Growth for the sake of growth, plus ignorance and expertise in complex situations: two depictions

Edward Abbey said “growth for growth’s sake is the ideology of the cancer cell":

From a series called Illuminating Quotes, Visualised by Maggie Appleton. I like this drawing because it shows that there is plenty of room in the concept of capitalism that isn't infected by this destructive ideology. That's where we ought to concentrate our energies.

Appleton also nicely visualized Edward R. Murrow's statement that "Anyone who isn't confused doesn't really understand the situation," which seems particularly apt when it comes to tax law, especially international:

Tax transparency, democracy and "expertise"

Transparency is being fully contested in international tax circles:

The hosts were expecting a heated but constructive debate, and for most of the nine-hour conference delegates heard in turn the impassioned arguments of campaigners for country by country reporting and the deliberations of tax professionals whose main argument centred on the complexity of international tax.

The complexity issue is that if regular, uninformed people are given all the data, they will misinterpret it and hang effigies of the innocent.  This is an unconvincing argument that the OECD tried to imply with its consideration of the matter in 2011: “the issue of whether greater transparency could aid public debate on appropriate tax policy” would be “very difficult to assess” because the political discourse would involve “differing arguments, [that] can be used more or less responsibly.”  This is an argument that tax compliance is so subjective, no one could ever make sense of it definitively, so it's best not to argue it in public.  Only experts should do so, and then only in quiet rooms.

I was happy to see Sol Picciotto mentioned in the article, he's a terrific thinker and scholar on international tax:

During a discussion on tax dispute resolution Sol Picciotto, Emeritus Professor of Law at Lancaster University, interrupted James Bullock’s defence of modest meals shared at meetings with HMRC to say that the level of transparency being proposed was ‘quite clear – that taxpayers should declare what tax they pay in each country’.

Picciotto added: ‘As regards disputes, the terms of a settlement should be public. We’re not talking about sandwiches, we’re talking about the transparency of what tax people pay where. If a dispute goes to the tribunal, it’s public. If there’s a settlement, it should be public.’

Later, Judith Freedman, University of Oxford tax prof, said that publishing details of settlements ‘would not be that helpful’ to people: ‘What are they going to make of them? I want to have a properly instituted organisation which has independent experts who can scrutinise those settlements. That’s far better than leaving it to whoever happens to be able to pick up on this, the press …’

‘That’s democracy,’ a delegate shouted from the audience. Freedman continued: ‘I believe it’s the job of properly constituted organisations, rather than the press, to examine this because that would give us integrity and confidence in the system. These are very, very difficult things to understand.’

That statement is distressing on grounds of the expertise question alone.  Who decides what constitutes "a properly constituted organisation"?  Professor Freedman?  The Oxford Center for Business Taxation?

The article closes with a mention of a twitter feed associated with the conference, in which it was tweeted ‘It has to be admitted that few tax experts have oratory skills or passion comparable to [those of] tax campaigners and politicians.’


Perhaps, but it's a matter of backing and platforms, isn't it.

On Expertise and Influence: Interview with Ann Pettifor

What constitutes expertise as a social, political and cultural matter?  It involves charts, data, lines on a CV, connections, financial support, and a means of repeatedly broadcasting the same message.  In 2003, Ann Pettifor predicted the global debt meltdown but no one was listening; in this interview with the Renegade Economist [posted at NC], she discusses the crowding out of ideas that is perpetuated because of the structure of interest group-funded economics research.  This sounds so much like the Vijay Prashad interview in regards to the silencing of alternative views from UNCTAD which, like Pettifor, is credited with accurate predictions about the economic crisis.  A similar tale can be told about tax treaty policy making and the turf struggle between the OECD and the UN.  In international tax in general we see the cult of expertise in the claiming of "internationally agreed standards" on tax policy, with I think similar effects--the alternative view is too often silenced, sometimes intentionally but often just by lacking the necessary backing and platforms.

Starting at around the 7 minute mark, Pettifor has a lot to say about institutional expertise and about why we will continue to get more of the same policy prescriptions from influential economists: they are mostly "hired guns" who don't have tenure, while those with tenure, who can "afford to say that which is not mainstream," are few and far between.  She says most economists therefore "are employed in think tanks and research departments that are underwritten by the finance sector.  RE agrees: "if you watch Charles Ferguson's film Inside Job and you see the cowardice of the neoclassical economists at the end who jut blankly refuse to answer the questions and then when they do are full of spite, you get a kind of insight into the murky world you're dealing in."  

Pettifor then talks about conferences where neoclassical and heterodox economists are engaging in dialogue, and she says this is unusual because the neoclassicals "aren't used to dialogue with anyone who doesn't share their world view, and that is so damaging."

Jumping to 10:20, she lays out the intellectual/institutional conflict:

"I am right now reading a speech by a man called Ben Broadbent, who is on the board of the bank of England and who was at Goldman Sachs and who's written a paper saying that the cause of the crisis had absolutely nothing to do with easy money, i.e., unregulated money; it had everything to do with the fact that interest rates were incredibly low.   

Now when I read that paper, it is so deceptive really, and yet it's packed with charts and data, and some sources, even, of information, he does neglect to give us the source of some of his data, that paper, I am convinced, has been written in Goldman Sachs's research department and he's delivered the speech on behalf of Goldman Sachs and he's on the bank of the Board of England.   

Now, that's not a conspiracy.  It's huge political and economic power.  And those of us who have an alternative view don't have that sort of backing, and don't have those sorts of platforms, and that's very damaging for public discourse."

Much more on the substantive economic issues and debate as the interview continues.