in parts of the country, most likely will lead to a set curriculum and thus a set textbook and teaching aids for all subjects, and should hence significantly raise the bottom of the education distribution (though I don’t think it will matter for the top). Whilst one cannot really see this dynamic yet on the ground, in which schools and states are just getting used to the idea of a national curriculum, one can argue that other countries that have a national curriculum have indeed gone the way of raising the floor (NZ in particular). Given the competitive mindset of the Australians and the fact that you now get frequent international comparisons, I do expect the political pressures to accumulate to use the national curriculum to improve what is taught and how it is taught. In short, I think the signs are good in terms of addressing problem number 1. Continue reading →

The Bizarre Logic of a Conservative Mind

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Thanks to commenter Sancho for alerting me to the following post, by Sarah Kliff, at the Washington Post’s Wonkblog (via Reading is for Snobs). It had me chuckling all the way to the bottle-o and back on this dreary, rainy Melbourne morning:

Readers ask, we answer! What happens if you don’t pay Obamacare’s tax penalty?

Gene is a self-employed New Yorker who currently purchases his own health insurance. He also is a strong opponent of Obamacare. And starting next year, Gene plans to drop his health coverage in express protest of the health law’s mandate.

“I will cancel my insurance the instant I can no longer be denied insurance for preexisting conditions,” Gene wrote in an e-mail Sunday night. “I will not fill out the special IRS form.”

Gene asked that I not use his last name as he’s talking specifically about disobeying a federal mandate…

“I am especially interested to know what happens, if anything, when my 2013 federal tax return does not include the Obamacare form and when I refuse to comply with any request to produce one?” Gene asked in his e-mail. “Am I correct that if I do not provide the form, there is nothing the IRS can do to me? And if they can do something to me, what is it that they can do?”

To answer these questions, I called up Catherine Livingston. Up until January, she was the health-care counsel in the Internal Revenue Services’s Office of Chief Counsel. She now works as a partner at the law firm Jones Day.

The first thing I asked her was what happens if you don’t send in a form that specifies whether you do or don’t have insurance coverage. That, she told me, isn’t actually clear yet.

I’ll skip over the intricacies of US tax accounting and tax law that follow. What’s interesting to me in this post is Gene’s cunning little plan to avoid paying the $95 tax penalty he might incur by dropping his health coverage:

Continue reading →