Posts by Terence W
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I honestly can't recall a single situation where I have ever contemplated referencing an encyclopedia in four years of uni.
I can, in my masters thesis. I needed simple background information about the two cities whose governance processes I was studying (founding date, for example). This information is not common knowledge so needed to be sourced. It also wasn't so central to my thesis that I felt the need to delve - in Portuguese - into any debates historians or demographers may have been having about the matter.
No doubt I could have found the figures in someone else's paper on the actual topic I was studying, but would this really be a more reliable source? And did I really want to waste the time looking? When I had actual research to do.
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I can think of plenty of situations where it would be appropriate to cite from an encyclopedia in an essay. Basic demographic, historical or statistical information, for example. Sure, if your essay is on the history of Southern Brazil, you wouldn't want to be using the encyclopedia as your source but, if as part of an essay on the rise of the populist left in that region, you wanted to refer briefly to the war with Paraguay* then why not?
As for the Wikipedia: agreed it's not acceptable in essays, but an automatic fail? There are a heck of a lot of other bad sources out there, does he fail them too?
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* Anyone seeking a quick gotcha ought to get Googling and see whether there ever was an actual war between Brazil and Paraguay.
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Thanks, Danyl, for the Bassett / Campbell link. A well worthwhile read. (Campbell that is - not Bassett).
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Obama's health policy was worse than Clinton's and he seems to have brought the conservative line on social security but he's not a Chicago Style neo-liberal. His economic adviser is from U-Chicago but sure ain't Becker or Friedman.
It's true that his economic policies won't be particularly left but, with the exception of health, they'll still be comparable to Clinton's and well on the sane side of McCain. I think most Nation-reading liberals (myself included) are aware his limitations but, after the last 8 years, are still happy to settle for someone mildly progressive who won't invade Iran at the first jerk of Anne Coulter's knee...
Interesting article on Obama's economic tendencies: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21491
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having reconsidered:
I withdraw the second half of my last comment. I think that diminishing marginal utility is sufficient counter to the claim of dead weight welfare loss.
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Christopher,
Thanks. Off home now but will have a read. I'm not at all sure about the dead weight welfare losses you talk about though: wouldn't these presume that there was no such thing as diminishing marginal utility and also that the real world was at least approximately close to one in which rational market actors were perfectly free to make welfare enhancing choices with no externalities? (Kindof a world as stylised in Arrow-Debreu if I recall correctly).
Ok - I'm outta here...
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Christopher Worthington,
Just quickly, as I'm keen to head off on an after dinner walk:
I haven't had a chance to read Mankiw's paper yet and if he has some good empirics behind those numbers that will sway my view somewhat. Nevertheless:
1. As Gareth and the blogger at Stumbling and Mumbling suggest, while one can devise all sorts of plausible cases as to why a progressive taxation system may discourage effort and therefor slow growth it's also equally easy to come up with counterpoints: people may, for example, actually work harder in order to meet their financial aspirations; or, unless marginal tax rates are more than 100%, everyone still ends up better off as they earn more and this may be all the incentive that is needed; or, few people work in jobs where effort is exactly correlated with income; or, people may be motivated by desires other than money (status, belief etc); and so on.
2. Cross country regressions on tax and growth (like cross country regressions on almost anything) are indeed problematic but the weak relationship between tax system progressivity and low growth is also visible when we cast our gaze over the history over individual countries. Once again, maybe other effects mask the influence of tax. However, given that the flat tax high growth belief is taken as axiomatic in some quarters, you'd like to think that <i>something</i> would leap from the data somewhere. It doesn't
3. The other point always worth remembering is that public policy, including tax policy, is all about increasing wellbeing. Not GDP. In a country with low levels of GDP growth is crucial. Yet, as I've written elsewhere, in a country like New Zealand it is, while still important, not everything.
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Possibly the wrong site to be asking this on, but have been looking for a while for documented evidence of this "lower top tax rates incentivising hard work". I understand the theories of marginal income etc, and can see how it may have an impact on secondary/part-time employment but does anyone know of a study that actually suggests what the national impact would possibly be? i.e. what growth we would expect?
The belief that flatter tax structures lead to higher growth is as much an article of faith as it is something based by solid evidence.
I blogged this in quite some detail a while back and Lane Kenworthy also has a good post on the debate in the American context here.
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For fans of conspiracy theory funnies...
http://www.theonion.com/content//node/76782?utm_source=embedded_video_2
Hoping this works for the Onion as well as you tube. Otherwise follow the link.
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Hi AS,
Thanks for your comments. I'm at work now, and the only thing likely to make me more grumpy than working on Sunday is not achieving anything because I was too busy arguing in PA System. So I'll keep things short and make this my last comment :)
With regards to education, this isn't an field I'm at all knowledgeable about so I'll defer to your experience while still remaining somewhat sceptical of arguments which suggest that real solutions won't require real money.
And I agree with you that the majority of people in the top tax bracket are merely wealthy (vis a vis median income) as opposed to super wealthy. That's why my preferred solution to increase progressivity is a new bracket somewhere over 100K.
As for the BRT: the thing is that they (or at least their ideological fellow travelers) have, with the help of our daily papers they driven the debate on tax cuts - at least as I see it. While, at the same time, improvements in services (and in health they most definitely exist) get minimal mention in our public discourse.
If, fully informed, the NZ public chooses tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the wealthy, over more spending then so be it. I just wish we could have a slightly more informed debate.
Ok - off to work.