My weekly read-around: Xi Jinping trying to keep growing Chinese capitalism inside the “bird cage”; Montana’s Beartooth range; “Rings of Power” elvenizes the orcs—to the dismay of trolls, & not in...
"Charismatic kleptocrats and ideologues wind up, sooner or later and it is almost always sooner, regarding plutocrats as their lawful prey…"
Yeah, but consider. You get a tax cut, or non-enforcement of a tax scam, that saves you personally 200m and your company 200b and regulation non-enforcement that saves the company 500b. Why would you grudge letting Trump wet his beak. He'd choke on 100m, which would be tax deductible.
I remember a friend telling me during the Nixon years, that an acquaintance, a wealthy businessman, said, of Nixon, "I own him from the socks up."
I think that's the right analysis for a wide range of parameters but with a severe discontinuity at "Trump or his handler puts you in jail and gives your company to somebody else." The experience from China and Russia is that a modern-ish economy with an authoritarian leader can be profitable but comes with idiosyncratic non-financial risks. If I were wealthy enough to get a 200m windfall from tax shenanigans I'm pretty sure the marginal utility of that money wouldn't compensate the increased risk of falling out of a window or taking a surprise holiday in a re-education camp.
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure few people get to that level of wealth without some sort of expectation of immunity from such mundane risks, so I guess I see where those guys are coming from.
The Rodrik trilemma, if viewed as a pure economic issue, is easy to resolve. Immigration. It boosts rich-country and poor-country income (if you count remittances), and leaves plenty of headroom for climate change mitigation.
However, mass immigration is precluded by political economy, so the trilemma remains.
"Charismatic kleptocrats and ideologues wind up, sooner or later and it is almost always sooner, regarding plutocrats as their lawful prey…"
Yeah, but consider. You get a tax cut, or non-enforcement of a tax scam, that saves you personally 200m and your company 200b and regulation non-enforcement that saves the company 500b. Why would you grudge letting Trump wet his beak. He'd choke on 100m, which would be tax deductible.
I remember a friend telling me during the Nixon years, that an acquaintance, a wealthy businessman, said, of Nixon, "I own him from the socks up."
I think that's the right analysis for a wide range of parameters but with a severe discontinuity at "Trump or his handler puts you in jail and gives your company to somebody else." The experience from China and Russia is that a modern-ish economy with an authoritarian leader can be profitable but comes with idiosyncratic non-financial risks. If I were wealthy enough to get a 200m windfall from tax shenanigans I'm pretty sure the marginal utility of that money wouldn't compensate the increased risk of falling out of a window or taking a surprise holiday in a re-education camp.
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure few people get to that level of wealth without some sort of expectation of immunity from such mundane risks, so I guess I see where those guys are coming from.
The Rodrik trilemma, if viewed as a pure economic issue, is easy to resolve. Immigration. It boosts rich-country and poor-country income (if you count remittances), and leaves plenty of headroom for climate change mitigation.
However, mass immigration is precluded by political economy, so the trilemma remains.