Thursday, January 12, 2012

Rick Bookstaber — The Bifurcated Society


Read it at Rick Bookstaber
The Bifurcated Society
by Rick Bookstaber
Senior Policy Adviser to the Financial Stability Oversight Council and Senior Policy Adviser at the SEC.

If you have been following the current debate about employment, the job guarantee, productivity, living standard, distribution, and creating a vision for the future, go read this. It's insightful in itself and important to this debate, as well as for policy in general.


BTW, this post shows that the informal economy is growing by leaps and bounds. The informal economy is work performed that is not recorded as a transaction, hence, not included in GDP. Recent estimates are that the informal economy is on the order to 10 trillion USD globally.

2 comments:

Clonal said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Tom Hickey said...

I'll tell you a funny story, Matt. In the Sixties, there was a coop that support of commune of essentially kids who were into living the good life and serving others. While they dressed like the "freaks" that wanted to be socially, they were not DFHs by any stretch. I didn't know them but shopped at their store "Beautiful Day" in College Park, when I was teaching a University of Maryland part-time during the time I was a grad student at Georgetown in DC.

One day was standing at the single check out counter, next in line, when a young well-dressed and groomed man walked and up to the register. He identified himself to the clerk as being from the IRS and said that he have been sent over to check up on what was going on since they hadn't submitted a tax return. The clerk look somewhat puzzled, and said, Tax return? What's that?" The IRS agent just smiled and said that they were required to submitted records to the IRS. The clerk answered, "Oh."

Then the IRS guy said, "Well, I'd like to see your books." Then it got good. The clerk responded, "Books?" The IRS got, non-plussed said, "Well, do you have a shoebox where you keep your receipts?" The clerks said, "Oh, sure." The IRS guy, "Well, finish checking this person out, and I'll sit down with you and show you how to put it all together the way we need it." He was still smiling, too.

I was pretty amazed as I left with my stuff and the clerk saying, "Have a beautiful day." They were still in business next time I was there, so I guess it worked out.