I’m a fan of the Chinese Doom Scroll Substack where the author translates a selection of posts from Weibo. Great set on nannies today. But also this on the Hong Kong fire:
“Heard a Hong Kong architect talk about the skyscraper fire recently and he mentioned a shocking bit of logic.
Why were these skyscrapers getting their outer wall renovated at the same time? Why do all 8 buildings need scaffolds builded? Why have the scaffolds been there for over a year?
The reason is actually because no Hong Kong construction company has that many workers to work on all those buildings at once. You need thousands of people working at the same time for that, and once the work is done, those workers will have nothing to do and nowhere to go. So normally, you would build scaffolds on the buildings one by one and work on them one by one.
But in that case, it’ll be really hard for the construction company to get the money from the homeowners up front all at once, and it’ll be a slow process getting the rest of the funds, and there’s no guarantee you’ll get all of it. The construction company wrapped all the buildings up so they can get the downpayment all at the same time, but they can still only work on one building at a time. This way, the scaffolds stay on the buildings for a very long time. Over a year, in this case.
It’s because these buildings stayed wrapped up for so long that the bamboo dried out. Once a fire broke out, the risks is really high that it’ll spread to other buildings. Normally, the gap between the buildings was enough to prevent fires, but the extra width of the bamboo scaffolds made the gap smaller, causing this multi-building fire. So the biggest reason for this accident is bad construction order policy. They shouldn’t have wrapped all the buildings up for so long, just so they can get more of the downpayment.
I don’t know whether or not this Hong Kong architect was right, but if it’s true, then this is a very important lesson to learn. There should be laws made that if skyscrapers are getting worked on at the same time, the safe distance between them needs to be recalculated to avoid multiple construction projects going on in high density areas to prevent a similar situation.”
Comments say, “I don’t know if it’s possible to make a law that skyscrapers are not allowed to be taller than how high the escape ladders can reach or how high the fire hydrants can pump.”
“The last building to get renovated is so sad. It has to be all wrapped up for several years.”
“Hong Kong people are so polite. If it was me, due to my health reasons, I wouldn’t be able to put up with it for more than a month before I got frustrated.
Presumably the idea is that the scaffolding narrows the gap so allowing the netting to ignite the dried out bamboo. But like you what I have heard elsewhere concentrates on the netting.
"Hong Kong has one of the most laissez-faire economic systems in the world. For instance, their outstanding (and profitable) subway system is privately owned."
Which was also true, at one time, of NYC's subway. The one August Belmont (property developer and race horse breeding financier) built in 1904. But when he wanted to build a second line the politicians, greedy to share in the revenues, refused to let him do it without cutting them in on the deal. That was the seed of New York City's destruction of the subways (where it is today).
>Perhaps every advocacy movement starts out with one or two good ideas. But once they become established, they just keep going. They move right past the point of optimal advocacy, to a position where their efforts are counterproductive.
I suspect this is it. Sort of rhymes with the winner's curse is an auction theory in that if you frame yourself as an advocate for something, almost by definition you need to be one of the people pushing it furthest or bidding the most on it. Unless society starts very far in the wrong direction, almost by definition, you'll overbid. So probably best not to identify too strongly with either side of any dichotomy if you want any chance of finding the optimal balance.
Advocates are like lawyers. They aren't there to explore nuance and arrive at the best answer or policy in a good faith dialog with all sides. They're there to be a fierce, biased, uncompromising champion for the cause they represent. They have every incentive to upsell information that purports to support their view and ignore (or even hide) information that counters it.
Not to say that this is *inherently* bad, as the general idea behind lawyers is that hopefully, with lawyers on both sides of a case, each doing their absolute best to vigorously argue for their side, that their combined efforts make for a more energetic search for the truth than would otherwise be the case with unbiased investigators carefully considering and weighing all of the evidence.
Whether or not that's true I think largely depends on how the match is officiated, so to speak. The judge has to keep both sides in line, rules of evidence and discovery have to be respected (e.g. no "hiding" things as mentioned above), objections to arguments have to be properly considered and adjudicated on-the-fly, etc.
As for policy advocates, the question is whether government officials have the integrity and the competence to weigh the input from both sides (normally by relying on policy advisors and subject matter experts), or whether they're just responding to the raw politics of things (i.e. "this group supported me so I must therefore fulfill my promises to them"). If the former, the advocates themselves can play a vital role even if they aren't individually all that consistent, or the people you'd want being the actual decision makers.
But by the same token, this also implies that those of us who aren't advocates and are, at least in principle, unbiased seekers of the truth need to be wary of the fact that information which comes from an advocate is inherently biased. Too often I see people make arguments about a topic and then be content to cite some statistics put out by the Center for the Promotion of X, as if they're the chief academic experts on the topic of X, rather than a group dedicated to a specific position with regard to X (which, in fairness, is an impression many advocacy groups are happy to give with deceptive names like "Center For Immigration Studies").
I'd agree with you on your advocacy point and maybe even on lawyers in civil law but you completely missed the mark on criminal law. The criminal law system isn't adversarial nor a neutral arbitrator hence both in theory the judge and the prosecutor drive to "win" plays second fiddle to their ethnical duty to the public to be just, honest, and that they get the right guy even at the expense of helping the defense; that concept is lost on the modern American bar and we could go a long way to fixing that if we made the prosecution actually prove their case and prove in a factual evidentiary sort way, not with legal fiction, short cut presumptions, coercion, insinuation, and subjective "facts'.
A great example here is the "presumption of mailing" in that a "properly addressed and stamped letter that was mailed is presumed to have been received"; no the prosecution should HAVE to prove the letter was actually mailed, actually delivered, actually read, and actually understood because way to many people languish in prison over never having received a letter and it's undefendable because of that presumption. As an example, the rest need to go to, at least in the context of the "offense/prosecution" because the default case is "innocence". And to tie that back to advocacy point a little, no SME's and "advocacy" groups should not get "presumption of expertise/truth", i.e. "no expect testimony by doctors" based on "AMA positions" or any of the ilk like that from ABA, AAP, etc. Time and time again you see industry trade and advocacy group reports get quoted as God's truth (and accepted so) by judges as fact as opposed to non-amissible third party opinion. That is especially rife in the psychological, sociological, and criminology "expert" realms, i.e. "doctor X says Y" ... the response should be "so what, he can prove what he says is true, not presumed so".
I don’t think revealed preference is at all a useful metric for policies with a ton of conflating variables. Like net migration from California to Texas probably has a lot less to do with how each collects taxes than with housing policy. For both environmental and policy reasons, Texas is a much more affordable place particularly with respect to housing than California. I strongly suspect that people are moving to Texas not because they really hate income taxes, but because they can’t afford to live in a place where, even if they make a combined $200,000 a year, they’ll have trouble affording more than a 1000 SF apartment (and forget it for a family of four trying to get by on, say, two teacher salaries).
Why not both? Yes, housing costs are the primary reason people leave NY and California, but taxes are still a huge factor in interstate migration, as any decent cross sectional study would show. None of the many states that border Texas have high population growth, and all have a state income tax. Look at side by side comparisons between states with and without income taxes.
Texas is an enormous state. You’re not exactly choosing between Austin or New Mexico. It’s also got a couple of uniquely booming sectors, though the Austin tech migration appears to be a nothingburger. But those state level characteristics matter a whole lot. Washington had a big population boom for 15 years. The influx there over Oregon had, by my estimation, approximately nothing to do with the lack of state income tax and everything to do with Amazon going on a massive growth spree (with accompanying positive externalities). Oregon had nothing of the sort. But then, if nothing else, during Covid there was a pretty large jump in migration from Seattle to places like Bend, Oregon that had natural beauty, a growing art and cultural scene, and much cheaper housing.
There’s also the fact that Texas actually has higher middle and lower class tax burdens than California. Texas just doesn’t tax rich people.
I strongly suspect people (other than a few mega wealthy people) don’t think at all about how states collect revenue when they decide where to live— they think about how easy it is to get a good job, how nice of a place it is to live, how much they can afford on their pay (primarily, housing), infrastructure (schools, roads, etc.), probably roughly in that order.
I strongly disagree with many of those points. Taxes are one reason why companies choose low tax states, so you can't site successful companies as a counterargument. I don't believe Texas taxes middle class people more highly than does California. New Orleans and Houston were once rivals for big oil headquarters, and then New Orleans completely lost out to Texas. Why aren't oil centers like Tulsa booming?
Oregon is bigger than Washington, and has a better climate. It also has a big metro area. It should be doing better than Washington. I've met people who moved to Nashville because of no state income tax. And what's so special about South Dakota?
In any case, there are far too many examples of states with no state income tax to just brush off this factor.
I'd encourage you to look at some of my Econlog posts on this topic.
I think the company location point strongly supports my claim. There was a mini boomlet in Austin when a few tech libertarians made a big show of moving from the Bay to Austin. That not so inconspicuously died. Turned out agglomeration effects in the Bay were super powerful. Similarly, finance continues to sit overwhelmingly in New York, which is also a high tax state.
Texas is a powerhouse in sectors like oil and gas, as well as solar and wind. That has a lot to do with its environment and resources. Its effort to become a tech hub has been, as I noted, a bust.
The Oregon-Washington comparison, too, is quite instructive. Washington was a backwater until the 80s. Its growth relative to Oregon has nothing to do with taxes and approximately everything to do with Microsoft almost single-handedly building a tech infrastructure more or less from scratch. And that in turn had everything to do with Bill Gates and Paul Allen wanting to go home.
I think if we’re talking about reasoning by anecdote, well, the counter argument is that the wealthiest states overwhelmingly have income taxes. California, New York, Massachusetts… all have income taxes. Washington is the exception there.
And housing prices continue to be by far the most compelling explanation for any migration. California has long had high income taxes. Yet housing costs have really skyrocketed in the last 20 or so years. It really strains credibility that people all of a sudden decided they hated state income taxes and decided to bail. Just imagine the counterfactual. If California cut income taxes to zero, while housing costs kept rising (or, realistically, rose way more, as they replaced state income taxes with property taxes that both taxed property directly and put more income in people’s pockets to chase scarce real state), the idea that people would stay doesn’t pass the laugh test.
Austin is still booming. I think we are talking past each other. There's no doubt that places like Massachusetts and California have a lot of the most innovative tech companies and lots of well paying jobs. My point related to population. People are clearly moving to states with no income tax; it's not even in doubt in my view.
I have many posts explaining why those "quintile studies" are meaningless. I've been in all five quintiles at various stages of my life, but that fact has no bearing on anything. When we think of average "families" they are mostly in the top three quintiles. The bottom two are heavily weighted toward young people in college, retired people, the unemployed, etc., etc.
Another way of putting it is that 73% of Americans spend at least part of their life in the top 20%, so they naturally care a lot about tax rates for the top 20%. Not many ambitious people think "I'll settle in California, because when I'm middle aged I'll earn too little to pay any income tax". Migration is overwhelming determined by tax rates for the top half of the distribution.
Your info on Austin is out of date, I think. It’s well documented that companies are fleeing just as quickly as they came in. Article linked at the bottom.
And while the headline point might look directionally right, it’s also pretty clear that you’re ignoring confounding variables and declaring that the tail is wagging the dog. Yes, there’s big net migration out of New York and California. But peek under the hood. The migration out of California is driven by the middle and bottom of the income distribution. And Texas taxes people in the middle and bottom more than California does. So those people are very evidently not fleeing high income taxes. What they are fleeing is high housing costs. And high housing costs tend to correlate to… high income taxes. Now, the most telling part of the analysis is what happens when you look at states where that correlation breaks. The archetype is Washington, which has a tech hub with high housing costs but no income tax. And net migration there is… negative. So I think it’s quite obvious that housing costs are the dog, and tax obsessives’ fixation on tax rates as a cause just falls apart pretty quickly.
"Washington was a backwater until the 80s. Its growth relative to Oregon has nothing to do with taxes and approximately everything to do with Microsoft ...."
That's just wrong factually. Washington has always been more economically advanced than Oregon. Boeing, shipyards, trade with Japan and other Asian countries. Seattle even has NFL and MLB teams that Portland lacks.
Not significantly. The “will the last person leaving Seattle turn off the lights” billboard wasn’t just someone being funny. In 1980, when Microsoft moved to Washington, Oregon’s GDP per capita was about 90% of Washington’s. In 2023 (the last year the particular data set I found runs), Oregon’s GDP per capita was about 73% of Washington’s. And even that change wasn’t linear. In 1996, Oregon’s GDP per capita reached 96% of Washington’s.
>"The influx there over Oregon had, by my estimation, approximately nothing to do with the lack of state income tax and everything to do with Amazon going on a massive growth spree (with accompanying positive externalities)."
Arguably Amazon growing in Washington in the first place was nontrivially due to the lack of State income tax…
Amazon growing in Washington was kind of an accident. Bezos decided to plant Amazon there in the 90s. Similarly, Seattle being anything but a backwater is entirely an accident. It was a logging town with an aircraft sector that was dying in the 70s. It was revived as a tech hub pretty much entirely because Bill Gates and Paul Allen happened to be from Seattle and decided to move their small software business from Albuquerque back to their hometown. That business blew up and spun out an entire tech ecosystem. Enrico Moretti describes it in his terrific book “The New Geography of Jobs.”
Would Gates' homesickness been sufficient for the move if Washington taxed income? Even if so, would Microsoft have blown up as much as it did? Would that have been sufficient for Bezos to choose over Silicon Valley? Even if it was, would Amazon have grown as it did?
Even if the absence of a State income tax is a negligible *proximate* cause, it's implausible that it was immaterial.
Ummmmm yes. There’s absolutely no reason to assign magic powers to taxes. The rest of the tech ecosystem arose in California, where income taxes were very high. Even more so when your counterfactual is “if Washington had income taxes, Amazon would have had to go to… California, where taxes were the highest.”
Given that fact, the idea that taxes played some major role (or even minor role) in the growth of Silicon Valley just makes no sense. The only way to get there is to assume your conclusion.
"approximately nothing to do with the lack of state income tax and everything to do with Amazon going on a massive growth spree"
Have you ever wondered why Amazon was founded in Seattle? Bezos was quoted as saying it's because of the location central to book distributors. Seattle is central?
Likewise, Microsoft moved early on from New Mexico (which was at the time the center of the personal computer universe) to Washington. Gates and Allen were making good money even then (with outstanding growth prospects), and Gates especially was very money focused. Furthermore, as early as employee #70 (Jerry Dunietz), Microsoft was touting the benefits of no state income tax in employee recruiting.
It would be impolitic for Gates and Bezos to just say outright, "We moved here because there's no income tax." But maybe society would be better off if they did.
P.S. Have you ever wondered why Bezos moved his primary residence from Washington to Florida? Could it be related to the creation of a Capital Gains Tax in Washington State?
There were two major tech hubs in America. The Bay was one. Seattle was the other. Washington had a favorable online sales tax environment at the time. If Amazon had been, say, a search engine or a social network, odds are they would’ve started out in the Bay. That has, again, absolutely nothing to do with personal tax rates.
Gates and Allen moved Microsoft to Seattle, again, for one reason and one reason only— they grew up there and met at the Lakeside School. It had approximately nothing to do with lack of state income tax. It was both necessary and sufficient to their decision. You’re making up a motivation that doesn’t exist because… you desperately want your conclusion to be true. But it isn’t.
Now, as for Bezos moving to Miami to escape taxes. Sure, that probably had something to do with it. That and weather/water. And yeah, if you effectively put billion dollar taxes on centibillionaires, they may move to avoid that. That’s a good reason not to levy state capital gains taxes, though more because it’s not gonna collect much revenue than anything else.
But Bezos went to Florida for the same reason rich old people have always retired to Florida. But it hasn’t made Florida a place that high value added businesses actually go because… it lacks good schools and universities and culture and all the things talented employees actually want for their families. It’s become a successful hub for crypto, but that’s to be expected because Florida’s always been a magnet for crime.
"It had approximately nothing to do with lack of state income tax."
While neither you nor I know why Gates and Allen moved from New Mexico to Seattle, you did not respond to the fact that as early as employee #70, Microsoft was touting the absence of a WA state income tax in employee recruiting.
"if you effectively put billion dollar taxes on centibillionaires, they may move to avoid that."
So you admit that Capital Gains taxes DO affect individuals' decisions. You fail to explain to me why that is true, but that income taxes DON'T affect individuals decisions.
And just for clarification, Washington taxes capital gains over $1 million per year. Not just "centibillionaires".
Memorable quote: “Trump is strongly opposed to crimes committed by ordinary people, but views heads of state quite differently.” Once written, it becomes so obvious! Trump also views billionaires, sycophants, and henchmen quite differently.
Advocacy is often counterproductive because being effective would put the advocacy organization out of business, which they don’t want to do. They need the problem to keep growing in order to expand the urgency and scope of their advocacy
On point # 2, Trump pardoned ex IL Gov Rod Blagojevic earlier this year. Guy was a shady politician and Democrat. But Trump says he was “set up” by bad people. So yeah, seems like he’s only sympathetic to other heads of state/ political leaders.
I mean, once again, you say bizarre things that have no basis in reality.
99% of conservatives don't want subsidies for electric cars, or mandates that force people to buy them. They want you to compete in the marketplace, fair and square, like everyone else.
I own three Teslas. But that is a personal preference. Unlike most "liberals" who are not really "liberal", I would never impose my preferences on someone else. And therein lies the difference between the two parties on this issue.
LOL, I never once even mentioned electric cars. But if I had, you'd still be wrong. Electric cars are far more popular among liberals than conservatives.
I agree with most points, but this one is not obvious to me: "It should be easy to run large budget surpluses with US levels of federal spending (roughly 23% of GDP.)" I'm German, but was a graduate student in the US. To achieve balance or a surplus at the given level of spending, obviously taxes would have to be higher. I've never known any people as rabidly anti-tax as many Americans I encountered. I don't see how it "should be easy" to raise taxes.
I agree. I meant easy in a technically sense. In contrast, a country like France would have great difficulty raising more revenue even if they tried.
You are correct that Americans hate taxes, but they also hate inflation and they also hate big cuts to Social Security and Medicare. And those are basically the only three choices they have, unless an AI miracle saves us.
I love this post. I live in Scotland surrounded by the delusions of "good" nationalism so that point resonated especially strongly.
I feel it is important to draw distinction between systemic analysis and systems thinking. Scott Sumner has brilliantly explained 10 examples of the former based on the evidence of what goes on in the real world. Systems thinking in my experience sounds very impressive but in practice it is an attempt to force the facts to fit into the system thinkers preconceived notion of the how the world should work.
I don't think the story is as simple as you say RE: Utah.
I pulled the American Community Survey "Household Size by Number of Workers in Household" for Utah and New York, and there's big differences in number of workers.
New York is 27% no-worker households, 27% 1-worker households, 37% 2-worker households, and 8% 3 or more worker households.
Utah is just 18% 0-worker households, 34% 1-worker, 33% 2-worker, and 13% 3 or more.
Possible that household composition is explaining some or most of the difference there?
Yes, that's a valid point. In per capita terms I'd guess that they are about equal. But even in that case there's no reason for New Yorkers to look down on Utah residents.
Also, consider cost of living differences and real incomes.
The BBC, The guardian, CNBC, none of them are actually there.
All of your news comes from Zelensky's puppets. And Ukraine is obviously in propaganda mode, just like every country who is at war since the very beginning of time.
You seem to be suffering, like many babyboomers, from Russiaphobia.
In your mind, they are always evil, always guilty. Just declare something terrible happened, and blame it on Russia.
You cannot even name one war crime putin committed that is not currently disputed by a number of countries who have conducted their own investigations.
Why do you pretend like you know what the truth is? Propaganda and war are like peanutbutter and bread. Ukraine is desperate for help. They will do anything, stage anything, lie about anything, just to get the West into the war. Zelensky is also terribly corrupt. how could you possibly trust anything that comes from his mouth, unless you have some anti-russian prejudice.
"You cannot even name one war crime putin committed"
Invading an internationally recognized independent sovereign country with the intent to annex territory is clearly a war crime. Even Russia accepted Ukraine's sovereignty at one time. Every single death in the war is his responsibility.
There are differences (the sovereignty of Ukraine was far more universally recognized than the sovereignty of Tibet or Goa), but I'm not defending the two latter actions. The more important reason why Ukraine is attracting international assistance is that its military has been fairly effective in holding off Russia, and this conflict is considered far more likely to lead to an even bigger European war, whereas the other examples you cited were not viewed as likely to lead to a broader war. It is very important to deter Russian aggression.
Great post overall Scott and one of your betters one in recent times but I have to push back on this comment. International law isn't law and you know it, it's a polite diplomatic fiction. The thing about sovereignty is you are bound by no one hence why you are sovereign; Russia can't break laws anymore than the Pope can, rex lex and all. Also good old public choice theory, Russia's trust agent is Putin and Putin is a person hence to tie that all together, what Russian Federation statute did Putin break? You can't blame Putin here for faithfully executing his office as Russia has an impeachment process and guess what, he hasn't been impeached hence it's fair to say "Russia" is fine with with his actions.
Now one could argue Putin violated Ukrainian law and that's OK, they are free to request Russia deport him (I'm guessing they will say no, qualified immunity and all that) or put a request in with Interpol though I'd suggest Ukraine might have a hard time finding a Ukrainian statute Putin violated as well that also has jurisdiction, i.e. I highly doubt Ukraine passed a law that says "For purposes of this law, it has intergalactic jurisdiction. It shall be a Class A felony, punishable with a fine no more than ₴5.000, three years probation, or up to life in prison (Ukraine abolished the death penalty) for any individual employed by a foreign government to intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly violate, order a violation, or cause to be violated, Ukrainian territory. "
And if you want to argue the rest of the word is free to invade and dispose of him, that's perfectly OK but to Gian's point, that's simply vae victis.
I'm not defending Putin here, I'm just tired of the ever growing pervasive legalism embedding itself into the American psyche each year in that everything is a "law" and that is the yardstick to measure morality, ethics, etc. It's not. Putin didn't break any law here, not did Russia. He simply decided, on behalf of Russia, to use his sovereignty and his neighbors can either defender their own or relinquish it because that's how nations work, the UN isn't the US Federal government with supremacy over it's states (nations).
It reminded me of something that had been making the social media rounds recently along the lines "Pope Leo declare Trump's sinking of drug ships illegal" and I was like "I do hope the State of the Vatican City's public relations press officer follows up on that soon and let's us know exactly which Vatican statute Trump broke because I'm curious; or is it simply illegal because the Pope, as an absolute monarchy, simply said so". I'm still waiting on that statute reference.
In relation to Switzerland, that referendum affected far less than 1%. It isn't _that_ rich!
But it was not so much a vote for good economics as it was a conservative vote. The Swiss voting public is broadly conservative and this referendum, in addition to being blatantly ideological, had the particular weakness of creating a new federal tax, whereas all but one of the 26 Cantons has an inheritance tax already.
Happily for the Swiss, a conservative voting public makes for broadly better outcomes than the alternatives (see also Australia).
Unfortunately it appears not so hard to bribe voters into accepting handouts and then they never look back (see nearly everywhere, but especially Australia more recently).
Hopefully for the Swiss their referendum system at least slows the rate of decline more than elsewhere.
Good points. In my view the Swiss model depends as much on decentralization as on democracy. Populism is less attractive if people can move from poorly run cantons to more sensibly run cantons. It's a sort of healthy competition. In America, this explains why suburban school districts are more cost effective than big city school districts.
Also, it is, _very_ decentralised, with a lot of voting even at the commune level, especially in German showing Switzerland. In my view this "trains" voters.
Well the litmus test here is to explain what went wrong in Australia?
Betrayal by the media who started just not telling the truth (not quite lying but omitting a lot of relevant info)?
Or did the people just find that in fact they were quite willing to be bought out by someone who was willing to lie/be wilfully blind about the numbers?
Or cultural change (I'm a bit sceptical in the Australian case, we mainly imported east asians)?
Switzerland has a history of conservatism and relatively good economics.
I ain’t an expert on Australia, but I would have said at best it was just kinda ok on both. Even if I’m wrong on “conservatism”, and that change away only happened relatively recently, I don’t think I’m wrong re: economics.
Yes, I'm sorry, that was a confusing bait and switch. Context: I'm quite familiar with both and think that they have more in common than is commonly thought.
I don't think either country had any particularly good economic policies besides, and these are fairly important ones, 1) going early on free domestic trade, 2) generally good institutions, and 3) never going socialist.
In the 80s, Australia reformed significantly and therefore was well placed to ride the economic wave, as was Switzerland with its highly competitive and specialised industries and army-reinforced culture, even as many of their neighbours started to stagnate.
In the 90s and 00s, many sophisticated commentators bemoaned the respective electorates' conservative and backwards attitudes: Switzerland refusing EU membership, rejecting minarets, resisting gay marriage, etc, Australia paying down (federal) debt to below 30% of gdp and relying on public-private partnerships for infrastructure instead of "investing", and consistently endorsing coal power and anti-refugee rhetoric. All the while both countries oversaw largely prudent pension reforms and continued growth, as well as to admit very high numbers of both economic immigrants and refugees. Come COVID, both countries were well placed to manage the cost, and did so.
But, here the comparison slips. For some years prior to COVID Australia had been in political chaos and post COVID the dam really broke, and Australia is now faced with spiralling social expenditures and debt, and no-one appears to have any coherent plan to right the boat.
That, in a very long winded way, is what I was getting at.
I was reading a little about Switzerland because it seemed like such a utopia. I made an effort to search for information on downsides. People say it can be a boring country to live in because everyone is so conservative. There isn't much adventure or excitement.
I am never sure what excitement refers to here. If you like running, hiking, biking of any kind, skiing of any kind, it is amazing.
There is a lot of exciting and challenging your work opportunities too.
I assume people are talking about there being a much more limited cultural opportunities compared to bigger cities and a very expensive and relatively staid culinary scene. That's very true!
Some people would miss the bustle and creative energy of some big cities, even though I think there is quite a bit of that in Zurich at least.
Also, one is very unlikely to get mugged or attacked at all, which is boring from some perspectives.
on advocacy. That should be easy to solve. Advocacy very often is the proposition that the allocation of resources produced by free flowing market forces (incl. the market of ideas) has it wrong. There may be exceptions (advocacy for deregulation) but the pattern is common. So no wonder that advocacy makes the resulting equilibrium worse - it is a market distortion.
Good point. So the original environmental movement may have been good (pollution control on cars, etc.) because of market failure. Once those were corrected, they went too far.
I’m a fan of the Chinese Doom Scroll Substack where the author translates a selection of posts from Weibo. Great set on nannies today. But also this on the Hong Kong fire:
“Heard a Hong Kong architect talk about the skyscraper fire recently and he mentioned a shocking bit of logic.
Why were these skyscrapers getting their outer wall renovated at the same time? Why do all 8 buildings need scaffolds builded? Why have the scaffolds been there for over a year?
The reason is actually because no Hong Kong construction company has that many workers to work on all those buildings at once. You need thousands of people working at the same time for that, and once the work is done, those workers will have nothing to do and nowhere to go. So normally, you would build scaffolds on the buildings one by one and work on them one by one.
But in that case, it’ll be really hard for the construction company to get the money from the homeowners up front all at once, and it’ll be a slow process getting the rest of the funds, and there’s no guarantee you’ll get all of it. The construction company wrapped all the buildings up so they can get the downpayment all at the same time, but they can still only work on one building at a time. This way, the scaffolds stay on the buildings for a very long time. Over a year, in this case.
It’s because these buildings stayed wrapped up for so long that the bamboo dried out. Once a fire broke out, the risks is really high that it’ll spread to other buildings. Normally, the gap between the buildings was enough to prevent fires, but the extra width of the bamboo scaffolds made the gap smaller, causing this multi-building fire. So the biggest reason for this accident is bad construction order policy. They shouldn’t have wrapped all the buildings up for so long, just so they can get more of the downpayment.
I don’t know whether or not this Hong Kong architect was right, but if it’s true, then this is a very important lesson to learn. There should be laws made that if skyscrapers are getting worked on at the same time, the safe distance between them needs to be recalculated to avoid multiple construction projects going on in high density areas to prevent a similar situation.”
Comments say, “I don’t know if it’s possible to make a law that skyscrapers are not allowed to be taller than how high the escape ladders can reach or how high the fire hydrants can pump.”
“The last building to get renovated is so sad. It has to be all wrapped up for several years.”
“Hong Kong people are so polite. If it was me, due to my health reasons, I wouldn’t be able to put up with it for more than a month before I got frustrated.
Thanks for that info.
My reading of analyses from local media suggests that the netting was the problem, not so much the bamboo scaffolding.
Presumably the idea is that the scaffolding narrows the gap so allowing the netting to ignite the dried out bamboo. But like you what I have heard elsewhere concentrates on the netting.
"Hong Kong has one of the most laissez-faire economic systems in the world. For instance, their outstanding (and profitable) subway system is privately owned."
Which was also true, at one time, of NYC's subway. The one August Belmont (property developer and race horse breeding financier) built in 1904. But when he wanted to build a second line the politicians, greedy to share in the revenues, refused to let him do it without cutting them in on the deal. That was the seed of New York City's destruction of the subways (where it is today).
Good point. NYC was built under a far more laissez-faire regime. Today, it would be illegal to recreate NYC.
>Perhaps every advocacy movement starts out with one or two good ideas. But once they become established, they just keep going. They move right past the point of optimal advocacy, to a position where their efforts are counterproductive.
I suspect this is it. Sort of rhymes with the winner's curse is an auction theory in that if you frame yourself as an advocate for something, almost by definition you need to be one of the people pushing it furthest or bidding the most on it. Unless society starts very far in the wrong direction, almost by definition, you'll overbid. So probably best not to identify too strongly with either side of any dichotomy if you want any chance of finding the optimal balance.
Advocates are like lawyers. They aren't there to explore nuance and arrive at the best answer or policy in a good faith dialog with all sides. They're there to be a fierce, biased, uncompromising champion for the cause they represent. They have every incentive to upsell information that purports to support their view and ignore (or even hide) information that counters it.
Not to say that this is *inherently* bad, as the general idea behind lawyers is that hopefully, with lawyers on both sides of a case, each doing their absolute best to vigorously argue for their side, that their combined efforts make for a more energetic search for the truth than would otherwise be the case with unbiased investigators carefully considering and weighing all of the evidence.
Whether or not that's true I think largely depends on how the match is officiated, so to speak. The judge has to keep both sides in line, rules of evidence and discovery have to be respected (e.g. no "hiding" things as mentioned above), objections to arguments have to be properly considered and adjudicated on-the-fly, etc.
As for policy advocates, the question is whether government officials have the integrity and the competence to weigh the input from both sides (normally by relying on policy advisors and subject matter experts), or whether they're just responding to the raw politics of things (i.e. "this group supported me so I must therefore fulfill my promises to them"). If the former, the advocates themselves can play a vital role even if they aren't individually all that consistent, or the people you'd want being the actual decision makers.
But by the same token, this also implies that those of us who aren't advocates and are, at least in principle, unbiased seekers of the truth need to be wary of the fact that information which comes from an advocate is inherently biased. Too often I see people make arguments about a topic and then be content to cite some statistics put out by the Center for the Promotion of X, as if they're the chief academic experts on the topic of X, rather than a group dedicated to a specific position with regard to X (which, in fairness, is an impression many advocacy groups are happy to give with deceptive names like "Center For Immigration Studies").
I'd agree with you on your advocacy point and maybe even on lawyers in civil law but you completely missed the mark on criminal law. The criminal law system isn't adversarial nor a neutral arbitrator hence both in theory the judge and the prosecutor drive to "win" plays second fiddle to their ethnical duty to the public to be just, honest, and that they get the right guy even at the expense of helping the defense; that concept is lost on the modern American bar and we could go a long way to fixing that if we made the prosecution actually prove their case and prove in a factual evidentiary sort way, not with legal fiction, short cut presumptions, coercion, insinuation, and subjective "facts'.
A great example here is the "presumption of mailing" in that a "properly addressed and stamped letter that was mailed is presumed to have been received"; no the prosecution should HAVE to prove the letter was actually mailed, actually delivered, actually read, and actually understood because way to many people languish in prison over never having received a letter and it's undefendable because of that presumption. As an example, the rest need to go to, at least in the context of the "offense/prosecution" because the default case is "innocence". And to tie that back to advocacy point a little, no SME's and "advocacy" groups should not get "presumption of expertise/truth", i.e. "no expect testimony by doctors" based on "AMA positions" or any of the ilk like that from ABA, AAP, etc. Time and time again you see industry trade and advocacy group reports get quoted as God's truth (and accepted so) by judges as fact as opposed to non-amissible third party opinion. That is especially rife in the psychological, sociological, and criminology "expert" realms, i.e. "doctor X says Y" ... the response should be "so what, he can prove what he says is true, not presumed so".
I don’t think revealed preference is at all a useful metric for policies with a ton of conflating variables. Like net migration from California to Texas probably has a lot less to do with how each collects taxes than with housing policy. For both environmental and policy reasons, Texas is a much more affordable place particularly with respect to housing than California. I strongly suspect that people are moving to Texas not because they really hate income taxes, but because they can’t afford to live in a place where, even if they make a combined $200,000 a year, they’ll have trouble affording more than a 1000 SF apartment (and forget it for a family of four trying to get by on, say, two teacher salaries).
Why not both? Yes, housing costs are the primary reason people leave NY and California, but taxes are still a huge factor in interstate migration, as any decent cross sectional study would show. None of the many states that border Texas have high population growth, and all have a state income tax. Look at side by side comparisons between states with and without income taxes.
Texas is an enormous state. You’re not exactly choosing between Austin or New Mexico. It’s also got a couple of uniquely booming sectors, though the Austin tech migration appears to be a nothingburger. But those state level characteristics matter a whole lot. Washington had a big population boom for 15 years. The influx there over Oregon had, by my estimation, approximately nothing to do with the lack of state income tax and everything to do with Amazon going on a massive growth spree (with accompanying positive externalities). Oregon had nothing of the sort. But then, if nothing else, during Covid there was a pretty large jump in migration from Seattle to places like Bend, Oregon that had natural beauty, a growing art and cultural scene, and much cheaper housing.
There’s also the fact that Texas actually has higher middle and lower class tax burdens than California. Texas just doesn’t tax rich people.
I strongly suspect people (other than a few mega wealthy people) don’t think at all about how states collect revenue when they decide where to live— they think about how easy it is to get a good job, how nice of a place it is to live, how much they can afford on their pay (primarily, housing), infrastructure (schools, roads, etc.), probably roughly in that order.
I strongly disagree with many of those points. Taxes are one reason why companies choose low tax states, so you can't site successful companies as a counterargument. I don't believe Texas taxes middle class people more highly than does California. New Orleans and Houston were once rivals for big oil headquarters, and then New Orleans completely lost out to Texas. Why aren't oil centers like Tulsa booming?
Oregon is bigger than Washington, and has a better climate. It also has a big metro area. It should be doing better than Washington. I've met people who moved to Nashville because of no state income tax. And what's so special about South Dakota?
In any case, there are far too many examples of states with no state income tax to just brush off this factor.
I'd encourage you to look at some of my Econlog posts on this topic.
I think the company location point strongly supports my claim. There was a mini boomlet in Austin when a few tech libertarians made a big show of moving from the Bay to Austin. That not so inconspicuously died. Turned out agglomeration effects in the Bay were super powerful. Similarly, finance continues to sit overwhelmingly in New York, which is also a high tax state.
Texas is a powerhouse in sectors like oil and gas, as well as solar and wind. That has a lot to do with its environment and resources. Its effort to become a tech hub has been, as I noted, a bust.
The Oregon-Washington comparison, too, is quite instructive. Washington was a backwater until the 80s. Its growth relative to Oregon has nothing to do with taxes and approximately everything to do with Microsoft almost single-handedly building a tech infrastructure more or less from scratch. And that in turn had everything to do with Bill Gates and Paul Allen wanting to go home.
I think if we’re talking about reasoning by anecdote, well, the counter argument is that the wealthiest states overwhelmingly have income taxes. California, New York, Massachusetts… all have income taxes. Washington is the exception there.
And housing prices continue to be by far the most compelling explanation for any migration. California has long had high income taxes. Yet housing costs have really skyrocketed in the last 20 or so years. It really strains credibility that people all of a sudden decided they hated state income taxes and decided to bail. Just imagine the counterfactual. If California cut income taxes to zero, while housing costs kept rising (or, realistically, rose way more, as they replaced state income taxes with property taxes that both taxed property directly and put more income in people’s pockets to chase scarce real state), the idea that people would stay doesn’t pass the laugh test.
And tax burdens are in fact higher on lower and middle income people in Texas. https://itep.org/is-california-really-a-high-tax-state/#:~:text=For%20families%20across%20the%20bottom,those%20paid%20by%20other%20families.
Austin is still booming. I think we are talking past each other. There's no doubt that places like Massachusetts and California have a lot of the most innovative tech companies and lots of well paying jobs. My point related to population. People are clearly moving to states with no income tax; it's not even in doubt in my view.
I have many posts explaining why those "quintile studies" are meaningless. I've been in all five quintiles at various stages of my life, but that fact has no bearing on anything. When we think of average "families" they are mostly in the top three quintiles. The bottom two are heavily weighted toward young people in college, retired people, the unemployed, etc., etc.
Another way of putting it is that 73% of Americans spend at least part of their life in the top 20%, so they naturally care a lot about tax rates for the top 20%. Not many ambitious people think "I'll settle in California, because when I'm middle aged I'll earn too little to pay any income tax". Migration is overwhelming determined by tax rates for the top half of the distribution.
Your info on Austin is out of date, I think. It’s well documented that companies are fleeing just as quickly as they came in. Article linked at the bottom.
And while the headline point might look directionally right, it’s also pretty clear that you’re ignoring confounding variables and declaring that the tail is wagging the dog. Yes, there’s big net migration out of New York and California. But peek under the hood. The migration out of California is driven by the middle and bottom of the income distribution. And Texas taxes people in the middle and bottom more than California does. So those people are very evidently not fleeing high income taxes. What they are fleeing is high housing costs. And high housing costs tend to correlate to… high income taxes. Now, the most telling part of the analysis is what happens when you look at states where that correlation breaks. The archetype is Washington, which has a tech hub with high housing costs but no income tax. And net migration there is… negative. So I think it’s quite obvious that housing costs are the dog, and tax obsessives’ fixation on tax rates as a cause just falls apart pretty quickly.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/austin-texas-tech-bust-oracle-tesla/#:~:text=Venture%20capitalists%20invested%20$6.75%20billion%20in%20Austin,in%202023%20they%20invested%20only%20$3.8%20billion.
"Washington was a backwater until the 80s. Its growth relative to Oregon has nothing to do with taxes and approximately everything to do with Microsoft ...."
That's just wrong factually. Washington has always been more economically advanced than Oregon. Boeing, shipyards, trade with Japan and other Asian countries. Seattle even has NFL and MLB teams that Portland lacks.
Not significantly. The “will the last person leaving Seattle turn off the lights” billboard wasn’t just someone being funny. In 1980, when Microsoft moved to Washington, Oregon’s GDP per capita was about 90% of Washington’s. In 2023 (the last year the particular data set I found runs), Oregon’s GDP per capita was about 73% of Washington’s. And even that change wasn’t linear. In 1996, Oregon’s GDP per capita reached 96% of Washington’s.
>"The influx there over Oregon had, by my estimation, approximately nothing to do with the lack of state income tax and everything to do with Amazon going on a massive growth spree (with accompanying positive externalities)."
Arguably Amazon growing in Washington in the first place was nontrivially due to the lack of State income tax…
Amazon growing in Washington was kind of an accident. Bezos decided to plant Amazon there in the 90s. Similarly, Seattle being anything but a backwater is entirely an accident. It was a logging town with an aircraft sector that was dying in the 70s. It was revived as a tech hub pretty much entirely because Bill Gates and Paul Allen happened to be from Seattle and decided to move their small software business from Albuquerque back to their hometown. That business blew up and spun out an entire tech ecosystem. Enrico Moretti describes it in his terrific book “The New Geography of Jobs.”
Would Gates' homesickness been sufficient for the move if Washington taxed income? Even if so, would Microsoft have blown up as much as it did? Would that have been sufficient for Bezos to choose over Silicon Valley? Even if it was, would Amazon have grown as it did?
Even if the absence of a State income tax is a negligible *proximate* cause, it's implausible that it was immaterial.
Ummmmm yes. There’s absolutely no reason to assign magic powers to taxes. The rest of the tech ecosystem arose in California, where income taxes were very high. Even more so when your counterfactual is “if Washington had income taxes, Amazon would have had to go to… California, where taxes were the highest.”
Given that fact, the idea that taxes played some major role (or even minor role) in the growth of Silicon Valley just makes no sense. The only way to get there is to assume your conclusion.
"approximately nothing to do with the lack of state income tax and everything to do with Amazon going on a massive growth spree"
Have you ever wondered why Amazon was founded in Seattle? Bezos was quoted as saying it's because of the location central to book distributors. Seattle is central?
Likewise, Microsoft moved early on from New Mexico (which was at the time the center of the personal computer universe) to Washington. Gates and Allen were making good money even then (with outstanding growth prospects), and Gates especially was very money focused. Furthermore, as early as employee #70 (Jerry Dunietz), Microsoft was touting the benefits of no state income tax in employee recruiting.
It would be impolitic for Gates and Bezos to just say outright, "We moved here because there's no income tax." But maybe society would be better off if they did.
P.S. Have you ever wondered why Bezos moved his primary residence from Washington to Florida? Could it be related to the creation of a Capital Gains Tax in Washington State?
There were two major tech hubs in America. The Bay was one. Seattle was the other. Washington had a favorable online sales tax environment at the time. If Amazon had been, say, a search engine or a social network, odds are they would’ve started out in the Bay. That has, again, absolutely nothing to do with personal tax rates.
Gates and Allen moved Microsoft to Seattle, again, for one reason and one reason only— they grew up there and met at the Lakeside School. It had approximately nothing to do with lack of state income tax. It was both necessary and sufficient to their decision. You’re making up a motivation that doesn’t exist because… you desperately want your conclusion to be true. But it isn’t.
Now, as for Bezos moving to Miami to escape taxes. Sure, that probably had something to do with it. That and weather/water. And yeah, if you effectively put billion dollar taxes on centibillionaires, they may move to avoid that. That’s a good reason not to levy state capital gains taxes, though more because it’s not gonna collect much revenue than anything else.
But Bezos went to Florida for the same reason rich old people have always retired to Florida. But it hasn’t made Florida a place that high value added businesses actually go because… it lacks good schools and universities and culture and all the things talented employees actually want for their families. It’s become a successful hub for crypto, but that’s to be expected because Florida’s always been a magnet for crime.
"It had approximately nothing to do with lack of state income tax."
While neither you nor I know why Gates and Allen moved from New Mexico to Seattle, you did not respond to the fact that as early as employee #70, Microsoft was touting the absence of a WA state income tax in employee recruiting.
"if you effectively put billion dollar taxes on centibillionaires, they may move to avoid that."
So you admit that Capital Gains taxes DO affect individuals' decisions. You fail to explain to me why that is true, but that income taxes DON'T affect individuals decisions.
And just for clarification, Washington taxes capital gains over $1 million per year. Not just "centibillionaires".
Doesn't Texas derive a lot of money from the oil industry? I think that has gone to funding state universities.
New Mexico, Oklahoma and Louisiana also have lots of oil, and their economies range from average to bad.
Memorable quote: “Trump is strongly opposed to crimes committed by ordinary people, but views heads of state quite differently.” Once written, it becomes so obvious! Trump also views billionaires, sycophants, and henchmen quite differently.
Advocacy is often counterproductive because being effective would put the advocacy organization out of business, which they don’t want to do. They need the problem to keep growing in order to expand the urgency and scope of their advocacy
Good point.
On point # 2, Trump pardoned ex IL Gov Rod Blagojevic earlier this year. Guy was a shady politician and Democrat. But Trump says he was “set up” by bad people. So yeah, seems like he’s only sympathetic to other heads of state/ political leaders.
Good point. Didn't he suck up to Trump?
I think so…he was on The Apprentice I’m pretty sure.
Conservatives have no problem with electric cars.
I mean, once again, you say bizarre things that have no basis in reality.
99% of conservatives don't want subsidies for electric cars, or mandates that force people to buy them. They want you to compete in the marketplace, fair and square, like everyone else.
I own three Teslas. But that is a personal preference. Unlike most "liberals" who are not really "liberal", I would never impose my preferences on someone else. And therein lies the difference between the two parties on this issue.
"you say bizarre things"
LOL, I never once even mentioned electric cars. But if I had, you'd still be wrong. Electric cars are far more popular among liberals than conservatives.
I agree with most points, but this one is not obvious to me: "It should be easy to run large budget surpluses with US levels of federal spending (roughly 23% of GDP.)" I'm German, but was a graduate student in the US. To achieve balance or a surplus at the given level of spending, obviously taxes would have to be higher. I've never known any people as rabidly anti-tax as many Americans I encountered. I don't see how it "should be easy" to raise taxes.
I agree. I meant easy in a technically sense. In contrast, a country like France would have great difficulty raising more revenue even if they tried.
You are correct that Americans hate taxes, but they also hate inflation and they also hate big cuts to Social Security and Medicare. And those are basically the only three choices they have, unless an AI miracle saves us.
I love this post. I live in Scotland surrounded by the delusions of "good" nationalism so that point resonated especially strongly.
I feel it is important to draw distinction between systemic analysis and systems thinking. Scott Sumner has brilliantly explained 10 examples of the former based on the evidence of what goes on in the real world. Systems thinking in my experience sounds very impressive but in practice it is an attempt to force the facts to fit into the system thinkers preconceived notion of the how the world should work.
I don't think the story is as simple as you say RE: Utah.
I pulled the American Community Survey "Household Size by Number of Workers in Household" for Utah and New York, and there's big differences in number of workers.
New York is 27% no-worker households, 27% 1-worker households, 37% 2-worker households, and 8% 3 or more worker households.
Utah is just 18% 0-worker households, 34% 1-worker, 33% 2-worker, and 13% 3 or more.
Possible that household composition is explaining some or most of the difference there?
Yes, that's a valid point. In per capita terms I'd guess that they are about equal. But even in that case there's no reason for New Yorkers to look down on Utah residents.
Also, consider cost of living differences and real incomes.
You are not in ukraine.
CNN is not in Ukraine (not on the front lines)
Fox is not in Ukraine (not on the front lines)
The BBC, The guardian, CNBC, none of them are actually there.
All of your news comes from Zelensky's puppets. And Ukraine is obviously in propaganda mode, just like every country who is at war since the very beginning of time.
You seem to be suffering, like many babyboomers, from Russiaphobia.
In your mind, they are always evil, always guilty. Just declare something terrible happened, and blame it on Russia.
You cannot even name one war crime putin committed that is not currently disputed by a number of countries who have conducted their own investigations.
Why do you pretend like you know what the truth is? Propaganda and war are like peanutbutter and bread. Ukraine is desperate for help. They will do anything, stage anything, lie about anything, just to get the West into the war. Zelensky is also terribly corrupt. how could you possibly trust anything that comes from his mouth, unless you have some anti-russian prejudice.
"You cannot even name one war crime putin committed"
Invading an internationally recognized independent sovereign country with the intent to annex territory is clearly a war crime. Even Russia accepted Ukraine's sovereignty at one time. Every single death in the war is his responsibility.
Is it logical to criminalize the war-making itself?
War crime should properly be the crimes committed in course of war.
You may not like it (I do), but there are laws against international aggression. These laws were applied after WWII.
Well, these "laws" are purely victors' justice. I didn't see them applied to Chinese aggression on Tibet and India's on Goa for that matter.
There are differences (the sovereignty of Ukraine was far more universally recognized than the sovereignty of Tibet or Goa), but I'm not defending the two latter actions. The more important reason why Ukraine is attracting international assistance is that its military has been fairly effective in holding off Russia, and this conflict is considered far more likely to lead to an even bigger European war, whereas the other examples you cited were not viewed as likely to lead to a broader war. It is very important to deter Russian aggression.
Great post overall Scott and one of your betters one in recent times but I have to push back on this comment. International law isn't law and you know it, it's a polite diplomatic fiction. The thing about sovereignty is you are bound by no one hence why you are sovereign; Russia can't break laws anymore than the Pope can, rex lex and all. Also good old public choice theory, Russia's trust agent is Putin and Putin is a person hence to tie that all together, what Russian Federation statute did Putin break? You can't blame Putin here for faithfully executing his office as Russia has an impeachment process and guess what, he hasn't been impeached hence it's fair to say "Russia" is fine with with his actions.
Now one could argue Putin violated Ukrainian law and that's OK, they are free to request Russia deport him (I'm guessing they will say no, qualified immunity and all that) or put a request in with Interpol though I'd suggest Ukraine might have a hard time finding a Ukrainian statute Putin violated as well that also has jurisdiction, i.e. I highly doubt Ukraine passed a law that says "For purposes of this law, it has intergalactic jurisdiction. It shall be a Class A felony, punishable with a fine no more than ₴5.000, three years probation, or up to life in prison (Ukraine abolished the death penalty) for any individual employed by a foreign government to intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly violate, order a violation, or cause to be violated, Ukrainian territory. "
And if you want to argue the rest of the word is free to invade and dispose of him, that's perfectly OK but to Gian's point, that's simply vae victis.
I'm not defending Putin here, I'm just tired of the ever growing pervasive legalism embedding itself into the American psyche each year in that everything is a "law" and that is the yardstick to measure morality, ethics, etc. It's not. Putin didn't break any law here, not did Russia. He simply decided, on behalf of Russia, to use his sovereignty and his neighbors can either defender their own or relinquish it because that's how nations work, the UN isn't the US Federal government with supremacy over it's states (nations).
It reminded me of something that had been making the social media rounds recently along the lines "Pope Leo declare Trump's sinking of drug ships illegal" and I was like "I do hope the State of the Vatican City's public relations press officer follows up on that soon and let's us know exactly which Vatican statute Trump broke because I'm curious; or is it simply illegal because the Pope, as an absolute monarchy, simply said so". I'm still waiting on that statute reference.
indeed, it is the supreme international crime
In relation to Switzerland, that referendum affected far less than 1%. It isn't _that_ rich!
But it was not so much a vote for good economics as it was a conservative vote. The Swiss voting public is broadly conservative and this referendum, in addition to being blatantly ideological, had the particular weakness of creating a new federal tax, whereas all but one of the 26 Cantons has an inheritance tax already.
Happily for the Swiss, a conservative voting public makes for broadly better outcomes than the alternatives (see also Australia).
Unfortunately it appears not so hard to bribe voters into accepting handouts and then they never look back (see nearly everywhere, but especially Australia more recently).
Hopefully for the Swiss their referendum system at least slows the rate of decline more than elsewhere.
Good points. In my view the Swiss model depends as much on decentralization as on democracy. Populism is less attractive if people can move from poorly run cantons to more sensibly run cantons. It's a sort of healthy competition. In America, this explains why suburban school districts are more cost effective than big city school districts.
This is very true.
Also, it is, _very_ decentralised, with a lot of voting even at the commune level, especially in German showing Switzerland. In my view this "trains" voters.
“But it was not so much a vote for good economics as it was a conservative vote.”
In a place with good governance, there is high correlation between / overlap between the two.
And such correlation is NOT merely a coincidence.
I agree, but the causation is imo only about 30-60%.
Perhaps, but my claim is that the mutually reinforcing causations get you to 80%+
Well the litmus test here is to explain what went wrong in Australia?
Betrayal by the media who started just not telling the truth (not quite lying but omitting a lot of relevant info)?
Or did the people just find that in fact they were quite willing to be bought out by someone who was willing to lie/be wilfully blind about the numbers?
Or cultural change (I'm a bit sceptical in the Australian case, we mainly imported east asians)?
Or some other factor? Which?
I’m confused.
Switzerland has a history of conservatism and relatively good economics.
I ain’t an expert on Australia, but I would have said at best it was just kinda ok on both. Even if I’m wrong on “conservatism”, and that change away only happened relatively recently, I don’t think I’m wrong re: economics.
Yes, I'm sorry, that was a confusing bait and switch. Context: I'm quite familiar with both and think that they have more in common than is commonly thought.
I don't think either country had any particularly good economic policies besides, and these are fairly important ones, 1) going early on free domestic trade, 2) generally good institutions, and 3) never going socialist.
In the 80s, Australia reformed significantly and therefore was well placed to ride the economic wave, as was Switzerland with its highly competitive and specialised industries and army-reinforced culture, even as many of their neighbours started to stagnate.
In the 90s and 00s, many sophisticated commentators bemoaned the respective electorates' conservative and backwards attitudes: Switzerland refusing EU membership, rejecting minarets, resisting gay marriage, etc, Australia paying down (federal) debt to below 30% of gdp and relying on public-private partnerships for infrastructure instead of "investing", and consistently endorsing coal power and anti-refugee rhetoric. All the while both countries oversaw largely prudent pension reforms and continued growth, as well as to admit very high numbers of both economic immigrants and refugees. Come COVID, both countries were well placed to manage the cost, and did so.
But, here the comparison slips. For some years prior to COVID Australia had been in political chaos and post COVID the dam really broke, and Australia is now faced with spiralling social expenditures and debt, and no-one appears to have any coherent plan to right the boat.
That, in a very long winded way, is what I was getting at.
I was reading a little about Switzerland because it seemed like such a utopia. I made an effort to search for information on downsides. People say it can be a boring country to live in because everyone is so conservative. There isn't much adventure or excitement.
Yes, Haiti is much less boring.
I am never sure what excitement refers to here. If you like running, hiking, biking of any kind, skiing of any kind, it is amazing.
There is a lot of exciting and challenging your work opportunities too.
I assume people are talking about there being a much more limited cultural opportunities compared to bigger cities and a very expensive and relatively staid culinary scene. That's very true!
Some people would miss the bustle and creative energy of some big cities, even though I think there is quite a bit of that in Zurich at least.
Also, one is very unlikely to get mugged or attacked at all, which is boring from some perspectives.
On reasons for why many advocacy groups are awful, there is this classic from Scott Alexander: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
Great post.
Scott,
on advocacy. That should be easy to solve. Advocacy very often is the proposition that the allocation of resources produced by free flowing market forces (incl. the market of ideas) has it wrong. There may be exceptions (advocacy for deregulation) but the pattern is common. So no wonder that advocacy makes the resulting equilibrium worse - it is a market distortion.
Good point. So the original environmental movement may have been good (pollution control on cars, etc.) because of market failure. Once those were corrected, they went too far.
MBS didn't really kill an "American reporter", it was a Qatari Gray Zone asset.
"MBS didn't really kill an "American reporter""
Yes he did. Please don't believe everything you read---the world is full of misinformation.