Comment by sanj 3 days ago
“ The obvious loss is to government revenue, but the more subtle and still very real loss is the diversion of high-powered talent from what could have been gains in efficiency and productivity to focus instead on corporate reorganizations and tax evasion games.”
I’d expect very little overlap between those talent pools.
How many computer programmers moonlight as tax avoidance accountants?
Tangential, but a pet project I've been working on has been doing exactly that! Looking at US federal tax laws and using constraints solves to find optimal paths to the lowest taxes.
I don't really do anything besides play with it, my taxes are very simple and boring, but it's been a fun project to play around with.
Yeah, that is tax minimization, not tax avoidance. There's a big difference.
How many people pursue business or accounting degrees instead of mechanical engineering or biotechnology degrees? The talent flows to what policy incentivizes, over the long run.
Your point, that people can't just switch careers willy nilly, actually reinforces the point of the article -- that incentivizing accounting games actually reduces time spent on impactful pursuits in the long run.
More like how many people with degrees in Business go into Management Consulting, would like to join a startup as a Product Manager, or accountants that want to be Associates at a VC firm rather than work a big 4.
But even for programmers, plenty of people make the decision to go into programming or medicine or law because they are well paid and respected careers. And interests in secondary school and university are influenced by parents, teachers and the culture promoting certain directions. Kids these days are bombarded by STEM everything.
Tons of people who get degrees in technical fields work outside that field. There are many people who have have spent at least part of their studies or career in hard science, SWE, IT, management consulting, law or finance before switching to something else in that list to improve their work/life balance, to make more money, to find employment more easily, or simply because learning the field and cracking its puzzles is engaging work for them no matter the exact technical field it's in.
High finance and crypto are two places where a high concentration of technical skills intersect with using those same skills to game our financial and legal systems.
If there were no need for tax avoidance accountants, they very well might have chosen to study to become software engineers instead. It's not like they were born a tax avoidance accountant and would be sitting in the field rotting if they couldn't find work avoiding taxes. Many would at least be regular accountants (efficiently allocating money is still more useful to all of us than efficiently avoiding taxes), or maybe some other sort of lawyer (your city's prosecutors AND your city's public defenders are both sorely overworked).
Tax avoidance is a legal problem instead of a tech problem, but it has many parallels wherever there are bad incentives. These are fundamentally not pro-social activities, but trying to get an unfair advantage through loopholes.
More computer programmers might moonlight as SEO gurus, if search engines didn't put up at least a token amount of resistance against scummy low-effort SEO tactics.
Fewer tax avoidance accountants would still be tax avoidance accountants, if we made a bigger effort to prevent it. (And that doesn't mean accountants would have to be programmers instead, there are many other kinds of talent)
Wow. I can't believe people believe this is still true in 2024.
I worked in crypto sector which paid really well in some cases... Though compensation had little to do with talent and more to do with focus on political bs and alignment with the needs of corrupt authorities. Some could argue there was an inverse correlation between talent and compensation as the most corrupt people are often that way because they lack talent to begin with.
I've observed similar dynamics in big tech corporations, unfortunately. People are promoted on the basis of their incompetence and capacity for self-delusion as it creates the necessary blind-spots which allow organizations to occasionally poke their toes beyond red lines to reap massive profits.
Stupidity and incompetence are useful attributes within corporations because they instill a feeling of insecurity in the minds of the affected employees and this makes them highly loyal and controllable. Sometimes I think one of the main reasons these companies hire actual intelligent people is to make the incompetent people feel insecure 'imposter syndrome' and increase their degree of loyalty/compliance. They don't actually need intelligent people to run things because they have monopolies and the big profits are to be reaped in maintaining their monopolies which is achieved via dirty politics; not achieved via innovation.
I think many intelligent people have observed this reality in companies they worked for. We've seen the HR manager who will bend over backwards to deny reality to align with the goals of management.
Why? Talent goes where to best pay is, if you’re not paying taxes you can pay your agent more.