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The Tax Advantage of Big Business: How the Structure of Corporate Taxation Fuels Concentration and Inequality
Get PDFCorporate concentration in the United States has been on the rise in recent years, sparking a heated debate about its causes, consequences, and potential remedies. This article examines a facet of public policy that has been neglected in the debate: corporate taxation. Developing the first empirical mapping of the effective tax rates of nonfinancial corporations disaggregated by size and broken down by jurisdiction, the article reveals a striking tax advantage for big business at home and abroad. The analysis goes on to show how persistent regressivity in the tax structure is bound up with the increasing relative power of large corporations within the corporate universe, as well as a shift in firm-level power relations. As large corporations become less disposed to investments that may indirectly benefit ordinary workers, they become more disposed to shareholder value enhancement that directly benefits the asset-rich. What this means is that the corporate tax structure is connected not only to rising corporate concentration but also to widening household inequality
Can the World Get Along Without Natural Resources?
Get PDFIn the distant future, aliens come to Earth. They find a planet devoid of life. Looking closer, the aliens see that life on Earth was once abundant, but was wiped out by a mass extinction. Curiously, this event was driven not by geological disaster, but by one of the extinct species itself. In an orgy of consumption, an odd little animal put the planet under enough stress to drive itself — and the rest of life — extinct.
Then comes a startling discovering. Preserved in the sediment lies a document written by a member of the doomed species. What secrets does it contain? The aliens work for years to translate it, hoping that it offers a clue about what drove the species to overconsume. And indeed it does. The document heralds a remarkable delusion: “The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources.”
What a naive animal, the aliens conclude. While sucking the planet dry, the animal proclaimed its independence from natural resources. No wonder it went extinct.
In this article, I discuss how economists reached such bizarre conclusions. And I offer some thoughts about the role that resources actually play in sustaining human societies
Supply and Demand Deconstructed
No full textPrices are caused by supply and demand, right? So say neoclassical economists. If you’ve bought their fairy tale, I recommend you watch the video below. In it, Jonathan Nitzan demolishes the neoclassical theory of prices. It’s a master lesson in how to deconstruct a theory
Can Capitalists Continue to Squeeze the Income Share of Employees?
Get PDFThere is much debate over the distributive share of employees in national income – how to measure it, whether it goes up or down and, of course, why it matters. But something in this debate often seems amiss. Like many aggregates, the national income share of employees is a synthetic measure. It’s made up of two largely unrelated entities – the relative number of employees in society and their relative individual income – and these two entities don’t have to move in the same direction. Indeed, in the United States they have trended in opposite directions for almost a century. In this short research note, which focuses on the United States, we examine these opposite movements, explain why they are important and suggest that, if they continue, the United States will be much more conflictual and crisis prone in the future than it is today
Rafine Edilmiş Güç: Bir Mücadele Alanı Olarak Erken Cumhuriyet Döneminde Şeker Şirketleri (Refined Power: Sugar Companies in the Early Republican Period as the Site of Contest)
Get PDFManuscripts Don't Burn
Get PDFFROM THE ARTICLE: The French Revolution changed the world. In the new order, the masters no longer need Monsieur Fouche and the thought police. They don’t need guillotines to clip brains and scissors to censor pamphlets. They don’t need strategic-studies institutes to manage oppression and navigate conflict. Instead, they prefer to subsidize ‘cultural pluralism’ and ‘critical studies’, support centres for democracy and privatization, and promote civil-society networks and global NGOs. They are no longer afraid of words. Or so we are told...
Reconsidering Systemic Fear and the Stock Market: A Reply to Baines and Hager
Get PDFA recent New Political Economy article by Baines and Hager (2020) critiqued Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan’s capital-as-power (CasP) model of the stock market (Bichler & Nitzan, 2016). Bichler and Nitzan’s model of the stock market seeks to explain how financial crises are tied to the (upper) limits of redistributing income through power. Bichler and Nitzan use American financial data to show that “U.S.-based capitalists” have risen to a great height of power, relative to the underlying population. This height also produces a “forward-looking” fear about the ability to accumulate even more (Bichler & Nitzan, 2016).
Baines and Hager took the important step of examining the CasP model with financial data from four other countries–France, Germany, Great Britain and Japan. They argue that these countries follow some of the patterns of the United States, but not all. These differences in patterns matter because Baines and Hager are curious to know how the CasP model of the stock market can function as a general model of capital accumulation at an international level.
This paper will respond to the part of Baines and Hager’s paper where they analyze “systemic fear” in the stock markets of France, Germany, Great Britain and Japan. It argues that Baines and Hager were perhaps too quick to dismiss systemic fear as a concept to study national and regional differences in international political economy. This concept is still in its infancy and, with more consideration, there are opportunities to investigate the characteristics of systemic fear. By re-examining systemic fear in twelve countries, this paper will show the potential for the concept of systemic fear to support the study of capitalist crisis and national diversity in capitalist development
An Evolutionary Theory of Resource Distribution
Get PDFThis paper explores how the evolution of human sociality can help us understand how we distribute resources. Using ideas from sociobiology, I argue that resource distribution is marked by a tension between two levels of natural selection. At the group level, selfless behavior is advantageous. But at the individual level, selfish behavior is advantageous. I explore how this tension affects the distribution of resources
Dematerialization Through Services: Evaluating the Evidence
Get PDFDematerialization through services is a popular proposal for reducing environmental impact. The idea is that by shifting from the production of goods to the provision of services, a society can reduce its material demands. But do societies with a larger service sector actually dematerialize? I test the ‘dematerialization through services’ hypothesis with a focus on fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions—the primary drivers of climate change. I find no evidence that a service transition leads to carbon dematerialization. Instead, a larger service sector is associated with greater use of fossil fuels and greater carbon emissions per person. This suggests that 'dematerialization through services’ is not a valid sustainability policy
Capitalists Contra Workers
No full textOver the past 139 years, the total return on U.S. equities (capital appreciation plus reinvested dividends) grew 905 times faster than the manufacturing wage rate