The Art of Taxation

March 27, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

When I saw this,


I knew it had to be one of the New York abstract impressionists. But which one? Frank Stella gone curvy? Morris Louis turned sideways and making clearer line separations? Kenneth Noland?
But it’s a graph of taxpayers (original here). Here it is with title and axis labels:

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

It shows the relative tax burden by income level. Each horizontal line is a year, its width “sized and colored by the tax burden: the amount of tax due relative to the long-term average at each income level. Above-average burdens appear thick and red and below-average thin and blue.” The wedge of blue that begins at $8000 in 1974 is the Carter era change that excluded low-wage earners from the income tax.

I mentally divided the graph at the $100K vertical and looked at the relative shares since about 1980. The graph shows what everyone knows – the very rich, who had been paying a bit more in the Clinton years, made out like bandits in the Bush years. In the graph, they have recaptured their 1920s position as the thin blue line. But the Bush tax cuts lightened the burden of the poor and even middle-income people. Hence, the deficits that Republicans are now so concerned about.

I leave it to critics like Flâneuse to say what in the graph needs work. What struck me was the similarity between data and art.*

Last year’s version of the same data seemed much harder to read. It also looked very much like some of Clyfford Still’s canvases.



* “The graph is better; at least it has meaning.” That was the reaction of my friend Sol, an actual artist who in his youth studied with the New York School gang, lived down the street from the Cedar Tavern, and even played mandolin with Rothko. So I respect his opinion (I also use his casual sketch of me as my Facebook pic).

The Opinions of Mankind

March 25, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, wrote of “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind.” Ed Koch, when he was mayor of New York, used to ask, “How’m I doing?”

A recent Gallup report, based on surveys in more than 100 countries has an answer: Generally, the Obama bump – the huge boost in favorable views of the US leadership – has held.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

Yes, in 2007 and 2008, the US Bush-Cheney team was trailing a few points behind the authoritarian bureaucrats running China. Now, thanks to the election of Obama, we’re Number One. (See my post-inauguration post.) (In some countries, positive views of the US administration have slipped in the past year, but they are still well above the Bush era ratings.)

Views of America and Americans are much less volatile than views of our leaders. The country remains by far the country people would most like to move to (Gallup does not show data for previous years, but it’s probably not much different).

I also suspect that views of American people have also been steadily positive, even when our government was greatly disliked. They like us, they really like us. Of course, the Americans that go abroad and become de facto PR agents are not a representative sample of the population. They are probably more affluent. They also are much more likely to come from liberal states (in the map below – found here – “blue” states are white or light gray).

Poltical Culture

March 22, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Keith Humphreys (here) comments on the reactions of the British to Margaret Thatcher’s dementia, first made public in 2008.

When [Ronald Reagan] was revealed to have Alzheimer’s disease, many people who voted against him voiced sincere sympathy for what he and his family were going through. In contrast . . . if Ms. Thatcher’s own dementia is generating sympathy in Brits who hated her policies, they are doing a frightfully good job of hiding it. I don’t even hear much sympathy from people who did vote for her.

Matt Yglesias (here) explains this with some electoral data. Thatcher was never the preference of the majority of voters. Her election wins were all minority: “a three way election in 1979 with 44 percent of the vote. In 1983 her support slipped slightly to more like 43 percent. In 1987 she won again, but her support further dropped to around 42 percent.”

Matt concludes,

the ability of a prime minister to wield extraordinary power based on a parliamentary majority obtained with an electoral minority seems likely to engender a lot of bitterness.

Political culture may also have something to do with it. In the US, the President is also the symbolic head of the nation. In the UK, that function belongs to the Queen. The President, even after he leaves office, is still addressed as Mr. President. The Prime Minister is just a politician. (See an earlier post on this here.)

Matt’s post, especially that last comment, took me back to a personal incident that suggests other differences in political cultures. In August of 2005, we rented a flat in London – Vauxhall, just south of the river – for a few days. The woman we rented from met us at Victoria station in her Toyota and gave us a motor tour of London before taking us to the flat. (She had been in the travel business and was now retired, which is why she could rent out her flat while she removed to a family house in Sussex.) “There’s no Brits in London any more,” she said pointing to the pedestrians as we passed. And indeed, there were many who looked to be Asian, Arab, or African. She also complained about the “queers” in her neighborhood.

In the US, a person who talked like that would surely have voted for Bush and other Republicans. So I quickly pegged her as a hardline Thatcherite Conservative. But as we drove through Westminster, she slowed a bit and pointed up at a bronze statue.

“That’s Oliver Cromwell,” she said, “the only dictator Britain’s ever had. Except for Maggie Thatcher.”

Weber Fails B-School (or the Other Way Round)

March 21, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Having written a textbook, I know that textbooks don’t get everything right, but c’mon guys.

From Peter Klein at Organizations and Markets

Focusing on Max Weber, Cummings and Bridgman document a series of whoppers that appear consistently in leading management texts, such as the belief that “ideal type” means best or optimal; that Weber did his major work in the 1940s (Parsons’s translation of Wirtschaft and Gesellschaft appeared in 1947, 27 years after Weber’s death); that Weber personally admired bureaucracy (In Search of Excellence avers that Weber “pooh-poohed charismatic leadership and doted on bureaucracy”); and other gross misunderstandings. FAIL

(I'm surprised that the OrgTheorists didn’t pick this up.)