Ms Duflo said the importance of the two most commonly
cited approaches to tackling poverty — foreign aid and freeing up trade with
poor countries — had often been "overstated".
Thomas Piketty’s New Book: Impressive Research, Problematic Solutions
Capital and Ideology is a quantitative history of inequality, a
largely noneconomic theory of social stratification, an investigation
into the social roots of current populism, and a political manifesto for
the European left.
New York Times op-ed: How to Tax Our Way Back to Justice, by Emmanuel Saez (UC-Berkeley) & Gabriel Zucman (UC-Berkeley):
America’s soaring inequality has a new engine: its regressive tax system. Over the past half century, even as their wealth rose to previously unseen heights, the richest Americans watched their tax rates collapse. For the working classes over the same period, as wages stagnated, work conditions deteriorated and debts ballooned, tax rates increased.
Stop to think this over for a minute: For the first time in the past hundred years, the working class — the 50 percent of Americans with the lowest incomes — today pays higher tax rates than billionaires. ...
[W]we have estimated how much each social group, from the poorest to billionaires, paid in taxes for the year 2018. Our starting point is the total amount of tax revenue collected in the United States, 28 percent of national income. We allocate this total across the population, divided into 15 income groups: the bottom 10 percent (the 24 million adults with the lowest pretax income), the next 10 percent and so on, with finer-grained groups within the top 10 percent, up to the 400 wealthiest Americans.
'A crime of the powerful': what are Australia's anti-corruption bodies?
Nick BonyhadyAre Australian universities putting our national security at risk by working with China?
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Australia's top universities could be aiding the Chinese Communist Party's mission to develop mass surveillance and military technologies, amid rising concerns from Australian intelligence agencies that they are putting national security at risk
Four Corners on Chinese Influence
Four Corners on Chinese Influence
The Politics Of Noise (It’s Everywhere)
Noise is never just about sound; it is inseparable from issues of power and powerlessness. It is a violation we can’t control and to which, because of our anatomy, we cannot close ourselves off. “We have all thought of killing our neighbors at some point,” a soft-spoken scientist researching noise abatement told me. As environmental hazards go, noise gets low billing. – The Atlantic
Is there such a thing as unconditional forgiveness? I doubt it. But perhaps someone can supply a clear example of it.
Suppose you take money from my wallet without my permission. I catch you at it and express my moral objection. You give me back my money and apologize for having taken it. I forgive you. I forgive you, but only because you have made restitution and have apologized. For I might not have forgiven you: I might have told you to go to hell and get out of my life for good.
By forgiving you, I freely abandon the justified negative attitude toward you that resulted from your bad behavior. This works a salutary change in me, but it also does you good, for now you are restored to my good graces and our mutual relations become once again amicable.
The example just given suggests two things about forgiveness.
First, it suggests that forgiveness is conditional in nature. It suggests that a necessary condition of an act's being an act of forgiveness is that the malefactor admit wrongdoing, show some remorse, and make amends in some way or other, by restitution, paying a fine, serving time in jail, or in some other way. There is forgiveness only if there is sincere admission of guilt and/or an evening of the scales of justice.
Second, it suggests that forgiveness is morally permissible only if the malefactor sincerely admits guilt and makes amends in some way or another. That is, one ought not forgive those who refuse to admit guilt, etc. For it is an offense against justice if I let you get away with your wrongdoing and award you the benefit of my forgiveness for nothing. When Bill Clinton, exercising his presidential power of pardon, pardoned Marc Rich, that was an affront to justice and in a two-fold way. Rich got away with his wrongdoing, and it was unfair to similar others who did not get away with their similar wrongdoing. Of course, what Clinton did was LEGAL, but the legal and the moral are two and not one.
My thesis, then, is that genuine forgiveness is conditional in its being and in its justifiability.
‘A waste of six minutes’: Virginia Trioli on political interviews
Fed up with stonewalling and spin, the ABC journalist is taking a different tack.
But
that is not the heroic part. He also sought to have the Tax Court order
the IRS to not jerk other people around in the way that he was jerked
around. In that quixotic quest he failed, because as the mantra goes the
Tax Court is a court of “limited jurisdiction. Here is the story. ...
Mr.
Davis contacted Senator Cory Booker’s office. They got the Taxpayer
Advocate Service involved. Since the ninety day clock was ticking, there
was also a Tax Court petition filed.
Thanks
to the Taxpayer Advocate, the IRS backed down — “respondent reversed
his position, issued a "no change" certification that petitioners' 2014
tax return was accepted as filed, and mailed petitioners a proposed
decision document reflecting his concession of the deficiency.”
Admit
it. You or I would have been happy with that and stopped. But not Mr.
Davis. He wanted his expenses of $154.98, but more importantly — here is
the heroic quixotic part — he wanted the Tax Court to order the IRS to
not ever jerk anybody around the way that he was jerked around.
Petitioners
additionally requested that this Court adopt a rule that would be
applied when two or more Federal agencies provide conflicting
information to a taxpayer, the taxpayer discloses the conflict in his or
her return, the taxpayer provides documentation supporting his or her
position, and the taxpayer continues to respond timely to respondent.
Under petitioners' proposed rule, if all of these requirements are met,
respondent would be prevented from seeking a deficiency.
Whatever
the merits of such a rule might be, it will not be coming from the Tax
Court, because of its oft mention “limited jurisdiction”. Congress has
not given it the authority to create operating rules for the IRS. It’s
too bad, but I have to congratulate Mr. Davis on the effort. Thinking
about how to help the next person avoid the aggravation you have
experienced is one of the things that helps make the world a better
place.
The New Yorker – [“At the end of every section in this article, you can read the text that an artificial intelligence predicted would come next.”] “…But Smart Compose goes well beyond spell-checking. It isn’t correcting words I’ve already formed in my head; it’s coming up with them for me, by harnessing the predictive power of deep learning, a subset of machine learning. Machine learning is the sophisticated method of computing probabilities in large data sets, and it underlies virtually all the extraordinary A.I. advances of recent years, including those in navigation, image recognition, search, game playing, and autonomous vehicles. In this case, it’s making billions of lightning-fast probability calculations about word patterns from a year’s worth of e-mails sent from Gmail.com. (It does not include e-mails sent by G Suite customers.)
“…In February, OpenAI, an artificial-intelligence company, announced that the release of the full version of its A.I. writer, called GPT-2—a kind of supercharged version of Smart Compose—would be delayed, because the machine was too good at writing. The announcement struck critics as a grandiose publicity stunt (on Twitter, the insults flew), but it was in keeping with the company’s somewhat paradoxical mission, which is both to advance research in artificial intelligence as rapidly as possible and to prepare for the potential threat posed by superintelligent machines that haven’t been taught to “love humanity,” as Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, put it to me…”
