Utopia, you are standing in it!

In past columns on the topic of basic income, most of my attention has focused on how universal handouts would undermine the work ethic.

To be succinct, I fear that a non-trivial share of the population would exit the labor force if they received a big chunk of guaranteed money from government.

But there’s another side to the fiscal equation, which is the tax burden would be needed to finance a basic income.

Thanks to some research from Germany, we have at least one answer to that question.

But I suspect that most people won’t like the results, which were put together by a team led by Professor Frank C. Englmann of the Institute of Economics and Law (IVR) at the University of Stuttgart.

…introducing a UBI that guarantees a livelihood while eliminating social benefits (e.g., unemployment benefits, old age security, and family allowance) would considerably simplify the German…

Our recent History of Parliament / University of East Anglia conference on ‘Politics before Democracy’ featured over 30 papers on topics ranging across the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Over the next few weeks we’ll be posting some summaries as part of a guest blog series. To start us off, Professor Sarah Richardson explores how widows, many of whom could vote in local elections, assumed a central place in some of the earlier debates about giving women the parliamentary vote.

According to the Earl of Salisbury in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part III, among the heinous crimes that should not be pardoned, even if enacted under solemn oath, were rape, murder, robbery and wringing ‘the widow from her customed right’. The widow’s ‘customed right’ was of course her property or dower, and with property ownership came the right to vote, or did it? Women’s suffrage campaigners in the 19

Along with Phil Magness, John Moore and Phil Vøn Schløsser, I assembled a series of concerns that we have regarding the measurement of income inequality in the US before 1945 as pictured by the Piketty-Saez U-Curve. We argue that the pronounced left-hand side of the U-Curve is sensitive to minor changes in assumptions as well as minor improvements in data quality. We argue that income inequality probably did fall and rise over the 20th century, but not in the proportions presented in the Piketty-Saez papers. The paper is available here on SSRN and the abstract is below:

In this article, we reconsider the level and trend of the income inequality series produced by Piketty and Saez (2003, 2015) for the United States using tax data for the period prior to 1945, which forms the left-side of a century-long distributional U-curve. We argue that there are reasons to doubt…

On Monday I wrote about the MPC membership of Caroline Saunders, whose four-year term had expired on 2 April 2023 and who appeared to be continuing to serve only at the day-to-day pleasure of the Minister of Finance. The Reserve Bank’s website on Monday said that her term had expired, and there was no statement from the Reserve Bank or from the Minister of Finance to the effect that she had either been reappointed or told to go away. That all seemed less than desirable (fact, and lack of transparency).

As I noted in that post, it all seemed rather odd. The election is approaching and the Minister of Finance had already last year reappointed one member, Peter Harris, to a term expiring in October. Under the conventions around elections, no new appointment could be made by the current government when the new term would start smack in the middle…

Over the last few days I’ve been reading a few pieces on UK monetary policy and high inflation. The first was a speech from the Deputy Governor responsible for economics and monetary policy, Ben Broadbent (over there senior central bankers actually give serious and thoughtful speeches on things the Bank has responsibility for), and the second was a new paper by long-term adviser, analyst and researcher Tim Congdon. There is a lot of overlap because Congdon’s paper is broader (“Why has inflation come back”) but his analytical approach has tended to emphasise the monetary aggregates, while Broadbent’s speech which is narrower in focus is specifically on the question of what information value for monetary policymakers there is (or isn’t) in the monetary aggregates over the longer term and in the specific context of the inflation of the last couple of years. Both are worth reading.

My own view on the…

It’s election year and the sniping between political parties has ramped up as expected.

While the big battalions of Labour and National have only exchanged long-range shots there’s plenty of activity among the minor players.

Unfortunately for them (but popcorn time for the rest of us), one of those smaller players – the Green Party – has chosen an election year to start a civil war within their own ranks.

Over at Kiwiblog, DPF has noticed what’s going on with one Elizabeth Kerekere at the forefront firing not just insults stupidly at one of the best politicians they have, Chloe Swabrick, but spraying fire across the party in general.

But it now appears to be about more than just sniping. It looks Kerekere has mates and they’re determined to take over the Green Party – and they’re Marxists.

And it’s not just the usual suspects like DPF pointing…