On a less somber note, you are praising the empowerment of ignorant people to become secret informants on behalf of a security state with the power to disrupt the lives of others. This is a tried and proven path that many countries have followed and we all know where it leads.
Your post amounts to "I'm glad these idiots found a voice, now that they finally affect us all, we can do something about it". But your assumption that they affect us all equally is not supported by this story, otherwise all passengers on that plane would have been taken off and screened by police.
I think you fail to realize that these idiots affect mainly minorities, as that is how uneducated minds work: they can't see past their own identity (and by the power of numbers, most idiots are white). So what you're effectively saying is "I'm okay with idiots harrassing minorities".
(edit to add an unwarranted disclaimer: by "idiot", I'm not referring to the lady in the original story, but to the OP's description of the "tragically ignorant, in need of raising their bar")
When I read responses like this (that have no connection with the comments they're in response to) I have to just assume that Hacker News has switched out my comments and replaced them with something completely different.
Please let me know if you manage to catch the witches you appear to be hunting.
A metric that I like is mean(log(after-tax income)). It is a reasonable measure of the average "utility" that income provides to a population. If money circulates among corporations but does not change personal income, then the metric remains constant. If everyone's income increases 1%, then the metric increases 1%. If inequality increases, then the metric decreases since average utility also decreases.
If money circulates among corporations but does not change personal income, then the metric remains constant.
This is true of GDP as well, since GDP only includes final goods. I.e. if a farmer produces wheat, and the wheat is then used to produce bread, the farmer -> baker transaction is excluded from GDP. Only the baker -> consumer transaction counts towards GDP.
If you want to try and measure utility, your metric should be based on consumption - e.g. mean(log(after tax consumption)). Income isn't utility, it's only potential utility.
If we used income, your metric would unfairly penalize volatile income. I.e., a person with a stable income of $50k/year would be considered 70% better than a person who earns $100k then $0k (saving $50k in the first year and spending it in the second while having an identical lifestyle.
Good point on the final goods distinction, thanks.
The distinction between consumption and income is not significant for a large fraction of the population, and if you are going to track just one number, it really shouldn't be consumption. If you do that, you have no hope of tracking changes in social structures or inequality or wealth accumulation. You would have to track wealth or income too.
Addressing your concern over volatile income is not that important and could compromise the usefulness of the metric. If you propose using GDP or any other linear function instead (rather a logarithm or power-law) then you cannot approximate utility and your number will be insensitive to changes in inequality. If incomes go up for the bottom half by 10%, then GDP would not change by much, though many would be better off. Income taxes are already calculated annually to smooth out these income fluctuations for seasonal workers.
If you do that, you have no hope of tracking changes in social structures or inequality or wealth accumulation. You would have to track wealth or income too.
But you wanted to measure 'average "utility"', not "social structures". Utility comes from consumption, not income. You are right that tracking consumption would fail to be a proxy for income inequality (as you now seem to want it to be) because consumption inequality is vastly lower than income inequality.
At this point, your metric sounds less like an improvement on GDP, and more like just some other random thing you want to track.
The idea of using log-income as a proxy for utility is not new. It is a standard measure in the economics of taxation. Yes it is different than measuring consumption. It is an improvement over GDP in the sense that it measures how the economy is serving the population. Some consider this to be a laudable goal.
The economy is serving the population when it enables consumption. Income is shifting numbers around in banks, consumption is delicious mac&cheese.
That said, you criticized log(consumption) above because it doesn't measure "social structures" and "inequality". Those things are pretty explicitly not how the economy is serving the population.
If you include wealth transfers such as inheritance in consumption, and you include mortgage spending, then log-consumption can work fine too. The only problem is that it is more difficult to measure because you would need to track either either consumption per-person or both income and savings per-person.
Income is easily measured for individuals, and aggregate consumption is easily measured by merchants. This is why we have a progressive income tax and not progressive consumption taxes. It could be done, it is just more difficult.
You can repeat as often as you wish that "inequality" is not relevant, but you are wrong. Utility is increased more if $1 is earned/spent by a poor person than a rich person, ipso facto inequality is bad for utility, all else being equal. My reference to the economy serving the population, is just a reference to utility, as opposed to any other linear measure such as GDP.
As an alternate hypothetical, lets imagine that every multinational happens to be related to a large number of subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Singapore, and Luxembourg. Furthermore, suppose that three quarters of all world-wide corporate profits happen to be booked in these four countries with a minuscule population. Clearly there would be a problem.
So long as there is "greyness" in the allocation of profits among related entities, this will be systematically exploited to maximally shift profit low tax jurisdictions.
Although transfer pricing is a significant component, it is not the only one.
The most obnoxious methods probably relate to hybrid mismatches where corporations exploit differences in two tax codes to take deductions in both countries. This may involve a payment that is treated as interest in one country and a dividend in the other. It may involve an entity that is treated like a flow-through partnership in one country and a corporation in the other.
There is also "treaty shopping" where corporations set up faux corporations in countries with favourable bilateral treaties so they may reduce their tax when shifting profits from country A to the intermediary to country B.
0. When many of the world's resources will be depleted in a multi-decade timeframe, there is a problem. I want humanity to last millions of years.
1. Fortunately, longer schooling and birth control has reduced the rate of growth in the model of Malthus. This is dumb luck, not divination from GDP.
2. Please remember that we won WWII and went to the moon in the periods with highest marginal tax rates. Growth is probably highest with higher rates of taxation and government investment in R&D.
How is that a "loophole." Multi-national structures seem like a necessary facet of the tax code. And the listed strategies don't seem to take advantage of obscure provisions, but basic mechanics of the tax system: deduction of costs from gross revenues, etc.
Take a closer look at the sections on hybrid entities, treaty shopping, and transfer pricing. There are loopholes wide enough to let tanker ships pass.
> So if we focused on developing a tool whose sole purpose was to give us quantified feedback on the consequences of our actions - much like how we use utility bills ...
Utility bills and a carbon tax are the only feedback you need. All the rest is politics.
Does a carbon tax stop the slash-and-burn in Indonesia (for palm oil) and Brazil (for cattle)?
I agree that the full cost of what we buy needs to be included in its price or else we'll keep seeing the same problem, having only kicked it down the road a bit. But there are also many more large problems besides climate change that involve more than carbon dioxide emissions.
The ratio of comments to votes in this thread is a perfect example of the "chilling effect" surrounding this topic and the limits it creates on free speech.
the same really. I don't think anyone will know for sure. The poor guy might just have not caught the issues back then. Or maybe it was malicious and still is.
It's hard to say. In these cases, the wisest option is "innocent until proved guilty". False positives are worse than false negatives.
That's probably more attributable to knowledge of HN's algorithms basing article ranking on the upvote/comment ratio than on any sort of "chilling effect".
I agree with the sentiment, but I don't think a competition investigation is the appropriate forum to deal with this. There should be a fine, perhaps through a class action or criminal conviction.
I certainly hope the penalty for illegally wiretapping hundreds of millions of people is more than $1 per head. I value the privacy of my conversations (and life) way more than that.
Besides, if I opt-in to this service, why should everyone who ever walks into my home or office be presumed to have made the same choice? What if I am a doctor or lawyer who is not legally allowed to make that choice?
So you think that the appropriation of unused real estate is worse than whatever disaster led to the mass exodus of a population from a major city. Interesting, but that is not how I think.
