A few random notes

I earned a quick escape to the cafe this morning after heaving my toddler and Schauzer round Wandsworth Park for an hour. The FT.

Relevant to the "middle class is suffering" bit: here is something on the German middle class. It is defined objectively (rather than the opinion polling asking "who do you think you are") as 70-150% of median income, and it is projected to shrink - the so-called 'hollowing out".

Larry Summers' view on globalisation and its victims struck me as correct in the liberal line; not standing in the way of forces that ultimately benefit the world, but recognising how they produce winners and losers (I tend to distinguish Tories from Liberals in how the former are more disingenuous in seeing the rich/winners in general as having deserved it, the latter with the more nuanced views that see the injustices and path dependencies).

I liked this in particular:

There has been a race to the bottom in the taxation of corporate income as nations lower their rates to entice business to issue more debt and invest in their jurisdictions. Closely related is the problem of tax havens that seek to lure wealthy citizens with promises that they can avoid paying taxes altogether on large parts of their fortunes. It might be inevitable that globalisation leads to some increases in inequality; it is not necessary that it also compromise the possibility of progressive taxation.

Labour's very immobility in relation to capital requires differential treatment.

I also enjoyed Paul Collier's contribution to Martin Wolf's thread on food prices. Collier is very hard-headed in the Bottom Billion, and here blames an addiction to small peasant farming amongst aid-givers as part of the problem (if I remember rightly). I can recall from Global History how massive plantations were not an effective way of ensuring that prosperity reached throughout an economy and enabled the wider demand and investment that leads to sustainable development. But perhaps those writers were not analysing a period of scarcity.