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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Q: Indefinite Integral $\int\frac{1}{1+\tan^{-1}x}\,\text{d}x$ I tried to solve this indefinite integral, $$\int\frac{1}{1+\tan^{-1}x}\,\text{d}x.$$
I tried taking the change of variable $u=\tan^{-1}x$ but failed to reach a solution.
Can anyone help me?
Thanks in advance.

A: Let $u=\tan^{-1}x$ ,
Then $x=\tan u$
$\therefore\int\dfrac{1}{1+\tan^{-1}x}~dx$
$=\int\dfrac{d(\tan u)}{u+1}$
$=\dfrac{\tan u}{u+1}-\int\tan u~d\left(\dfrac{1}{u+1}\right)$
$=\dfrac{\tan u}{u+1}+\int\dfrac{\tan u}{(u+1)^2}~du$
$=\dfrac{\tan u}{u+1}+\int\sum\limits_{n=0}^\infty\dfrac{8u}{((2n+1)^2\pi^2-4u^2)(u+1)^2}~du$ (use Mittag-Leffler Expansion of tangent)
$=\dfrac{\tan u}{u+1}-\int\sum\limits_{n=0}^\infty\dfrac{8}{((2n+1)\pi-2)^2((2n+1)\pi+2u)}~du+\int\sum\limits_{n=0}^\infty\dfrac{8}{((2n+1)\pi+2)^2((2n+1)\pi-2u)}~du+\int\sum\limits_{n=0}^\infty\dfrac{8((2n+1)^2\pi^2+4)}{((2n+1)^2\pi^2-4)^2(u+1)}~du-\int\sum\limits_{n=0}^\infty\dfrac{8}{((2n+1)^2\pi^2-4)(u+1)^2}~du$
$=\dfrac{\tan u}{u+1}-\sum\limits_{n=0}^\infty\dfrac{4\ln((2n+1)\pi+2u)}{((2n+1)\pi-2)^2}-\sum\limits_{n=0}^\infty\dfrac{4\ln((2n+1)\pi-2u)}{((2n+1)\pi+2)^2}+\sum\limits_{n=0}^\infty\dfrac{8((2n+1)^2\pi^2+4)\ln(u+1)}{((2n+1)^2\pi^2-4)^2}+\sum\limits_{n=0}^\infty\dfrac{8}{((2n+1)^2\pi^2-4)(u+1)}+C$
$=\sec^21\ln(\tan^{-1}x+1)+\dfrac{x+\tan1}{\tan^{-1}x+1}-\sum\limits_{n=0}^\infty\dfrac{4\ln((2n+1)\pi+2\tan^{-1}x)}{((2n+1)\pi-2)^2}-\sum\limits_{n=0}^\infty\dfrac{4\ln((2n+1)\pi-2\tan^{-1}x)}{((2n+1)\pi+2)^2}+C$
Check by Wolfram Alpha https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sum+ln%28%282n%2B1%29pi%2Ba%29%2F%28%282n%2B1%29pi-2%29%5E2%2Cn%3D0+to+inf and https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=sum+ln%28%282n%2B1%29pi-a%29%2F%28%282n%2B1%29pi%2B2%29%5E2%2Cn%3D0+to+inf, the two infinite series converges.

A: This is not a complete answer, but just converts it to a nested infinite sum.
Letting $f(x) = \frac{1}{1+\tan^{-1}(x)}$, I found the first couple of derivatives at $x = 0$ to be:
$$f(0) = 1, f'(0)=-1, f''(0)=2, f'''(0)=-4, f^{(4)}(0)=8, f^{(5)}(0) = -24$$
Plugging these into the OEIS, I found A191700. Using the formula in the OEIS of $$f^{(n)}(0) = (-1)^n n! \sum_{k=1}^{n} k! (-1)^{(3n+k)/2}\sum_{i=k}^{n} \frac{2^{i-k}}{i!} S(i, k) \binom{n-1}{i-1} $$
means that $$f(x) = \sum_{n=0}^{\infty} \frac{f^{(n)}(0)}{n!}x^n = \sum_{n=0}^\infty \left((-1)^n \sum_{k=1}^{n} k! (-1)^{(3n+k)/2}\sum_{i=k}^{n} \frac{2^{i-k}}{i!} S(i, k) \binom{n-1}{i-1}  x^n \right)$$
Integrating, we have $$\int f(x) dx = \sum_{n=0}^\infty \left(\frac{(-1)^n}{n+1} \sum_{k=1}^{n} k! (-1)^{(3n+k)/2}\sum_{i=k}^{n} \frac{2^{i-k}}{i!} S(i, k) \binom{n-1}{i-1}  x^{n+1} \right) + C$$
This may be able to be simplified by switching the order of summation. However, I got nowhere with that. If anyone makes more progress in simplifying this, feel free to add another answer or post a comment.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


This chapter explores Barker's experiments with group work on the stage and, in particular, his development of a choral aesthetic. It examines the importance Barker placed on the notion of the unified group and how it challenged the largely individualistic conventions of British theatre at the time, which manifested themselves in performances and stage pictures that prioritised the individual 'star' actor. It identifies the key influences that shaped Barker's practice, including the work of other directors such as Reinhardt and Stanislavsky, as well as wider social and political issues. While reference is made to his contemporary work at the Court Theatre, this chapter focuses in the main on his three Shakespeare productions at the Savoy in 1912-14, and his series of Greek plays staged first at the Court and then toured to the east coast of the United States in 1915.


text:
The Men who Stole the World: An interview with Nicholas Shaxson
Nicholas Shaxson's latest book is a shocking account of the scale, depth and penetration of tax havens across the globe. Here, the author cuts to the heart of the problem, in an interview with the New Left Project.
Nicholas Shaxson
And tax havens, presumably, are sunny Mediterranean beaches and exotic islands in the Atlantic?
The traditional view is exactly that, of a few palm-fringed tropical islands in the Caribbean, Monaco, Switzerland, Liechtenstein. Small states. But if you do the analysis of what a tax haven is and what they are selling, you will find that these small islands are generally sideshows to the big event. The biggest tax havens in the modern global economy are big OECD rich country economies – the United States, the United Kingdom, Switzerland. The Cayman Islands is still very big – it's the biggest island tax haven in terms of financial services. Luxembourg is a great dark horse of the offshore world – it is absolutely massive. The Netherlands, Ireland… these are all OECD countries, and if you talk about offshore activity, about providing facilities for people elsewhere to escape, either legally or illegally, what they are required to do at home, then you have to realise that the offshore system is much, much bigger than the stereotype. There is no other way to analyse it, really.
The pervasiveness of this stereotype has been one of the great reasons why the offshore system has been invisible. People have always thought of tax havens as sideshows to the main event, whereas in fact they are central to the global economy.
In the book you describe the City of London as the centre of a "spider web" of tax havens across the globe. How significant is the City's role in the international offshore economy?
This has a long historical pedigree. The City of London was the financial capital of the world's greatest empire, and it is no coincidence that today the City of London is at the centre of a great financial network around the world. It developed in two phases. London itself became an offshore jurisdiction from the mid-1950s, exactly the time of decolonisation, with the creation of this new market known as the 'Euromarket' or 'Eurodollars', which despite the name has nothing to do with the Euro or US dollar currencies. It was a market in which financing happened in a range of different currencies in London, but the Bank of England designated these activities to be unregulated and as such created a deregulated space. This was an offshore market, and it grew incredibly rapidly from the 1950s and especially in the 1960s and '70s, when it became an important force in the global economy. So that was the first stage, when the City of London became the centre of these so-called Euromarkets – big offshore markets.
The second phase started in the late '60s and properly got going in the 70's, when semi-independent British territories around the world, particularly in the Caribbean, began to realise that they could attract serious money by offering secrecy and zero or low tax rates. They realised that if they put these strong secrecy measures in place money would be sucked out of the United States, Africa, and so on. Money started to flood in in large quantities in the 1970s.
Britain has had an ambiguous role in these different territories. It has places like the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Gibraltar and Turks and Caicos, which are called 'Overseas Territories' and are the remnants of the British empire. These islands are scattered around, mostly in the Caribbean but also elsewhere, and became magnets for capital from nearby jurisdictions. Then there are the 'Crown Dependencies' much closer to Britain – Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man – which have old histories as tax havens and have played an offshore role for decades, even centuries. They also got in on this game of attracting money by offering secrecy, zero taxes, and escape from laws.
So you have the creation of these tax havens in their own right, but what they quickly became were 'feeders' for the City of London. They would channel money and the business of handling money into the City, encompassing both licit and illicit business – huge capital flight out of Africa was being attracted to these places, for example. The City had this network of jurisdictions scattered around the whole world whose aim was to attract capital and then feed that money and the business of handling money into the City. So while the analogy with a 'spider's web' is a bit sinister sounding it is apt – this network catches business from different parts of the world and then feeds into the centre.
One of the revelations in your book I found most striking was that the City of London itself is jurisdictionally distinct from the United Kingdom. When you walk around London and you see the looming skyscrapers and the gleaming buildings of the financial district they feel like alien presence, and what you show in your book is that in some sense they are.
When talking about the 'City' you have to distinguish between two things. The general view of the City is just 'the financial services industry', and when people say 'the City' that is generally what they mean. But in my book I am much more specific: I'm referring to the City of London Corporation, which is an ancient historical entity. It is on one level simply the municipal authority for the Square Mile, which is around 700 acres of prime land in the centre of London, which is essentially home to the financial services industry. But this entity, the City of London Corporation, is no ordinary municipal authority. It is an authority that has managed to carve itself out of many of the laws and regulations that apply to the rest of the United Kingdom, in a process that has lasted for centuries. It is an island of special privileges. One colourful marker of the discontinuity between the City of London Corporation and the rest of the country is that the Queen, when she crosses into the City, does this strange ceremony where she is met by the Lord Mayor and the City police raise a red rope and the Queen crosses, and there's the Lord Mayor's sword, etc. There is this whole colourful ceremony, and it's treated now as just a ceremonial thing for tourists, but it is a marker of the fact that the City is politically and constitutionally a different entity that has, through the power of finance, been able to carve itself out a separate jurisdiction.
Another example is the voting rights in the City. The City is composed of 25 wards and when ward elections are held for the Common Council, which is the main decision making body, not only do the residents get a vote but the corporations within the City get to vote as well. This is not the workforces of those corporations but the corporate management. So you have Goldman Sachs voting in a British election. It is completely bizarre. There are all sorts of historical reasons behind this but the fact is that the City is a very different constitutional and political entity within the United Kingdom, and in a sense not only is it the centre of this offshore spider web but is also an offshore island in its own right. The City of London has a Lord Mayor but London has a Mayor as well, so this is really a tale of two cities.
A major theme in the book is the frequent incompatibility of economic and political freedom. You describe how one of the key features of a successful tax haven is "political stability", which, translated into English, means freedom from democratic interference. So in Switzerland you have the 'concordance' system, the City of London Corporation gives votes to corporations, and so on. Why are these two principles so often at odds with each other?
I would make a distinction between 'economic' freedom and 'financial' freedom. Going back to J.M. Keynes there was a feeling that the more that there is financial globalisation the more difficult it is for democratically elected governments to set the economic policies they want. Keynes had a saying that finance should be primarily national. There was a period of about a quarter of a century after the Second World War where financial flows across borders were quite heavily constrained. And that was a period, for many reasons, of high growth and quite widespread growth. But it is very well known that when your country is completely opened up to financial capital you can have huge flows of hot money forcing the government to adopt policies that it would not otherwise adopt. Hence the famous quote by James Carville, Bill Clinton's economic advisor, that [paraphrasing] 'when I am reborn I want to be reincarnated as the bond market so I can intimidate everybody'. So there is a paradox: as you free up financial capital, in a sense a form of bondage for the people and their democratic representatives emerges. And tax havens are fundamental to that because they make it even harder for governments to raise as much revenue from the wealthier sector of the population as they would like according to their democratic mandate, because they are afraid that the money will flee. So governments will lower taxes on the wealthy because of this fear.
The language of 'freedom' seems have been redefined in mainstream political discourse over the last few decades to mean economic liberalisation. Is this connected to the rise of offshore?
Absolutely. Among the people who are out there lobbying for tax havens this word 'freedom' crops up all the time. What it essentially amounts to, in the offshore context, is freedom for wealthy people to escape the responsibility to society that would otherwise constrain them. The cruellest example of that is tax: either illegally by finding offshore secrecy to evade taxes or legally by finding clever ways to avoid it, the net result is that ordinary people have to pay the taxes that the rich do not. So these people are conflating 'freedom' for themselves with 'freedom' for everybody.
In the book you describe a battle between US regulators and lawmakers in the Cayman Islands, with the latter coming up with increasingly sophisticated legal mechanisms to thwart the tax collecting efforts of the former. In any other context it would be strange to imagine the Cayman Islands being able to put up any kind of resistance to the US. Why have American officials been unable to crack down on it more effectively?
There has generally been quite an antagonistic relationship between the US government and secrecy jurisdictions like the Cayman Islands. Despite this the Cayman Island's offshore activity has continued to grow. There are many reasons for this. One is the lobbying power of Wall Street. Wall Street loves the Cayman Islands because offshore banking can be an awful lot more profitable than onshore banking, because you don't have the same constraints – you can escape reserve requirements and you can grow your business much faster. So there is a huge Wall Street lobbying element.
There is also the fact that Britain is standing staunchly behind its own tax havens, including the Cayman Islands, which makes it harder for the United States to act.
The norms of state sovereignty also make it difficult for the US to impose restraints on a nominally sovereign state, although it is questionable whether the Cayman Islands really is an independent state.
There is also a more generic problem. The Cayman Islands, say, will enact some sort of legislation aimed at attracting capital. The US government will react with some sort of defence against that new legislation. There will then be teams of lawyers in tax havens, or on Wall Street, or in the City of London, devoting themselves to hatching up plans to find new ways around it. This dynamic has two effects. First, tax systems steadily become more and more complicated through this cat-and-mouse process. Second, the countries that are able to defend themselves, up to a point, from all these newly discovered loopholes are generally the developed, wealthier countries, which have sophisticated lawyers and so on to draw upon to construct defences, albeit leaky ones. The developing countries generally lack access to this expertise and are left wide open to the proliferation of loopholes. So it has tended to be developing countries that have suffered particularly from this.
What is the relationship between tax havens and the drug trade and organised crime?
The drug trade makes heavy use of the offshore system. The money now involved is so large that you can't transport it in suitcases anymore. A suitcase can only hold around $1-2 million, and we are now talking about tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. In terms of the overall scale of what is happening offshore there are various different estimates. One is by Raymond Baker who wrote a book called Capitalism's Achilles Heel and who now works for Global Financial Integrity in Washington. According to his analysis criminal money – which includes money from the drug trade, as well as various other sources – accounts for roughly a third of the overall picture. Corruption money, the focus of so much attention, amounts to only three percent of the picture. The remaining two-thirds is commercial money – transfer mispricing, tax avoidance and evasion by corporations, and so on. All of these different components use the same facilities and the same corporate and secrecy structures. They are all in it together. So there is a very unhealthy proximity of the criminal and the commercial being incubated offshore.
Let's talk about New Labour. What was that government's record like on tax havens?
I think most people would accept that New Labour became much too beholden to the City, and I think a lot of people in the Labour Party now regret that. As Tony Blair came to power Labour had been in the wilderness for a long time and were desperate to get into power, and they thought it was a good idea to make this pact with the City – the financial interests but also the people who ran the City of London Corporation – so that that flank would be protected. The idea was that the City would make its money, Labour would tolerate its activities, make tax regulation flexible, sound all the buzzwords that sounded great until the crisis happened ('tax efficiency', etc.) and they would then take some tax benefit out of that. Until about 2007 that bargain seems to have worked well enough for Labour, and then things all fell apart. The Conservative Party of course since then is even more beholden to the City, but New Labour really lost its way.
In the offshore context, Gordon Brown had said [paraphrasing] "we will not permit millionaires to get tax relief in tax havens" and made signals that Labour would really get serious about it. But once he became Chancellor and then Prime Minister he was much more words than substance.
New Labour is often praised, rightly or wrongly, for its record on international development. Should its support for offshore call this into question?
Yes, absolutely. This month a Washington-based organisation, Global Financial Integrity, put out some new research. They got a former IMF senior economist to crunch the numbers on illicit financial flows out of developing countries, and their latest analysis is that in 2008 $1.2 trillion – that's trillion, not billion – leaked as illicit flows out of developing countries. If you compare that to the $100+ billion of foreign aid going to developing countries, you're looking at one dollar going in as aid and ten dollars going out under the table. So there is a huge problem there. There has been a massive focus on foreign aid, which in general terms is not a bad thing, but one of the problems has been, and this is very much true under New Labour, the ignoring of the bigger issue of huge illicit outflows, which are associated with tax havens, crime, and so on.
Let's look at some arguments used to defend tax havens, or at any rate to defend government leniency towards them. First, it is often argued that financial firms employ lots of people, they generate a lot of wealth, and so if, in order to attract their business, corporation tax has to be lowered and tax avoidance tolerated, those sacrifices are on balance worth making.
This is the main argument offered in offshore's defence. Before I started working on tax havens I spent 12-13 years researching the politics of oil-producing countries in West Africa. One of the things that always startled me was that a country like Nigeria would be earning literally hundreds of billions of dollars from its oil, and this made some people extremely wealthy, yet if you look at the actual human development, all this vast volume of money has hardly done any good for most of the population compared to their peers in the region. There is a whole literature about the so-called 'resource curse'. So money in itself isn't necessarily a good thing.
Turning to the UK, the financial flows into the City as a result of offshore activity have dwarfed the inflows of our peers. But are we in Britain any better off than, say, the French, or the Germans? I think that's a difficult case to make. If anything one could argue that we are worse off – we are a more unequal society, and though there is more wealth at the top there is also more deprivation at the bottom.
There is also the problem that this money is what economists call 'economic rent'. Offshore finance is a way of attracting easy money, hot money, which will typically go into real estate and speculation on real estate and producing property bubbles. So these financial inflows are not actually making Britain a more productive place. Y could already make this argument before 2007, before the financial system collapsed and we all had to start paying for it.
Then on top of that you have the problems in the developing countries that are all these financial outflows.
So there are three crucial reasons to reject this claim. I think that the arguments in defence of the City don't stand up to scrutiny. But they are very attractive on the surface.
Another argument is that given financial globalisation there is little that one country can do on its own to crackdown on offshore finance. If, say, the British government were to clamp down on tax avoidance, financial capital would simply flee to somewhere more welcoming.
In any measures taken against offshore finance, international co-operation is always going to be crucial. Having said that there is an awful lot that individual countries can do and leadership that can be taken. Many people say, 'oh the offshore system is just a bunch of atomised jurisdictions, all independent sovereign nations, so how can we ever get them to agree on anything?' In fact there are a very small number of influential players. Britain, by the admission of City officials themselves, is responsible for half of the world's tax havens, half of the offshore system. In fact the Tax Justice Network did an analysis and put together a financial secrecy index that again found that around half of the global offshore system is at least partly controlled by Britain. So Britain is absolutely crucial to changing this whole game, absolutely central. I think people in Britain don't yet understand the importance that their own country has in it.
Also the OECD club of rich countries has a dominant position in setting economic rules, on international tax in particular. The OECD's policy on this issue reflects the interests of its members many of which are tax havens in their own right. In April 2009 there was a G-20 statement that the 'era of bank secrecy is over' and mandating the OECD to start cracking down on it, accompanied by an awful lot of fanfare in the media. If you actually look at the specifics of what the OECD has done since then it looks like a whitewash. There is no other word for it. There has not been the change that is required. So the OECD is a good target for those who want to put pressure on the big players in the offshore system. And of course the United States is another big part of the picture.
Fortuitously your book was published just as UK Uncut, which protests against corporate tax avoidance, made this a live political issue. Do you see potential in that campaign?
I and others who have been working on this have been dreaming that something like UK Uncut would come along. We're all absolutely delighted. The issue of tax avoidance is incredibly complex on a technical level, but at the heart of it it's a very simple matter: these are corporations who are using legal or illegal means to cut their tax bills, with the outcome that ordinary people have to pay their tax bills for them. That is profoundly unfair. I think that everybody in UK Uncut and many others realise that this is a major issue. We are talking billions and tens of billions of pounds potentially lost. If you compare those sums to the amounts being cut from public expenditure there is an obvious campaign to be had here, and it is absolutely fantastic to see people out on the streets. It would be nice to see hundreds of thousands of people protesting this, and I am hoping that this is something that UK Uncut, the Tax Justice Network and others can build towards. There is no economic or political rationale for what is going on, and I see UK Uncut as a signal of something new emerging. I'm very hopeful that it will grow.
What's interesting is that UK Uncut has not simply attracted the support of liberals and leftists. The Daily Mail has been supportive, for instance.
That's right. Since I've started researching this I have never seen it as a particularly left-right issue. It will clearly be a more attractive campaigning issue for people on the left, but as you say the Daily Mail has also been very interested in the argument. It is a bit like the fight against corruption – it's not obviously a left-wing or right-wing issue. What offshore finance is, after all, is a corruption of markets. It is not how capitalism or trade should work. There are no economic textbooks that say that this is a beneficial way to proceed. So you can oppose offshore finance whether you are a fan of free markets or a critic.
In terms of steps we can take against offshore finance, is it fundamentally a matter of restricting the free movement of financial capital?
Before we start talking about things like that, we are still in a very early phase of educating people. This is something that is not yet nearly enough on the radar, so the first phase has to be education, making people realise the scale and importance of the offshore system. One of the statistics I include in the book is that approximately half of all world trade passes through tax havens. There are many different ways of measuring it and the precise figure can be argued about but we are talking about that order of magnitude, and I think people generally haven't woken up to that fact. So that's the early phase we're in.
Until now the lobbyists and defenders of offshore have had a field day and they have had their views predominate. There is a whole corrupted culture of tolerance for this abusive behaviour. The accountancy firms are particularly to blame for promoting aggressive financial schemes, and you will get journalists who have a story on tax to write calling up an accountancy firm because the technicalities are complicated. In doing so they will receive and propagate a particular worldview. So you have a corruption of the culture and a lack of understanding, and that is what needs to change at this stage.
After that, there is no magic bullet. There are various different ways of reigning in the offshore system, lots of steps that can be taken, but public engagement is absolutely fundamental to it.
It seems like the offshore system is very deeply embedded in the dominant capitalist institutions. It will be very difficult to get rid of.
Certainly there is a very powerful and self-reinforcing dynamic at play here. You have a race to the bottom in which jurisdictions compete with each other to offer ever deeper secrecy and ever lower tax schemes to attract money. Then you have competition between accountancy and law firms to out-do each other on devising aggressive schemes to enable tax avoidance. And then you have the multinationals competing with each other to drive their tax bills down. This is a powerful dynamic, which is why we need significant public engagement to challenge it.
I think we are now at the point where, because this has been so unopposed, there is a huge potential for an awakening. The entire economics profession has been largely blind to this stuff, has never really factored it in to its calculations, so it really needs to take it on board. Political discourse is beginning to change now. It is a big battle, but I think huge amounts of progress can be made.
You write in the book that the interests of industrial capital and financial capital often conflict, for instance on the desired level of interest rates. Is there much division on the issue of tax havens? If so does this offer a potential wedge for campaigners to exploit?
Potentially, but we have seen the financialisation of industrial capital. That is part of the problem: multinationals now, even if they are effectively manufacturing corporations, have embedded offshore tax avoidance in their business model.
The real competition is between them and smaller and medium-size businesses that are onshore. Those businesses are really suffering from this because they are being out-competed on economic practices that have nothing to do with real productivity or efficiency. There is an organisation in the US that has just been established called Business and Investors Against Tax Haven Abuse, which represents smaller and more nationally-based businesses that are being out-competed by multinationals on the exploitation of tax havens. So there is definitely potential pressure in that area that campaigners could harness.
What role did the offshore system play in the recent financial crisis?
There have been a lot of statements that tax havens had nothing to do with the financial crisis, and I think the main reason for this is that people are still working with the image of tax havens as exotic palm-fringed islands in the Atlantic. If you look at the locations where all the business was done, it was in places like Luxembourg, Delaware, Ireland, the Cayman Islands, Jersey, Guernsey. Traditionally just the Cayman Islands, Jersey and Guernsey would have been thought of as offshore jurisdictions and Luxembourg, Ireland and Delaware would have been seen as onshore. But if you realise that these are the places that were selling offshore finance and where the special purpose entities were being incorporated then you start to realise that clearly offshore was central to that aspect of the crisis. More generally competitive deregulation by offshore secrecy jurisdictions was one driver – one that in my view was at least as significant as neoliberal ideology – of the process of financial liberalisation, the race to the bottom.
There is also, with the huge illicit flows out of developing countries to developed countries, the element of deficit finance and this was a hidden contributor to the macroeconomic imbalances that underlie the crisis.
There are all sorts of other, slightly arcane reasons. There are complicated stories to be told, for instance, about how accountancy firms were able to use Jersey as a crowbar to force the deregulation of limited liability laws so that it was easier for auditors to get off the hook when things went wrong.
Has the financial sector learnt the correct lessons from the crisis, in your view?
I think most people would agree that lessons haven't really been learnt. Bankers are still getting their bonuses. There has been a lot of talk about coordinating financial regulation but no real action. We have seen a bit of progress but, again, the offshore aspect to all of this has been almost completely ignored because the role of tax havens has not been understood.
Finally, what resources can you recommend to people who would like to learn more about this issue?
For analysis I would recommend the website and blog of the Tax Justice Network, which I work for. These offer a trove of information. Their material is sometimes a bit technical, but it's mostly written in a very accessible form. In the next month or two we will start building a program to provide a new range of materials more accessible to a lay audience.
The Guardian ran a very good series on the 'tax gap' that's worth checking out.
Richard Murphy's blog is very interesting.
Private Eye is a great source for information – the guy who writes most of their material on these issues is a top tax expert who used to work as a senior official in the corporate division of HM Revenue & Customs, so he really knows his stuff. With the Vodafone story [an article in Private Eye accused Vodafone of avoiding £6 billion in tax] there have been a lot of claims circulating that the figure of six billion an "urban myth". It's not. These companies that are being reported on tend to respond in that way, but it's an incredibly slippery field and it is very easy to construct an argument that you have paid all your taxes when in fact you have been avoiding them. So Private Eye is a very reputable source for this and when it runs stories about tax evasion and avoidance they should be taken very seriously.
In the US Global Financial Integrity do a lot of interesting work. Various NGOs are also now getting involved. Action Aid, for example, did a very good report on the brewer SABMiller and its tax avoidance in Africa.
There has not been enough focus on the financial regulation side of the offshore system – there hasn't been any in-depth study on how offshore financial regulation works. There is some material in my book but it is a ripe field for further research.
This piece was originally published on the New Left Project.
From Panama with love

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Russia, Iran working toward visa-free regime for businessmen, tourists
Moscow and Tehran plan to sign a memorandum of understanding in 2015, Iranian Ambassador to Russia Mehdi Sanaei said. The projected agreement is one of the first steps in moving toward a visa-free regime between the two countries.
MOSCOW, January 27 (Sputnik) – Moscow and Tehran are considering creating a visa-free regime between the two countries for businessmen and tourists by signing a memorandum of understanding in 2015, Iranian Ambassador to Russia Mehdi Sanaei told RIA Novosti in an interview Tuesday.
"It's difficult for our businessmen to get a visa to Russia, especially a long-term visa, but we are happy that in 2014 our ministers [of foreign affairs], [Sergei] Lavrov and [Mohammad] Zarif agreed on the easing of the visa regime, especially for businessmen and tourists," Sanaei said.
The signing of a memorandum of understanding is one of the first steps in moving toward a visa-free regime between the two countries.
"[The ministers of foreign affairs] have almost completed a memorandum of understanding and I'm sure that in 2015 it will be signed," the ambassador added.
On September 12, 2000, Russia, India and Iran signed an agreement establishing the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), aimed at reducing travel time and boosting trade among the countries. The so-called Russian-Indian Corridor is expected to run from Mumbai to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas and continue to the Russian city of Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea.
In 2011, Russia and Iran signed a major transport cooperation deal, agreeing to develop cooperation in road, air, rail and marine transport.
By Sputnik News
Iran visa requirements, Iran-Russia ties, Iran-Russia visa-free regime's talks, iran's ambassador to russia, Mehdi Sanayee, Quoted, RIA Novosti	January 27, 2015
Iran makes warplane landing gear test apparatus
The treachery of Boehner and Bibi


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text:
Keep a close eye on your heirs during 2010
Half Sigma points out:
The wise members of Congress have determined that the estate tax will be 45% in 2009, 0% in 2010, and then 55/60% in 2011 and years after. Clearly, the best year to die is 2010. By dying in 2010 a rich person essentially doubles the amount of money his heirs will receive.
I predict that there will be a mysterious increase in deaths among the very wealthy in 2010.
A reader notes this abstract:
Dying to Save Taxes: Evidence from Estate Tax Returns on the Death Elasticity
"This paper examines data from U.S. federal tax returns to shed light on whether the timing of death is responsive to its tax consequences. We investigate the temporal pattern of deaths around the time of changes in the estate tax system periods when living longer, or dying sooner, could significantly affect estate tax liability. We find some evidence that there is a small death elasticity, although we cannot rule out that what we have uncovered is ex post doctoring of the reported date of death."
But, I bet the timing advantages of Grandma kicking off by 12/31 have never been as huge as they will be in 2010.
Are women's voices getting lower in the UK?
The Times of London reports:
Women lower tone for some vocal equality with men
Kitty Donaldson
WOMEN are toning it down. A new book reveals that their voices have deepened significantly in the second half of the 20th century.
The change is revealed in The Human Voice by Anne Karpf, which details research indicating the change. It shows that when 1945 recordings of women aged between 18 and 25 were compared with similar recordings from 1993, the average pitch of the later group was about 23 hertz lower — roughly equivalent to a semitone drop.
Singing coaches and audio archivists confirm the trend. Jonnie Robinson, a curator at the British Library who specialises in dialects, said: "Women's voices do seem to have lowered over the last 50 years.
King Lear said of his daughter Cordelia:
"Her voice was ever soft,
Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman."
Assuming that Shakespeare meant "low" to mean "low pitched" rather than just as another synonym for "soft" and "gentle," then I agree. My wife sings alto rather than soprano, and that makes her speaking voice very easy on the ears.
The downside of a deep voice in a man is that it's hard to speak quickly and precisely. The famous BBC accent, which was first inculcated in 18th Century English public schools, allows its users to communicate quickly and transparently, even using tricky multi-syllabic words like "portraiture." A higher pitch goes well with the BBC accent because if you are as guttural as Henry Kissinger or Arnold Schwarzenegger, it's hard to say "portraiture" in less than about five seconds.
A quarter century ago, I went out a couple of times with a girl from Cameroon in West Africa. She said that girls in Cameroon were taught to speak with very high pitched voices and boys with very low pitched voices. Unfortunately, her unnaturally high intonation got on my nerves, so I stopped asking her out.
There seems to be a belt running from Russia south into Arabia where men tend to speak with deep voices. I don't know if this is natural or a cultural affectation.
Perhaps the highest pitched styles are found among the Vietnamese.
I would guess that people of African descent are most likely to have deeply resonant voices, which might be related to the internal structure of the nasal cavities and the like.
That reminds me that many years ago, my wife and I were in the famous Dean & Deluca gourmet grocery store in Manhattan, when we noticed a huge middle-aged black man with a tremendously resonant bass voice and a Trinidadian accent checking out. "Hey, that's that UnCola Nut guy, uh, Geoffrey Holder," I told my wife.
The kid behind the checkout counter stared at Holder and stammered, "You're ... you're ..."
Holder flashed him a killer smile. "That's right, I am James Earl Jones. But, don't tell anyone. You see, I'm traveling in-cog-ni-to," he replied, with complete delight in his exquisite overpronunciation of the word "incognito." He then let out the famous "Ha-Ha-Ha" from his old 7-Up commercials, picked up his bag of groceries, and departed, leaving the kid gaping.
My interview with Charles Murray
will appear in the new issue of The American Conservative. Here's an excerpt:
Once a decade, Charles Murray publishes massive data-driven volumes such as Losing Ground (1984), The Bell Curve (1994), and Human Achievement (2003). In between, he pens smaller, more philosophical books such as In Pursuit: Of Happiness and Good Government (1988) and What it Means to Be a Libertarian (1997).
In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State is Murray's latest little work. Only 127 pages (not counting the elaborate appendices), it offers a striking combination of futuristic policy wonkery and Murray's old-fashioned notions, derived from Aristotle, Jefferson, and his own small-town upbringing, of how people can lead a good life. "Happiness is lasting and justified satisfaction with one's life as a whole," he writes.
Having demonstrated in Losing Ground that the Great Society poverty programs degraded the poor (an tour de force that ultimately led to the successful welfare reform of 1996), but having also documented in The Bell Curve that not all of our fellow citizens are cut out to thrive in the highly libertarian society that he would ideally prefer, Murray now offers in In Our Hands a "Plan" for a generous but radically simplified welfare state. He suggests abolishing all transfer programs, including Social Security, and replacing them with a single grant of $10,000 to each adult.
I discussed his new book with him via e-mail:
Q. Is this your follow-up to The Bell Curve, where you documented that some people are just unlucky about their endowment of human capital?
A. You're the first person to ask that question. Yes, it is a libertarian's compromise with the realities documented in The Bell Curve. The dynamics that the Plan will set in motion are ones that create the "valued places" that Dick Herrnstein and I talked about in the final chapter of The Bell Curve. In effect, I'm saying to the left, "You get to have big government in terms of spending, if you'll give me small government in terms of the government's ability to stage manage people's lives." ...
Q. Can I be a test case and get $10,000?
A. No test cases. I'm fomenting revolution here.
NBA statistics done right:
I've been boning up lately on the weird world of basketball statistics, a field less mature than baseball statistics. I don't feel all that confident in my understanding of NBA numbers yet, but I do want to mention that Matt Yglesias' new Slate piece explaining why Dirk Nowitzki of the NBA Finalist Dallas Mavericks has gotten better since his best friend, the great point guard Steve Nash, left the team, strikes me as a lot more plausible use of data than Malcolm Gladwell's recent book review about basketball statistics in The New Yorker. Yglesias writes:
If Dallas isn't winning because it plays better defense, then what's the team's secret? The Mavericks are winning because they've unshackled Dirk Nowitzki. The conventional wisdom says that great players in general, and Nash in particular, make their teammates better. But in the case of the Mavericks, Nash made Nowitzki—the team's best player and his best friend—distinctly worse.
Playing with Nash turned Nowitzki into a half-star, half-carnival freak. Nash's penetrate-and-dish moves allowed the 7-foot tall, David Hasselhoff-loving German to take advantage of his uncanny accuracy from the 3-point line. It turns out, though, that having him spot up for 3-pointers isn't the best use of Nowitzki's abilities. Nash's great asset is his unselfishness and ability to find the open man. What makes Nowitzki special is that he doesn't need to be open in order to score. Nobody can guard him...
A strong case can be made that Nowitzki, not the MVP Nash, has now emerged as the best player in the NBA.
Nowitzki has gotten better by parting ways with the league's most unselfish player. And Dallas as a whole is proving that you can generate an effective offense by "playing the wrong way." The Mavericks run lots of isolation plays and don't usually bother passing to the open man. Nash's Suns ended 19.7 percent of their possessions with assists, the highest rate in the league. Nowitzki's Mavericks assisted teammates just 14.8 percent of the time. Only the horrifyingly bad Knicks had a lower rate. Meanwhile, the superselfish Mavs had the league's second-most efficient offense in the regular season.
I would guess that Yglesias was inspired by the criticism of Malcolm Gladwell's contention, based on his three economists' rather unsophisticated analyses, that Kevin Garnett has been far and away the best player in the NBA for years.
Garnett is a great basketball player, but in his current situation on the awful Minnesota Timberwolves, he's too unselfish for his team's good. He does all the subtle little things well, but he doesn't do enough of the obvious big thing: put the ball in the basket. He averaged only 21.8 points per game in 2006 on a team where everybody else stinks. He needed to score about 30 ppg just to lift his team to mediocrity.
Something that has been hard for me, and many others, to learn is that in sports, the most effective athletes are often the selfish or show-offy ones, not the good citizens who always do the conservative things that the coaches tell them to do. Back in 1920, the fans loved Babe Ruth for hitting more homeruns than all the others teams in the league, but the baseball experts held him in contempt for swinging for the fences instead of choking up on the bat and trying for singles. Well, we now know for sure that dumb ol' Babe was right and all the smart money guys like Ty Cobb and John McGraw were wrong about this fundamental question of baseball strategy.
Or remember when the young Magic Johnson organized a palace coup on the Lakers and got his coach, Paul Westhead (who had won the NBA championship with Magic not long before), fired and replaced with Pat Riley? Magic felt stifled by Westhead's conservative offensive style and wanted a coach who would let him play the freewheeling "Showtime" game that the fans loved. Well, Magic went on to win four more championships.
After Magic, it became stylish to view scoring as a crude, inferior skill than just about anybody could do. The real art of basketball was in passing to the open man, like Magic did. When Michael Jordan came along, the fans were instantly enraptured but the mavens sniffed. This guy was always shooting the ball, which seemed so 1970s: sure, he'll sell a lot of shoes with his fancy scoring average, but you can't win championships leading the league in scoring. Six championships later, none of them won with a genuine point guard on the Bulls, we know that the fans were right and the experts wrong.
In golf, the old, prestigious Ben Hogan strategy of driving for accuracy, not distance, then hitting superb long irons onto the green is obsolete. Tiger Woods, Vijay Singh, Phil Mickelson, and Ernie Els now follow a less elegant approach of "flogging" the hell out of the ball off the tee, going and finding it, then wedging it out of the rough and onto the green from short range. It works.
As a conservative, this pattern in sports rather irks me. Cautious traditionalism deserves to win, right? Well, it doesn't always work out that way...
The Mild, Mild Midwest
From my review of the new film version of Garrison Keillor's public radio variety show "A Prairie Home Companion" in the upcoming issue of The American Conservative:
For most of us, acting our age requires an awkward improvisation for which we've tried to avoid preparing. Garrison Keillor, however, has always had the soul of a 63-year-old, and now that he's finally attained that age on the calendar, he's the Grand Master at it.
The Mark Twain of Minnesota has at last made a movie out of his "Prairie Home Companion," which he's been broadcasting live for two hours every Saturday, 32 weeks per year since 1974, when he got the inspiration while writing a profile of Nashville's Grand Ole Opry for The New Yorker. The low-key film version is merely a fictionalized rendition of his show, with lots of unfashionable old songs like "Frankie & Johnnie" and a little backstage drama about how after tonight's performance the series is being shut down by a soulless Texas corporation.
In a bit of Blue State humor, such as it is, one Minnesotan gripes, "Don't make fun of Texans just because they talk funny, their eyes don't focus, and the flesh is rotting from their bones." Keillor used to write an advice column in Salon, in which his primary message was "to bust loose." Good counsel, I'm sure, for the gentle souls who look to Garrison Keillor as a role model, but perhaps not a reliable general worldview.
Minnesotans like Keillor tend to be politically liberal because they are so personally conservative by nature and nurture that they can't imagine anybody else might need to be restrained by law or tradition. The more hell-raising Texans, in contrast, take a less softheaded view.
Abortion Dust-Up
John Derbyshire takes a whack at Ramesh Ponnuru's book Party of Death. Ramesh responds. Separately, John O'Sullivan reviews the book.
By the way, pp. 65-73 of Ramesh's book includes the most lucid summary of my critique of the Freakonomics abortion-cut-crime theory I've read (including my own stuff). Here's a small sample:
If the abortion-cuts-crime theory is true, then its truth should be faced and its implications pondered. If it is true, then Levitt, Donohue, and Dubner deserve credit for advancing our understanding of some complicated social phenomena.
But is it true? For a long time, the only people who challenged it were a few researchers (notably Baruch College economist Ted Joyce) whose papers received rather less attention than Levitt's, and the journalist-blogger Steve Sailer. It is these critics, however unheralded, who appear to have the stronger case.
The most impressive evidence for the Levitt theory is that the states that legalized abortion a few years before Roe saw their crimes rates drop a few years earlier than the rest of the country. What Freakonomics ignores, however, is that crime had risen earlier in those same state. As Sailer writes, "[T]he two big urban areas that were the first to enjoy the purported crime-fighting benefits of legalized abortion in 1970, New York City and Los Angeles, were also the ground zeros of the teen murder rampage that began, perhaps not coincidentally, about 16 years later."
I'll see if Ramesh will let me post the whole thing. Ideally, though, some magazine would print those pages of his as a stand-alone article.
A long Vanity Fair article on the Niger yellowcake forgeries and Michael Ledeen:
The War They Wanted, The Lies They Needed
The Bush administration invaded Iraq claiming Saddam Hussein had tried to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger. As much of Washington knew, and the world soon learned, the charge was false. Worse, it appears to have been the cornerstone of a highly successful "black propaganda" campaign with links to the White House
By CRAIG UNGER
Longtime iSteve readers won't find too much that's new in this 12,500 word report. It reaches the same dead-end I did long ago: Logic points to National Review's Michael Ledeen as the obvious usual suspect in this world-historical fraud, but there's nothing close to proof tying him to it.
One thing we do know for sure: Ledeen has not publicly taken up my suggestion that he use his intimate contacts with the known Italian players in the scandal "to search for the Real Forgers."
Henry Kissinger on national character in the World Cup
Here is an excerpt from Kissinger's 1986 article on how the different playing styles of the major soccer powers reflect their national personalities. Some editor should get Kissinger to update it to see how much things have changed in 20 years.
World Cup according to Character
The German national team plays the way its general staff prepared for the war; games are meticulously planned, each player skilled in both attack and defense. Intricate pass patterns evolve, starting right in front of the German goal. Anything achievable by human foresight, careful preparation and hard work is accounted for.
And there have been great successes. Of the last six prior World Cups, Germany has won two, was second twice, third once and out of the running only in 1978. At the same time, the German national team suffers from the same disability as the famous Schlieffen plan for German strategy in World War I. There is a limit to human foresight; psychological stress on those charged with executing excessively complex maneuvers cannot be calculated in advance. If the German team falls behind, or if its intricate approach yields no results, its game is shadowed by the underlying national premonition that in the end even the most dedicated effort will go unrewarded, by the nightmare that ultimately fate is cruel ? a nightmare reinforced by the knowledge that the German media are unmerciful when high expectations go unfulfilled. The impression is unavoidable that an outstanding national soccer team has not brought a proportionate amount of joy to a people that may not in its heart of hearts believe joy is the ultimate national destiny. [More]
Tom Piatak responds:
Soccer represents the same sort of insidious threat to the American national character as did the metric system, nearly foisted on us in the dark days of the '70s. Fortunately, we survived that threat, thanks in part to the patriots who filled all road signs giving the speed in kilometers per hour with buckshot.
Soccer is the metric system in short pants. It is the "sport" (if such a word applies to an activity as soporific as a telephone book reading contest) the rest of the world plays, and desperately wants us to play, so we can become like the rest of the world and lose what makes us American. Give it no publicity, lest the real Americans who read your site think they are "supposed" to follow soccer and end up just like the Europeans, rioting and looting out of the sheer boredom generated from watching such a game.
"Amnesty" Is Not about "Citizenship," Dammit, It's about Residency
My new posting on the VDARE blog:
Residency">"Amnesty" Is Not about "Citizenship," Dammit, It's about Residency
The Washington Post reports:
"The president has been supportive of the Senate approach, and in his speech Tuesday indicated that he does not regard such an approach as "amnesty" because illegal immigrants would have to get behind legal immigrants in line for citizenship."
It is so frustrating that the media lets President Humpty Dumpty use words to mean whatever he wants them to mean. First, the main point is not whether illegal aliens get citizenship now or or later or never. The benefits of citizenship are modest: you get to vote, but you also have to serve on juries, which most citizens view as a burden, not a benefit. (For immigrants, the benefits also include you can bring in your siblings and your parents. Permanent legal residents only get to import their spouses and parents. And citizens can't get deported after getting out of prison.)
No, what illegal aliens primarily want is residency, permanent legal residency. Illegal aliens don't want amnesty for illegally voting (hopefully) or illegally serving on juries (undoubtedly); they want amnesty for illegally residing in America.
Second, back in 2004, as you may recall, but nobody in the MSM seems to remember, Bush was defining "amnesty" (which he has always claimed to be against) not to mean "getting ahead of legal immigrants in line for citizenship," but as "getting on the path to citizenship" at all. Republican Congressmen didn't want illegal aliens getting the vote because they would predominantly vote Democratic. As I pointed out back then, this Rovian gambit was rhetorically unsupportable — if the debate was over illegal aliens getting residency without citizenship vs. residency with citizenship, the Democrats would win because Americans like to believe that making somebody an American citizen is a good thing.
WSJ OpinionJournal headlines of op-eds I don't need to read
It often seems lately as if the WSJ Editorial Page boys are just going through the motions, that they've been so catastrophically wrong that they're starting to get depressed and are just winging it. Here are some recent headlines from their website that make the essays sound self-evidently bogus:
On the Editorial Page BY NANCY DE WOLF SMITH
Reza Pahlavi says America should help Iranians who oppose the regime.
By any chance, would one of those Iranians who oppose the regime and thus deserve help from America be Reza Pahlavi, son of the late Shah of Iran?
Leisure & Arts BY JOSIAH BUNTING III
Do Americans still understand the meaning of honor?
Isn't there something a little ironic about the people who helped lie us into the war in Iraq with their WMD duplicity nagging the rest of us about how we don't have enough "honor?" When did fraud become honorable?
On the Editorial Page BY KOFI A. ANNAN
Nations that welcome immigrants are the most dynamic in the world.
Sure, like China, South Korea, and India ... Isn't it funny how the WSJ, which denounces UN supremo Kofi Annan weekly as a crook and a liar, is happy to publish his crooked lies about immigration? (Do check out the readers' spirited responses.)
Do autistic children never recover?
An NYT oped by Cammie McGovern, "Autism's Parent Trap," is getting a lot of publicity for asserting:
Now, as the mother of a 10-year-old, I will say what no parents who have just discovered their child is autistic want to hear, but should, at least from one person: I've never met a recovered child outside the pages of those old books.
I only have anecdotal evidence, but I know a kid who was extremely autistic from birth -- he hated to be cuddled as a baby. (In contrast, most autistic children don't show symptoms until they are toddlers.) He didn't speak until he was five. Then, one day, he said:
"Nuclear Regulatory Commission"
And he has seldom stopped talking since. He's a nerdy teenager today, but that's a lot better than being autistic.
Prominent alienist calls Americans stupid
Why does the Wall Street Journal hate America? James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page has, for perhaps the first time in his career, deigned to cite a quantitative study of the educational performance of immigrants. Too bad it's slapdash and misleading:
Keep America stupid--seal the borders!
Why They Call Nativists 'Know-Nothings'
Blogger Harry Forbes notes something quite interesting:
The Boston Globe website published the pictures of each valedictorian in Boston's high schools and other high school programs. As you thumb through the pictures, it is striking how many of these students are immigrants. So many, that I decided to take some statistics. The Globe listed the country of birth for each student. For some US-born students I guessed that they were 2nd generation immigrants (for instance if they were Vietnamese). Almost 2/3 of the Boston valedictorians are either immigrants or children of immigrants. From my analysis: here is the breakdown of the 38 valedictorians:
1st or 2nd generation US 63.2%
Later than 2nd generation US 32.8%
Born in the US 52.6%
Born overseas 47.4%
iSteve readers being more analytical and honest, it was inevitable that one would actually explain what was going on:
That article (and the Journal, too – of course) seemed to miss the real point. These schools appear to only be in Boston proper, not the suburbs
Because Boston it so old, the de jure suburbs, like Cambridge, begin extraordinarily close to the city center, so it's easy to escape the Boston school district.
As we saw back in the tumult over school busing in Boston in the 1970s, most of the white American students left in the Boston public schools -- even back then -- were working class Irish kids in neighborhoods like Southie. Judge Arthur Garrity, who ordered the forced busing in the Boston schools lived in the wealthy white suburb of Wellesley, which was, surprise, unaffected by his decision.
The Boston Public Schools system: 58,000 students (44% black, 33% Hispanic, 14% white, 9% Asian). An additional 21,000+ students live in the district but attend private or charter schools.
The average SAT score of "college-bound seniors" in the district is just 895 (and that's under the new, easier scoring system that began about a decade ago. The statewide average is 1047, and no doubt a higher percentage of seniors are college bound than in Boston, so the real gap is even larger than 150 points (which is about 3/4ths of a standard deviation).
So, if diversity is so wonderful, how come the white parents of the Boston area won't send their kids to diverse schools, other than elite schools with competitive examinations?
Anyway, the current debate is mostly about illegal Mexican immigrants. Although 33% of the students are Hispanics, none of the 38 valedictorians was from Mexico.
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