Hardcore for Nerds

» Treasure Ireland

Powerful article by Irish left economist Michael Taft:

“US multinationals have a strong presence in Ireland – making up nearly two-thirds of all MNC turnover in Ireland. American MNCs take €240,000 in profit per employee here in Ireland; in the other EU countries, they take only €31,800. More interesting, despite the global recession, American MNCs increased their profit per employee in 2009 by over 8% in Ireland. In other EU countries, American MNCs suffered a loss of nearly 21%.”

That’s a little over $300,000 at the current exchange rate. Of course most of it comes from ‘transfer pricing’ (moving revenues between jurisdictions to find the one with the least tax) so the employees don’t receive - or create - much of it, and neither does the Irish state, due to our 12.5% tax on corporations:

“So here is a question: if all things are on the budgetary table, why is there no place for an increase in the corporate tax rate? This would not undermine pre-tax profits, and even if it were raised by a mere 2.5%, it would still be lower – much lower – than almost any other European country.

And here is another question: where in Europe, indeed the world, can MNCs make as much profit as in Ireland even if the corporate tax rate were increased?

So, why is the issue of the corporate tax rate taboo? That’s an easy question to answer: because it has been elevated to almost metaphysical status.”

A taboo that comes from the real employment the multinational companies provide, as well the total contribution to the state coffers - which more and more seems like our ‘cut’ from an international money laundering scheme. Rather than just asking for more - although we do need more employment, manufacturing is increasingly less labour-intensive, and the digital sector requires more technological and linguistic skills than are available in the population; the extra tax would certainly help with the budgetary problems, and alleviate the pressure on social spending, but the tax take as a whole needs to be put on a fairer, larger and more sustainable footing - maybe the left here should just have the cojones to say it’s wrong in the first place?

What we ought to do is consolidate the tax base across Europe and the US, so the evasive transfer pricing can’t occur, and the profits are spread evenly across the states where they are created (and then of course we have to deal with commodity pricing and the exploitation of the rest of the world). But, as long as our political institutions - in America and in Europe - serve capital ahead of social interests, that won’t happen: after all, it is basically asking to extend a giant communist super-state across the western world. And that really won’t go down well with some people.

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» Apple paid less than 2% tax on overseas profit last year

Ok, so people are paying sales/value added tax on their products, but there’s something sick about globalised companies running their subsequent profits through so many countries that they avoid paying a significant amount of tax in any of them.

Ireland, along with the Netherlands, is a big offender in Europe when it comes to ‘transfer pricing’ - we take a big enough cut from the whole pie to make it work for us, which makes the process remarkably like money laundering. Meanwhile these tech companies (Google and Amazon are also mentioned, along with Starbucks) present an image of virtuous progress, appealing to the affluent consumers of the world while stealing from the societies that make them possible (by providing essential services, educating the workforce, funding crucial research - all under threat by austerity measures weighted on spending rather than tax).

As I mentioned before, I’m becoming very suspicious of the economic sense of the internet age, and how it serves capital ahead of anything else.

politics economics dotcapitalism

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(Photograph: Eric Luke/The Irish Times)
“The bank bailout has cost the 4.5 million in the Republic €16,000 each, but only three of them were prepared to brave yesterday’s wind and rain to take part in a Halloween protest outside the Central Bank on Dublin’s Dame St.
The zombie protest was organised by Luke Eastwood from Wexford, and he cut a lonely figure as he arrived on the steps on the Central Bank at the stroke of midday carrying a placard and dressed like a zombie called Ivor Bailout. He admitted his protest had echoes of the Down With This Sort of Thing episode of Father Ted, in which the priests of Craggy Island chain themselves to railings outside the local cinema in protest at a screening of The Passion of St Tibulus, but he insisted his demonstration was no laughing matter.
“I am a bit disappointed by the turnout, he said. But I am not surprised. I think people are burnt out and I think they are apathetic. I think they have been sedated by Fair City and Coronation Street.”

Aagh, I had the idea of dressing up as a zombie banker (geddit?) but I was too lazy/antisocial to bother going through with it. I’m not big into theatrical protesting either (the Central Bank was the site of the Occupy camp in Dublin), but I feel sorry for this guy. On the other hand, there’s a certain symbolic quality in being a lone protester for a cause that is actually pretty popular. More popular even, perhaps, than ‘soak the rich’ or (my ultimate honest ideological favourite) ‘overthrow capitalism’ - the banks are the millstone around the Irish state and economy, in that even if we have unfortunately paid back a lot of the debt already we haven’t exactly paid it off since we have had to in the meantime accumulate huge borrowings for regular government expenditure.
In a way, since the actual banks have been recapitalised (with our money) and are somewhat functional again (albeit facing huge problems with mortgages), they are no longer the zombies of recent economic parlance: what we have is zombie debt, that can’t be killed unless the Irish and European body politic is willing to have a cold hard look at the linkage between Eurozone banks, debtor and creditor nations and the structures of free trade and free movement of capital over the last decade or more. It’s this zombie debt that has its hands around the economic and social neck of the country, squeezing out a brain drain of emigration and poisoning the lifeblood of cities and towns across the island.
It is an epidemic that has swept across Greece and infected Italy and Spain, even France, but it suits the neoliberals and fiscal conservatives in Northern Europe to characterise it as a morality play of profligate state spending, when private spending driven by private capital has played a more crucial role - a mutant virus that spread from deregulated capitalism, in pursuit of endless growth of company profits and individual income, engineered by the mad theorists of economic liberalism. And in the Anglo-American world, too, it suits those pursuing an anti-state austerity agenda to use the bogeyman of zombie debt - or the zombie debtor - to scare the population into supporting pro-cylical action to shrink public spending while the capacity to borrow remains their one bulwark against a shrinking economy.
In other words, a spectre is haunting the Western world - and it ain’t communism.

(Photograph: Eric Luke/The Irish Times)

“The bank bailout has cost the 4.5 million in the Republic €16,000 each, but only three of them were prepared to brave yesterday’s wind and rain to take part in a Halloween protest outside the Central Bank on Dublin’s Dame St.

The zombie protest was organised by Luke Eastwood from Wexford, and he cut a lonely figure as he arrived on the steps on the Central Bank at the stroke of midday carrying a placard and dressed like a zombie called Ivor Bailout. He admitted his protest had echoes of the Down With This Sort of Thing episode of Father Ted, in which the priests of Craggy Island chain themselves to railings outside the local cinema in protest at a screening of The Passion of St Tibulus, but he insisted his demonstration was no laughing matter.

“I am a bit disappointed by the turnout, he said. But I am not surprised. I think people are burnt out and I think they are apathetic. I think they have been sedated by Fair City and Coronation Street.”

Aagh, I had the idea of dressing up as a zombie banker (geddit?) but I was too lazy/antisocial to bother going through with it. I’m not big into theatrical protesting either (the Central Bank was the site of the Occupy camp in Dublin), but I feel sorry for this guy. On the other hand, there’s a certain symbolic quality in being a lone protester for a cause that is actually pretty popular. More popular even, perhaps, than ‘soak the rich’ or (my ultimate honest ideological favourite) ‘overthrow capitalism’ - the banks are the millstone around the Irish state and economy, in that even if we have unfortunately paid back a lot of the debt already we haven’t exactly paid it off since we have had to in the meantime accumulate huge borrowings for regular government expenditure.

In a way, since the actual banks have been recapitalised (with our money) and are somewhat functional again (albeit facing huge problems with mortgages), they are no longer the zombies of recent economic parlance: what we have is zombie debt, that can’t be killed unless the Irish and European body politic is willing to have a cold hard look at the linkage between Eurozone banks, debtor and creditor nations and the structures of free trade and free movement of capital over the last decade or more. It’s this zombie debt that has its hands around the economic and social neck of the country, squeezing out a brain drain of emigration and poisoning the lifeblood of cities and towns across the island.

It is an epidemic that has swept across Greece and infected Italy and Spain, even France, but it suits the neoliberals and fiscal conservatives in Northern Europe to characterise it as a morality play of profligate state spending, when private spending driven by private capital has played a more crucial role - a mutant virus that spread from deregulated capitalism, in pursuit of endless growth of company profits and individual income, engineered by the mad theorists of economic liberalism. And in the Anglo-American world, too, it suits those pursuing an anti-state austerity agenda to use the bogeyman of zombie debt - or the zombie debtor - to scare the population into supporting pro-cylical action to shrink public spending while the capacity to borrow remains their one bulwark against a shrinking economy.

In other words, a spectre is haunting the Western world - and it ain’t communism.

irish economics politics zombies

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“ As a society, we’re supposedly committed to the principle that workers, the poor, those struggling to get by, deserve a share of the wealth for practicing their craft. But we also believe that investors and owners deserve returns on their equity. What we gloss over is the irresolvable contradiction between those two things.

—

‘Amanda Palmer’s Accidental Experiment With Real Communism’

This, in the middle of a piece about more specifically music-industry issues, I found to be a strikingly elegant description of the problem with capitalism, or at least with our political approach to it (you could say that the dividing line between economic Left and Right is which side gets the larger emphasis, now that society remains committed to supporting both - pointing out the contradiction in social terms gets you accused of class warfare, as perhaps Romney discovered, but fundamentally class is the issue of who get to be owners and who get to be workers).

The part about wandering the byways of Facebook and Google being unpaid labour, though, I don’t altogether agree with. Apart from blurring the lines, from both perspectives, between work and leisure and what exactly constitutes ‘labour’, it’s not unrewarded. New media and social media, along with the various other free platforms for online activity, provide a service in exchange for ‘eyeballs’ and a contribution to the nebulous, half-unbelievable world of internet advertising. Add in the push from venture capital - hello Tumblr - and it seems as if we’re heading for another dotcom bubble.

Essentially “dotcapitalism” (which is a term I just invented, feel free to add to its brand recognition by incorporating into your own intellectual property) seems to function by shifting the use of capital as much as possible onto labour which is unpaid, though not necessarily unpleasant. The term ‘affective labour’ covers the extent to which sharing and other forms of social interaction underpin some of the most active yet mysteriously commercial parts of the internet - sharing which, especially in the case of music, may be subversive of one kind of property (that of artists themselves, and their representatives) but is supportive of another kind of property, one that uses human opinions and self-expression as a commodity to be bought and sold, analysed and monetised. And, perhaps a little late to the party, I’m starting to find that rather creepy. Given the pressure to optimise everything, to ‘grow’ pageviews, I find myself wondering when about to (say) tweet a link to something, how much has the desire to express, to inform, to share (and how less the desire to create, to truly subvert, to truly rebel) been captured by the industry that promotes the internet as a social, prepaid mode of communication.

This is not ‘labour’ in the sense that it provides many of us with a living, which is another of the chief reasons why I resile slightly at the use of the expression, but it provides a distraction from labour (and lack thereof) while also being labour in the sense that it creates profits for others, and genuine employment for some (although the nature of this employment is, unsurprisingly, often problematic). Historically the distraction-from-work and entertainment would have taken the form of consumption, as it is still generally seen - yet with the apparent difficulty that people are now not paying for it, and either or both are not expected to and do not expect to. Moreover, while people are clearly still paying for it by indirect means - whether or not these prove sufficient, we will discover - there is no obvious requirement for employers to pay a rate for ‘actual’ labour that allows for the enjoyment of free entertainment.

If consumer capitalism has ‘worked’, so to speak, by paying people enough for the production of goods and services so that they can afford to consume them, dotcapitalism introduces a murky break in the circle by making (mostly virtual) goods and services dependent on revenue from advertising, which is itself dependent on the income from a shrinking pool of paid-for physical products. Shrinking not necessarily in terms of value (although I suspect that might be the case, as a proportion of the economy) but in number of kind, restricted by having to draw on finite incomes of consumers, and by dwindling environmental resources. Whereas capital flows to the new, the growing, the market-expanding: finding new ways to harness the affective labour of the technological masses, expandable because it is cheap, requiring little or no pay, only the power to host and run; finite only to the literal exhaustion point of human interest, the number of hours in the day someone can look at a computer screen and tap on a keyboard or keypad.

Of course, the technological improvements that every tech-conference speaks of can deliver actual efficiencies, improvements in productivity (even perhaps through targeted advertising!) in meatspace, or in the blurred area between offline and online, where it’s still more meat and money-making than not; but I’m afraid that sometime quite soon the income and investment from capital and consumption in the offline economy will become insufficient to sustain the advertising budgets that support the ‘free’ web, and a bubble will burst. There could be adjustments: we could start redirecting our income in more conscious ways, forego some more frivolous entertainments while perhaps even reducing our physical, paid-for consumption; but that would be to go against the tide of capitalist growth, of supposedly rational consumer economic incentives. There could very well be some crucial part of the economics I’m missing: perhaps Google have hired their own economists to figure this out, if they care, but it seems to me that for all the talk of it, interconnectedness is something people don’t really understand about either the web or economics.

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ooh, sharp…

(via)

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“ In the years leading up to the bust, there were about 325,000 gainfully employed under-25s in the State. At the last count there were just 130,000, meaning that for every 10 jobs that existed at the beginning of 2008, six have disappeared. Put another way, in 2012 only a quarter of the 15-24 age group is working, down from half before the crash.

—

Youth unemployment: the remedies - Dan O’Brien - The Irish Times

However you spin that regards education (I think we’re happy expecting that probably most 15-24 year olds would be in education, full-time - I didn’t finish my primary degree until age 22, my master’s at 23; the problem has been after that point) it’s a large drop, covered in part by emigration. The next sentence I don’t wholly agree with, though:

“When you consider that the number of over-45s at work has hardly been affected by the recession, it is surprising that issues of intergenerational equity have not come to the fore.”

Partly because it’s answered later in the same article, although he doesn’t seem to realise it:

“While longer spells in education probably account for most of the young people who are not in the workforce, it is very likely that more under-25s who are neither at work, on the dole or in education are depending on their parents.”

Almost literally it’s ‘don’t bite the hand that feeds you’, since most people in their early 20s are likely to have parents in the over-45 age group; it’s the parents paycheques and pensions which stretch to providing an unofficial support and safety net. So while there are definite issues about entry to public sector jobs and unequal conditions between new and existing workers, it’s a mistake to suggest that the young don’t also benefit from the old hanging on to their incomes. Yes, we’d like the opportunity for more independence, but not as cover for pursuing an ideological agenda against public sector pay, thank you very much.

‘Intergenerational (in)equity’ is I think in many respects a weaker force than intergenerational solidarity, and to suggest otherwise implies a lot of arguments at family dinners. Instead the major force at work in Irish economics is, as always, more of an ‘intersectional inequality’, between those (young or old) on higher incomes, with better opportunities and resources, and those on lower incomes without. Wealth is already redistributed within families - that is essentially their purpose, to provide for the next generation - and what is needed is greater redistribution between families, i.e. across society, the social family mediated by the state. It’s ironic that conservatism, so traditionally supportive of ‘the family’, is now in hock to a neoliberalism which seeks to drive it apart by reducing its members to simple individuals, a radical anti-patriarchy that sees the destruction of unionised working gains as a solution to the poverty of youth, rather than as removing a crucial backstop against the tidal wave of failure created by capitalism.

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“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” Mr. Romney said. “There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it, that that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.”
(Behind the ‘People Who Pay No Income Tax’ - NYTimes.com)

It’s not just that, as the blog post above points out, the people who don’t pay federal income tax (whatever about other taxes on income) are in that position precisely because they are on low incomes, but that doesn’t even correlate with areas that support Democratic presidential candidates. So not only is Romney callous and misguided in his depiction of the figures, he’s not even correct in his political analysis.
I saw the map above linked in the comments under the Irish Times report on the issue (while looking for any comments in support of Romney: the closest I found was “See how the Obama campaign hates the unvarnished truth. It is right to.”, from a notable reactionary Tony Allwright). It’s from a different non-partisan organisation that Romney got his figures from (the Tax Policy Center) but though I didn’t find where exactly the image is used on their site, the Tax Foundation do have an excellently detailed report on Tax Equity and the Growth in Nonpayers covering the same issue. (People with a grasp of statistics might notice that the highest figures in the map don’t exceed 45%, as against Romney’s average of 47%; it also covers only filers, which excludes those below the $9,000/$19,000 threshold of having to file for income tax, and estimated to bring the total number closer to 50%)
In any case, we have this same ‘issue’ of people on low incomes paying relatively small amounts of progressive income tax in Ireland: I think it’s a natural outcome of combining the neoliberal politics of ‘freeing’ people from the burden of taxation (in particular in Ireland, as a way of gaining populist votes) with the economic trend of maintaining or even increasing the proportion of low-income jobs (particularly in the context of recession). And as the rich earn more and more money, they end up paying a larger share of the income tax, which conservatives then spin as an inherent inequity rather than a glaringly obvious consequence of income inequality.
Personally I believe that tax as a proportion of the national income definitely needs to be increased in Ireland (which sits closer to the US in that regard than the rest of Europe), which can be done across a broad range of taxes, geared most progressively towards income (but not neglecting capital wealth) which would spread across all levels of earnings conditional on a shrinking of the gap between those earning the most and the least. That seems to be the only fair way to fund the services people clearly want while maintaining a social cohesiveness between ‘rich’ and ‘poor’. Of course Romney doesn’t think like that: his issue doesn’t even seem to be with the inequity of the lower paid paying less tax, but that the Republican aim of tax cuts to the rich potentially doesn’t interest people who are already deemed too poor to pay the taxes he wants to cut (even if it seems plenty of people in that situation are in fact willing to vote for that agenda!).
It’s all part of larger conservative ideology that sees taxes and benefits, not as a necessary redistribution of income for a fair society, but an active impediment to the economic underpinnings of it. As the excellent Irish politics blog Cedar Lounge Revolution critiqued the statement of an Irish government minister recently:

“The priority for the Government is not to have further tax increases on work because you create this dreadful disincentive that encourages people to stay on benefit.”

To be honest I’m not sure what he means by that last sentence. I’d have thought the most significant factor ‘encouraging people to stay on benefit’ is lack of employment opportunities, and it is hard to understand given how low tax the economy has been (with still relatively low tax rises over the past four years – albeit some hugely distorting ones like the USC) how there have been any disincentive involved. Ah, except for the fact that we’re also talking about extremely low paying jobs. But then those sorts of jobs are unlikely to offer the sort of long term solution (or even short term) that is needed for those who are unemployed.

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” Mr. Romney said. “There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it, that that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what.”

(Behind the ‘People Who Pay No Income Tax’ - NYTimes.com)

It’s not just that, as the blog post above points out, the people who don’t pay federal income tax (whatever about other taxes on income) are in that position precisely because they are on low incomes, but that doesn’t even correlate with areas that support Democratic presidential candidates. So not only is Romney callous and misguided in his depiction of the figures, he’s not even correct in his political analysis.

I saw the map above linked in the comments under the Irish Times report on the issue (while looking for any comments in support of Romney: the closest I found was “See how the Obama campaign hates the unvarnished truth. It is right to.”, from a notable reactionary Tony Allwright). It’s from a different non-partisan organisation that Romney got his figures from (the Tax Policy Center) but though I didn’t find where exactly the image is used on their site, the Tax Foundation do have an excellently detailed report on Tax Equity and the Growth in Nonpayers covering the same issue. (People with a grasp of statistics might notice that the highest figures in the map don’t exceed 45%, as against Romney’s average of 47%; it also covers only filers, which excludes those below the $9,000/$19,000 threshold of having to file for income tax, and estimated to bring the total number closer to 50%)

In any case, we have this same ‘issue’ of people on low incomes paying relatively small amounts of progressive income tax in Ireland: I think it’s a natural outcome of combining the neoliberal politics of ‘freeing’ people from the burden of taxation (in particular in Ireland, as a way of gaining populist votes) with the economic trend of maintaining or even increasing the proportion of low-income jobs (particularly in the context of recession). And as the rich earn more and more money, they end up paying a larger share of the income tax, which conservatives then spin as an inherent inequity rather than a glaringly obvious consequence of income inequality.

Personally I believe that tax as a proportion of the national income definitely needs to be increased in Ireland (which sits closer to the US in that regard than the rest of Europe), which can be done across a broad range of taxes, geared most progressively towards income (but not neglecting capital wealth) which would spread across all levels of earnings conditional on a shrinking of the gap between those earning the most and the least. That seems to be the only fair way to fund the services people clearly want while maintaining a social cohesiveness between ‘rich’ and ‘poor’. Of course Romney doesn’t think like that: his issue doesn’t even seem to be with the inequity of the lower paid paying less tax, but that the Republican aim of tax cuts to the rich potentially doesn’t interest people who are already deemed too poor to pay the taxes he wants to cut (even if it seems plenty of people in that situation are in fact willing to vote for that agenda!).

It’s all part of larger conservative ideology that sees taxes and benefits, not as a necessary redistribution of income for a fair society, but an active impediment to the economic underpinnings of it. As the excellent Irish politics blog Cedar Lounge Revolution critiqued the statement of an Irish government minister recently:

“The priority for the Government is not to have further tax increases on work because you create this dreadful disincentive that encourages people to stay on benefit.”

To be honest I’m not sure what he means by that last sentence. I’d have thought the most significant factor ‘encouraging people to stay on benefit’ is lack of employment opportunities, and it is hard to understand given how low tax the economy has been (with still relatively low tax rises over the past four years – albeit some hugely distorting ones like the USC) how there have been any disincentive involved. Ah, except for the fact that we’re also talking about extremely low paying jobs. But then those sorts of jobs are unlikely to offer the sort of long term solution (or even short term) that is needed for those who are unemployed.

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» The Dark Side of Mitt Romney - Vanity Fair

“…In the end, Romney’s winners outweighed his losers on the Bain balance sheet. Marc Wolpow, a former Bain partner who worked with Romney on many deals, said the discussion at buyout companies typically does not focus on whether jobs will be created. “It’s the opposite—what jobs we can cut,” Wolpow said. “Because you had to document how you were going to create value. Eliminating redundancy, or the elimination of people, is a very valid way. Businesses will die if you don’t do that. I think the way Mitt should explain it is, if we didn’t buy these businesses and impose efficiencies on them, the market would have done it with disastrous consequences.”

The first sentence of this is amazingly trivial - of course the winners outweighed the losers (from a narrow business perspective) because otherwise Romney would have been a failed businessman, and/or there would be no point in doing what they did. It’s not like Bain Capital was some kind of charitable or not-for-profit endeavour, right? One in which there was a higher goal against which immediate, pragmatic success could be measured but not necessarily supersede - as in, we may not be doing this as well as we should be, but it’s worth doing?

Oh, but wait, there is a higher goal - capitalism! (And also family: “The Romneys have long cited a well-known Mormon credo popularized by the late church leader David O. McKay: “No other success can compensate for failure in the home.””) The idea, as expressed in the final line, that the actions of individual actors are somehow both separable from but ultimately determined by ‘the market’ is a pernicious fallacy that is behind much of the current economic woes of both the US and Europe; because they are, and they are the actions of, ‘the market’!

It is a conscious and profit-driven decision to “impose efficiencies”, on the conscious assumption that what the market seeks actually does represent ‘efficiency’ (and not a distorted equilibrium of rent-seeking and negative externalities). Or in other words, ‘market forces don’t exist in a vacuum’.

The whole piece is a good read - the parts about Mormonism are not effective because of any ‘weirdness’ about the religion, but because the descriptions of his actions as a bishop (okay, that sounds a little weird) remind me strongly of the none-too-subtly characterised actions of an interfering Catholic priest in a novel I read recently, set in 1940s Ireland - by telling a single mother to either give up her child for adoption or leave the church. To be honest, I’m not aware of the ‘light side’ of Romney, although his personality seems to reflect mine insofar as he is introverted and coldly logical, if more inclined towards rigid conformism (an IST-, for fans of MBTI). And he’s not well liked on this side of the pond.

Also recommended is this Vanity Fair piece on the light, but profound, side of Obama (if I being fair, it could be said to be a little hagiographical) during the time of the Libyan intervention.

politics us romney economics religion mbti

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» Germans hold better opinion of Ireland than other EU bailout states

Well duh, that’s part of a general Northern European prejudices (we may be profligate debtors, but we’re not lazy layabouts like those Portuguese or Greeks). Except…

“On the issue of tax, 45 per cent felt Ireland had lower taxes for workers while 11 per cent said Germany had lower taxes, while 12 per cent thought they were the same.

There was a similar view of taxes on business, with 47 per cent saying they were lower in Ireland, 11 per cent saying they were lower in Germany and 10 per cent the same.

On public sector salaries, 37 per cent felt they were higher in Germany, 18 per cent said they were higher in Ireland and 13 per cent said they were equal.”

And our government’s response to the recession is a) keep taxes low and b) try and reduce public sector pay? No wonder the Germans won’t give us free money for our banks!

(See also: America)

(actually this is kinda surprising, cos I’d always heard that Germany is a relatively low-wage economy since its 1990s ‘reforms’, particularly at the lower levels of the labour market, while higher rates of social insurance also reduce take-home pay - though providing for a better social safety net and services. Maybe it’s based on the assumption that our taxes are too low and economy too weak to pay German-level salaries to public sector workers - or conversely a domestic grievance with both taxes and public sector salaries being too high? The trope here, in Ireland, is that the top public servants are definitely overpaid relative to their European counterparts, and the further right on the political spectrum you are the further down the pay scales goes the ‘overpaid’ mantra.)

economics europe germany irish politics irony

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thejogging:

RIOT SHIELD WITH COMPLEX MATHEMATICAL EQUATION USED IN FINANCIAL MARKETS CONTAINING DERIVATIVE INVESTMENT INSTRUMENTS, 2012

Sculpture

~

I like this because it’s thought-provoking, but in an unexpected way. They’re always talked about, but I’ve never actually seen one of the ‘complex mathematical equations’ used in the financial markets before. And sure, it looks complicated* - and I’ve no idea what it means, or what any of the four variables R, p, l and H stand for - but it looks quite normal compared to other mathematical equations I’ve seen in other (actual) branches of science. So in appearance at least it’s not really that mystical, in fact it’s as familiar as anything else from physics or pure mathematics - probably the plastic that makes up the riot shield itself has a long and complicated-looking chemical equation describing its production. Which points to a certain element of anti-intellectualism in laying the blame for the financial crash on ‘exotic instruments’ and these incomprehensible mathematics - I’m sure on a practical level there’s a lot of truth to that, it’s difficult to manage and assess what you can’t understand, but it’s when it’s taken from that kind of insider critique to a generalised statement of criticism that I wonder.

I guess you could say Oppenheimer and those working on the atomic bomb did understand what they were doing in a technical and physical sense, although they were more ambivalent about its human and political consequences, and these mad wizards of financial trading are more blindly destructive, in a less horrendous but perhaps more socially pervasive manner; but I’m suspicious of the idea that we should be fearful of science and knowledge itself rather than the means of controlling and implementing such (although, to go a little Foucauldian, those two can’t be wholly separated). Or maybe it’s just that economics is, and always will be, the ‘dismal science’ - although ironically that name** was given, not simply because it attempts to elevate complicated empirical judgements in social science to determinative mathematical theory, but because it was felt that it predicted the unsustainability of human population growth.

Which prediction, by Malthus, was rendered null by technological advancement - at least until now, where the return of environmental pressures have undermined not only the economic ideal of limitless economic growth, but also brought into question the capacity of the planet to sustain the associated and interlinked human population growth. I don’t think it’s right or even possible that mathematical equations will solely decide the limits of human aspiration, but a new political economy will have to be formed for a sustainable world, and the revolution will include complicated mathematics.

*complex, as I understand it, is simply to mean containing multiple parts, while complicated more accurately (and subjectively) implies difficulty of understanding

**apparently as opposed to ‘The Gay Science’, which makes me feel bad for not having read Nietzsche yet.

(via raptoravatar)

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