One can conceive of pushing back general government, in fact the whole public sector, into their component households. They would form a vast subset of the set of households. These would be the households fed by government payrolls. As opposed to, say, a household which drew its income from employ in the private sector. So in reality one can in fact reduce the entire task of social accounting to that for a single sector-the household sector.
So that is the top break for the entire spreadsheet. One column per household. Row wise Assets, Liabilities and Net Worth. This would complete the simulacrum of homo economicus.
AT&T CEO’s pay jumps 35 percent to $20.3 million in 2009
from Macworld by Ann Bednarz
*** begin quote ***
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson’s stock awards fell 8 percent in 2009, but he earned a cash bonus of $5.85 million that helped increase his total compensation by 35 percent.
*** end quote ***
Corporations are are a gooferment creation. So, needless to say, they are screwed up.
It’s unseemly for ANY corporation employee to have a salary greater than that of the President.
The gooferment’s creation fails to align the interest of the owners and the employees.
The gooferment could correct that error with five year stock options as the manner of executive compensation. Or maybe, a mix of options that vest from 10 to 50 years? With a sliding scale, weighted towards the middle?
That could be done with the stroke of a pen.
If I was “king”, I’d have the “Sheriff of Nottingham” (aka the IRS) audit any company that pays salaries greater than that of the Prez.
How fast could things change?
How many lobbyists and politicians would have their pockets stuffed with cash to kill this?
HR 3590 has passed, 219 to 212. Now comes the Motion to Recommit. That’s not expected to derail the process, but might slow it down. And then the vote on the ‘reconciliation’ amendments in HR 4872.
Everyone is getting their shot at a Philip Blond point right now: the Brooks column, Deneen and Rod the Bod after the Tocqueville Forum event last night, The Immanent Frame. So, as I frequently ask myself, why not me?
In a moment of many voices, I will say but a few sentences. Blond identifies himself with the Distributists, which is a sometimes obscure reference for Americans, even among some traditional conservatives. And that’s because Distributism is not dealing quite so explicitly with a tradition being lost, so much as an alternative form of development – accepting historical change, but insisting that it must be steered in a certain way. Much as I like Chesterton and Belloc, my thoughts here drift toward E.F. Schumacher, whose Small is Beautiful was a minor milestone in “Third way” thinking.
Schumacher’s focus, and Blond’s, is that the physical community is a spiritual one, and that our spiritual future must be a relational future. This further reminds me of the ideals of Renaissance civic humanism, which took a medieval/classical ideal of a state that is good for its people, and began to think again about what this meant for the causes of virtue within it, eventually drawing deep conclusions about participation in the political process for the everyday man.
The problematic issue with civic humanism, and I think Red Toryism, is defining the point at which the community should no longer be politicized. Most of us think communities can and should be stronger, and if they are going to be politicized – ie organized into self-identifying polity, capable of decision-making - then it seems quite humane to do so in a very local way. Indeed, participatory citizenship, even to a small polity, bestows a sense of ownership as well as an enhanced awareness of the community. Great all around. But the spiritual identity of men is more complex than a mere zoon politikon. To what extent must we be satisfied with apolitical relationships, and when can even local politics overrun natural relations with institutionalized ones? These are questions the Red Tory in all of us should deal with … when it does become more of a reality.
Externalities (spillover effects) are common in virtually every area of economic activity. Externalities occur when firm or people impose costs or benefits outside the market place. External cost and benefits together are called externalities.
External cost are said to be the negative externalities and external benefits are said to be positive externalities. External cost is the uncompensated cost n individual or the firm imposes on the other; the best example for external cost or negative externalities is the environment cost of the pollution. The external benefits are the benefits the individual or firm gives to others without receiving any compensation in returns, the best example for positive externality or external benefit is the national defense provided to protect the freedom of everyone, even if one wants or not irrespective of whether one is paying for it or not and commodity available from public distribution system. The government should be more concerned about the negative externalities.
The government should be more concerned about the negative externalities. They are defined as third party effects arising from production and or consumption of goods and services for which no appropriate compensation is paid. The study of externalities by economists has been more in the recent years after the link between the economy and environment became strong.
Externalities create divergence between private and social cost, e.g. costs of pollution is not included in the cost of production of the factory, which is creating the pollution; but it is included in the social cost as the community has to bear the cost in some way or the other. Thus the social cost in this case is greater than the private cost.
Social cost = private cost + private cost
A chemical factory throwing out a lot of chemical waste in the nearby river killing the fish and making the water unhealthy for use, refineries pollute the air and paint industry creating bad odour, creating respiratory track infections and other diseases to all the people living in the area around the factories. These negative externalities will increase the social cost as the cost on the clean up and health will increase. External cost due to traffic jams, an individual deciding to go for a drive in the peak hours and increasing the travel time of the other drivers are all negative externalities.
We already have discussed about investment function and capital expenditure in our previous post. Now, the blog will discuss about all aspect of business and economics.
Fully 2.5 billion of the world’s adults don’t use banks or microfinance institutions to save or borrow money, but unserved doesn’t mean unservable.
Pointers:
• Fully 2.5 billion of the world’s adults don’t use formal banks or semiformal microfinance institutions to save or borrow money.
• Nearly 2.2 billion of these unserved adults live in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.
• Unserved, however, does not mean unservable.
• The microfinance movement, for example, has long helped expand credit use among the world’s poor—reaching more than 150 million clients in 2008 alone.
• Approximately 1.2 billion adults in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East who use formal or semiformal credit or savings products, about 800 million live on less than $5 a day.
• Large unserved populations represent opportunities for institutions that are able to offer an innovative range of high-quality, affordable financial products and services.
• With the right financial education and support to make good choices, lower-income consumers will benefit from credit, savings, insurance, and payments products that help them invest in economic opportunities, better manage their money, reduce risks, and plan for the future.
Two areas of endeavor have caught my interest as obvious examples of systems that are broken and in need of fixing. Regarding the first – healthcare — I’ve basically stuck my head in the sand and ignored it, leaving that issue and related debates to others better qualified to coax coherence out of complexity. The second – the recording industry – I’ve blogged about directly and indirectly over time.
As currently practiced in the U.S., the healthcare industry is on a collision course with insolvency. Already, tens of millions of people lack coverage, and those with coverage are either being squeezed by increased premiums accompanied by automatic claim refusals and/or are forced into bankruptcy when a major medical problem arises. The details of healthcare reform change daily, but reform of this particular industry is something that only government can do. Left to their own devices, the inextricably entwined healthcare and insurance industries simply cannot fix themselves while perverse incentives continue to corrupt the services rendered and cause costs to spiral without improvement in outcomes. Yet members of the Tea Party movement advocate against self-interest, seeing in the spectre of government interference an evil worse than, for instance, a total lack of preretirement healthcare benefits. Many of these people are retirees already enjoying the benefits of Medicaid and Medicare. Their intransigence about reform, even if it’s only step 1 in a multistep process, boggles the mind.
In contrast, this article by Miles Raymer in the Chicago Reader is notable for the author’s admission that he has changed his mind about free file sharing, which he now disparagingly calls freeloading. The business model that had served the recording industry for decades, based on intellectual property rights (specificaly, copyright) recognized for centuries, has been wrecked by file sharing made easy by modern technology. “Fine,” thought Raymer (and many others), “we’ll just figure out a different was of making money to support the creative impulse.” Several years into that experiment, he now recognizes new sources of revenue don’t simply spring magically into existence in the wake of the destruction of old ones. Any number of people could have told him that, but I surmise he was only able to learn that lesson the hard way. Until then, he happily advocated against self-interest, willingly giving away the fruits of his labor. Put another way, he embraced the demise of the music industry as the result of file sharing with the rose-hued optimism often called creative destruction.
HR 3590 has passed, 219 to 212. Now comes the Motion to Recommit. That’s not expected to derail the process, but might slow it down. And then the vote on the ‘reconciliation’ amendments in HR 4872.