Here in the US, we only have downward class mobility, unless you are very, very clever, and continuously lucky, continuously reinvesting those gains from your cleverness into social and financial capital without making any ‘bad investments’, or ever having any sudden medical or financial disaster happen to you.

The studies you cite in your second comment don't support this. They show less class mobility in both directions.

That is a political decision and can be changed at will.

How do you propose taxing profits from other countries would work? Send the military in and take it by force? Ban the company from selling products in Germany unless they pay some arbitrary amount like North Korea? Do you pro-rata their global profits? How do you reconcile when some regions are more or less profitable than others? You imply something that is frankly crazy. Not even Zimbabwe tried anything like that, and they stole huge swathes of land and ended up with a starving population.

If it were that simple, Trump would not have had to threaten the G7 for an exception for his companies, he could just have withdrawn from the treaty.

That is exactly what he did. It's in the article. Please read it.

I am dismayed how they continue to poll. Most of their policies seem so common sense. I guess what rules NZ politics now is "will they make my house price go up?"

Exactly. That level of control scares me.

This has (((THE JEWS))) energy. “The right” doesn’t control your access to big booty mommy incest porn. PayPal is doing this because it looks bad when op-eds are published showing their network is used to purchase questionable content. It’s the reason Visa and Mastercard shut down PornHub.

This is why we need to foster the growth and adoption of cryptocurrencies like monero. The current payment providers are too big for their britches. They know customers don’t have any other choice.

The EU is investigating a digital euro, but you won’t be pleased to learn that one of the key reasons is to increase tracking and compliance. Meaning their stated goal is to be able to restrict how the currency is used, by who, when, and on what. The EU is the very last organisation to ever create and maintain an anonymous and agnostic currency. We have that already with monero.

No, land value tax. CGT hits all investments like start ups and enterprise. We want more of that, not less. Investment in land, on the other hand, is strangling the nation. Economically and socially. Land can’t be offshored or hidden in the Seychelles. Tax the shit out of land and watch house prices and rent tumble. It also encourages efficient use of land, meaning we see higher density housing close to industrial hubs. This means more affordable and more efficient public transport, and more people able to live closer to work.

Well, making necessities more expensive is difficult to sell no matter how it’s packaged. Like it or not, oil is used in everything from transporting food, to growing food, to medicine and supplements, to commuting for work, to home insulation and building, to iPhones and computers. Making those things more expensive, no matter the righteousness of the intention, hurts especially the working classes and the poor. Targeted subsidies to compensate them for their loss is impossible to fairly calibrate, and usually results in even greater political turmoil.

Carbon taxes can work if the country is wealthy and can afford the productivity loss (and the citizens are willing to give up that economic progress and wealth). Given the relatively small size of Australia, and the tiny reduction in global CO2 output relative to the exponentially higher output of China alone, I think most Australians believe the very small ecological benefits are vastly outweighed by the social and economic costs. Such a tax is political suicide right now. Making the cost of housing and transport and food more expensive given current geopolitical events would be highly irresponsible.

Yeah, those "kill switches" are marketed as being effective but they are imperfect. Same issues with Private Internet Access. They're probably good enough for most people for browsing the internet, but when torrenting, it takes just one TCP packet to give you away.

I live in Copenhagen. We have plenty. They're relatively expensive though, so obviously most bikes are not (yet) ebikes. We are also experiencing a bike theft epidemic, which discourages people from buying expensive bikes. Another factor is the country is flat as a pancake and the weather is rarely hot. It's much easier to get to work without working up a sweat on a regular bike. In fact, people often relish the ability to get some exercise in the morning and evening. Lastly, Copenhagen isn't very big. We don't have the same crazy distances seen in American cities.

The US is unarguably less meritocratic than the amalgamated EU by every possible metric… unless your conception of a ‘meritocracy’ is ‘you have to be a genius to even stand a chance at doing better than your parents, otherwise, all that matters is how much wealth you were born into.’

Okay but then how do you reconcile the study you presented with what you are arguing now? Either the study you cited above is poorly constructed and the results aren't reliable, or what you argue now is incorrect.

I think it's time to have a radical rethink of taxation, because this race to the bottom appears inevitable. We will never get every country to sign up to this, and in a world where profit is increasingly driven by IT services, it is easier than ever to domicile in a tax friendly country. I propose the following:

1. Institute a land value tax. This has many benefits but in the context of businesses, it is impossible to evade or avoid. Land can't be offshored or hidden in a the Seychelles.
2. Increase VAT. There is already a robust mechanism for collecting VAT derived from foreign companies. Increasing this tax is achievable and realistic.
3. Eliminate exemptions and tax breaks for personal capital gains and income.
4. Abolish corporate income taxes. These are generally already gamed to minimise booked profit. Eventually shareholders have to sell shares or draw down on OE. Tax this.

Not necessarily. If that were universally true, all multinational companies would have their seat in the country with the cheapest taxes, which they clearly do not. There are other factors. But yes, it’s one of them.

You're correct in that it's not universally true, but their premise is mostly accurate. Especially in a world which increasingly sees income generated by low-friction IT services. These can be easily relocated.

The global minimum tax isn’t that. It literally wouldn’t matter if the USA were in or out, because the broad global agreement means, if the Americans don’t collect the 15%, some other country can and will.

I'm not sure you understand how this tax treaty is intended to work, or in fact how income taxes work with regards to tax domiciles. Business tax is levied against profit accrued in the location in which the sale is ascribed. Microsoft can sell a German an Office license, and they are liable for zero tax on any profit if the sale is from the U.S. entity. However any products sold in Germany are liable for VAT, and that requires a tax presence. VAT is outside the scope of this tax treaty. It is concerned almost exclusively with tax on profit. By instituting a floor, it doesn't matter if Microsoft domiciles in Germany or Ireland. They're subject the same minimum taxation on profit. This avoids situations like the Double Irish Dutch Sandwich.

The user above is correct: if the U.S. won't impose a tax floor, companies can and will relocate their (at least for tax purposes), if their tax floor (including subsidies and exemptions) is lower.

My read on this is that the genetic component is much more significant in the US than in other places... because the US is significantly more economically stratified, nepotistic, and has a broken education system where rich idiots can get all the education they want, and skate by, but you basically have to be a diligent and lucky genius to escape poverty and the shit-tier education it has bestowed you with.

Thanks for the study. I will review in more detail. I don't agree with your conclusion here. Greater association between success and IQ, as we see in the U.S., would imply a higher degree of meritocracy. That is, more intelligent people are better able to break through class barriers due to their performance. This study implies that Europe is more hierarchically stratified, and that one's abilities are not enough to make any difference in success. To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if this were the case.

I know I can easily get hooked on those so I just avoid them. Games should work around my life, not the other way around. That's why I'm heavily into single player games now. I can hit pause whenever I like.

If Reddit ever disclosed how many "users" were bots, I'm quite confident it would be >80%. 95%+ of everything we see on the front page. Now consider who is running those bots, and why. What kind of opinions are they trying to shape?

Yeah but I’m pretty sure the relative wealth/affluence of the neighborhood you grew up in is significantly more strongly correlated with overall life outcomes

That is, surprisingly, incorrect. A meta-analysis by Strenze (2007) showed that the predictive power of IQ is slightly stronger than that of parental socio-economic status (SES) (Table 1). Specifically, IQ measured before age 19 outdoes parental SES in predicting future educational attainment, occupational status, and income after age 29 (see “best studies” on Table 1). In other words, if you want to predict an adolescent’s success in adulthood along a given metric of success (e.g., income, educational attainment, or occupational status), it is more useful to know that adolescent’s IQ than to know the success of their parents along that same metric. In the conclusion of the analysis, Strenze (page 416) argues that this would be unexpected if the predictive power of IQ could be attributed primarily to its association with parental SES:

Despite the modest conclusion, these results are important because they falsify a claim often made by the critics of the “testing movement”: that the positive relationship between intelligence and success is just the effect of parental SES or academic performance influencing them both (see Bowles & Gintis, 1976; Fischer et al., 1996; McClelland, 1973). If the correlation between intelligence and success was a mere byproduct of the causal effect of parental SES or academic performance, then parental SES and academic performance should have outcompeted intelligence as predictors of success; but this was clearly not so. These results confirm that intelligence is an independent causal force among the determinants of success; in other words, the fact that intelligent people are successful is not completely explainable by the fact that intelligent people have wealthy parents and are doing better at school.*

The meta-analysis does find that parental SES also correlates significantly with the future outcomes of the child. However, because youth IQ and parental SES are correlated, it is possible that some unspecified portion of the predictive power of youth IQ is due to its correlation with parental SES (or vice-versa). To get a more precise estimate of the effects of youth IQ (independent of parental SES), we need to estimate the predictive power of IQ after controlling for parental SES.

Success is undoubtedly multi-factorial. Who you know is important. So is parental educational achievement, access to nutritional food, an absence of violence in the home, IQ, etc.

Thanks for the study. I agree on all points. This is the challenge with sociological research: it is unethical to conduct controlled studies. We will never have controlled IQ research. The study suggests we continue to perform better quality primary research, and I fully agree. Until then, as per the data in the study, the correlative evidence remains compelling. At least as far as sociological research goes.

I tend to think this research is more compelling and useful at the macro level. We should bear in mind that the correlative coefficient between IQ and income is only between 0.2 and 0.4. There are many other factors which also impact outcomes.

IQ is highly correlated with life outcomes like income, life expectancy, employment, and crime. Maybe it doesn’t measure “intelligence,” but it measures something which appears to be very important for modern society. There are undoubtedly different forms of intelligence which are not measured by an IQ test.

It seems you weren't the only one who didn't like that. The show was cancelled after season 5. We see this again and again. The Rings of Power. Sex Education. She-Hulk. Willow. Velma. Doctor Who. Ms. Marvel. Batwoman. The Wheel of Time. Writers who don't respect the source material, or think movies and shows are a soapbox instead of a medium for entertainment and creativity.