doukdouk

Fair point.

If your point is that "monopoly" has a different meaning in a colloquial/political context and in a legal context, that it relies on non-obvious definitions of what the relevant market, what dominant is, and that it varies by country, I do not think it strongly supports the assertion that it does not have a loose definition.

Because it is generally accepted that monopolies are bad and that not-monopolies are ok. It is much easier to sell the simple idea that "X is a monopoly, so split X", than to make a long case that "X does Y and Z which meet ABC definition of unfair use of market position, bla bla bla, so split X". Conversely, for a company in the wrong, it is easier to say "Of course monopolies are bad, but we are not a monopoly!".

Again, mindless arguing what exact word fit or does not fit the situation detracts from the real issues.

State-owned monopolies exist in most capitalist countries, from operating prisons, to managing railroad or telecom infrastructure, to nuclear energy. The US may have fewer of those than say, the UK or France or Singapore, but I would not call those countries _communist_.

I think you missed the point - representatives should be expert (at a minimum) in HN interests or come from the same demographics (better) as HN commentators. Anything else means they are "morons", to use the word of the previous commentator.

Words get abused a lot, and for some of them, they do not have a clear-cut, universally agreed upon meaning. "Monopoly" is one of such words (others candidate include: freedom, democracy, justice).

When random person X complains about, say, Google having a monopoly, there are two possibilities:

- Person X means something along "Google has a dominant market position and abuses its power", slightly abusing the meaning of "monopoly".

- Person X means Google is literally a monopoly, that it is not possible to get online ads otherwise and does not know that firms such as Facebook exist.

Somehow a lot of people choose to believe interpretation #2 is true, and spend a lot of time debating whether this or that company is a "monopoly" as if it is somehow more important than the substantive issues.

They are still in use, see this [0] French FOB in Mali

[0] https://i.redd.it/f325vekqsxh51.jpg

Ultimately, this isn't a step towards more government surveillance.

Architect of (illegal) government surveillance gets influential role in a major Internet company.

I do not expect him to strongly criticize Amazon's privacy violations or questionable data collection. I fully expect him to be supportive of Amazon initiatives that will make for an easier government surveillance (even if only for improving their chances at getting government contracts).

Of course the US government cannot coerce Amazon any more with Alexander on board. Yet having powerful, government surveillance supporting, well versed in building systems of government surveillance, individuals on the board will surely have a very different impact than having a privacy rights activists on the board.

Some thoughts on whether hard times make strong men: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...

I don't think such calculations are particularly useful, maybe about as much as Paul Graham's wealth tax "model". The reason is that tax codes are way more complicated than just nominal tax rates.

Did you know, for instance, that you taxable income is 90% of your real income [0]? So the 45% rate kicks in at a 175,340€ wage, not actually 157,806€.

Anyway, it does not matter because of the unusually large income splitting [1]. If both adults have a 157,806€ wage and say, two kids, the total income would be 315,612 with three fiscal shares, and thus would pay 3 times the amount of taxes owed for a 315,612/3 income (i.e. 105204€), where the marginal tax rate is 30%, not 45% [2].

Anyway, it does not matter either because the main income tax in France is not the "income tax", but the "generalized social contribution" (flat rate).

My point is not to write an essay on French taxation, but to show that simply comparing tax brackets and rates is useless, since the definition of "taxable income" is not the same between different countries, how brackets, rates and taxable income are used to actually compute the tax amount is not straightforward, there are many others taxes, and so forth.

[0] https://www.impots.gouv.fr/portail/particulier/questions/com...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_splitting

[2] Amount of tax is number of n T(i/n), where i is income, T is the function which maps income to taxes owed and n is the number of fiscal shares. Because T is convex, n T(i/n) is less than T(i).

All this feels so wasteful, especially the CIR and formerly the CICE. Instead of having low taxes, you have nominally high taxes and a bazillion paperwork-heavy to make them low. Might as well just make them low in the first place.

There is indeed one in numpy : https://numpy.org/doc/stable/reference/generated/numpy.clip....

VAT pass through can be quite high (see for instance [0]) : VAT does not tax businesses as much as consumers.

[0] https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2016/12/31/Est...

Is it?

In contrast to Chamley-Judd, the optimal tax on capital is positive in our model because we have finite long run elasticities of inheritance to tax rate

https://www.nber.org/papers/w17989.pdf

I actually worry a lot that as I get "popular" I'll be able to get away with saying stupider stuff than I would have dared say before. This sort of thing happens to a lot of people, and I would really like to avoid it

Paul Graham, as quoted in Maciej Cegłowski's blog post "Dabblers and blowhards"

- https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

Wealth is not money. Wealth is production. It is the flow of money. Wealth is efficiency. Wealth is production not consumption.

A flow of money is income, which is different from wealth. See "What are income and wealth?" by the OECD for instance

- https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/9789264246010-3-en.p...

Property taxes are a wealth tax, specifically a tax on real estate wealth. It's hard to see why taxing this form of wealth is so great, but other forms of wealth is so bad.

As for the argument that the US should be more decentralized - less money goes to the federal government, more to the states - this may or may not be true, but this applies equally to all taxes, not wealth taxes in particular.

The extreme case of this is France, where the "income tax" (90B€/year, progressive) is not the largest income tax. Rather, it is the "generalized social contribution" (124B€/year, flat rate). Of course, public discourse is focused on the income tax (50% of households don't pay any tax whatsoever!), not the main tax on income.

An important point here would the magnitude of those effects: how much a 1% wealth tax would reduce wealth creation? Whether it is by .0000001% or by 99%, it would be "incentives to create less wealth" but in the former case it is all but negligible and in the latter case it is a catastrophe.

Capital tax opponents seem to always use the elasticity of wealth creation with respect to the wealth tax rate is extremely high, but I do not remember seeing any evidence on this.

Interestingly, what you see as completely normal (other taxes) was once as disturbing as capital tax seems to be:

Window tax was a property tax based on the number of windows in a house.

At that time, many people in Britain opposed income tax, on principle, because the disclosure of personal income represented an unacceptable governmental intrusion into private matters, and a potential threat to personal liberty. In fact the first permanent British income tax was not introduced until 1842 [note by me: not until 1914 in France!], and the issue remained intensely controversial well into the 20th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax

Near 50% of American pay ZERO tax whatsoever

The link you gave says that about 50% of Americans pay zero federal income tax. Are you trying to imply that the only tax in the US is the federal income tax?

Federal income tax brings about 2000 billions USD, US GDP is about 21000 billions USD, and all taxes/GDP is about 25% or about 5250 billions.

Or, in other words, you're overlooking about 2/3 of all taxes.

Well, not putting explosives in a city is not hard; not putting substances that have some industry uses and happen to be explosive (eg fertilizer) near industry is hard.

After all, it needs to be shipped, stored and used.

If there's shipping, there will be some port city not far.

And if there is industrial use, there will be workers, and some city as well to house the workers.

See:

- Halifax explosion (how hard is it to not make explosive-carrying ships go to ports?)

- AZF explosion (how hard is it to not locate factories far away from cities?)

- Texas City Refinery explosion (how hard is it to not let refinery workers inside the refinery?)

- Tianjin explosions (how hard is it to not locate a port city near its port?)

And so forth

This trial was done in Kenya, not South Africa.

I don't see how that would be a problem: even if it was common, handing out pill to one group but not the other would still lead to one group being more "dewormed" than the other, all others things being equal.

Anyway, in this case, I do not believe deworming was as common as you assume:

Baseline parasitological surveys indicated that helminth infection rates were over 90%, and over a third had a moderate-heavy infection according to a modified WHO infection criteria (Miguel and Kremer 2004)

Drug take-up rates were high, at approximately 75% in the treatment group, and under 5% in the control group (Miguel and Kremer 2004).

5% of the population taking the drug when >90% should means the drug is not "common".

All those many factors equally affect both groups, that's the point of running a randomized trial. I am not sure how they are relevant to the claims that worms cause poor outcomes or that deworming children make them less poor adults. Could you please explain?

My understanding is that this is not a clinical trial at all - the question is not whether the treatment works for health purposes, but whether this medicine, that was already tested for its medical effects, also has long lasting economic impact. Hence the FDA is completely irrelevant here.

In this case, the deworming treatment was allocated randomly (see the paper [0]). Giving the deworming treatment to children make them less poor than those who did not get the treatment, and there should be no baseline differences on average between the two group of children since the allocation was random.

Is going from "deworming children make less poor" to "the worms cause poor outcomes" such a stretch?

[0] http://emiguel.econ.berkeley.edu/research/twenty-year-econom...

Is it really not a surprise? If someone told me that there was a magic, 50-cent-a-year pill that would increase my wage by 15% for the next 20 years, I would be skeptical.

See this paper [0] bu Gabaix for instance:

This paper proposes that idiosyncratic firm-level shocks can explain an important part of aggregate movements and provide a microfoundation for aggregate shocks.

Existing research has focused on using aggregate shocks to explain business cycles, arguing that individual firm shocks average out in the aggregate. I show that this argument breaks down if the distribution of firm sizes is fat-tailed, as documented empirically.

The idiosyncratic movements of the largest 100 firms in the United States appear to explain about one-third of variations in output growth.

[0] http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~xgabaix/papers/granular.pdf