Fin Keegan

A recent report by UNICEF on child well-being in rich countries seems to vindicate our decision to raise the kids in Ireland.

Across “six dimensions” averaging measures such as “Health and Safety” and “Subjective Well-Being”, the United Nations agency arrives at the conclusion that kids are best off being brought up in either Scandinavia/Switzerland, the Benelux, Spain/Italy, or Ireland.

The US and UK, though scoring high in Education (US) or Health/Safety (UK), manage to come dead last in the 21 OECD nations under analysis.

However, a closer look (click on table image below) reveals that free-market countries tend to fare poorly on these measures. Why? Because the internal wealth disparity is wider than society permits in, say, more socialist-leaning countries such as Sweden or France. And freedom of expression tends to be more valued in the UK and US, leading to lower scores for child “Behaviour and Risks”.

One corollary of this is that if you are wealthy (and thus healthy, safe, and well-educated) in the UK or US, your children’s well-being moves up to par with the countries at the top off the UNICEF table.

(Or it does if your “family and peer relationships” are not fractured: interestingly, the US/UK tradition of self-actualization means that, on that score, the two largest free-traders again trail their wealthy cohorts in Europe.)

Click on images above to enlarge data tables.

Source [PDF]: UNICEF, Child poverty in perspective: An overview of child well-being in rich countries, Innocenti Report Card 7 (Florence: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, 2007)

One of the best dramas ever produced by television has just ended in a hail of ambiguities.

The Sopranos‘ dialogue, acting, conceptual wit, and direction have all been praised to the skies elsewhere. Like HBO stablemate Big Love, it is at once both believable and unbelievable that such lives could be lived in our modern world.

But, the deepest appeal of this mobster clan may be their elemental likeness to us: wealthy, or comparatively so, both we and they alike live with a radically split consciousness: worrying over our children, vain about our waistlines, more or less slaves to our appetites, we remain wilfully ignorant of the pain of those (the victims; the poor; the powerless) upon whom our lifestyle is based.

If Chinese peasants-turned-factory-workers, to take but one example, were to successfully organize for fair working conditions tomorrow, our cheap clothing and footwear would be gone in a week.

For Tony Soprano there is “out there” and “in here”, with markedly different rules and moral imperatives at work in each context: aren’t we all a little like him?

John C. Goodman and Laurence Kotlikoff have put together a modified version of Steve Forbes’ famous flat tax plan.

What I like about their plan (linked below) is the implicit distinction between “rich” and “poor” dollars, i.e. the acknowledgment that one’s ten-thousandth dollar has a different meaning, and hence value, from one’s ten-millionth dollar.

However, I think we should go further: continued progressivity to tax saturation. In other words: a universal salary cap.

Why? Because there is nothing, beyond single-handedly curing premature death, that any human being can do that merits earning on the current level of our billionaire class.

We’ve become so used to the endless pursuit of personal wealth that nobody thinks it odd anymore but, as any Martian will tell you, no mortal, American or otherwise, has any true need (or actual want, indeed) of their twenty-seventh million dollar wad.

Therefore I propose that the tax rate kicks in at the level suggested by Kotlikoff and Goodman ($46,000 for families) and thencefrom progresses at an evenly growing tax rate until, at $4.6 million, say, the rate terminates, necessarily, at 100%.

Granted, there will be a challenge to society (for one, how to re-allocate the money without bloating government) and the makers of fine shower curtains and umbrella stands might notice a dip in sales–but we would, on the up-side of my plan, be spared the obscene and ultimately damaging kink of our current system: wealth obesity.

Reference: John C. Goodman: A Kinder, Gentler Flat Tax Forbes, September 29th, 2005

Last week, Francis Spufford gave an interesting talk on the notion of “Plenty”–what does it mean “to have or not to have enough”?

Some highlights:

I propose a rule: if you aren’t sure whether you really live in plenty, you do.

…

From our cornucopias…pour houses that keep out the weather, clean water to bathe in daily, medicines to prolong life, clothes no-one wore before us — and then stuff, oh a torrent of stuff of unimaginable profusion and variety, stuff to tempt us, stuff to entertain us, stuff to decorate ourselves with, stuff to transport us from place to place, stuff to store other stuff in.

…

We are still running as hard as we can, with apparently undiminished urgency, and our desires still feel to us as if they are thwarted and fulfilled in the proportions you’d expect from a resistant universe.

…

[If] we all did decide, one at a time or all together, on some mark that represented adequate plenty, and stopped buying at it, our plenty wouldn’t glide calmly to a halt. It would collapse, because the system depends on striving, and whatever no longer strives to rise in our system doesn’t just stop rising, it immediately and inexorably sinks.

That’s why in our age of plenty everyone who can is still working frantically hard

Full Transcript: BBC Radio 3 - Twenty Minutes: Plenty: The Land of Cockaigne

Image: povertycodes, by thane via flickr.

Martin Kettle, in passing, makes a useful point about some unexpected consequences of the 1989 revolutions:

It was not…just [in] eastern Europe [that Communism collapsed] but across the world, above all in Russia and China. Once these countries, with their billions of skilled but largely impoverished inhabitants, began to become market economies, the writing was on the wall for high-cost welfare settlements in the developed world.

Source: Kettle: Germany and France are struggling with a new world, The Guardian, May 24th, 2005

Here’s a telling insight from Fintan O’Toole:

I sometimes think that much of the public life of [Ireland] since 1963 has been an attempt to fill the hole in our self-image that Kennedy’s visit [to Ireland] had exposed. We were supposed to be a deeply spiritual people, concerned with God, the land and the nation. The ecstasy evoked by the appearance among us of the first citizen of the great republic of the West revealed to us how utterly bedazzled we were by all the things we were not meant to want: his cool, sexy, glamour, his impregnable aura of wealth and his ability to embody the fridges and TVs, the porches and pools that our American cousins conjured up in those family photographs. We were embarrassed by our sudden, naked impulse to worship the golden calf

Source: Fintan O’Toole What We Think of America Granta #77, March 28th, 2002

Alexander McCall Smith visits Las Vegas:

After Beverley Hills I am taken to speak to the Las Vegas Literary Society. There are more society ladies, and the event there is even grander. I sit opposite the wife of the last Governor of Nevada. She has two guests to entertain that week, the other one being Mr Gorbachev. The night before, whispers one of the other ladies, they took him to a Russian Restaurant. I nod: the Russian Restaurant is in my hotel and I have noticed it. You couldn’t fail to notice it: it has outside it a large statue of Lenin and they have chopped the head off it. Then they have covered it with artificial bird droppings. It is a gesture of quite unbelievable triumphalism. I reflect on the fact that they took Mr Gorbachev to dinner there. Even by the standards of Las Vegas that defies belief.

After lunch and the signing of books, I jump into the powerful car of one of the society ladies and am taken off to the Liberace Museum. There is much to be seen there, and in a very curious way it is rather touching. The human spirit, I have decided, moves in mysterious ways.

Source: Alexander McCall-Smith: A flea in your ear can be a very pleasant thing, The Scotsman, April 12th 2004