Or, the coming debate on moral incidence of taxes

You're going to hear a lot about the triumph of injustice in the next 6-12 months. Or rather, you're going to hear a lot about The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay, by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman (2019).

For one thing, the two economists have signed on as economic advisors to 2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, who has for years been putting questions of economics and notions of justice front-and-center. But more generally, economic justice is having a moment, and I prophesy that you'll hear more about it before you hear less.

So this is my first real attempt to understand exactly what kind of moment it is, in the best way I know how -- by writing. Specifically, by writing a review that unpacks TToI for non-economists. (I am an economist, but not the kind that helps p— I mean, not a macroeconomist. I have macro­economists in my blogroll; that's my primary qualification here.)

One note before we begin: I really don't want to wade into the Economics-Twitter debate about academic standards and practices that arose around the publication of TToI, when review copies were circulated to journalists before economists, and the data tables were delayed from the book release by a few weeks. I think that that discussion of Saez and Zucman's work is framed to produce heat rather than light, and I'm not particularly interested.

So we start the discussion with what we know now, setting aside the question of how we got here. Go somewhere else if you want

If you hadn't heard: A group that was almost certainly Russian military intelligence stole almost 20,000 emails from the DNC and Wikileaks published them on Saturday. Personally, I doubt that there's anything in them, but---

---what's that?---

---they're literally the smoking gun of a plot to steal the nomination for Hillary Cl---

---no, no, I'm certain that they're not---

---um---

---okay, okay, I'll take a look and see what's there. Here we go.

(1a)

Before we do this, I want you to ask yourself what you expect to find in the emails. Obviously you clicked this link because you expected to say something bad. I expected them to show bad things happening. Some of the bad things that I expected were there, some weren't, and there were some bad things that I hadn't expected.

But, just as an exercise, write down a list of things that you expect to find in the very worst of those 20,000 emails. Hard evidence of primary-rigging? Wink-wink references to "Plan H"? Gleeful gloating at Bernie's downfall? PG-13 language? Plots about new ways to insult Donald Trump?

We'll check back in at the end to compare your predictions to reality.

In a conversation with an acquaintance about the political ethics of voting for Jill Stein, I realized that I had very little idea what the Green Party stood for. (Um...the environment?) So I spent a few hours today reading the Green Party platform. I can't say it was an exciting experience, but now at least I feel like I have some sense of what it means to be Green. I liked a good deal of what I read, but in the end, there were a few things that I just couldn't stomach.

(1)

1. There's actually a good deal to like about the Green platform. It's pro-UBI, (mostly) pro-immigration, pro-space, pro-Land Value Tax, and generally promotes its environmental agenda through disincentive taxes, rather than hard regulation. These are pretty incredible ideas, and I'd be overjoyed to see any of them move into the Overton Window of American politics in the near future. Good on the Greens for getting behind them.

Also in the list of good -- though less revelatory -- ideas are pro-LGBT, anti-prohibition, anti-incarceration, and pro-infrastructure planks.

2. There's a great deal more cloying utopianism that doesn't even mean anything on a policy level. There are pages upon pages that just read like "...and we will have better schools, and we will have stronger communities,

(1)

Political betting site PredictIt offers everyone the ability to (legally) bet (real money) on the outcome of political events. For example:

You can pay 39¢ for a Yes share in BUSH.RNOM16, which will be worth $1 if Jeb Bush wins the Republican nomination, and $0 if he does not. Similarly, you can pay 63¢ for a No share in BUSH.RNOM16, which will be worth $0 if he wins and $1 otherwise. (Another way to think about this is that you can sell a Yes share for 37¢ or buy one for 39¢. These numbers are different for pretty much the same reason that you can't sell your used textbooks back to Amazon for the full price you paid.)

If you have a strong information that Bush is, say, 50% likely to win, then you might buy a lot of Yes shares, and therefore drive the price up. In this way, the market records a sort of weighted-vote among the people willing to bet on the site -- the fact that it's stabilized at 37¢–39¢ should mean, in an efficient market, that all participants agree that the probability that he wins is above 37% and below 39%. If they disagreed, they could make money in expectation by betting their beliefs, which would move (or at least widen) the market.

(a)

Open borders? No, that's a ... proposal ... which says essentially there is no United States...

It would make everybody in America poorer -- you're doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don't think there's any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help [our] poor people. What some people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs...

I think from a moral responsibility we've got to work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the problems of international poverty, but you don't do that by making people in this country even poorer.

(b)

"I want people taken care of in the country, okay? You can call it anything you want, but I want -- including people that don’t have anything," he told radio host John Fredericks in an interview Wednesday. "We gotta do that."

(1)

Now: of (A) and (B), which was said by Donald Trump, and which was said by Bernie Sanders?

Well, if you pattern-matched "liberal" to "nice guy" and "conservative" to "evil", you were wrong (as I'm sure you found out when

(0a)

Scott Alexander, writing at Slate Star Codex, has some words:

So presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has proposed universal free college tuition.

On the one hand, I sympathize with his goals. If you can’t get any job better than 'fast food worker' without a college degree, and poor people can’t afford college degrees, that’s a pretty grim situation, and obviously unfair to the poor.

...

But, well, when we require doctors to get a college degree before they can go to medical school, we’re throwing out [$5 billion], enough to house all the homeless people in the country... Senator Sanders admits that his plan would cost $70 billion per year. That's... enough to give $2000 every year to every American in poverty.

At what point do we say "Actually, no, let's not do that, and just let people hold basic jobs even if they don't cough up a a hundred thousand dollars from somewhere to get a degree in Medieval History"?

...

If I were Sanders, I'd propose a different strategy. Make "college degree" a protected characteristic, like race and religion and sexuality. If you’re not allowed to ask a job candidate whether they’re gay, you’re not allowed to ask them whether they’re a college graduate or not. You can give them all sorts of examinations, you can ask them their high school grades and SAT scores, you can ask their work history, but if you ask them if they have a degree then that’s illegal class-based discrimination and you’re going to jail. I realize this is a blatant violation of my