Progressivity

This article, based on a longer research paper, is interesting throughout. Working with an enormous database of distributional national accounts, the authors quantify the redistributive impacts of tax and transfer systems across countries. I repeat their key findings here: 

We establish five main findings:

1. Tax-and-transfer systems always reduce inequality, but with large variations.

2.About 90% of these variations are driven by transfers, while only 10% come from taxes.

3. Redistribution rises with development, but this is entirely due to transfers; tax progressivity is uncorrelated with per capita income.

4. Redistribution has increased in most world regions, except in Africa and Eastern Europe, where it has stagnated.

5. About 80% of variations in post-tax inequality are driven by differences in pre-tax inequality (predistribution), while 20% are driven by the direct effect of taxes and transfers (redistribution).

Some caveats are in order, some of which spring from somewhat arbitrary or at least contestable choices made in the classifications. First, they count "social insurance" payments such as social security as part of pre-tax incomes, and hence "predistribution." Second, conditional cash grants are counted as transfers; presumably this implies that "negative income tax" programs such as the earned income tax credit (EITC) are counted as part of the transfer system, not the tax system. And inevitably they have to make numerous simplifying assumptions about the incidence of taxes and transfers (who really pays?), etc.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway is the last: cross-country differences in the inequality of pre-tax income accounts for the lion's share of cross-country differences in post-tax inequality. Of course, predistribution includes lots of determinants, many of which are driven by government policies, such as educational systems. It would not seem to be a category error to think of educational equity as part of redistribution, rather than predistribution. 

Reading roundup

Slow couple of months for reading. 

Season of Migration to the North
Tayeb Salih

First published in 1966, this celebrated novel by the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih covers a range of topical themes, including most obviously colonialism, but also the (mis-)treatment of women in Sudanese and Western society. It is also rich and subtle in its descriptive language and its mysterious doppelgänger narrative. I can't compare it with the original Arabic, but judging from the results, Denys Johnson-Davies's translation is exquisite. Highly recommended.

The Eye of the Heron
Ursula K. LeGuin

Well, not really a heron, but that's what the human colonists have decided one of the creatures looks like on the planet they have colonized– some of them against their will. The story moves right along, and LeGuin covers many of her themes– gender, freedom, authoritarianism. The effectiveness and limits of non-violent collective action play a central role. The book also offers a pretty decent fictional illustration of the Domar serfdom model. 

Vagabonds
Hao Jingfang

Earth vs. Mars, ho hum. I stuck with this sci-fi snooze-fest far longer than I should have.

Art of the Chicken
Jacques Pépin 

I consider myself a pretty good cook, and others seem to agree. I learned some of what I know from observing Mom, who is a very good cook, but I would say Jacques Pépin deserves the most credit for my competence and confidence in the kitchen. His cooking shows always struck the right balance between taste, technique, intuition, quality ingredients, and charm. Speaking of charm, that would be the right term for Jacques's colorful paintings of chickens, which fill many of the pages of this book. Part memoir, part cookbook, the recipes are casual and assume that you have watched Jacques enough to know what to do with them. 

Fungi!

A good day yesterday for fungus in El Corte de Madera Creek Open Space Preserve... In order: shaggy manes, some kind of big agaricus, pumpernickel bagel on old-growth redwood, tafoni, grisette, blackening russula of some sort, ramaria (coral fungus), bolete, questionable stropharia, Amanita gemmata (?).

Felicity

Roughly concurrently with the run of the greatest TV show of all time, another show featured an "innocent" but determined young woman making her way in the world. We watched the pilot of Felicity last night, and I doubt I'll watch many more episodes. Dated, earnest, and not really my demographic. But judging from the pilot, the show was really pretty good. And Keri Russell was already amazing. You see the steeliness and intelligence that made her so good in The Americans. There is a lot going on behind that angular, elegant, pretty face– vulnerability, sure, but also arrogance, and suppressed anger. 

Saliences

Nothing like a visit to rugged Pescadero Beach to be reminded of the contrast between the permanent and the ephemeral... concerns of Ammons in this great poem: "where not a single single thing endures, the overall reassures." 

Saliences

A.R. Ammons

Consistencies rise

and ride

the mind down

hard routes

        walled

with no outlet and so

to open a variable geography,

        proliferate

possibility, here

is this dune fest

        releasing

mind feeding out,

gathering clusters,

fields of order in disorder,

where choice

can make beginnings,

        turns,

        reversals,

where straight line

and air-hard thought

can meet

unarranged disorder,

        dissolve

before the one event that

creates present time

in the multi-variable

        scope :

a variable of wind

among the dunes,

making variables

of position and direction and sound

of every reed leaf

and bloom,

running streams of sand,

winding, rising, at a depression

falling out into deltas,

weathering shells with blast,

striking hiss into clumps of grass,

against bayberry leaves,

     lifting

the spider from footing to footing

hard across the dry even crust

toward the surf :

wind, a variable, soft wind, hard

steady wind, wind

shaped and kept in the

bent of trees,

the prevailing dipping seaward

of reeds,

the kept and erased sandcrab trails :

wind, the variable to the gull's flight,

how and where he drops the clam

and the way he heads in, running to loft :

wind, from the sea, high surf

and cool weather;

from the land, a lessened breakage

and the land's heat :

wind alone as a variable,

as a factor in millions of events,

leaves no two moments

on the dunes the same :

     keep

free to these events,

bend to these

changing weathers :

multiple as sand, events of sense

alter old dunes

of mind,

release new channels of flow,

free materials

to new forms :

ind alone as a variable

rakes this neck of dunes

out of calculation's reach :

come out of the hard

routes and ruts,

pour over the walls

of previous assessments : turn to

the open,

the unexpected, to new saliences of feature.

*

The reassurance is

that through change

continuities sinuously work,

cause and effect

        without alarm,

gradual shadings out or in,

motions that full

        with time

do not surprise, no

abrupt leap or burst : possibility,

with meaningful development

of circumstance :

when I went back to the dunes today,

        saliences,

congruent to memory,

spread firmingly across my sight :

the narrow white path

rose and dropped over

grassy rises toward the sea :

sheets of reeds,

tasseling now near fall,

filled the hollows

with shapes of ponds or lakes :

bayberry, darker, made wandering

chains of clumps, sometimes pouring

into heads, like stopped water :

        much seemed

constant, to be looked

forward to, expected :

from the top of a dune rise,

look of ocean salience : in

        the hollow,

where a runlet

        makes in

at full tide and fills a bowl,

extravagance of pink periwinkle

along the grassy edge,

and a blue, bunchy weed, deep blue,

deep into the mind the dark blue

        constant :

minnows left high in the tide-deserted pocket,

        fiddler crabs

bringing up gray pellets of drying sand,

disappearing from air's faster events

at any close approach :

certain things and habits

        recognizable as

having lasted through the night :

though what change in

a day’s doing!

desertions of swallows

        that yesterday

ravaged air, bush, reed, attention

in gatherings wide as this neck of dunes :

now, not a sound

or shadow, no trace of memory, no remnant

        Explanation :

summations of permanence!

where not a single single thing endures,

the overall reassures, 

deaths and flights,

shifts and sudden assaults claiming

limited orders,

the separate particles : 

earth brings to grief

much in an hour that sang, leaped, swirled, 

yet keeps a round

        quiet turning,

beyond loss or gain,

beyond concern for the separate reach.

What to blame for the sorry state of U.S. politics

The latest Times / Siena poll puts Trump in the lead in several swing states, and a quick perusal of the tables reveals where the blame lies: namely, the 19th Amendment. Sure, it gave women the vote, but it failed to take the next logical step, which was to take away the vote for men. Once again, the nation suffers the consequences.