My regular Sunday piece of interesting, longer, deeper stories I found during the week. It’s also a chance for you to share what you found this week too. Those stimulating links you wanted to share, but just didn’t fit in anywhere (no linkwhoring). This week: taxes and growth, foreign wars and the quality of MPs.
But first for something completely different: The Ig Nobels are out. These fabulous awards for research ‘that makes you laugh and then makes you think’ include this year: the prize for physics for work on the forces that determine how a ponytail is shaped and moves; the prize for medicine for work on how to minimise patients exploding during colonoscopies; the prize for anatomy for finding out that chimpanzees can recognise other individuals from photos of their rear ends; and the prize for fluid dynamics for working out why your coffee spills while you walk…
Onto more serious topics, and in the wake of Romney’s 47% speech, here’s the data on who doesn’t pay US income tax – millionaires, retirees, the military on active service, and those working on very low incomes… As well as a question asking why when they’ve never had it so good, the rich are so damn angry? And you know you want it: yet another study showing that cutting tax rates doesn’t boost economic growth.
Over in Britain they’re asking why the boss doesn’t work for a salary – with yet more evidence between the disconnection between pay and performance: both in practice and in motivation. The boss only cares that he’s being paid as well as the next boss, not the actual figure, and he cares more about his salary than his bonus, whether he gets it or not. Which he invariably does, even when the company’s going down the tubes…
Over in Germany, they’re asking if they even need growth at all, as major thinkers realise it’s impossible and are willing to say so. Better to not destroy the planet in pursuit of an impossible dream: Angela Merkel take note.
To go further afield, Syria continues, with the latest dispatches of bombings of civilians by government planes quite distressing – this seems an intractable war. Speaking of intractable wars, a Vietnam vet sees that all the lessons of counter-insurgency from that conflict have been lost, and the US is committing the same mistakes again in Iraq and Afghanistan. If the local government is corrupt and not bothered about winning its people over, nothing you do is going to make a difference.
Finally onto MPs: Sue Kedgley says “It’s no wonder we don’t trust our MPs.” But David Blunkett over in the UK points out that you may hate them, but it’s still better we have politicians than faceless bureaucrats running the place.
And as a politician who doesn’t get a lot of profile, here’s Rajen Prasad comparing the quality of Labour private members bills (Marriage Equality, minimum wage, holidays, etc) to National ones (small arcane law tidy-ups that won’t affect anyone). You need to skip about 1/3 of the way in to get past the preamble…
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