What Will happen Kill Neoliberalism ...

What Will happen Kill Neoliberalism The Nation. From early May, still interesting. William Darity, Jr.:

Suppose, however, that Marx was correct in his expectation that capitalism, like other social modes of production before it, will wind down gradually, but wrong in his expectation that it would be succeeded by a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” a civilization without class stratification. Suppose, indeed, that the age of capitalism is actually reaching its conclusion—but one that doesn’t involve the ascension of the working class. Suppose, instead, that we consider the existence of a third great social class vying with the other two for social dominance: what was seen in the work of such disparate thinkers as James Burnham, Alvin Gouldner, Barbara Ehrenreich, and John Ehrenreich as the managerial class.

Dovetails rather neatly both with Robert Frank’s Listen, Liberal and Glennon’s views on “institutionalized bureaucratic autocracy” (one aspect of which would be The Blob) in Links yesterday.

On corporation tax, the Institute of Fiscal Studies has shown its neoliberal prejudice - BC 

The FT needs to grasp a little tax reality

POSTED ON MAY 26 2017

Chris Giles has an article in the FT in which he says:

Conservative and Labour manifestos fail to grasp economic reality

In the Tory case this is because Giles thinks May wants an evidence free approach to Brexit that cannot be delivered. This we know to be true.

In Labour’s case it is because:

Labour’s priorities for increased public spending — abolishing student fees and nationalising utilities — shows little grasp of the needs of the disadvantaged nor a strategic understanding of the public finance priorities of the next decade.

I happen to think that a good point: Labour does, I hope, have sufficient plans for tackling real disadvantage from the proceeds of the growth its policies would deliver.

But his criticism of Labour is also unfounded when it comes to the other other issue he mentions, which is:

Labour wants to raise almost £50bn a year from higher taxes with the vast majority coming from companies or richer people. It makes no proper allowance for evidence that both of these targets are rather good at avoiding higher taxes — either by reducing their taxable activity or by changing the appearance of their affairs to the tax authorities.

Giles does here fail to grasp tax reality, as he has so often failed to do in the past. He is not, then following his own precept. This is for three reasons.

First, rules on tax avoidance, and especially as they apply to practitioners and automatic information exchange from tax havens, are going to make this abuse much harder.

Second, country-by-country reporting is going to make abuse by large companies considerably more difficult.

Third, if Labour employs more people at HMRC then the odds change: Giles is making the mistake of assuming ever diminishing tax authority capacity.

He’s wrong, in other words. The FT needs to get up to speed on tax reality.

DeLong: The Future of Work: Automation and Labor: Inclusive AI: Technology and Policy for a Diverse Human Future Brad DeLong

The inevitable future of Slack is your boss using it to spy on you Quartz (CL). This:

[A] Swedish-Swiss industrial engineering company, ABB, says it has a solution: It has given some of its employees a kind of automated “do not disturb” sign: custom-designed traffic lights for their desks.

The FlowLight system evaluates how busy someone is by measuring their combined mouse and keyboard activity against that person’s baseline average. When activity is in the top 9% of their typical range, the light turns red, letting colleagues know that it’s the wrong time to amble over with a funny anecdote or any question that’s not absolutely burning. Non-emergencies can wait until the light is green.

As the article points out: 

It’s easy to imagine this turning into an Orwellian nightmare: men and women planted at their desks, frantically typing and scrolling to keep their lights red, red, always red.

But it’s actually worse. The assumption is that when you’re typing, you’re working. When you’re sitting quietly and thinking, you’re not working. Remind me to short ABB.

The sad reason half of Americans don’t take all their paid vacationMarketWatch

The Dumb Politics of Elite Condescension Joan C. McWilliams, NYT

Swept up in city tax sales, Baltimore churches at risk of losing property to California investor Baltimore Sun

The Art and Science of Comedic TimingNew York Magazine

World Bankspeak – how to hide the failure of a mission! Bill Mitchell. References this fascinating source: Bankspeak: The Language of World Bank Reports, 1946–2012 Stanford Literary Lab.