The real numbers
Who are the entrepreneurs- what percentage of socirty become entrepreneurs? Which entrepreneurs have changed the world- Gates, Bezos, Jobs, Huang,Zuckerberg, the Youtube 3, the Paypal mafia, the Collison brothers. What about the luxury firms, LVMH?
Which of these contributes more to human wellbeing? Is it possible to measure this?
What are the real issues of society?
Rape, theft, violence, corruption, poverty, homelessness?
Or the perception of crime?
Or hate? Of course, in a perfect world there would be no hate, malice, envy, jealousy, malevolence or indeed, violence and crime against humans or animals but we have to try to crawl slowly towards progress in these areas- overnight solutions are just not possible.
see how do rich people stay rich
Here’s George Orwell on Hate and Thought Crime
“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp. Thus, at one moment Winston's hatred was not turned against Goldstein at all, but, on the contrary, against Big Brother, the Party, and the Thought Police; and at such moments his heart went out to the lonely, derided heretic on the screen, sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies. And yet the very next instant he was at one with the people about him, and all that was said of Goldstein seemed to him to be true.”
“He discovered that while he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic action. And it was no longer the same cramped, awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals —
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
over and over again, filling half a page.
He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was absurd, since the writing of those particular words was not more dangerous than the initial act of opening the diary, but for a moment he was tempted to tear out the spoiled pages and abandon the enterprise altogether.
He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was useless. Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed — would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper — the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
Here’s Joan Smith writing about the new Hate Crime in Scotland:
“In normal circumstances, people tend to know whether or not they’ve committed a crime. That’s no longer the case in Scotland, however, where the effects of a poorly-drafted piece of legislation are already being felt. Since Monday — April Fools’ Day, appropriately enough — no one can say with any certainty whether they’ve committed an offence under the SNP’s new hate crime law. They don’t even know whether a “non-crime hate incident” (NCHI) has been recorded against them, affecting their chances of future employment or their ability to volunteer for a good cause.
The Hate Crime and Public Order Act has created a vague criminal offence of “stirring up of hatred”, with stiffer sentences if the offence involves prejudice on the basis of age, disability, religion, sexual orientation or transgender identity. Earlier this week the First Minister, Humza Yousaf, claimed it was needed to deal with a “rising tide of hatred” in Scotland and across the world, although the latter regrettably falls outside his remit. Ministers often cite “hate crimes” against trans people as a reason why the new law is needed, yet Scotland’s official figures tell a different story. Recorded hate crimes in this category have decreased dramatically, from a high of 86 in 2021/22 to 55 the following year.
What the Act has done is create opportunities for anyone who wants to settle a score or make trouble for a public figure. Almost 4,000 complaints were received by the police in the first 24 hours, many of them targeting the novelist J.K. Rowling, who challenged the legislation with a thread on X describing 10 trans women as men. The Scottish Tories estimate that 1.4 million complaints could be made under the new Act in the next 12 months, many of them anonymous.
In a rather delicious development, complaints about Rowling were outnumbered by complaints against Yousaf — who steered the legislation through Holyrood when he was Justice Minister — in relation to a speech he made about race in 2020. Police Scotland swiftly announced that Rowling’s posts on X did not meet the criminal threshold under the new Act, while it said that complaints against Yousaf had been investigated at the time and dismissed.
But their acknowledgement that an NCHI has not been recorded in either case exposes glaring inconsistencies — and apparent political bias — in the way the law is applied. A Conservative MSP, Murdo Fraser, is threatening legal action against Police Scotland after discovering the force has logged an NCHI against him.
Fraser’s “offence” was sharing a post on X that ridiculed the Scottish government’s “non-binary action plan”, suggesting that “identifying” as non-binary is “as valid as choosing to identify as a cat”. The discrepancy has prompted an accusation by the SNP MP, Joanna Cherry KC, that Police Scotland is revising policy “on the hoof” to avoid the embarrassment of recording an NCHI against a famous author and philanthropist.
The police says every report will be investigated, taking up time that could be devoted to actual crimes. In Edinburgh 80% of burglaries are unsolved, while rape reports reached a new high in Scotland in 2022/23, yet officers are now apparently expected to respond to every complaint about hurt feelings. This looks very much like a politicised police force, forced into a position where it has to pander to the demands of busybodies and extremists. The only answer is to repeal.”
Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She has been Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board since 2013. Her book Homegrown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists was published in 2019.
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see also millions and billions
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Eat the rich
extract from the Economist
Limitarianism. By Ingrid Robeyns. Astra House; 336 pages; $28. Allen Lane; £25
Enough. By Luke Hildyard. Pluto Press; 160 pages; $19.95 and £14.99
“The authors offer many reasons for loathing the loaded. They are bad for the environment, with their private jets and occasional holidays in space. They aggravate housing shortages by owning multiple homes. Some of them buy political influence. Some acquired their wealth corruptly. A pragmatist might tackle these problems directly, by taxing carbon emissions, allowing more homes to be built, tightening campaign-finance laws or cracking down on corruption. But for Ms Robeyns and Mr Hildyard, everything depends on cutting the rich down to size.”
But if she is serious when she says that $10m should be “as hard a limit as possible”, that implies something very close to a marginal tax rate of 100%.
Such a policy would provoke tax-avoidance on an epic scale. Brainy advisers would strain every synapse to help rich folk hide their wealth or shift it to friendlier jurisdictions. If, against the odds, a government managed to thwart such tricks, many rich folk would emigrate. And if governments all adopted similar wealth-banning policies and enforcement was tight, as the authors desire, the effects would be even worse.
Imagine a world where any gain above £180,000 a year, or $10m over a lifetime, was forfeit. Highly productive people—such as surgeons and engineers, never mind word wizards like J.K. Rowling—would have no financial incentive to keep working after that point was passed. Perhaps some would carry on toiling out of altruism or for the love of the job. But many would be tempted to kick back, relax and deprive the world of their exceptional skills, drive and imagination.
Consider, too, the incentives such a system would create for entrepreneurs. You have an idea for a better mousetrap. Under the old system, you might mortgage your house to raise cash to build a mousetrap factory, in the hope of making a fortune. Under the new system, you must shoulder the same risks (such as losing your home), for a small fraction of the rewards.
Potentially big ideas would stay small. Even if your mousetrap is so good that the world might reasonably be expected to beat a path to your door, it would be irrational to borrow money to expand production. The financial risks of trying to build a global business fall on you. The rewards go to someone else. Only a mug would take such a bet.
Or a politician, betting with other people’s money. Indeed, most ventures that required hefty capital upfront—from chip factories to offshore wind farms—would probably have to be owned or backed by the state. Since the record of state-run industries over the past century has been one of cronyism, sluggishness and inefficiency, this ought to have given the authors pause.
But in a study of 27 rich countries in 2017, Jacob Lundberg of Uppsala University in Sweden found that five (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland and Sweden) were already on the wrong side of the Laffer curve. That is, their top tax rates were so high—adding up to around 70% in Sweden, for example—that their governments would raise more money if they cut them.
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from Steve Jobs
https://x.com/JonErlichman/status/1777487661210460368
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from the Economist
American Kleptocracy. By Casey Michel. St Martin’s Press; 368 pages; $29.99. Scribe; £18.99
The Enablers. By Frank Vogl. Rowman & Littlefield; 216 pages; $32 and £25
“Measuring the private wealth parked in “secrecy jurisdictions” is, by definition, impossible. Estimates range from a few trillion dollars to $32trn. The proportion that is dodgy is also hard to estimate. At one extreme is perfectly legitimate money—personal funds seeking privacy, or cross-border joint-ventures using offshore structures for the purposes of neutrality. At the other is black cash, stashed in shell companies or trusts to mask corruption or launder drug money.”
“American regulators have long worried about the enablers, but thanks to effective lobbying they have managed to crawl through loophole after loophole. Estate agents, luxury-goods vendors and others, for instance, won “temporary” exemptions from the Patriot Act (a post-9/11 law with strong anti-money-laundering provisions), which then became permanent.”
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The real numbers- China
Evergrande
“HONG KONG (AP) — A Hong Kong court ordered China Evergrande, the world’s most heavily indebted real estate developer, to undergo liquidation following a failed effort to restructure $300 billion owed to banks and bondholders that fueled fears about China’s rising debt burden.
“It would be a situation where the court says enough is enough,” Judge Linda Chan said Monday. She said it was appropriate for the court to order Evergrande to wind up its business given a “lack of progress on the part of the company putting forward a viable restructuring proposal” as well as Evergrande’s insolvency.
China Evergrande Group is among dozens of Chinese developers that have collapsed since 2020 under official pressure to rein in surging debt the ruling Communist Party views as a threat to China’s slowing economic growth.
from https://apnews.com/article/china-evergrande-property-liquidation-order-7965ab1ec2f0208c53f9298daf8b9fd0
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Bank of Jiujiang, a mid-tier lender from a southern Chinese river town, imparted some bad news on March 19th. In a rare disclosure, it told investors profits for 2023 might fall by 30%, because of poorly performing loans.
A decade ago, instead of declaring the true size of their problems by identifying debts as “non-performing loans”, banks shoved them into other categories of assets, signalling to regulators that there remained a good chance borrowers would repay (in fact, many of the companies had gone bankrupt). In 2017 one of the NAFR’s predecessors began leaning on lenders to be more truthful. The result has been an outpouring of undesirable loans. Bank of Jiujiang’s bad loans, for instance, increased seven-fold between 2015 and late last year.
How much of this surge in activity can be trusted? Recognising and digesting bad debts is difficult. Discovering such lending weakens financial institutions’ balance-sheets since they are forced to use capital to provision for future bad debts, which in turn makes it harder for the government to direct financial support to favoured industries in pursuit of other policy goals. Some revelations will happen legitimately as local governments recapitalise banks, pumping in funds to enable them to continue to write off bad debts.
Others will happen via AMCs, and thus will only sometimes be legitimate. China created four centrally controlled AMCs decades ago to hoover up bad debts. They are now struggling. One needed a $6.6bn bail-out in 2021. Others are poorly capitalised and as a result buying fewer and fewer bad debts, even as banks crank out more. In 2016 the four state AMCs bought nearly 1trn yuan of about 1.5trn yuan in total non-performing loans. By 2022 their purchases came to less than 500bn yuan, despite bad debts rising to almost 3trn yuan.
In late January state media reported that three of them would be merged with China’s sovereign wealth fund. They have become distressed financial institutions in their own right and can hardly perform the debt clean-up work for which they were created.
from https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/03/27/chinas-banks-have-a-bad-debt-problem