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I am considering moving house, within UK, and have started cursorily looking at properties. In some London suburbs, those you would like to live in, a four bedroom house with a bit of garden, relatively close to a tube station, even at the far end of the line, sells for around £2.5Mn. This is whilst the average UK salary remains stubbornly stuck at around £30,000. These houses are worth 80 times the average salary. This is difficult to comprehend, and one has to ask the question, who is buying these properties? It cannot be working people. Or maybe it can. I have been giving this considerable thought, as I am fascinated by the apparently unexplainable. I wonder whether this market is sustained by inheritance, the combined result of smaller families and of older parents owning now expensive property which was acquired cheaply and which, when passed down, is sold to fund upgrading. Living in a desirable property may be becoming a multigenerational project. Bad news if your family is poor...

The Biden administration has started an effort to introduce a minimum corporation tax level globally, which they are aiming to set at 21%. The plan also contemplates ensuring tax is paid where profit is generated, precluding the escape to more benign tax climates. These are fantastic news, although we need to be wary of the many obstacles this initiative will still face, if it is ever to become a reality. As corporate profits increase and more people struggle as a result of inequality, fair corporate taxation and a degree of social redistribution of their profits is critical to maintain a precarious social balance. From my perch, the most important aspect of this development is the recognition that tax evasion and inequality are problems that can only be addressed globally, as corporations think and function globally. Once we perceive global problems in global rather than national terms, we may even have a chance to fix them! I am definitely on Team Biden on this one Length: 982 charac...

I just read on the financial papers that the inflation resulting from economic stimulus post pandemic is good for stocks, which was presented as a positive. This may well be the case but, even if some individuals, with significant stock investments, may regard it as positive, society certainly cannot. Inflation reduces the acquisitive power of all families, many of which are already just managing, to quote Theresa May. Growth in stocks value would be a positive only for a few, for those whose stocks yields represent a larger proportion of their income than the proceeds of their work and that, sadly, is not the case for most. Thus, this inflation, welcomed with the words Good News by the relevant paper, will be another of the many mechanisms by which the pandemic would have increased inequality. And this is the key challenge of capitalism. Unabated and without restraints, that is just what it does. Most events, framed in it, increase inequality, accumulation being intrinsic to its natur...

We have a problem. The Independent reveals today that top supermarkets in the UK throw away enough food to put together 190 million meals per year. This does not even account for what we, the consumers, dispose of. At the same time, 100,000 children go hungry every day and 280,000 homeless people roam the streets, again, hungry. Get your calculator out. The food discarded by the supermarkets, sent to landfill and to, as it decomposes, generate greenhouse gases, would be enough to give each of these people one and a half meals per day, all year round. We could, pretty much for free, eradicate hunger, an embarrassment to a country with the resources of the UK. The fact that we don’t, that there seems to be no willingness, by government, supermarkets or even the public, is despicable and infuriating. We, the public, can fix this, by pressurising the supermarkets to develop a system that efficiently transfers that unwanted food to those who want it. Logistics, after all, are their strength...

Our modern World is redefining inequality. This used to be bad enough, the haves enjoying luxurious standards of living whilst the have nots, the majority, lived hand to mouth, struggling to survive from one day to the next. With the industrial revolution, and especially in the XX century, the general increase in wealth delivered meaningful improvements in the standard of living for most. These were the halcyon days of capitalism. But, at some point, in the 80s, with Reaganism, Thatcherism and neoliberalism, we lost our compass. Inequality is now escalating to unprecedented levels, even in the First World. Young people are staring at a future where automation will have taken many jobs, where assets are so expensive they are completely unaffordable and, to compound it all, where even the environment, nature, that one asset we all used to enjoy for free, regardless of individual resources, is being depleted, exhausted, to a point where we will be leaving nothing to those who come after u...

Pile wrote, in the late XIX Century, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, highly recommended bedside reading for any young teenager. Orwell wrote the outstanding Animal Farm, which I have quoted previously, highly recommended bedside reading for older teenagers. In it, Napoleon enunciates the darkly meaningful All pigs are equal, but some pigs are more equal than others . This week, in Wall Street, Robin Hood Trading suspended GameStop shares to control volatility, as private investors teamed up to drive up the price, in a move which has cost shorting hedge funds a fortune, and, for once, transferred wealth from funds to small investors. Robin Hood’s action seems to protect the rich from the poor, hardly the modus operandi of the Middle Ages folklore hero the trading platform takes its name from. This makes for a great, Orwellian conspiracy theory, but I fear the true explanation is more prosaic, related to Robin Hood’s lack of financial resources to cover exposures, as it must do in la...

The title sentence is probably the best known in the outstanding bibliography of George Orwell. I have borrowed it from him to reflect on recent events at the Capitol. An angry, aggressive mob forced its way into the seat of the country’s legislative chambers, aiming to, at least, protest, at best, from their perspective, overturn the outcome of the democratic elections held in their country a couple of months before. The act they engaged in is clearly typified in law as terrorism and rebellion, two very serious crimes. However, they did so with impunity, with little consequence, for the great majority of perpetrators. Their race and political views protected them from police violence. Had their race and views been different and their actions the same, the consequences to them and the violence of the security forces reaction would have been much graver. This difference is Orwellian, an adjective we have come to use to describe oppressive, dystopic, unequal and unjust societies  Len...

We live in a knowledge economy. This means that knowledge, know how, technology, are the way for individuals and organisations to establish competitive advantage. Some call it knowledge capitalism. The moniker is apt, more so than most using it realise, because there is another aspect, which we often ignore, but also determines outcomes. Talking last night to the parents of a couple of teenagers who have just joined the private school system from state school, a message was clear. Private school confers you a huge advantage, not in the quality of content taught, where public colleges may be adequately competing, not even on the facilities offered to students, superior in private institutions, but not so critical to outcomes, but mainly in the culture of achievement and aspiration that private institutions surround students with and in the exceptional networks of future useful contacts they help them develop. Parents pay deer for these advantages, but the return on investment is high...

A recently published Rand Corporation study reveals an ongoing significant redistribution of wealth, from 90% of the population to the top 10%. This is not new and, for me, not a surprise. I’ve written about inequality before. What is new about the Rand study is that it quantifies the redistribution, at least for the US. If the share of wealth and income in US society had remained unchanged since the three decades following World War II, the 90% would be $47 trillion per year richer. The figure is staggering, less than 10% of the population would know how to write it in extended form. The average American would be $42,000 per year better of. How can the wealthy and powerful get away with this in a democracy, where people vote on policies? Simple. We know we have an enemy, but we don’t know who it is. For white men, Latinos and blacks. And for them, white men. For Brits, Europeans and, for many Europeans, African and Asian refugees. Meanwhile, the true enemy hides in plain sight  Le...

Last week in UK we learnt of a Conservative government plan to exempt for hedge fund managers, company managers and City dealmakers flying into UK of quarantine requirements. The stated rationale, if you care to listen, is that they are not a risk, as they fly in by private jet, use private cars and do 4-5 meetings in a day and fly out. This is disingenuous. For a start, it shares with Trump the unusual notion that people cannot get infected in a car. Secondly, the exempt will be meeting with people in UK, otherwise, what is the point in coming? And further, 4-5 meetings in a day can be done online. In fact, merger and acquisition activity in UK has been strong in the last 6 months, with many deals completed fully online. The exemption seems based in the very Tory notion that the wealthy are not infectious, that they know better and can avoid contagion, unlike the poor, who are also stupid, as their poverty clearly indicates. The virus is not only part time, but also reversely elitist...

I’ve lately been making the following joke: ‘The stupidest person in the cemetery is the one with the largest bank balance at death, and the smartest is the one showing a nice, round zero’. But this is not really a joke. It is in fact a pointed statement about money’s purpose and value. It is valuable only because it allows us to exchange goods and services, as we have chosen it as a simple and intuitive proxy for value. Thus, the value of our money is only exercised when we use it (for purchases, investment, tax payment or charity). When we don’t, and it sits on a bank account where we stare in awe at the many zeroes and grin at our name on the Forbes Richest List (other lists available, not that I recommend any), we get no value from it, bar for an empty, twisted satisfaction at most. Money must be deployed in the economy, creating wealth and improving standard of living for all. Anything else is stupid and indicative of a lack of understanding and, by extension, lack of intelligence...

The quote that titles this entry is one of many acute thoughts by JL Ortega y Gasset, the great XX century Spanish philosopher. I was reminded of it by an interview I just read with Michael J Sandel, the Harvard sociology professor, a current great thinker. Sandel discusses the success culture which pervades modern society. The successful forget that their circumstances have played a great role in that success, they apportion causality disproportionately to own merit. Luck and environment are removed from this revisionist view of biography. Conversely, if success is fruit only of dedication, effort and talent, so must failure be the just harvest of their antagonists. With this simple, reductionist logic, society blames the unsuccessful for their hardship and, in a fell swoop, removes the need for solidarity. This is unjust and dishonest and, if nothing else, the current appeal of populism tells us it is high time for fairness and honesty from the fortunate (I choose the word pointedly)...

  Inequality is one of our major social challenges nowadays. The political turmoil agitating our societies today is a direct consequence of it. In fact, inequality is nothing new, humanity has lived with it for centuries, at many times graver than currently. But, alas, as we grew wealthier in the last century, there was hope that we may start to address it, that mindless accumulation of profits would be superseded by more lofty objectives and focuses from the powerful and the mighty. It is interesting, revisiting John Stuart Mill in the last few days, to note that he was already, 150 years ago, preoccupied with the same issues and also that his blueprint for solving them, and his actual expectation of the evolution of capitalism, remains relevant today. It seems that, in socio political terms, we have made little progress since the Victorians. His recipe? Higher inheritance taxation and workers cooperatives competing in a capitalist system with private enterprises. Would they work ...