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Monthly Archives: November 2018

Treasure Islands: Revealing but Naïve

• Nicholas Shaxson, Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 272 pages, 2011, $27.00.

Nicholas Shaxson is a well-traveled British investigative writer who specializes in international business. Treasure Islands is an investigation of the many ways that criminals and multinationals contrive to evade taxes by setting up “special purpose vehicles” and other kinds of shell entities in lenient tax jurisdictions like Switzerland, the Cayman Islands and — so Shaxson claims — even the financial centers of the United States (Wall Street) and the United Kingdom (the City of London). The book exemplifies views of bien pensants Europeans. Taxes are good and government is always beneficent…MORE

There is a new documentary based on Shaxson’s book:

The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire (Documentary)

 

What’s it all about, Alfie? (and Fred)

In the right-hand corner, Professor B. F. “Fred” Skinner brilliant and creative proponent of an old idea – organisms (that’s you!) learn through reinforcement, carrot (big) and (small) stick: “Behavior is determined by its consequences” and “[teaching is] arranging contingencies [of reinforcement] which bring changes in behavior.”

In the other corner is reinforcement-denier, multi-book-author Alfie Kohn, who recently wrote “For nearly half a century, research has raised troubling questions…the studies keep telling us … that rewards, like punishments, tend not only to be ineffective – particularly over the long haul – but often to undermine the very thing we’re trying to promote….Extrinsic motivators (rewards) tend to reduce intrinsic motivation (people’s interest in, or commitment to, what they’re doing).”  And, don’t forget “Rewards are tools used by people with more power on those with less”! MORE