by Paul Collier
* Contrast this action by the junior management of GM with that of the junior management of Johnson & Johnson during the Tylenol crisis and what lay behind that difference.
* John Kay has pointed out to me that the detailed language of the Act encourages boards to take a larger perspective, but when I mentioned this to the Chairman of a major company he shook his head, assuring me that he was legally required to attend only to the interests of shareholders. A culture interprets its texts.
* The ‘winner’s curse’ suggests that this will not be very common.
* For the minority of readers who lack a sense of humour, this play on Charlotte Brontë’s phrase is a joke. While our eldest indeed has the accoutrements of a trophy child, he would be rightly outraged and incredulous at the implication that his parents contributed anything towards his achievements.
* A development of which I am becoming increasingly enthusiastic.
* This was why the British Government was so keen on the enlargement of the EU.
* President Kim of the World Bank told me of his frustration that even when opportunistic squatters, who had moved on to land assigned for road-widening, were offered substantial compensation, the human rights lobby was sufficiently powerful to block it.
* As a retired and highly respected African president explained to me, ‘I told my ministers that they should never say no to the World Bank or IMF: it was too dangerous. But nor should they ever actually do what they told us: we couldn’t trust them.’
* This section is based on Betts and Collier (2017).
* This section is based on Collier and Sterck (2018).
* Each extra dollar of income is assumed to give less ‘utility’, so that a transfer from someone who has a high income to someone with less will increase total utility and so be an improvement.
* To keep things simple, suppose that, apart from wages being higher than their previous incomes as farmers, people are indifferent between life in the city and life in the country.
* It is better to have an annual tax than a one-off tax on the gain in value, because when a one-off tax is introduced, developers postpone investments that would increase land value, and instead put resources into lobbying for the tax to be removed, blaming the tax for killing investment. With an annual tax, this strategic incentive to postpone – technically the ‘option value’ – is greatly reduced.
* In the USA, income taxes vary between states and cities. In the UK income tax rates now differ between Scotland and England. The current proposal differs from these designs not in administration, but in the assignment of the resulting revenues.
* It may even exceed the value of the prize, in a phenomenon known as ‘the winner’s curse’.
* These ideas reflect my conversations with Diana Noble, the CEO who rebuilt CDC into the most purposive of the development banks working to bring firms into poor countries.
* I would like to thank Professor John Sutton, Dean of the Economics Department at the London School of Economics, doyen of industrial economics (and proud Irishman), for the knowledge on which this section is based.
* A term so new that Spellcheck refuses to recognize it.
* The practice of pre-announcing to the pregnant mother that her baby will be removed at birth produces a severe increase in maternal stress that irretrievably damages the foetus.
* Consistent with marginalization, Spellcheck refuses to recognize the name despite its population being double that of Oxford, a name to which it raises no objection.
* Instead of writing books, I could have been a rent-seeking barrister.
* Britain used to have such colleges, called polytechnics. Symptomatic of the British bias to academic prestige, they were all turned into universities.
* In Britain during 2016, among those in further education only 4,000 people achieved a technical level award: less than one for every 10,000 of the British population (Alison Wolf, Financial Times, 28 December 2017).
* In May 2018 the French government introduced such a policy.
* Just in case, let me assure them that I have them over a legal barrel: thank God for barristers.
* This would be the mortgage outstanding at the date the policy was first announced, so as to avoid it being gamed by remortgaging.
* The shareholders ended up bearing losses that far exceeded these dividends, as the share price collapsed.
* 30/70 = 0.43.
* But not necessarily: as part of the reality checks for this book, I asked a highly experienced lawyer to comment on these proposals. His response was ‘I like the idea of targeting the rich City lawyers and their metropolitan ilk.’ But perhaps he is atypical: he is a Quaker.
* This chapter has benefited from innumerable discussions with Tony Venables. It draws on Collier (2018a).
* I seized my opportunity to contribute to that effort (Collier, 2013).
* The statistics that follow are by the psephologist Dr Stephen Fisher, of Oxford University, based on the most reliable of the Brexit survey data. We realized the scope for testing these hypotheses too late to write up the research prior to the publication deadline for this book, but our intention is to submit it for professional scrutiny and publication. In the interim, the results must be treated as provisional.
* Formal Marxist theory has long recognized that the vanguard is dependent upon attracting a category of fans termed ‘useful idiots’. Mr Corbyn’s insightful innovation was to refine this into ‘youthful idiots’.
* In December 2017 I was invited to address Denmark’s Social Democrats. Mette Frederiksen, its remarkable new leader, had arrived at precisely this diagnosis and was vigorously returning the party back to its co-operative, communitarian origins. Reversing a long period of decline, its vote share was already rising, with the exception of highly educated metropolitans: the WEIRD were indignantly shifting to the hard left.
