Category Archives: Social values

Guest Post: Awareness of Poverty Over Three Centuries

By Martin Ravallion, Director of the Development Research Group, World Bank. Cross posted from VoxEU

For how long have we cared about poverty? Tracing the number of references to the word “poverty” in books published since 1700, this column shows that there was marked increase between 1740 and 1790, culminating in a “Poverty Enlightenment”. Attention then faded through the 19th and 20th centuries, leaving room for the second Poverty Enlightenment in 1960 – and interest in poverty still rising.

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Taibbi on Why No One on Wall Street Goes to Jail

There’s a fine new piece by Matt Taibbi on the utter lack of criminal prosecutions on Wall Street, particularly of the big perps. He goes through a series of well known instances of actual (to everyone save the prosecutors) cases of chicanery, ranging from Freddie Mac accounting fraud, the protection of Morgan Stanley CEO from insider trading charges, Lehman’s misleading reporting of restricted stock payments, and gives the sordid details of how whistleblowers were ignored and aggressive SEC staff like Gary Aguirre were fired.

To my mind, the juiciest and most depressing part of the story comes fairly late in the piece, when Aguirre attends a day long conference last November (with a $2200 price tag) on financial law enforcement. This is what “enforcement” looks like:

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Jeffrey Sachs on the Budget: “Do we really have to have our own Egypt here in the United States?”

This is astonishing. Jeffrey Sachs manages to speak candidly about what is going on about the Obama budget cuts and related politics on an MSM outlet. To put it mildly, this is a marked contrast with his prior stance on liberalization of financial markets and development. Hat tip Jesse via e-mail:

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Doug Smith: Social Impact Bonds – Right Result, Wrong Way (Part 1)

By Douglas K. Smith, Member, Board of Directors, SeaChange Capital Partners

Social impact bonds, a useful experiment underway in England, is gaining attention on this side of the pond, including from the Obama administration. We are glad to see this at SeaChange (a non-profit group seeking innovative ways to bring capital to the non-profit sector). What is deeply concerning, though, is how some elites are packaging and promoting social impact bonds as yet one more example of everything the market does is good while everything government does is bad. Moreover, these same elites betray a stunningly superficial grasp about how markets actually work.

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New York Times Article Perpetuates Short-Sighted Management Attitudes

One of the reasons American management isn’t what it used to be is that most companies do not give a rat’s ass about employees. Yes, you’ll get the usual human resources blather about how “our employees are our most important asset”, but actions on this front speak vastly louder than words. In the 1970s and early 1980s, management gurus and the business press argued that one reason German and Japanese manufacturers were trouncing their American counterparts was that they had better employee relationships. But even though there is still a mini-industry dedicated to producing corporate “leaders”, US companies too often see employees as costs, and their objective is to get buy spending as little as possible on them, rather than treating them to the extent possible as allies in building a more successful, profitable venture.

An article in the “You’re the Boss,” a New York Times column, demonstrates how deeply these warped values have taken hold in American business. Now admittedly, this feature focuses on small businesses, and these enterprises are often on the knife edge of survival. At the same time, every now-big company was a small company once, and presumably a venue like the New York Times is trying to help these companies perform better and for those that have significant potential, to chart a path that increases their odds of achieving it.

So consider this discussion:

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Chamber of Commerce Law Firm Studied Disinformation, Smear and Coercion Campaign Against Opponents

On the one hand, it’s a badge of honor of sorts to see the most powerful political lobby, the Chamber of Commerce, have its operatives moving from the “ignore you” to the “fight you” stage of engagement. The flip side is that the tactics that they are willing to consider don’t reflect at all well on their commitment to principles like the rule of law or decency.

ThinkProgress today broke the story of the dirty works being considered. Readers may be aware of a massive leak of e-mails of the security firm HB Gary Federal which made the mistake of trying to hack the computers of Anonymous, the group that has taken to punishing organizations that cut off donations to Wikileaks.

Anonymous obtained and leaked the internal messages and rubbed HB Gary’s face in it a bit too.

The e-mail dump exposed some dirty laundry, namely that of a disinformation campaign that HB Gary plus two other “security” firms Palantir, and Berico Technologies (which together called themselves Team Themis had started to map out for a law firm the Chamber of Commerce works actively with, Hunton & Williams.

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Quelle Surprise! Tax Increases on Rich Do Not Lead to Exodus

A solid paper by Cristobal Young and Charles Varner, “Millionaire Migration and State Taxation of Top Incomes” (hat tip Matt) helps debunk the idea that high income individuals will pull up stakes if their taxes go up. The case study is an interesting one: New Jersey’s tax increases on top earners. New Jersey made the biggest increase of all US states, and also has the distinction of having a low income tax state (Connecticut) nearby, meaning that tax-sensitive residents had an option of moving not all that far to escape the increase, which presumably would allow them to maintain family ties.

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The study results might be labeled “Millionaires are People Too.”

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Tom Ferguson: Memo to Obama – Anything but Democracy Now for Egypt is Building on Sand

By Tom Ferguson, Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and a Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow. Cross posted from New Deal 2.0

Food and oil prices are rising as tension in Cairo is soaring — time to get on board with the people’s demands.

Add Barack Obama to the long list of statesmen who couldn’t solve the Riddle of the Sphinx. For a while last week it looked like a miracle was happening: The United States was on the verge of doing right and doing well at the same time. After stumbling initially, the administration openly warned the Egyptian army and government not to slaughter the protesters. It also started lining up behind the Egyptian people’s demands for a swift transition to a new, more democratic regime. Neo-con lions like Robert Kagan and Elliott Abrams bedded down with liberal internationalist lambs in a “Working Group on Egypt” that called for reforms and Mubarak’s exit, while John McCain and other Republicans offered bipartisan cover for Real Change in the world’s oldest civilization.

But by Saturday, February 5, the wheels started coming off.

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The IMF’s Epic Fail on Egypt

Over the last week, we’ve had the spectacle of the Western media speculating about what is going on in Egypt in the absence of much understanding of the forces at work (this article by Paul Amar is a notable exception).

Needless to say, there has also been a great deal of consternation as to how the West’s supposedly vaunted intelligence apparatus failed to see this one coming. This lapse is as bad as the inability to foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union (it’s arguably worse: a lot of people profited from the Cold War, and they’d have every reason to fan fears and thus look for evidence that would support the idea that the USSR was a formidable threat. By contrast, one would think that conveying word that the domestic situation in Egypt was charged would have led to more intense scrutiny which ought to have served some interests (like various consultants and analysts). That suggests the US was so wedded to Mubarak that anyone who dared say his regime was at risk would get “shoot the messenger” treatment, and thus nary a discouraging word was conveyed).

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Reagonomics Was Pro Business, Not Pro “Market”: We Speak on Real News Network

The centenary of Reagan’s birth is providing an excuse for trotting out a lot of hoary old myths and selective history about the 40th president. We gave a bit of an antidote on the Real News Network.

As much as I thought this clip came out well, I have a minor quibble, and wished the folks at Real News Network had not invoked the expression “free market” in the headline on their site. It’s a dangerous bit of propaganda, a malleable, often slippery concept (per Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty “It means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less”) and is rife with internal contradictions (see our long form discussion in ECONNED for details). The equivalent expression in the 1960s was “free enterprise” and that conveyed far more accurately whose interests were really served by the sort of liberalization being sought.

Enjoy!

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Pete Peterson Using High School Courses As Trojan Horse for Anti-Social Security, Medicare Propaganda

It’s not a pretty spectacle when a very rich man tells little people they ought to get by with less, particularly when his firm benefitted handsomely from the pump and dump operation that led to the financial crisis.

Pete Peterson, one of the two founders of the Blackstone Group, has had a longstanding campaign against Social Security and Medicare. He’s sufficiently aggressive that to combat consistent poll ratings that show that both programs enjoy substantial support, his foundation set out to generate different survey results by stacking the deck heavily in its favor. As we recounted last July:

For those who did not catch wind of it, the Peterson Foundation, which has long had Social Security and Medicare in its crosshairs, held a bizarre set of 19 faux town hall meetings over the previous weekend to scare participants into compliance and then collect the resulting distorted survey data, presumably to use in a wider PR campaign.

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Marshall Auerback: Plan B for Health Care Reform – It’s Called ‘Medicare for All’

By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and hedge fund manager who writes at New Deal 2.0. If we’re forced back to square one by the Supreme Court, why not get it right? My colleague, Bo Cutter, has noted the likelihood of continued challenges to health care reform in the wake of the recent Florida State […]

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Croesus Watch: Banker Pay Levitates to New Highs

Oh, I need a new round of black humor as a coping device to deal with the predictable but nevertheless disheartening news that banksters are getting record pay for 2010, after having gotten record pay for 2009…after having wrecked the global economy.

If this isn’t incentivizing destructive behavior, I’d like you to suggest how we could make this picture worse. A newspaper ad for the swaps salesman that tanked the most municipalities? Ticker tape parades for the deal structurer that was best at pulling most fees out of clients in ways they wouldn’t detect? (Oh wait, you’d have to include pretty much every derivative salesman) Honorable mention for the banker with the biggest expense account charges in the industry? (Oh wait, that’s not the right metric, we learned in Inside Job that the drugs and hookers get charged to research budgets. Damn).

My pet joke from the dot bomb era scandals is now looking a bit tired:

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8 PM EST Watch Dylan Ratigan Town Hall Session on Jobs, Innovation

Check in here at 8 PM to watch the Dylan Ratigan “Innovation in America” panel discussion as part of its Steel On Wheels Tour tonight at 8pm EST at the University of Denver.

The panel will include Andrew Jenks, from MTV’s World of Jenks, Nicole Glaros, Managing Director of TechStars Boulder, and Matt Miller of The Washington Post and host of Left, Right & Center.

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