Saturday Morning Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Edward Luce writes about the reckless greed of the U.S.' billionaire class which includes far too many people willing to see Donald Trump re-elected as the price of avoiding paying a fair share toward a civilized society. And Noah Smith compares a wealth tax to other alternatives in the effort to restore some sense of fairness and justice to the U.S.

- Meanwhile, David Macdonald studies the effect of exorbitant executive pay, and finds that it bears no meaningful positive relationship to stock performance:

It’s far more likely that, like so many traditions, old boys’ clubs die hard. Evidence that higher numbers of female executives produce better corporate results are just not sinking in.

Well, it turns out the same can be said for the evidence about excessive pay for CEOs, whatever their gender. Paying your CEO more has no relation to your company’s stock market performance. In fact, it could be worsening it.
...
...(T)here is statistically no relationship between executive pay and company stock price in Canada over this period. Put another way, other factors explain 99.8% of variations in executive pay. So, you can pay your execs more, but this will either have no effect on your share price or possibly it will drive the price down, not up.

And yet executive pay has been rising far faster than worker wages for decades, partly to buy the better stock performance that it clearly doesn’t buy. Moreover, all this bonus pay seems to flow to male and not female executives, driving the key component of the executive gender pay gap.

Power, not merit, is driving income and gender pay gaps.

- Political Potshots offers a reminder of the secretive funding structure behind Canada's right-wing astroturf groups.

- David Ljunggren and Anna Mehler Paperny reports on the Libs' plans to discard any possibility of universal pharmacare in favour of a scheme designed to cater to pharmaceutical corporations.

- George Monbiot discusses the environmental disaster being dumped onto less wealthy countries - and particularly the UK's practice of sending tires to India to be burned with no regard for the resulting health implications.

- Finally, Naomi Lakritz implores Albertans not to let Jason Kenney drag the province back to Ralph Klein's austerian governing agenda.

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Nicholas Fitz observes that inequality is far worse than the U.S. public believes - even as it already wants to see significant action. And Thomas Piketty updates his policy prescriptions arising out of Capital:

As I look back at my discussion of future policy proposals in the book, I may have devoted too much attention to progressive capital taxation and too little attention to a number of institutional evolutions that could prove equally important. Because capital is multidimensional and markets are imperfect, capital taxation needs to be supplemented with other asset-specific policies and regulations, including for instance land use and housing policies and intellectual property right laws. In particular, as rightly argued by Elizabeth Anderson in this symposium, monopoly power and the regulation of intellectual property rights play an important role in the dynamics of private wealth accumulation. Given the central role played by changing real estate values and rent levels in the aggregate evolution of capital-income ratios and capital shares in recent decades, it is clear that land use and housing policies have potentially a critical role to play, in particular to regulate and expend access to property. On the other hand, it is equally clear that such policies are sometime difficult to implement (e.g. public construction policies or housing subsidies have not always been very successful in the past), so they should certainly be viewed as complementary rather than substitute to progressive taxation.

Also, in my book I do not pay sufficient attention to the development of other alternative forms of property arrangements and participatory governance. One central reason why progressive capital taxation is important is because it can also bring increased transparency about company assets and accounts. In turn, increased financial transparency can help to develop new forms of governance; for instance, it can facilitate more worker involvement in company boards. In other words, “social-democratic” institutions such as progressive taxation (see Miriam Ronzoni in this symposium) can foster institutions that question in a more radical manner the very functioning of private property (note that progressive capital taxation transforms large private property as a temporary attribute rather than a permanent one – already a significant change). However these other institutions – whose aim should be to redefine and regulate property rights and power relations – must also be analyzed as such...

- Meanwhile, David Heinemeier Hansson writes from experience that extreme wealth is overrated even for those who accumulate it.

- Rebecca Green rounds up some reasons for hope and despair on the economic front. And Maximiliano Dvorkin notes that jobs involving routine tasks - whether manual or not - are in the midst of an extended stagnation.

- Andrew Learmonth discusses the devastating effects of austerity in creating child hunger in Scotland. And Naomi Lakritz rightly points out that Alberta's precarious fiscal situation can be traced back to Ralph Klein's obsession with slashing taxes and public services alike.

- Finally, Anita Nickerson argues that everybody ultimately loses out under a winner-take-all electoral system - meaning that it's long past time to ensure a more fair proportional system.