Interesting Links for 04-11-2015

[andrewducker]

• Entire editorial staff of Elsevier journal Lingua resigns over high price, lack of open access
  • (tags: OpenAccess publishing academia viaJaneCarnall )
• How reducing inequality boosts economic growth
  • (tags: inequality growth economics )
• BBC Greenlights Series Based on Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’
  • (tags: PhilipPullman tv bbc )
• Universal Basic

Comments

[supergee]

Universal basic income would be like vaccination. It would have a lot of the same enemies.

[danieldwilliam]

I shall look forward to the television series of His Dark Materials just as I am looking forward to reading the book with the Captain.

One of my epic wins as a parent was making for BB a model of the Lee Scorsby's airship out of plastic bottles and tissue paper to go with the armour I'd fashioned out of a mince pie tin for her Playmobil polar bear.

I'll be interested to see what the local climate change impacts of solar panels turn out to be. I wonder if there is a real estate deal to be struck...

[steer]

I may have mentioned this before, but I found it interesting. Piketty does a lot of statistics analysing wealth distribution in his book. There's one thing he says which rings really true, that wealth distributions can be extremely misleading

[drdoug]

Totally agree with your general point - wealth is a very tricky thing to measure. And switching to consumption as a measure doesn't fix the problem either - famously, Warren Buffett might even come out slightly less rich on that measure than either of us.

But I have to disagree on one point:

Assuming you don't count your pension pot

That's almost certainly the number 2 source of wealth after house ownership, surely?

Although this is probably massively unequally distributed: most people having no pension pot; the average for those who have one at all is probably of the order of £50k; then there's high-paid public/quasi-public pensions; and then very-senior pension pots which are the ones George Osborne keeps introducing amazing perks for like that one about giving up your rights to unfair dismissal.

I have no more disposable income than I did have.

Sure, but - assuming you have a repayment mortgage and keep up the payments - you can reasonably expect to live rent-free for a considerable period of time in the future.

[steer]

That's almost certainly the number 2 source of wealth after house ownership, surely?

That's a good point. I wanted to simply things. I'm not sure what effect pensions have on wealth inequality particularly given the existence of a state pension.

- assuming you have a repayment mortgage and keep up the payments - you can reasonably expect to live rent-free for a considerable period of time in the future.Depends on your age and location. If I were back in York then I'm at an age where buying a house is actually a poor decision compared with renting as I will pay slightly more to rent than to buy and will die before I recoup the loss (actually a mortgage company would not permit me to do this with a long term loan so I could only do this if I didn't own a house by paying a punitive monthly sum). So from a selfish point of view, if I moved back to York and didn't have a house then renting would be the financially smarter alternative purely from a disposable income point of view. (I guess you can sell the house, go back to renting

[drdoug]

Interesting - I've not run those sums before (I was lucky enough to be able to buy young) to see how it works out

[bart_calendar]

Before I say this I want to say I am seriously in favor of drug legalization.

But, I had a soft of creepy thought about it last night when I read about Ireland and drugs.

When Ireland first had to put in their austerity measures to assuage the gods of our New German Masters one thing they did was include a reduction in the booze tax. And they were pretty blatant about saying they did so because they figured cheaper pints in pubs would lead to people bitching less about all the benefit cuts.

What if the fairly sudden willingness of governments both here and in America to decriminalize drugs is because they think that turning people into addicts is a great way to keep people from protesting/voting, etc.... as they put in more austerity to widen the wealth gap even more?

Universal Basic Income as the Social Vaccine of the 21s

[drdoug]

I really like the idea of a universal basic income.

It can't possibly be as financially beneficial as vaccines, using that article's figures. It gives a ballpark cost of $3tn, which I assume is for the US. (It's about $10,000 per person per annum times the population at 300 million.) US GDP per annum is about $17tn. That's 18% of the entire economy. Which I would guess is a massive overestimate of the spend on dealing with the impacts of poverty, even if you extend them to indirect effects. Even if half of the entire economy is devoted to the costs of poverty (which is surely an absurd overestimate), that's still a benefit-to-cost ratio of less than 3, compared to 6 and above for the vaccine examples.

Re: Universal Basic Income as the Social Vaccine of the 21s

[andrewducker]

It won't be as good as the best of the vaccines, no.

But then it won't cost as much as that, as you can reduce a bunch of other social programs that you replace with it.

And I don't think that you're going to get benefits just from removing the costs of poverty - unless you include better education levels as being a negative cost of poverty, for instance.