I was asked yesterday why my work roams across tax, economics, accountancy and audit. It was suggested that this is unusual.
It was an interesting challenge, but one that was not hard to answer as it turned out.
Each of these disciplines is involved with four issues.
First they seek to identify transactions.
Then they seek to value them.
Then they want to appropriately record them.
Thereafter each wants to appraise their consequences.
Underpinning them all is a significant degree of potential commonality in that case.
Conceptually they are actually even more alike. That's because very rare exceptions apart each concerns itself with the change in the state of a claim on property, whether that claim is individual or collective. In essence, when a boundary is crossed as a consequence of that changed state then an issue arises that is (or should be) of concern to them.
In that case thinking developed in one area can, without much difficulty, usually be of relevance in another.
So why the problem with me thinking across them all? That's because people don't. In our world hyper-specialisation is promoted.
I've lost count of the number of times I have been told that if only I'd decided to concentrate on just one theme I might have been much more useful. My reply is always very confident. It is “No I wouldn't, because I'd have lost sight of the big picture”.
Big pictures matter. Too few look at them. It would be good if more did. We might then see the wood for the trees.
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I’ve noticed this in middle class professionals I’ve been rubbing shoulders with since graduating from Uni.
They’re all very talented and driven, but their biggest concern is spending their money and on their careers. It’s a sort of dumbing down effect achieved by being comfortable – they are intelligent enough to know things aren’t right elsewhere, but when it comes to the crunch and the pay is right, they think about number one. They’ll sit around the table at a coffee morning or at a dinner party wringing their hands hands about inequality or tut-tutting when reading the Guardian, but then think nothing of avoiding some tax or other or ensuring that they are at the front of the queue when there is an opportunity.
I think that the reason this happens is because of pay differentials – even in the public sector – where the pay increasingly encourages them to think the unthinkable – for anyone but themselves.
The main issue is that no one really has any other ideas to put forward in the public realm as to what society could look like (I’m talking about the mass popular public realm here, not your valiant efforts here Richard).
They moan about the NHS, but then are frightened into taking out private health insurance thus boosting the private sector and contributing to NHS decline.
They are happy to become asset rich and cash poor and use their homes as their own private bank.
They are quite happy to get fed up with the country and move abroad because they can – not realising that their mode of living has been enabled by the very economy they criticise.
Working class people are of course subject to an specially designed form of ignorance where they are encouraged to blame things on their neighbours and too many fall for it – they don’t realise that they have more in common with immigrants drowning off the south coast that they are encouraged to despise.
But our educated classes – the middle class in particular – seem to me have had their curiosity nullified by affluence and this need to ‘keep up with the Jones’. They have become very inward looking.
Modern capitalism is extremely cunning in how it gets under people’s skin. It buys people off – it’s the ‘financialization of the conscience’.
Of course, not all of the middle class are like this but I’ve seen an awful lot of it.
I think you describe many
chicken and egg
& I just thought it was because you’ve worked in all 4
but what about education ?
I am not at all sure what you are asking
This is the holistic approach and much can be said for it. My old University degree was entitled” Systems and Management” which was designed around one principle ,in any system under study “The whole is more than the sum of the parts”.
Analysing just the parts of any system separately does not give a good description or understanding of what happens when they all are working together.
We need more big thinking like this,that looks at a wide as spectrum as possible. In the case of economics it is a massive topic that covers a wide range of issues. More importantly, understanding the history of economics and accounting must be a first step, because we have come to live in a world where the bottom line has become the be all and end all,somehwere in all that, humanity has been lost. We need to find the way back.
The fact that the question was asked says we have a long way to go back
As a mining engineer of over 40 years starting from section boss up to mine superintendent, project engineering and including mine start-up and closure. We turned the tailings dam into a designated nature reserve. I have had to learn about almost every engineering discipline, my aim is to have enough knowledge to ask difficult questions. I got interested in economics when investigating how Ireland’s GDP could rise by 26% in one year (a large order of planes was booked in Ireland) and I found MMT.
Something’s you just can’t explain. I remember one fatality where a man drove his vehicle in a tunnel and turned right instead of left to do this he had to removed about 200 tonnes of rock (used as a safety barricade), through a wooden barricade, knocked down two safety signs (DANGER NO ACCESS OPEN STOPE) managed to get the machine around an acute bend by smashing rock off the side walls, though another barricade and sign and drove over the edge of an open stope, He and the machine fell over 100 metres.
[…] Tax, economics, audit and accounting are all intimately theoretically related — but almost no one … Tax Research UK […]
They are all bound up in keeping the rich families rich families.
Economics was invented to steal money from developing countries. Not colonialism, just business to “enrich both parties, look the economists say so” Economic Hitman…
Auditing is there to pretend that theft is at bay. That banks can never be wrong.
Accounting is there to disguise theft and evasion and avoidance.
Taxation is there to ensure that the poor remain poor and get to pay for all the state paid improvements that the rich families use most.
Economics used to be called Political Economy, the two terms being inseparable from each other. The Neoclassical stratagem understood this and thus began a process of economic academic compartmentalization and obfuscation to steer the narrative away from the conclusion of classical political economy – to free the public from rentier charges i.e. economic rent, what J.S. Mill called unearned income. The vested interests, among other fantasies, turned the fundamental three factors of production (land, labor, capital) into just two (labor and capital); via marginalism (the economic version of identity politics) turned the labor theory of value into subjective marginal utility; banished land economics to an academic Siberia; and dropped economic history as a requirement within the field!
So, of course atomization/hyper-specialization is the norm in the economic sphere – it has been corrupted to be as much – to protect the creditor class from the public learning about their unearned income.
Have you ever heard of David Ellerman? His work featured prominently in my own graduate work. Mr. Ellerman, if I remember correctly, refers to himself as an “intellectual trespasser” for working in several intellectual disciplines at once (as you do). [My own graduate work, and the work I am trying to accomplish “on my own time”, combines institutional economics, ethics, and justice. ]
I know the name
But I will gave to jog my memory