Read Gabriel’s Lips: Wealth concentration returns to levels last seen during the Roaring Twenties

The immorality of layoffs The Week

The sinking ship of self-interested super rich Anand Giridharadas, Unherd


Via FAS: Executive Branch Ethics and Financial Conflicts of Interest: Disqualification, CRS Legal Sidebar, January 31, 2019


Wealth concentration returning to ‘levels last seen during the Roaring Twenties,’ according to new research WaPo


NBER Working Paper Series: Global Wealth Inequality , Gabriel Zucman, Working Paper 25462, January 2019. “This article reviews the recent literature on the dynamics of global wealth inequality. I first reconcile available estimates of wealth inequality in the United States. Both surveys and tax data show that wealth inequality has increased dramatically since the 1980s, with a top 1% wealth share around 40% in 2016 vs. 25–30% in the 1980s. Second, I discuss the fast growing literature on wealth inequality across the world. Evidence points towards a rise in global wealth concentration: for China, Europe, and the United States combined, the top 1% wealth share has increased from 28% in 1980 to 33% today, while the bottom 75% share hovered around 10%. Recent studies, however, may under-estimate the level and rise of inequality, as financial globalization makes it increasingly hard to measure wealth at the top. I discuss how new data sources (leaks from financial institutions, tax amnesties, and macroeconomic statistics of tax havens) can be leveraged to better capture the wealth of the rich.”

See also – “The World Inequality Database(WID.world) aims to provide open and convenient access to the most extensive available database on the historical evolution of the world distribution of income and wealth, both within countries and between countries.”

Intercept: “…An unavoidable takeaway of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” is, essentially, that everything is even worse than you thought. Even if you’ve followed the news items and historical trends that gird Zuboff’s analysis, her telling takes what look like privacy overreaches and data blunders, and recasts them as the intentional movements of a global system designed to violate you as a revenue stream...


For Democrats Aiming Taxes at the Superrich, ‘the Moment Belongs to the Bold’ NYT


The $238 Million Penthouse Provokes a Fierce Response: Tax It NYT

Open-Plan Offices Are Now the Dumbest Management Fad of All Time

Inc.com – A new study from Harvard reveals that open-plan offices decrease rather than increase face-to-face collaboration: “Over the decades, a lot of really stupid management fads have come and gone, including:

1. Six Sigma, where employees wear different colored belts (like in karate) to show they’ve been trained in the methodology.
2. Stack Ranking, where employees are encouraged to rat each other out in order to secure their own advancement and budget.
3. Consensus Management, where all decisions must pass through multiple committees before being implemented.

It need hardly be said that these fads were and are (at best) a waste of time and (at worst) a set of expensive distractions. But open plan offices are worse. Much worse. Why? Because they decrease rather than increase employee collaboration. As my colleague Jessica Stillman pointed out last week, a new study from Harvard showed that when employees move from a traditional office to an open plan office, it doesn’t cause them to interact more socially or more frequently.

Instead, the opposite happens. They start using email and messaging with much greater frequency than before.


‘We won’: Landmark climate ruling as NSW court rejects coal mine Sydney Morning Herald