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"...people in your position bringing out the "but the rich pay more in taxes!" just reinforces my impression that harvard and higher education institutions are

"...people in your position bringing out the "but the rich pay more in taxes!" just reinforces my impression that harvard and higher education institutions are a complete sham." Can you qualify this line? I'm not entirely sure why his providing the verifiable statistics bears any connection to the merit of high quality higher education institutions? Genuinely confused - not bating.

ACow_Adonis 13y ago
Sure. First of all some context. Mankiw wrote one of the main textbooks while I was doing economics at university. I was one of the few people who also took philosophy and the like, who came to economics because I found the area itself fascinating rather than wishes for employment/riches, and who discovered economics as a subject relatively late (after philosophy and IT) so you might say I contrast Mankiw, Marx and Megabytes :P (and don't worry, I'm not a communist :P) My opinion of Mankiw, and the work of places that have hired him, is not particularly high. I don't think their work is intellectually very rigorous (not to be confused with "academically" rigorous via referencing lots of papers, using models and language the layman doesn't understand, and hiding behind institutional status). It doesn't deal with many of the questions and complexities and outcomes that people actually care about, and they clearly push an agenda behind a facade of legitimacy. The "rich pay more taxes", specifically, is just such a juvenile, dumb, populist thought terminating cliche. "Queen Victoria" probably funded more parks than the average man, but what the hell does that mean? "The pope" built more churches. If you redistribute money from the rich to the poor, now the poor pay more taxes! And what does that mean now? NOTHING! Should we do it? I don't know! "The rich pay more taxes" is a regular throw-away line from those who generally wish to lobby for the wealthy, reliant upon the idea of "agency of money and those who hold it" in our current society rather than analysing money and its relationship to actual societal outcomes, beliefs, structures and social power. Queen victoria and the pope, of course, didn't actually build those parks or those churches (Viccy wasn't very good at bricklaying for a start), but they had the social power to get others to do it for them. But does that in itself legitimize their positions, power and actions? So you read Mankiw's editorials, and they contain a whole bunch of cheap appeals that are easily dismissed, and not much content (and that goes for his work as well). Why did wages and the like suddenly take off in the financial sector compared to how it used to be historically in relative conservative banking? Is this because they weren't worth much or very competent before? How does debt, power imbalance, informational asymmetry, and turnover enter into all this? Why are remunerations so volatile if their wages are meritorious? What about when these golden-handshakes aren't connected to their actual performance? How do boards measure the worth of CEO's when everyone else can't? What about intercultural/temporal/national differences in pay/situations? Would we actually be better off if we took money from the rich, distributed it, and had a more even distribution of both wealth and taxes? What about heirs? No one intellectually serious or competent would ever spout such lines if they genuinely wanted to discuss the issue. But Mankiw, and the institutions that hire him, generally don't want to seriously discuss the issue. Hence, complete sham. /my, that sounds really harsh.

ACow_Adonis 13y ago

Sure. First of all some context. Mankiw wrote one of the main textbooks while I was doing economics at university. I was one of the few people who also took philosophy and the like, who came to economics because I found the area itself fascinating rather than wishes for employment/riches, and who discovered economics as a subject relatively late (after philosophy and IT) so you might say I contrast Mankiw, Marx and Megabytes :P (and don't worry, I'm not a communist :P) My opinion of Mankiw, and the work of places that have hired him, is not particularly high. I don't think their work is intellectually very rigorous (not to be confused with "academically" rigorous via referencing lots of papers, using models and language the layman doesn't understand, and hiding behind institutional status). It doesn't deal with many of the questions and complexities and outcomes that people actually care about, and they clearly push an agenda behind a facade of legitimacy. The "rich pay more taxes", specifically, is just such a juvenile, dumb, populist thought terminating cliche. "Queen Victoria" probably funded more parks than the average man, but what the hell does that mean? "The pope" built more churches. If you redistribute money from the rich to the poor, now the poor pay more taxes! And what does that mean now? NOTHING! Should we do it? I don't know! "The rich pay more taxes" is a regular throw-away line from those who generally wish to lobby for the wealthy, reliant upon the idea of "agency of money and those who hold it" in our current society rather than analysing money and its relationship to actual societal outcomes, beliefs, structures and social power. Queen victoria and the pope, of course, didn't actually build those parks or those churches (Viccy wasn't very good at bricklaying for a start), but they had the social power to get others to do it for them. But does that in itself legitimize their positions, power and actions? So you read Mankiw's editorials, and they contain a whole bunch of cheap appeals that are easily dismissed, and not much content (and that goes for his work as well). Why did wages and the like suddenly take off in the financial sector compared to how it used to be historically in relative conservative banking? Is this because they weren't worth much or very competent before? How does debt, power imbalance, informational asymmetry, and turnover enter into all this? Why are remunerations so volatile if their wages are meritorious? What about when these golden-handshakes aren't connected to their actual performance? How do boards measure the worth of CEO's when everyone else can't? What about intercultural/temporal/national differences in pay/situations? Would we actually be better off if we took money from the rich, distributed it, and had a more even distribution of both wealth and taxes? What about heirs? No one intellectually serious or competent would ever spout such lines if they genuinely wanted to discuss the issue. But Mankiw, and the institutions that hire him, generally don't want to seriously discuss the issue. Hence, complete sham. /my, that sounds really harsh.