Originally published at the Tax Justice Network
In edition 69 of our monthly podcast, the September 2017 Taxcast we look at our over-reliance on unhelpful economic measures like Gross Domestic Product and how it constrains us. Also:
- we discuss hurricanes, tax havens and disaster capitalism
- the bitcoin bubble – China may be closing its doors on it for the moment but tax havens like Switzerland are very interested…
Featuring: John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network and Professor of Political Arithmetic at University of Amsterdam, Daniel Mugge. Produced and presented by Naomi Fowler for the Tax Justice Network.
“If you use GDP as it’s currently measured in order to strengthen your economy, you’ll make choices that if you look at it closer, actually don’t make sense.”
“Because it’s been able to earn a lot of money the financial sector may show up as something that’s contributing positively to GDP and that seems like a serious mischaracterisation of how positive or otherwise the financial sector is for our individual countries.”
Professor of Political Arithmetic at University of Amsterdam, Daniel Mugge
“The last thing the world needs at the moment is an anti-government group of bitcoin suppliers and users who think it’s a good thing to operate beyond democratic or legal scrutiny.”
John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network
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2 comments
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If you think about it, the biggest metric that is not helpful to Americans is the stock market’s performance.
Over 80% of stocks are held by the top 10%:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/02/perspective-on-the-stock-market-rally-80-of-stock-value-held-by-top-10/
The reason why I say that is because the score of the Dow and the Nasdaq are often used as a metric for economic health.
What really should be used, in my opinion is:
1. Whether or not wages rose faster than living costs (the CPI is very inadequate)
2. How many people are undermployed, unemployed, or discouraged searchers who are out of the labor force
3. If productivity rose, whether or not real wages rose the same amount
4. Other living standards, such as health
I think that if we used these metrics, we’d come to the conclusion that the US is doing poorly indeed.
We are in a ‘RENT extracting Economy’ It all depends upon, which’ end’ you have achieved,the collector of the rent or the payer!
rest irrelevant!