- Hi. Welcome to my micro-blog about boring things.
- When we talk about a better society with equality for all, it's often in broad terms about broad topics, but it is a morass of little rules that generate the world we live in.
- In the present day, "wealth" means a set of electronic records at banks, recorders of deeds, stock brokerages, which allocate assets to some individuals far more than to others. Some of the rules about those electronic records and how things get transferred around are obvious and well-known. Others are obscure, because you need some amount of background and comfort with the lingo to understand them, and because they are boring.
- I once had the privilege of meeting Kenneth Arrow, and he talked about how he had wanted to become an accountant. He told his advisor, who hated the idea. His advisor told Arrow: "There is no music in it."
- The things I will write about will have no music. They will, however, often be how inequality perpetuates, how billions of dollars in taxes are avoided, and the rationale for sometimes seemingly perverse decisions.
- Because they are boring, these rules easily maintain themselves. If you are a corporation which stands to make a million dollars by a loophole in—let's make something up—the classification of active and passive income, there will be no political push-back. Not enough people will know what that even means, let alone have the political organization to properly lobby in the other direction.
- If we want a better society, we have to understand boring things and show up when boring things are being discussed.
Logistics
- I won't be posting daily or even with great frequency. Use an RSS reader or whatever other favorite tool you may have to get notifications about new posts, and be pleasantly surprised when one pushes itself to you.
- Do you have comments? Great, post them to your favorite social media and start a discussion! I may chime in, but you'll be most interested in the feedback of the people in your own network.
- A thank-you to Eric Bower, the creator of lists.sh, whose minimalist micro-blog format is very appropriate for essays on boring topics, and which will force me to break down contents into short posts. That also means you won't get a lot of context or op-edification from any one post. I'll try to give you enough that you know what to google.
- Thanks for reading, and here goes.