Sociological Images

An infographic accompanying an article at the New York Times reveals how “advanced economies” compare on various measures of equality, well-being, educational attainment, and more.  To illustrate this, for each measure countries that rank well are coded tan, countries that rank poorly and very poorly are coded orange and red respectively, and countries that are in the middle are grey.  The countries are then ranked from best to worst overall, with Australia coming in #1 and the United States coming in last.  You might be surprised how some of these countries measure up.

Thanks to Dmitriy T.M. for the link.

In the last few hundred years, dark-skinned peoples have been likened to apes in an effort to dehumanize them and justify their oppression and exploitation.  This is familiar to most Americans as something that is done peculiarly to Black people (as examples, see  here, here, and here).  The history of U.S. discrimination against the Irish, however, offers an interesting comparative data point.  The Irish, too, have been compared to apes, suggesting that this comparison is a generalizable tactic of oppression, not one inspired by the color of the skin of Africans.

Irish woman, “Bridget McBruiser,” contrasted with Florence Nightengale:

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A similar contrasting of the English woman (left) and the Irish woman (right):

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Cartoon facing off “the British Lion” and “the Irish monkey”:

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An Irishman, looking decidedly simian, in the left of this cartoon:

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The Irish and the Black are compared as equally problematic to the North and the South respectively.  Notice how both are drawn to look less human:

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A depiction of an Irish riot (1867):

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An Irishman, depicted as drunk, sits atop a powderkeg threatening to destroy the U.S.:

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Two similar cartoons from the same source:

About this cartoon, Michael O’Malley at George Mason University writes:

In this cartoon, captioned “A King of -Shanty,” the comparison becomes explicit. The “Ashantee” were a well known African tribe; “shanty” was the Irish word for a shack or poor man’s house. The cartoon mocks Irish poverty, caricatures irish people as ape like and primitive, and suggests they are little different from Africans, who the cartoonists seems to see the same way. This cartroon irishman has, again, the outhrust mouth, sloping forehead, and flat wide nose of the standard Irish caricature.

(source)

So, there you have it.  Being compared to apes is tactic of oppression totally unrelated to skin color — that is, it has nothing to do with Black people and everything to do with the effort to exert control and power.

For more on anti-Irish discrimination, see our post on Gingerism.  And see our earlier post on anti-Irish caricature in which we touched on this before.

Last week I stopped in the candy store on State St. in Madison, WI only to discover a product that I remember consuming as a kid, but thought had been banned in the U.S. years ago: tobacco-themed candy.

According to wikipedia, candy cigarettes (I’m not sure about the other products) are banned in Finland, Norway, Ireland, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia; Canada has banned packaging that resembles real cigarettes.  A U.S. ban was proposed in 1970 and again in 1991, but it failed to pass in both instances.

I do remember feeling cool, as a kid, when I pretended to smoke them.

The United States is a nation of immigrants… in that the majority of its citizens are not part of the native population of North America.  In other words, because it was and remains a colonized land.

That aside, is the United States unique in receiving an extremely large number of new immigrants relative to its size?  It turns out, No.

Lane Kenworthy, at Consider the Evidence, posted this figure, showing that the U.S. population does indeed include a substantial proportion of first generation immigrants (both legal and illegal), but it is not unique in that regard, nor does it carry the highest percentage:

It also fails to be true, as many anti-immigration people claim, that the U.S. accepts a uniquely large number of immigrants who need help once they arrive:

Cross-posted at Reports from the Economic Front.

How do corporations escape paying taxes?  Businessweek recently ran a story on Google that helps to explain how they do it.

The story begins by noting that: “Google has made $11.1 billion overseas since 2007.  It paid just 2.4 percent in taxes.  And that’s legal.”   This is pretty incredible because Google does business in many advanced capitalist countries with high tax rates.  For example, “The corporate tax rate in the U.K., Google’s second-largest market after the U.S., is 28 percent.”

While the article focuses on Google, and how it avoids paying taxes, it made clear that most of the leading high-technology companies use remarkably similar techniques to achieve similar results.

Ok, so how does Google do it?  Google’s office in Ireland is the center of the company’s international operations.  In 2009 it “was credited with 88 percent of the search juggernaut’s $12.5 billion in sales outside the U.S.”  But Google doesn’t pay taxes on that amount, because most of the profits went to Bermuda, where there is no corporate income tax.

So, how did Google get its profits to Bermuda?  Businessweek explains:

Google’s profits travel to the island’s white sands via a convoluted route known to tax lawyers as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich.” In Google’s case, it generally works like this: When a company in Europe, the Middle East, or Africa purchases a search ad through Google, it sends the money to Google Ireland. The Irish government taxes corporate profits at 12.5 percent, but Google mostly escapes that tax because its earnings don’t stay in the Dublin office, which reported a pretax profit of less than 1 percent of revenues in 2008.

Irish law makes it difficult for Google to send the money directly to Bermuda without incurring a large tax hit, so the payment makes a brief detour through the Netherlands, since Ireland doesn’t tax certain payments to companies in other European Union states. Once the money is in the Netherlands, Google can take advantage of generous Dutch tax laws. Its subsidiary there, Google Netherlands Holdings, is just a shell (it has no employees) and passes on about 99.8 percent of what it collects to Bermuda. (The subsidiary managed in Bermuda is technically an Irish company, hence the “Double Irish” nickname.)

This set-up (as Businessweek describes it) also helps Google lower its tax bill in the U.S.  Google Ireland licenses its search and advertizing technology from Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California.  Obviously this technology is worth a lot—but Google headquarters keeps the licensing fee to Google Ireland low.  Doing so means that Google headquarters can minimize its U.S. earnings and thus its tax obligations to the U.S. government.  And of course, Google Ireland knows how to move its profits around to minimize its tax liabilities.

Not surprisingly, corporations are always eager to learn from each other.  Thus, “Facebook is preparing a structure similar to Google’s that will send earnings from Ireland to the Cayman Islands, according to company filings and a person familiar with the arrangement.”  Microsoft already has one in place.

According to one study cited by Businessweek (done by Kimberly A Clausing, an economics professor at Reed College), these kinds of profit shifting arrangements cost the U.S. government as much as $60 billion a year.  And of course Ireland also loses plenty.  Too bad that the governments of Ireland and the U.S. are suffering from large federal deficits and under immense pressure to slash spending.   Collateral damage I guess to the profit-making drive.

What is being done to change this apparently legal racket?  According to Businessweek:

The government has made halting steps to change the rules that let multinationals shift income overseas. In 2009 the Treasury Dept. proposed levying taxes on certain payments between U.S. companies’ foreign subsidiaries, potentially including Google’s transfers from Ireland to Bermuda. The idea was dropped after Congress and Treasury officials were lobbied by companies including General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, and Starbucks, according to federal disclosures compiled by the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics. In February the Obama Administration proposed measures to curb companies’ ability to shift profits offshore, but they’ve largely stalled.

A nice cozy system, isn’t it.

I’m back! I was in the middle of moving and just overwhelmed with everything. Anyway. Talking Points Memo posted a link to an article at Slate about income inequality in the U.S., and particularly the increasing proportion of total U.S. income earned by the very rich. Timothy Noah refers to the “great compression” as a time period when income concentration among top earners dropped significantly, and argues that in the past three decades we’ve seen a “great divergence,” with increasing income inequality hitting levels not seen since the Great Depression:

A slideshow accompanies the article, providing more info on the changes Noah discusses. A few examples (the slideshow provides the data source used to create each image):

Even among the very rich, we see increasing divergence, with the super-ultra rich, the top 0.1% of earners, now making 8% of all U.S. income:

A comparison to some other countries (I don’t know why these specific nations were chosen for the comparison):

Keep in mind, this data includes only income. Wealth — the worth of all assets, including retirement and savings accounts, stocks, homes, cars, and anything else of value — is much more unequally distributed.

Congress is about to be embroiled in a major debate about whether to extend the tax cuts on high incomes; as both sides weigh in, here’s some context to keep in mind:

The effective tax rate is what people actually pay, as opposed to what their tax rate theoretically is. While we’ve certainly seen a large drop since the late ’70s, Noah argues that, compared to other economic changes, the effective tax rate hasn’t affected the rise in income inequality much. It plays a role, yes, but changing the tax rate on the very rich doesn’t affect the overall distribution of income a huge amount, in part because the effective rate, what people end up actually paying, generally ends up being smaller than what they theoretically owe based on the stated tax rate, once you take into account deductions, write-offs, loopholes, and so on.

So…happy post-Labor Day!

Claude Fischer at Made in America offered some data speaking to the idea that Americans are especially patriotic. That they, in other words, are more likely than citizens of other nations to think that “We’re Number One!”

Fischer provides some evidence by Tom Smith at the International Social Science Programme (ISSP; Tom’s book).  The ISSP, Fischer explains…

…involves survey research institutions in dozens of countries asking representative samples of their populations the same questions. A couple of times the ISSP has had its members ask questions designed to tap respondents’ pride in their countries… One set of questions asked respondents how much they agreed or disagreed with five statements such as “I would rather be a citizen of [my country] than of any other country in the world” and “Generally, speaking [my country] is a better country than most other countries.”

Smith put responses on a scale from 5 to 25, with 25 being the most patriotic.  Here are the results from some of the affluent, western democracies (on a shortened scale of 5 to 20):

As Fischer says, “Americans were #1 in claiming to be #1.”  Well, sort of.  Americans were the most patriotic among this group.  They turned out to be the second most patriotic of all countries.  Venezuela beat us.

(In any case, what struck me wasn’t the fact that the U.S. is so patriotic, but that many other of these countries were very patriotic as well!   The U.S. is certainly no outlier among this group.  In fact, it looks like all of these countries fall between 14 and 18 on this 20-point scale.  Statistically significant, perhaps, but how meaningful of a difference is it?)

Fischer goes on to ask what’s good and bad about pride and closes with the following concern for U.S. Americans:

We believe that we are #1 almost across the board, when in fact we are far below number one in many arenas – in health, K-12 education, working conditions, to mention just a few. Does our #1 pride then blind us to the possibility that we could learn a thing or two from other countries?