The futility of economic policy debate

Sam Bowman writes on the divide between boosters and doomsters - those who believe we can boost economic growth and those who don't. He misses, however, an important point.

This is that economic policy is not made by Sam, nor by Giles Wilkes, Stian Westlake, Aaron Batani or Torsten Bell. Policy-making (at least in the UK now) is not a meritocracy in which the people with the best ideas get the most say. Nor of course is it a democracy in which we all have equal say.

Instead, a mere glance at the Tory leadership contest (and a mere glance is all any of us can stand) tells us that policy is made not by the masses, nor by those of ability, but by those who can best appeal to a small minority who have little knowledge of economics and little desire for higher growth.

Given this, talking about what policies will raise growth is futile*. It begs the question: how can we create a polity in which sensible economic policy is even feasible?

The problem is that there are many structural barriers to growth-enhancing policies.

One was described by Joel Mokyr almost 30 years ago:

Sooner or later the forces of conservatism, the "if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it," the "if-God-had-wanted-us-to-fly-he-would-have-given-us-wings," and the "not-invented-here-so-it-can't-possibly-work" people take over and manage through a variety of legal and institutional channels to slow down and if possible stop technological creativity altogether.

These forces of conservatism block some policies that could boost growth. Landlords would oppose any measures to reduce house prices or to shift the tax base from incomes to land. Lawyers and accountants don't want tax simplification (one good benchmark for any Budget should be the question: how many accountants will it make redundant?) Nimbys oppose inrastructure spending, even if it is green. And incumbent companies oppose tougher competition policy, or even anything that fosters business start-ups.

I'd add that the financial sector generally is such a force of conservatism. it benefits from the low real interest rates that stagnation brings. Sure, General Motors favoured pro-growth policies in the 50s as it needed a mass market. But Goldman Sachs has much less need.

Pablo Torija Jimenez and Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page (pdf) have shown how policy is set with regard to the interests of the mega-rich. But many of these are opposed to the reforms necessary to boost growth.

Rentiers, though, aren't the only force of conservatism. Back in 2006 Ben Friedman showed that economic stagnation fuelled illiberalism, racism and reactionary politics. Subsequent events have proved him right. But this means there's another big constituency opposed to growth, and not just gobshite culture warriors such as Farage or GB News. Why should Tories trouble themselves with the tough thinking and difficult admin required to raise economic growth when they can win elections simply by promising to deport migrants?

Yet another such force, of course, is the media. And I don't mean only the mouthpieces of tax-dodgers, rentiers and racists. I'm thinking too of our most influential outlet, the BBC. As Simon Wren-Lewis has documented, it has for years thought of economic policy merely as being about "the nation's finances" with good policy being only about fiscal responsibility - which is of course oblivious to basic economics.

We heard an example of this error on the Today programme this morning, when the interviewer accepted Rachel Reeves' claim that nationalization was inconsistent with Labour's proposed fiscal rules thereby missing the big story - that Ms Reeves is unqualified to be Chancellor because she doesn't know the basics of double-entry book-keeping.

The media, though, is not the only barrier to sensible policy-making. So too are voters. A vote for a hard Brexit was a vote against economic growth. Sure you might think this was because voters were misinformed about its economic effects. But this only raises the question: if they ignored good economics on Brexit, what makes you think they'll accept good ideas to raise economic growth?

I fear there's another issue here - a form of what John Jost calls system justification (pdf). 15 years of stagnant incomes has merely led to resignation, adaptation and learned helplessness. Many voters think we just cannot have nice things, and that any party offering them is dealing in fantasy economics.

Of course, good economists are having the debate Sam describes, of whether policy can raise growth**. But this debate is like writing a menu when you don't yet have a kitchen nor even much hope of ever getting one. Before thinking about economic policy we must think about how to give sensible economics any political influence. Brains are not enough. What matters is power.

I confess to not having answers here. Part of the answer, though, I suspect is to build and support movements which offer countervailing power to the forces of conservatism - movements which tell politicians that there are costs to them of kowtowing to rentiers and reactionaries. This is why some of us welcomed the mass politics inspired by Corbyn - but also, of course, why that met with swift repression.

* Well, maybe not entirely. Such talk could be a transitional demand - a way of saying "here's what you could have if our system wasn't so dysfunctional", and thus a way of raising discontent with the system.

** FWIW, I incline to the doomster camp but believe that many potentially growth-boosting policies (tax reform, better immigration policy, competition policy, better vocational training) are free hits: even if they don't boost growth much, they'll not hurt it either.

Comments

[ltr]

Instead, a mere glance at the Tory leadership contest (and a mere glance is all any of us can stand) tells us that policy is made not by the masses, nor by those of ability, but by those who can best appeal to a small minority who have little knowledge of economics and little desire for higher growth....

[ A perfect description of the appalling Tory leadership possibilities, but the current Labour leadership distressingly offers no better prospect. ]

[rsm]

Why did economic stagnation in 2008 result in liberal US victories?

Why should growth be the goal when it leads to higher suicides and overdoses?

What if Ben Friedman is just telling a story supported by handwaving and cherry-picking?

[aragon]

Sam is wrong.

The real divide is between people who understand how things work and have a viable mental model vs economists.

Energy is the ability to do work. It is divided into potential energy and kinetic energy. (Physics 101).

Kinetic energy is when work has been done and energy transfered to an object, it has velocity (speed and direction).

In economics ownership is potential energy through the control of resources.
But you need other resources you may not own. (e.g. Labour/Machines, or chemical energy).

So to go to kinetic energy you need money.
Money has velocity (direction and speed).

If ownership of resources and money are too concentrated only the needs and desires of the rich are acted upon, and the velocity (of money) falls to zero and Society decays.

So billionares like Musk, Bezos, and Branson, get to play spacemen. Bill Gates seems more interested in acquiring farm land.

Institutionally we have the treasury a bunch of paper clip counters, who don't appear to understand sectorial balances (Oxford University).

Economic theory states that the owners of land can extract it's full value, and Fiance controls liquidity and financiers are short term greedy (long term stupid) - this applies to the people in control of UK resources including money.

Housing is just one asset class where finance and ownership are used to extract value from the public. (See Bank of England - House prices are controlled by affordability and availability of credit - i.e Interest rates).

Economic and other policies have made significant differences to the Asian Tigers: Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and yes, China.

As a cartoon in microchips with everything (RSA) says:
The Japanese are copying things we haven't invented yet.

Finance unleashed destroys society, and we have a oversized financial centre, not to mention Crypto.

What is the purpose of derivitives (outside faciyaying the creation of money for finance, and how many multiples is it of global GDP.)

Population is not the issue:

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by-country/

Norway: pop 5.5 Million
Taiwan: pop 24 Million
Canada: pop 38 Million
France: pop 65 Million

No the ratio of young to old is not the issue.

No-one listens to me, might as well go and eat worms!

But Sam is so wrong, about everything.

Truss, Sunak, Starmer, all no hopers who don't understand reality beyond their own PR.

p.s.
Just a first reaction to the Bosters vs Doomers
If I missed any point I may return to them.

[Blissex]

«build and support movements which offer countervailing power to the forces of conservatism - movements which tell politicians that there are costs to them of kowtowing to rentiers and reactionaries. This is why some of us welcomed the mass politics inspired by Corbyn - but also, of course, why that met with swift repression.»

If such a political movement were allowed by "the establishment" my suggestion is to base its popular appeal on "reciprocity" and "security" as embodied in social insurance. Many property owners (those in the pushed behind areas) do not benefit from the fantastic government created inflation in housing costs, and many that do really just want property profits to give them security, given the miserliness of social insurance.

[Blissex]

«No-one listens to me, might as well go and eat worms!»

I read your comments with interest, but often with despair because they seem to be written from a idealistic wykehamist perspective instead of a realistic one based on interests and power and chances.

«Money has velocity (direction and speed).»

The fantasy that there is one "money" is very comforting, never mind having a velocity.

«If ownership of resources and money are too concentrated only the needs and desires of the rich are acted upon, and the velocity (of money) falls to zero and Society decays.»

But that is not happening in the UK: the "rich" are 20-40% of voters, and they spent without reserve in their neighbourhood John Lewis, M&S, Waitroses, or on property renovations, or long cruises, etc.

«So billionares like Musk, Bezos, and Branson, get to play spacemen. Bill Gates seems more interested in acquiring farm land.»

The billionaires would be a lot less powerful if a large mass of 3-bedroom semi "gentry" were not their political allies.

«Institutionally we have the treasury a bunch of paper clip counters»

Rather than counting paper clips, the Treasury have distributed hundreds of billions per year, at very low interest rates, to property and finance interests.

«House prices are controlled by affordability and availability of credit - i.e Interest rates).»

Property prices may be limited by that, but are driven by concentration of jobs (or more rarely amenities), because people don't move to London because of the sunny beaches or the snowy slopes...

[James Charles]

'Unfortunately'?
“This is complete misinformation. Vox’s Dylan Matthews explained why in a 2016 article, and I have little add to his masterful and succinct debunking, so I’ll just quote him here.
Since its initial release, the Gilens/Page paper's findings have been targeted in three separate debunkings. Cornell professor Peter Enns, recent Princeton PhD graduate Omar Bashir, and a team of three researchers — UT Austin grad student J. Alexander Branham, University of Michigan professor Stuart Soroka, and UT professor Christopher Wlezien — have all taken a look at Gilens and Page's underlying data and found that their analysis doesn't hold up…
[T]he researchers critiquing the paper found that middle-income Americans and rich Americans actually agree on an overwhelming majority of topics. Out of the 1,779 bills in the Gilens/Page data set, majorities of the rich and middle class agree on 1,594…That means the groups agree on 89.6 percent of bills.
That leaves only 185 bills on which the rich and the middle class disagree, and even there the disagreements are small…
Bashir and Branham/Soroka/Wlezien find that on these 185 bills, the rich got their preferred outcome 53 percent of the time and the middle class got what they wanted 47 percent of the time. The difference between the two is not statistically significant…
The researchers found the rich’s win rate for economic issues where there's disagreement is 57.1 percent, compared with 51.1 percent for social issues. There's a difference, but not a robust one.
Bashir's paper prods at the Gilens data even more and finds a number of holes. Bashir concludes that strong support from the middle class is about as good a predictor of a policy being adopted as strong support from the rich. "In the original data set, change is enacted 47 percent of the time that median-income Americans favor it at a rate of 80 percent or more," Bashir writes. "Yet change is enacted 52 percent of the time that elites favor it at that rate."…
Bashir also notes that the Gilens and Page model explains very little. Its R-squared value is a measly 0.074. That is, 7.4 percent of variation in policy outcomes is determined by the measured views of the rich, the poor, and interest groups put together. So even if the rich control the bulk of that (and Bashir argues they do not), the absolute amount of sway over policy that represents is quite limited indeed.
There are many more problems with the paper, so you can go read Matthews’ entire article, and the three critique papers. But the statistics quoted in the excerpt above are already utterly damning for the Gilens/Page result. The whole model has almost no explanatory power at all — an R-squared of 0.074, for a model with that many variables, is nothing. And the fact that Gilens & Page’s data shows that policy outcomes tend to agree with the middle class as much as they agree with the rich completely destroys the claim in the tweet above — i.e. that “elected officials make policy to benefit the richest ten percent of the country to the exclusion of the needs of everyone else.”
In other words, if America is an oligarchy, it has not been demonstrated by Gilens & Page (2014), and all the people claiming that this paper is proof that America is an oligarchy are engaging in pseudoscientific mythmaking. Maybe in the future some research will show that super-rich people or big corporations really do pull the strings of American politics. And it’s sensible to worry about the influence of money in politics. But the exaggerated claims regularly made by the Left, based on a misinterpretation of this one very shaky paper, are a distraction from the real threats facing American democracy.”
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/yes-the-us-is-still-a-flawed-democracy?s=r

[aragon]

We were going from the decline of civilization (EROEI) to the Treasury.

The velocity of money from Finance to the London Housing market (i.e till it reaches rest) is very short
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money

In an analogy with kinetic energy money only does work when it is exchanged. It does no work when in an offshore bank account of a billionaire.

Finance creates money the Treasury and Politicians facilitate from this creation from thin air.

But as the money quickly goes to rest (Shelter is necessary but unproductive) it does little work and generates no wealth.

The UK is declining the Treasury is ensuring that London, is the last place to experience decline by concentrating wealth.

For example the Olympics were in London (Cleaning the polluted Lees Valley), and the resources created in thge media centre were intended to create a IT hub in London, there was the Silicon Roundabout.

Concentration of Government spending (Transport is 5x per head in London) The UK has large and intentional regional inequality.

The London, Oxford, Cambridge triangle is not known as the Golden triangle for nothing.

Kind of off the point of stimulating growth, outside of Finance.

[aragon]

If every dollar has a vote, as in economics billionaires can out vote everyone else.

How owns the organs of persuasion, and propaganda? Bezos, and the rich.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/jul/14/boris-johnson-telegraph-chicken-feed

"The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, today faced calls to apologise for his "out of touch" comment that his £250,000 earnings for writing a weekly Telegraph column were "chicken feed"."

So much for politicians and Journalists.

Often the people with the modest stakes (but non-zero) are the stoutest defenders as they do not wish to loose what stake they have.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/24/britain-rich-poor-strike-breaking-government-grenfell-tower

Somethings are self-evident and endure through the centuries.

It is “corrupting” because, as he put it in his later book, The Wealth of Nations, no society can be “flourishing and happy” when the “greater part of the members are poor and miserable”. But, he argued, it is necessary “to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society” to allow markets to work. And since “the affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor”, so the rich must be protected “by the powerful arm of the civil magistrate continually held up to chastise” the poor."
"

[James Charles]

Fighting yesterdays battles?

“The crisis now unfolding, however, is entirely different to the 1970s in one crucial respect… The 1970s crisis was largely artificial. When all is said and done, the oil shock was nothing more than the emerging OPEC cartel asserting its newfound leverage following the peak of continental US oil production. There was no shortage of oil any more than the three-day-week had been caused by coal shortages. What they did, perhaps, give us a glimpse of was what might happen in the event that our economies depleted our fossil fuel reserves before we had found a more versatile and energy-dense alternative. . . . That system has been on the life-support of quantitative easing and near zero interest rates ever since. Indeed, so perilous a state has the system been in since 2008, it was essential that the people who claim to be our leaders avoid doing anything so foolish as to lockdown the economy or launch an undeclared economic war on one of the world’s biggest commodity exporters . . .
And this is why the crisis we are beginning to experience will make the 1970s look like a golden age of peace and tranquility. . . . The sad reality though, is that our leaders – at least within the western empire – have bought into a vision of the future which cannot work without some new and yet-to-be-discovered high-density energy source (which rules out all of the so-called green technologies whose main purpose is to concentrate relatively weak and diffuse energy sources). . . . Even as we struggle to reimagine the 1970s in an attempt to understand the current situation, the only people on Earth today who can even begin to imagine the economic and social horrors that await western populations are the survivors of the 1980s famine in Ethiopia, the hyperinflation in 1990s Zimbabwe, or, ironically, the Russians who survived the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2022/07/01/bigger-than-you-can-imagine/

[James Charles]

“Surging electricity demand and a grid bottleneck caused a short-term blackout in the east of London on July 20.
The UK was able to avoid its homes and businesses going black by paying an unprecedented £9,724.54 (about $11,685) per megawatt-hour — more than 5,000% above the average price. This was the price that Belgium paid to make old electricity plants available for the English Channel . . .
If the grid was normal, and without traffic jams, the UK would have been able to send power to the southeast from any other part of the country. This includes all the way from Scotland, where there are more offshore wind farms than ever. The problem is that both the UK and other industrialized countries aren’t investing enough to upgrade their grids. This leaves the system vulnerable. “
https://www.share-talk.com/london-paid-a-record-price-to-dodge-a-blackout-last-week/#gs.6w33nw

[aragon]

“Surging electricity demand and a grid bottleneck caused a short-term blackout in the east of London on July 20."

Demonstrating again the Government, Treasury and Markets, competence in Energy Planning. The market will take care of it. Not to mention the Greens opposing Energy generation and switching to an all Electric economy. Yes, I too lived through the rolling demand management of the 70's.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severn_Barrage

"On 14 January 2014 it was announced that the Chairman and Chief Executive of Hafren Power had resigned, putting an end to the Severn Barrage project."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus

While Camus acknowledges that Kafka's work represents an exquisite description of the absurd condition, he mentions that Kafka fails as an absurd writer because his work retains a glimmer of hope."

"Abandon hope all you who enter here" (Proposed - by me - sign at Dover or Heathrow, I saw it somewhere before, at the gates of ...)"

[aragon]

Chris,
Leaving the EU was about abandoning a proto-Super State (Europeans state) and a club built around neo-liberal laws and dominated by Gertmany (don't tell the French).

In the short-term the economic impact may have been negative. And we still have neo-liberals in charge (including Starmer).

Long-term more control over our future, allowing the possibility of change, however unlikely.

The rock continues to roll down the mountain of socialism. (See Sisyphus)

[aragon]

I seem to be confused with Rushi or Chris or Jeremy?

Do they have free school meals at Winchester (45K p.a) as for the worms, it's a song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pqt4yBWkLI8

Nobody likes me, everybody hates me...

Even Roundhay school looks posh to me.

Four Yorkshire men - Sketch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Yorkshiremen_sketch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26ZDB9h7BLY

Money, Power who are these impostors?

Not even working class according to a leading member of the Labour shadow cabinet.

Still in the underclass, but not a chav.

No trickle down here...

[aragon]

Black and White version of the four Yorkshiremen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHFZBUTA4k

Pre Monty Python sketch from the TV who show At Last The 1948 Show starring Tim Brooke-Taylor, John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Marty Feldman.

[Blissex]

«“Surging electricity demand and a grid bottleneck caused a short-term blackout in the east of London on July 20.[...]»
«Demonstrating again the Government, Treasury and Markets, competence in Energy Planning. The market will take care of it.»

Electricity consumption (per-person) has been collapsing in the UK and some other european countries (and elsewhere) since 2003-2005, an inversion of tendency for the first time since electricity was invented.

https://blissex.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/dataelectreuothersconsperhead1960to2015.png
https://www.google.co.uk/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=eg_use_elec_kh_pc&idim=country:DEU:ITA:GBR:FRA:ESP:GRC:CHN:JPN:KOR:MYS:THA:BRA:MEX:URY:TUR:IRL:SGP:IND:ISR:USA

There are handwaving claims that this is due to massive investment in replacing less efficient electrical devices with more efficient ones, but:

* The biggest falls are in the poorest regions of countries like UK and Italy.

* Electricity consumption growth has boomed in countries like Korea-south, China-mainland, Malaysia, despite their ("catch-up") investing in the most recent and efficient devices.

It is demand destruction on a gigantic scale, but our media wisely focus on more urgent and important matters like expensive wallpapers and beers in "meetings".

Sometimes I feel that I might be entirely warped in worrying with very few other people about small details like the impact on business and voting of the property boom or the significance of a collapse in per-person electricity consumption, and that 6/1, beers, trans toilet laws, wallpapers are the most important issues of our time.

[rsm]

《In an analogy with kinetic energy money only does work when it is exchanged. It does no work when in an offshore bank account of a billionaire.》

How do you know the offshore bank is not selling Real Estate Investment Trust assets, at least partially backed by their deposits?

In other words how can you be so sure that offshore money doesn't circulate back to the country of origin in the form of mortgage loans, credit card loans, etc.?

《Electricity consumption (per-person) has been collapsing in the UK and some other european countries (and elsewhere) since 2003-2005, an inversion of tendency for the first time since electricity was invented.》

Is this just an artifact of electricity-hungry manufacturing moving offshore (so goods can move back, paid for with created Sterling)?

[aragon]

Finance is power and like Frankenstein monster it will destroy us while we worship at it's feet.

"1915, W.S. Maugham, "Of Human Bondage", chapter CVIII:

"Oh, don't talk to me about your socialists, I've got no patience with them," she cried. "It only means that another lot of lazy loafers will make a good thing out of the working classes. My motto is, leave me alone; I don't want anyone interfering with me; I'll make the best of a bad job, and the devil take the hindmost.""

You would have though with the rich consisting of the 0.01 percent and the comfortable, consisting of 20-40%, and many fewer a following a Housing Market collapse, they might be feeling the hot breath of brimstone on their collars.

But no:

"When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance. We're still dancing."

Chuck Prince, July 10th, 2007 (Former Citigroup CEO)

The party is still in full swing in London - start in 1980's - Chinese replaces Russian money, shame about the darkness in the rest of the country.

It is not only in WWI that "the lamps are going out all over Europe."

As for power, I am so effective they keep me insulated from the mains (240v RMS) lest I do something with it.

[Blissex]

«money only does work when it is exchanged. It does no work when in an offshore bank account of a billionaire.»

Money does not do any work, and when it is offshore, it is only *booked* offshore, it is not in any sense "physically" in an offshore location, it is just accounting, whether it is billions belonging to a corporation or to the nominee shells of a billionaire.

From a comment on "The Guardian" by the owner of a London cleaning business:

«London is indeed full of oligarchs from the USA to Outer Mongolia, hell bent of out spending and out doing their neighbours, if they even bother to turn up. Running a small cleaning company in the magic areas over the last few years has been insane. The demand for our cleaning services is high and we are able to turn down the so called oligarchs who whine about price but never about the quality, of course it won’t last Many of our payments are coming from North African based banks within the Spanish territories, Morocco, Algeria and most unusual Mali, who seems to issue a huge number of loaded debit cards for payment of services. In very recent years, many of the houses we clean, have been mortgaged to once again Mali based banks, although they have very familiar names, eg Santander.»

In particular note the "loaded debit cards" (anonymous). Of course the billionaires and many millionaires keep their loot *booked* offshore, and pay each other and their suppliers offshore too, all of that tax-free, even if they and their properties and stuff are physically in the UK.

Taxes are only for the little people, and "tax avoidance" is an "aspirational" issue for the upper-middle classes too, as this pinnacle of New Labour thinking shows:

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/labour-fears-corbyn-will-be-seen-as-unambitious-3tww86v5n
“Labour MPs have raised concerns that Jeremy Corbyn’s rhetoric on tax avoidance could appear anti-aspiration. A senior shadow cabinet source said the party leader was in danger of overreaching himself in his criticism of David Cameron for investing in Blaimrore, the fund set up in an offshore tax haven in the Bahamas by his father Ian.”

[ltr]

"Labour MPs have raised concerns that Jeremy Corbyn’s rhetoric on tax avoidance could appear anti-aspiration...."

Brilliantly self-destructive New Labour complaint; destructive for Britain as well of course. What a tragedy that there should even be a "New" Labour.

[Blissex]

«Brilliantly self-destructive New Labour complaint; destructive for Britain as well of course»

Only if "Britain" is regarded as including the servant classes, otherwise it is quite constructive.

Also, does it surprise anyone that tax avoidance by millionaire tory prime ministers is an important "aspirational" value for New Labour?

[Blissex]

«when it is offshore, it is only *booked* offshore, it is not in any sense "physically" in an offshore location»

To clarify further: all the "offshore" money is "invested" somewhere usually in the USA or UK themselves, by the account holders and/or the banks on whose books it is (and often many others via the magic of "rehypothecation"), it is not gold doubloons in treasure chests buried on some small island in the Caribbean.

[rsm]

Can I say Blissex is right on offshore money, and that the energy needed to create the money to buy energy is minuscule?

[ltr]

Part of the answer, though, I suspect is to build and support movements which offer countervailing power to the forces of conservatism - movements which tell politicians that there are costs to them of kowtowing to rentiers and reactionaries. This is why some of us welcomed the mass politics inspired by Corbyn - but also, of course, why that met with swift repression.

[ Agreed completely. ]

[aragon]

Treasure Island, what no pieces of Eight, Parrots and Wooden Legs.

Swift doesn't use much energy but blockchains with proof of work (Bitcoin, Eth etc) does to protect against sybil attacks.

Just think a CBDC would potentially make visible all transactions in sterling (anti-aspiration ?).

You can't read the Guardian and not be aware of the Panama and Paradise papers.

But in Finance money has become fantasy to be created to fund paper transactions (just look at crypto).

But the small people still work for fiat currency, so they are subject to PAYE.

Even the unemployed pay VAT (and 25% council Tax, TV Tax etc).

While Derivative contracts are estimated at on the high side one quadrillion or ten time global GDP.

Amazon is famous for tax avoidance.

Google Advert
(Search: Tax Avoidance)

"Asset Protection Strategies - Make Your Wealth Untouchable
libertymundo.com
Protect Everything You Own From Hostile Creditors and money grabbing government agencies. Protect your wealth from predators and learn new, unique strategies to make it untouchable"

Interesting use of the word predators and untouchable.

13 Years ago...

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2009/mar/04/obama-tax-haven-crackdown

"With an estimated $13tn (£9tn) of untaxed wealth held in offshore centres, taxing them would add $255bn of revenue to governments – more than double the global aid budget to poor countries."

[rsm]

Is our blogger inconsistent in citing Friedman when he talks of growth and tolerance, but ignoring the same Friedman when talking about the efficient markets hypothesis, which our blogger likes but Friedman, in the following quotation, debunks?

《[...] Shiller's objection to the identification of efficiency with nonforecastability is both apt and potentially of the utmost importance. As an example,just to make Shiller's point trivially obvious in thiscontext, suppose that all New York Stock Exchange prices were secretly set not by market trading but by the daily run of a computer located in the basement of 11 Wall Street and programmed to generate random numbers. The resulting securities prices, and the returns to holding securities, would be completely nonforecastable. But no one would argue that these prices led to an efficient allocation of economic resources. Shiller's point is that equally nonforecastable elements, originating not from a hidden computer but from social interactions among real human beings, are significant determinants of actual securities prices. The immediate corollary to Shiller'spoint, given the important role of the capital markets in an economy like that of the United States, is that the resulting resource allocations are not efficient either.》

From comments to Stock Prices and Social Dynamics by Robert Shiller