Sisyphus aims to tax parking, any day now

Posted on January 18, 2013 by Frederick Guy

This is a pity: a very modest proposed tax on parking lots in Massachusetts disappears from the governor’s budget. A similar thing happened in the early days of Britain’s present coalition government: a few Tories like Phillip Blond recognized that the failure to tax parkin g represents a big subsidy to big supermarkets; they were quickly smacked down. The same thing happened in the early days of New Labour: John Prescott and Gordon Brown wanted such a tax, but Blair vetoed it – Greg Palast puts it down to political skulduggery, which is to say business as usual.

In many places, while supermarkets are free to fill the streets with cars and cover the ground with asphalt, the customers of small shops pay high prices for on-street parking: in England this is about the only discretionary revenue source for local governments, with predictable results – in my neighborhood, Harringay, in London, a non-resident on-street space is priced at £3 (about $4.80) per hour, 9.5 hours per day, 6 days per week. Allowing for holidays, and assuming full occupancy but ignoring additional charges (fines) for over-staying, this works out to £8,607 ($13,771) per year.
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GMO giant hires retired cops to hunt down farmers

Posted on December 15, 2012 by Frederick Guy

The glories of the intellectual property imperium! (from Occupy Monsanto)

GMO giants DuPont have contracted dozens of retired law enforcement officers to begin patrolling farms in the US next year to spot any potential intellectual property theft.

DuPont Co, the second-largest seed country in the world, is hoping to find farmers that have purchased contracts to use their genetically modified soybean seeds but have breached the terms of agreement by illegally using the product for repeat harvests. Should farmers replant GMO seeds licensed by DuPont, they could be sued for invalidating their contracts.

http://www.occupymonsanto360.org (http://s.tt/1vNQa)

This reminded me of my teacher Sam Bowles talking about guard labor (I Google and am glad to find that he still talks about it). Excessive supervision that pays for itself by keeping down wages, prison guards, etc: a great deal of labor is devoted to just watching people who, in a better structure of motivation, would not need to be watched at all.

(To say nothing of the fact the the part of guard labor that consists of prison guards is devoted to keeping prisoners out of the labor market, so that’s everybody’s effort wasted: on this see Bruce Western and Katherine Beckett, and John Quiggin. But I digress.)

Further Googling tells me that Bill Totten, who has a company that distributes open source software in Japan, has made just the same association between IP protection and guard labor.

They read them so we don’t have to

Posted on September 10, 2012 by Frederick Guy

Zoe Heller is among the many who’ve had a good time demolishing Naomi Wolf’s book Vagina in the New York Review of Books (such fun it has been reading the demolitions that I’d never consider reading the book itself, which couldn’t possibly be as good as the rollicking critiques). Heller has a nice way with the demolishing phrase. I liked this characterization of Roald Dahl’s stories for adults, from Heller’s review of his authorized biography: ‘[They] … tend to focus on perverse forms of human vengeance and cruelty. At their best, they have a sinister sort of élan. More often they evince an oddly naïve idea of “sophistication,” an adolescent confusion of amorality with worldliness’.

Skills and the response to crisis

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Frederick Guy

My paper with Andrea Filippetti is now available from Birkbeck’s Centre for Innovation Management Research. Bottom line: European countries with a combination of good short-term unemployment insurance and vocational training participation were less likely to see reductions in private sector investment in innovation in the first year of the financial crisis: having just one of these was no help, and job security, the bête noire of neo-liberalism, made no difference. Another way of putting it is that, in this particular case (investment in innovation, during the financial crisis), it is the security part of the flexicurity model that provides the benefit. This is consistent with the logic of Estevez-Abe, Iversen & Soskice’s chapter in Hall & Soskice’s Varieties of Capitalism.

Ma Jian’s Odyssey

Posted on August 22, 2012 by Frederick Guy

Red Dust (2002) is marketed as a travel book, and I picked it up because travel books are appreciated in my household – any interesting one is a good present to bring home. And it is a great travel book, an account of Ma’s wanderings around China in the mid-1980s, with the travel book requisites of an outsider’s empathetic but detached and wry observations about people and places we don’t know ourselves. The sense of the separation between places – especially in the countryside, where the country’s big cities, or any city at all, seem to have mythical status – is vividly conveyed, as are the institutions of party and state, which bind together and control even the most remote parts. Poverty and emerging wealth, material progress and pollution, cruelty and kindness are all delivered economically, showing rather than telling, mostly in sketches of people Ma meets and of their circumstances. Whether for understanding people, or the country in a particular period, the book is well worthwhile.

But if Red Dust is a travel book, then Homer’s Odyssey is a travel book. Continue reading →

A beautiful teaching story

Posted on August 5, 2012 by Frederick Guy

… although it doesn’t say much for the teacher training requirements in California in the late 1940s. From the New York Times’ obituary for Karl Benjamin, an abstract painter from Los Angeles:

he began teaching fifth and sixth grade in the public schools in Bloomington, Calif., where, in addition to the three R’s, state law required him to teach art. He had not thought much about the subject before.
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Economic liberalization depends on strong states

Posted on August 4, 2012 by Frederick Guy

Julia Cagé and Lucie Gadenne find that

tariff cuts lead to lower tax revenues as a share of GDP. The drop is highest in poor countries that don’t have the capacity to compensate for lost tariff revenues with domestic taxes.

This is an important point in itself, and illustrates a more general principle that many of the benefits of economic liberalization depend on strong states. Continue reading →

Santana with subtitles

Posted on August 4, 2012 by Frederick Guy

Bio-doc on Carlos Santana on BBC4 last night. A nice reminder of the quality of the extended jams as opposed to many of the radio-friendly songs – singing was not the group’s strength. And, for British audiences, subtitles to cut past the perfectly lucid Mexican and Californian accents. Continue reading →

Weak intellectual property and economic catch up – the German case

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Frederick Guy

In Der Spiegel, Frank Thadeusz reviews Eckhard Höffner’s work. The story: 19th century Germany had far better dissemination of new scientific & technical ideas, in part because weak copyright enforcement forced publishers into aggressive pricing & paperback editions. In England publishers thrived but most people couldn’t afford their products. This difference helped Germany catch up.

What Höffner describes in 19th century Germany is a sort of open innovation system – not one without intellectual property protection, but one with weak protection. Continue reading →