Renting cars and driving around town simply doesn’t pencil out.
Despite being situated in a roomy part of Burbank, a hotel I just visited charges $35 per night for parking.
Luckily, I give airport rental counters the widest possible berth — a choice which is mainly about saving time for me. As a writer who’s not prone to motion sickness, I’m fully productive in the back seat of a Lyft or UberX. This means every avoided hour of driving is an extra hour of sleep, fun, or (all too often) work. I always kind of assumed this made good economic sense too. But I never bothered to run the numbers on it.
Alexa, the personal assistant that powers Amazon’s Echo speaker, makes it easy to play music, turn on the lights, tell us a joke, or order takeout. “It’s almost like casting a spell,” The Economistsaid, “say a few words into the air, and a nearby device will grant your wish.”
Remember the uproar over the Trump administration’s briefly floated idea of slapping a 20 percent tax on Mexican imports to pay for a border wall? (It’s okay if you don’t! Yeah, this was only last week, but there’s way too much to keep up with right now.) It turns out that the clumsily introduced tariff plan was actually a garbled presentation of a longstanding Republican proposal for a “border adjustment” tax (Quartz). The idea is to eliminate the current corporate income tax and replace it with, among other things, a broad 20 percent tax on all imports — effectively, substituting a tax on consumer spending for a tax on corporate profits.
Why would anyone want to do that? People across the political spectrum tend to agree that the U.S.’s corporate tax structure is busted: In theory its rates are high, but in practice companies get away with paying a lot less — often by parking profits overseas. Border adjustment is a plan embraced by conservative economists and lawmakers to keep money coming in to the federal coffers and encourage companies to repatriate their cash hoards while revamping the business tax structure. It’s part of a larger tax-reform scheme on the GOP policy roadmap that resembles the VAT (value-added tax) many European countries use, and it has implications for everything from international currency exchange to the price of eggs.
Imagine you run a global business, but you have no idea if one of your largest markets — say China or Mexico — might shut down due to a trade war. Or watching your once-powerful brand suddenly become the target of a boycott, simply because you allow Muslim employees to wear hijabs at the office. With Donald Trump in the Oval Office, once-implausible scenarios like these have become real possibilities.
For many people, a Trump presidency was the first surprise. It soon became clear that no one actually knew how his term in office would play out — not even Trump himself. As Trump proposes an array of initiatives ranging from healthcare repeal to tariffs on our second-largest trading partner, the long-term agenda has become even more opaque and uncertain. In the face of such confusion and impulsivity, many people and organizations have had tremendous difficulty planning their own strategies and actions for 2017 and beyond.
“A lighted match does not cause a fire. Rather, a fire takes place because of a particular combination of elements of which the lighted match is just one.”
The way we want to make sense of the world around us often has to do with causality. The question we ask is what caused “something” to happen. There is a variable, the “it,” that happened, that is now to be explained. In scientific study this variable is regarded as dependent. An independent variable, or variables, that cause it are then sought. This is also the if-then model of management. In organizations, a familiar explanation for success is that a particular manager or a particular culture caused it. But scholars are increasingly pointing out the fact that this view of the relationship between cause and effect is much too simplistic and leads to a limited or even faulty understanding of what was really going on.
Is the office obsolete — or mutating into something new and wonderful? Backchannel offers views from both sides of the future-of-the-office question in two recent pieces. The rise of “digital nomads,” writes Ben Snyder, accelerated in 2016. Companies in desperate need of talent, particularly in software, have abandoned the old-school idea of gathering everyone in one physical space and accepted that they’re only going to assemble a great team by going to a distributed model.
But wait a second, writes Greg Lindsay: At the same time, we’re seeing a boom in new-model coworking spaces like WeWork. In these offices, traditional behind-the-firewall watercooler culture gets replaced by a more open model that’s still able to take advantage of the dynamics of face-to-face interaction. “WeWork’s great innovation,” Lindsay argues, “was to convince companies of all sizes that sharing an office with hundreds or even thousands of strangers was an opportunity instead of a liability.” This new-style office is more of a “talent platform” that helps entrepreneurs find the skilled collaborators they need.
The idea of a Universal Basic Income — an unconditional cash stipend from the government that could, in principle, greatly simplify the existing system of means-tested programs — has come under fire for being antithetical to one of America’s strongest values: Work.
The argument, most recently articulated by Josh Barro at Business Insider, states that while a cash transfer may be able to provide subsistence, it cannot provide the sense of purpose and dignity that only a job can. The problem with these arguments is that they simply assume a UBI would significantly undermine the incentive to work, shifting the debate to the red-herring of work’s relationship with purpose. Noah Smith, for instance, responded to Barro by pondering the difficulties of empirically measuring an abstract sense of dignity, while Matt Bruenig responded by pointing out all the ways the rich receive vastly more “passive income” than the poor (like from interest and capital gains) without an apparent loss of purpose. Both these points are secondary to the most basic point: UBI is simply not a threat to work.
UBI and Work in Theory
The effect of a Universal Basic Income on work effort is theoretically ambiguous without specifying the means-tested programs that would be replaced. The economist Ed Dolan wrote what is perhaps the definitive piece on the subject here, walking through various scenarios in detail.
Cattle are cheap and ranchers are struggling, but the price of your steak hasn’t changed.
Cattle prices are extremely low right now, and ranchers across the country are struggling to feed their herds and their families. But you probably haven’t noticed a commensurate drop in the price of you beef at the market, have you.
Let’s just stipulate that 2016 was a lousy year. We lost the Greatest, Prince and a Princess (Leia), and saw the election of a clown who thinks he’s a king. Worse yet, the President-elect likes to communicate simple and wrong answers to complex questions in 140 characters. 2017 will be somewhat better if it sees the end of Silicon Valley tweeting its own 3 character simple and wrong answer to complex questions. UBI: It’s the wrong answer to the wrong question.
There is real angst in the United States about inequality and in particular with opportunity creation and the likelihood of moving ahead. Moreover, there is a legitimate debate about the future of work and what happens to employment with advances in technology (will software and robots eat our jobs?). Unfortunately, Silicon Valley’s obsession with the latest shiny object, Universal Basic Income, is making that problem worse. Like Donald Trump’s wall, it is absurdly expensive, won’t work and is a disingenuous distraction from the real problems. It’s time for Silicon Valley to stop the techno-libertarian navel gazing and turn their considerable talent and resource to the core issues.
Most of us know that Apple, like many global corporations, has a ton of profits that it has parked overseas to avoid paying U.S. taxes. But we might not have been aware that Apple takes mountains of this cash and plows it back into U.S. Treasury bonds — collecting interest from the U.S. government on the money that it has stockpiled far away from the tax collectors, under a 1962 IRS loophole. That interest totals “at least $600 million and possibly much more” over the last five years, according to a Bloomberg investigation.
Bloomberg dug deep into Apple’s regulatory filings to trace this financial shell game. Apple, of course, is hardly the only player, and there is nothing illegal or even that unusual about the investment. The lesson, as Bloomberg puts it, is in the sheer opacity of global operations today: “The purchases reflect how the distinction between what’s foreign and what’s not for multinationals often exists only in the world of accounting.”
