The IFS is quite right here, stamp duty is largely paid by pensioners

The Institute for Fiscal Studies is quite right here, the people who really pay stamp duty on shares are the pensioners:

Labour’s plans to raise taxes on businesses and financial transactions will hit pension funds, reducing returns for savers and harming living standards into old age, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned.

Jeremy Corbyn hopes to raise £5.6bn per year with a levy on bond and derivatives purchases, extending the stamp duty charge that already affects share transactions.

He said it would target banks and help repay the damage wrought by the financial crisis.

It is not, of course, the banks who buy and sell shares, but our pensions that do. And a charge on a transaction inside a pension will be paid by that pension.

This is all known as "tax incidence" of course, the thought that all taxes are paid by hte wallet of some live human being getting lighter - on the simple basis that there's only us folks here to pay taxes - and we need to walk through the effect of a tax on the economy in order to work out whose.

However the IFS said that, ultimately, all taxes are paid for by individuals.

This is not new news either. The IFS has issued a couple of papers on the subject in the past. There is also the EU's own investigation into the incidence of a financial transactions tax. Which shows that, yes, the incidence is largely upon  investors - pensioners that is - plus lower wages for the workers across the economy.

Taking the fat cats this ain't. Which is why the Mirrlees Review so strenuously insists that we just should not be having transactions taxes at all, they're simply a bad form of taxation to begin with.

If you do want to try to tax the financial sector there are other and better ways. An extension of stamp duty is the wrong thing to do entirely, it's a tax which should be abolished in its entirety.

This is hardly an onerous goal being set, is it?

The usual suspects are shouting about how the education system is to be starved of that funding vital to all that is good and holy:

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said that school funding would fall by nearly 3% by 2021 even with the additional £1bn a year, after adjusting for inflation and a rise in students enrolled.

“Taking account of forecast growth in pupil [numbers], this equates to a real-terms cut in spending per pupil of 2.8% between 2017–18 and 2021–22. Adding this to past cuts makes for a total real-terms cut to per-pupil spending of around 7% over the six years between 2015–16 and 2021–22,” the IFS said.

And we're afraid that we don't quite see it.

Firstly, it isn't true that the marginal costs of another pupil are the same as the average costs of a pupil. Education spending is far more lumpy than that. One more pupil into an extant school might cost the number of pencils they'll chew in a year but not much more than that.

Secondly, and much more importantly, this isn't actually a big ask. The education system is being asked to improve productivity by 1% a year or so. That's very much less than any private sector organisation tries to manage. And anyone at all who thinks that there isn't 1% a year to be ground out of the cost base of a British public service just sin't dealing with reality.

It's entirely true that the recently departed William Baumol had his Cost Disease, that it's more difficult to increase productivity in services than in manufacturing. But do note that he said more difficult, not impossible.

1% a year improvement in productivity, 1% a year reduction in costs? Pah!

The next iteration of the waste food problem

A general observation is that as modern fads and panics rotate through their second, third and fourth iterations then people start losing their minds. The original point becomes entirely forgotten and we end up with the meaningless, or even in gross error, incantation of the fashionable chant.

So it is with this about food waste, now we're onto how much bagged salad gets thrown away: 

People buying bagged salads with good intentions of eating healthily end up throwing 40per cent away.

The fragile leaves look appetising on the shelves but they have a very short shelf life and soon spoil and become soggy.

As a result, tonnes of lambs lettuce, baby spinach, wild rocket and ruby chard-duos end up in the bin.

New research suggests people throw away around 37,000 tonnes of salad every year, which is the equivalent of 178 million bags.

This is a useful example of failing Chesterton's Fence. Which is the idea that you cannot work out whether something should not exist until you have understood why it was first constructed. Noting a fence is one thing, but it is necessary to work out why the fence was constructed in the first place before it is possible to say it is no longer needed.

And so, why do we have bagged salad? Possibly because, even at these wastage rates, the loss is less than when all had to buy salad bits loose? We don't say that this is so, only that it's the relevant question to be asking.

As to the waste being worth a lot of money, no, of course it isn't. We're throwing it away so it is of no value to us. And yes, it really is true that we are the determinants of our own utility, the value of something to us is the value of something to us, not what either it should be nor what someone else thinks it should be.

But then others do manage to get to that ritual of incantation rather than doing the difficult bit of thinking:

The solution, then, it would seem, can in part come from us, the consumers. By taking personal responsibility and ensuring that we limit our consumption, we can probably dramatically reduce the colossal figure currently hanging over our bagged-salad heads.

It is indeed part of the worship of Gaia that we must reduce our consumption. Or at least acceptable ritual that we should claim to desire to do so, along with St Augustine's caveat of not quite yet perhaps. 

But there is that very proof that people aren't thinking. For of course the actual complaint here is that we're not consuming enough of this bagged salad, isn't it?

Ritual incantations rather than thinking just aren't the way to run the world.

We do love people holding directly contradictory ideas

This is something we humans do rather well, hold two or more directly contradictory ideas at the same time. One particular version of this is prevalent over on the environmental left these days. Which is that renewable energy is just so cheap these days that they're going to take over the entire power sector, while at the very same time any cut in investment funds to designing new methods of renewables would be to condemn the planet, and Flipper and ourselves, to drowning in ever hotter water.

As an example, over at Salon they are running these two stories side by side:

We’ve seen prices for new solar farms below 3 cents per kilowatt hour (kwh) in other countries for over a year now, but before this week, not in the U.S. That changed on Monday when Tucson Electric Power (TEP), an Arizona utility company, announced that it had reached an agreement to buy solar power at the same game-changing price.

TEP says that this is a “historically low price” for a 100-megawatt system capable of powering 21,000 homes — and that the sub-3-cents price is “less than half as much as it agreed to pay under similar contracts in recent years.”

For context, the average U.S. residential price for electricity is nearly 13 centsper kwh, and the average commercial price is 10.5 cents.

And further:

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, criticized Trump for his proposed cuts in clean energy research. “His budget proposes a staggering seventy percent cut to renewables and energy efficiency initiatives,” Cantwell said in a Tuesday statement responding to the budget proposal. “This would devastate an emerging sector of our economy by killing thousands of clean-energy jobs all over the country — all in a misguided effort to hold onto the past at the expense of our future.”

But if solar is now one third the price of conventionally produced electricity then we don't need to be doing any more research, do we? We've done what we needed to do and we can stop now and go on to try and solve the next problem.

Alternatively, of course, there's something hooky with that 3 cents number and we do need to keep researching. But they can't both be accurate complaints. Either we've got cheap renewables and we don't need to research cheap renewables any more or they're not cheap and we must continue. But we simply cannot be where we've achieved our goal and we must still research how to achieve our goal.

This is an absurdly stupid complaint about in work poverty here

This particular complaint should be met with an angry shout of "What the hell did you think was going to happen anyway?" quite possibly with a few cuffs around the ears to encourage thought:

A record 60% of British people in poverty live in a household where someone is in work, according to researchers, with the risk of falling into financial hardship especially high for families in private rented housing.

No, that's not it, this is:

Low pay is a trigger for in-work poverty but the primary determinant is the number of workers in a household, with single-earner families at a very significantly elevated risk of hardship, the study says.

So what the hell else did anyone think was going to happen?

Sigh.

We measure poverty as being below 60% of median household income (and then in various forms, before and after housing costs, disposable income, before and after tax and benefits and so on). We adjust for the size of the household, the number of adults - but not for the number of earners. The median UK household has two earners in it. Thus single earner households are much more likely to be in poverty simply because of the way we measure it, comparing single earner household incomes to that median of dual.

The result is built into our measurement system. We could not reach any other result given that measurement system.

Imagine, just as an example, that the second adult went out to work and the household then spent upon paid child care. As many have actually noted the extra earnings from that second job only just about cover those child care costs. The household isn't any better off. But by our poverty measure that household isn't going to be in poverty any more as a result of two earnings not one.

We must always, but always, remember that we do not actually have any poverty in the UK. That, the absolute poverty, was beaten back in the 1930s. What we have and what we measure today is inequality, the thing we call relative poverty. And if we don't remember this then we're going to be making mistakes similar to the one above.

Single earner households have lower earnings that dual earning ones. Blimey, that's a bit of a surprise, innit?

Economics has moved on, but the law hasn't

In Britain, manufacturers and suppliers can recommend prices to retailers, but they can't enforce those prices through a contract. Retail price maintenance (RPM) has been banned outright since 1964's Resale Prices Act on the grounds that it's anti-competive and hurts consumers. The problem is economics has moved on, but the law hasn't.

That's not the case in the US where the Supreme Court overturned a near hundred year precedent in 2007 to rule that suppliers that set minimum prices weren't necessarily undermining a competitive marketplace. In the US the practice was banned through the courts based on the best available economic theory and evidence. But when new theory and more importantly new data overturned the economic consensus the courts (eventually) took note.

The Competitions and Markets Authority (the regulator tasked with enforcing the law) states that "RPM agreements are usually unlawful because they prevent you (the retailer) from offering lower prices". It's a bit more complicated in reality: suppliers have little incentive to increase their retailer's markup at the expense of their consumers, especially in the face of competition from other brands. It wouldn't be wise for Coca Cola to set a minimum price that boosts Asda and Tesco's bottom lines when they face competition from Pepsi.

Most economists accept that RPM agreements can potentially undermine competition for two main reasons – exclusion and collusion. They make it easier to police collusive agreements at both the manufacturer's and the retailer's level. It might also enable a dominant but inefficient retailer prevent other more efficient retailers from undercutting them with smaller mark-ups.

If that was the only reason to employ an RPM agreement, then banning them would make sense. In fact since the practice was outlawed economists have discovered additional explanations for why a firm might employ an RPM agreement and why it is in the consumer's interest to let them.

To begin with, a range of products from high-end fashion to digital cameras and phones typically require retailers to invest substantial effort in hiring staff to explain and promote their features to customers. This doesn't come cheap. It means hiring more staff, training them and paying them more. That squeezes margins and pushes up prices in store. But a consumer is under no obligation to buy from the retailer who's put the effort in. No-frills retailers can free-ride off the effort of other retailers in promoting the product and sell it at a discount. The threat of free-riding discourages firms from investing in promoting the product and leads to a worse customer experience with less well-informed customers.

Think of a car dealer offering test drives with well-trained staff offering detailed explanations of the vehicle; the incentive to provide those services falls if the buyer has the option of going to a discount retailer afterwards.

If manufacturers agreed a minimum price with their retailers they could prevent no-frills discount stores from undercutting and free riding off of the ones that invested in promoting the product.

But it's not simply blocking free-riders. It also helps resolve a conflict between the incentives of retailers and manufacturers. Retailers have much less to gain than the supplier from promotional services. Retailers tend to make a greater investment attracting customers to their store over other shops, for instance by extending opening hours. If I ran an electronics shop, I might reward repeat customers to attract more customers from other shops. However, I'd have less of an incentive to invest in promoting Apple Macs by displaying them prominently, offering free installation and bundling in products as a special offer, because while I'll sell more Apple Macs I might sell fewer PCs.

It's true that manufacturers could simply pay retailers for floorspace. As UCLA's Benjamin Klein points out Gucci could simply pay a department for their product to be placed in a prominent place, but that would inefficient for a number of reasons. First, the value of floorspace varies from shop to shop. It'd be inefficient for Gucci to go to a great length at determining the value of floorspace in each different shop to them. Second, retailers tend to know better than manufacturers how to market products. Gucci might struggle to specify the exact promotional services that they want the department store to carry out. It is better for Gucci to solve that knowledge problem by creating a financial incentive for shop to push for further sales. Instead of this inefficient duplication of efforts they can just make sure that retailers have a financial incentive to market their products through a bigger markup.

Whether or not America or Britain's approach to RPM is right depends on how often RPM is used to boost competition and how often it's used to suppress competion. If it's the case that RPM is mostly used to police cartels and for dominant dealers to throw their weight around then the UK's approach is right.

But multiple meta-analyses of prosecuted cases of RPM find few cases of it being used to police cartels. Ippolito (1991) reviewed 203 litigated cases of RPM and found that just 13% of case alleged (not proved) horizontal price-fixing, while many more offered evidence suggesting the agreements led to better customer service. Ippolito's review backed up previous research by Overstreet (1983) which found that RPM agreements tended to appear in markets with little scope for either retailer or manufacturer collusion.

A more recent meta-analysis by LaFontaine and Slade (2005) which reviewed 23 papers came to a similar conclusion. They stated:

"...when manufacturers choose to impose such restraints, not only do they make themselves better off, but they also typically allow consumers to benefit from higher quality products and better service provision.

...

The evidence thus supports the conclusion that in these markets, manufacturer and consumer interests are apt to be aligned, while interference in the market is accomplished at the expense of consumers."

The evidence against banning RPM is overwhelming and on the strength of that evidence the US Supreme Court overturned the outright ban on RPM in 2007 moving to a rule of reason approach which requires firms to prove that RPM was being used for the purposes of undermining competition.

Promoting and preserving competition benefits consumers, but too often regulation rules out innovative solutions to potential market failures. Let's fix that and deregulate RPM.

Adam Smith - the most feminist man ever

Yes, you're right, of course that headline is a deliberately provocative piece of hyperbole. And yet it is indeed true that Smith described at least the most feminist of all socio-economic systems, that of roughly free market roughly capitalism. For that is the only system of organisation which has ever lifted mankind out of Malthusian growth. 

At which point this new book looks like a waste of valuable space and time:

Does capitalism help or hurt women is an enduring question. And one that a fascinating book, Capitalism, For and Against: a Feminist Debate (Cambridge University Press), seeks to answer that question.

There is the ritual mention of the fall in child mortality made but not enough is made of the full horror of that past. At which point Don Boudreaux mentions Queen Anne:

 A high-born English royal in the early modern era – a woman who was for twelve years Queen of what was by then one of the wealthiest nations on earth – died as a widow in 1714 at the age of 49 without a single surviving child despite giving birth ten times.  (Each of her other seven pregnancies ended in a miscarriage.)  Anne’s longest-surviving child was Prince William, Duke of Gloucester, who in 1700 died at the age of 11.

Anne’s sad fate was unusually bad even for her era, and especially for her class. 

Yes, at the bad end of the spectrum. Yet when we examine all the Stuart and Hanoverian Kings/Queens of England we find that absolutely none of them had all children surviving into adulthood. For many not even a majority of pregnancies led to a child even, rather than a baby and then nothing.

The aim and point of any form of life is of course that the life itself replicates down the generations. And for human beings, until very recently, that meant that in order to have a good chance of grandchildren a woman would be pregnant or nursing from marriage until menopause. If she survived that grueling duty of course, or if her fertility did. And that is the greatest achievement of the surplus that this capitalist free marketry has brought.

Today an odds on chance of grandchildren, a stable population, is achieved with 2.1 completed pregnancies per woman. Rather than the 10 and 20 needed by the British royal family of only two and three centuries ago. And if that ain't a feminist advance then what is?

Smith may only have described the system which achieved this but there's no doubt at all in our minds that this capitalist free marketry is the most feminist socio-economic system devised as yet.

Poor Greece, the fat lady ain't singing yet

As with the opera not being over until the Fat Lady has sung about her youth, beauty and slenderness the Greek debt saga is not going to end until the one important decision is taken - how much debt should Greece repay? We've been making this point for a number of years now in a number of venues. There is just this one question that must be answered:

Policymakers were still in disagreement this weekend over assumptions about Greece’s long-term growth trajectory, and the ability of the country to maintain a sizeable primary surplus over the medium term.

Countries such as Germany believe stronger growth in Greece will remove the need for debt relief, with the country’s expansion alone enough to reduce its debt burden to sustainable levels.

However, the International Monetary Fund has called for more conservative estimates of growth and primary surpluses, insisting that it will not join Greece’s €86bn (£74bn)  third bail-out package unless there was meaningful debt relief.

A simple truth about our universe is that debts which cannot be repaid will not be repaid. Thus putting rather a large weight upon the definition of "cannot." Which is where the disagreement is here.

The IMF thinks that Greece can run a primary budget surplus (the primary meaning before interest and debt repayment, the implication being this is the amount that can be used to pay down debt) of 1.5% of GDP for some decades. Run that forward and that means Greece can repay some portion but not all of the current debt. 

Everyone else is a politician and a politician quite aware of the fact that they've lent their voters' funds to Greece. And they'd just hate for said electorate to find out that they've lost that money by so lending it. So they've cut the interest rate to near nothing (a few basis points over the ECB's current QE influenced very low rates on much of it) and extended repayment out towards the end of the century. Losing money through opportunity cost, inflation and interest not paid is less politically painful than cutting the capital sum. Even the dimmest voter on the Chemnitz Omnibus would cotton on to the loss if there was a reduction in the outstanding sum.

But this still leaves them coming up short - unless Greece runs a primary surplus of 3.5% of GDP. So, that's the demand. Not what can Greece achieve, but what must Greece achieve to save political positions? 

Which is where the problem is. No democratic system can run a primary surplus of that size over time. It can be done for a year or two but sending that much of the economy off to foreigners just isn't going to happen over the long term. The only person we know of who did manage it was Ceausescu in Romania and they machine gunned him and his wife in the end.

The IMF is correct here but then this is Europe, political desires do so often seem to win out over economic reality. But that's why the whole thing is still rumbling on after all of these years. And it will continue to do so too. Until that basic truth is recognised by all, debts that cannot be repaid will not.

But what's actually wrong with Facebook and data?

There's obviously something we've missed in this argument about Facebook and the other internet giants and their collection and manipulation of our data. The specific fine handed out this past week we're just fine with. Facebook was more than a little economical with the actualite to the regulators over its capabilities and intentions. Whether there should be such regulators we think doubtful but if there are going to be then they should indeed be told the truth. It's like the courts and perjury and contempt - these are very serious crimes on the grounds that if we're going to have courts then people must take them seriously and also tell them the truth.

So with regulators, this is a rule of law matter. However, he larger issue here is something we've missed:

Equipping competition law for the formidable task of properly tackling data-rich behemoths is a fertile area of research and policy, but still awaits enforcement. Challenges include market definition, accurately valuing data assets and dealing with the particular modes of virtual competition.

If the value of data were more appropriately considered, the commission might not have waved through the Facebook/WhatsApp merger so easily.

We're not even understanding the concern here. The data, to the individual, isn't worth a great deal. That's why they're willing to hand it over in order to share cat pictures. The individual pieces of data are worth nothing. It's only the information, in aggregate, and when processed, that has any value. And that's what Facebook really is, an aggregator and processor of such information. That's the function of the beast, so why people are worrying about something doing what it says on the tin we're really just not sure.

We assume this is just the usual about people doing something new and damn it, they're Americans, so we had better stop them. 

If we are really to change the dynamics of the modern data economy, it is going to take more than just targeted arrows and small-fry fines.

Again, we're missing this. Was there a meeting at some point, one we weren't invited to, which decided that the dynamic must be changed? If so, what was the justification? That they're Americans or something useful?

Although we think we do understand this bit:

For the future to offer anything more than resignation to the power of Facebook and its ilk requires dedicated finance for sustainable, civic-oriented technology, strategies to incentivise growth and for people to vote with their feet. How many lies will it take until we hit that point with Facebook?

Yes, we get this bit:

Dr Julia Powles researches technology law and policy at Cornell Tech and at the University of Cambridge

Give my department a big grant please.

Other than that, what actually is the problem that is being complained about?