Author: dberger

[This started life as an email sent to Tim Harford in response to a column appearing in the Financial Times. The text here has been lightly edited for clarity, and has added context.]

With regards to your recent FT column (“A pre-Budget day guide to Britain’s bad taxes” [*]) you said out loud something I think gets far too little coverage in the UKs conversation about taxation.

You said “Taxes do not just transfer money from citizens to the government; they also shape our behaviour.”

I believe the degree to which the latter impacts their ability to do the former is under-appreciated by most, probably including the bureaucrats responsible for tax policy. 

Four decades as table top role player and game master – a hobby I know we share [*] – a decade spent at a video game company known for its digital distribution platform, award winning games and, shall we say, unorthodox organizational structure, and a variety of organizational roles across the technology sector have all led me to the same conclusion:

Everything is game design. 

And to badly paraphrase Philip K. Dick – “ignoring that reality doesn’t make it go away.”

Examples abound.  Eliminating the remittance taxation basis anecdotally caused wealthy mobile people to respond by using their mobility to preserve their wealth – reacting particularly to arguably rapacious death taxes [1, 2, 3, 4].  It was commonly predicted that aligning capital gains tax rates with income tax rates would discourage asset sales, potentially making the change revenue net-negative [1, 2]. 

Taxes are a sort of game – seen by many as at least slightly adversarial. And with regards to any game, what the game designer wanted or expected players to do when they designed the rules is largely irrelevant – what matters is how the players play the game.

Players have incentives to find, and take advantage of, places where complex rules combine in ways that are surprising to the rules designer, and they’re often remarkably effective at doing so.  This is often lumped into discussions of “game balance” and can be something of a black art.  Game rules get refined by play testing and iteration – something public finance has precious little opportunity to do.  So – as you point out when talking about the NZ VAT vs UK VAT treatments [note: he points out that NZ charges a lower VAT rate than the UK, but applies it more consistently, resulting in much higher per-capita tax revenue with few opportunities for evasion or “optimization”] – simpler is nearly always better.

I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir.

The last thing I wanted to say – and something I hope gets more attention from yourself and other commentators in positions to nudge the public discourse – is that when thinking about taxes: continuous functions are necessary and smooth continuous functions should be strongly preferred.” [note: in mathematics a continuous function is smooth – it has no jumps or discontinuities – but I use continuous here in the commonly understood sense – that the function has a value for all inputs.]

Whenever there are thresholds in fiscal policy – jumps between (for example) the tax on £X and £X+1 – people will look hard for ways to stay on the “right” side of the threshold – and zooming in on the data reveals points piled up against those fence posts.

I don’t at all mean to imply that setting tax policy is easy – or that there’s a “right answer” – but the behavior of the exchequer over the years I’ve been in the UK belies a lack of understanding of the game being played.  And succeeding at a game without understanding it is nigh on impossible.

Cheers.

There’s a quote, (mis)attributed to Aristotle, that begins “we are what we repeatedly do…” I’ve always like the quote for its resolution – “excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”

Lately the first bit, and what it captures about our odd relationship with work, has been on my mind (for probably self-evident reasons).

Most of us spend most of our time “at work” – it’s literally what we repeatedly do – and for many of us it becomes a defining aspect of self.

“I’m a carpenter.”

“I’m a lawyer.”

“I’m a nurse.”

“I’m a software engineer.”

It’s right there, hidden in the contraction. We’re not saying I do, we’re saying I am.

And yet, at the same time, most of us look forward to the day we can choose to stop.

Maybe you’re not “most of us.” Maybe you’re someone who – like a former colleague of mine – “would do this [job] for free.” If that’s you, I’m not sure this will make much sense. Sorry.

The question that’s been rattling around in my head lately is “If we are what we do, and mostly what we do is work, what are we when we’re not working – when we aren’t doing?”

I grew up in a “vanishing middle class” family. Both my parents spent their working years working “for someone else” – and nearly all of my friend’s parents did, too – so it’s probably my plebeian background that makes being able to opt out of someone else having claim to most of my time – while continuing to maintain a comfortable lifestyle – feel like an incredible luxury.

At the same time, prioritization was a recurring theme in my up-bringing. It wasn’t always explicitly talked about as prioritization, but in retrospect prioritization was the kernel of many of the lessons my parents worked to impart. Time was a scarce and finite resource, so you did what needed doing first, and once that was done you did what you wanted with whatever time was left.

If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding. That sort of thing.

I internalized that lesson really well. Maybe too well. I remember times as a kid, being burned out working on some “needs doing” thing – like homework – and not letting myself take a break. Even though a short break would would likely let me get done faster and better. Because this thing needed doing, and “needs doing” things come first.

Somewhere along the way – probably in college, when all the things that needed doing would overflow the available time – I got more intentional about prioritization. I stopped just thinking about something “needing doing” and started thinking about what would be “the best, most valuable, use” of my limited time.

What was “valuable” was a bit … subjective. Learning was valuable, so reading – even fiction – qualified. So did spending time with friends, almost irrespective of what we did with that time, as long as it was interactive. Watching TV was not valuable (unless it was what Dawnise and I have come to call “edutainment” on PBS). Ditto video games, which basically never qualified. On the other hand, “needs doing” things were valuable unless proven otherwise.

Where did that leave “work?” It turned out that many of the things I wanted to do required money. And since I didn’t have the foresight and fortune to be born into a wealthy family, work was how one got money.

One of the interview questions I used to ask software folks just starting out in the industry was “where does your paycheck come from?” It’s not a trick question – the goal was to see if they could turn their mental crank enough to get to some version of “the work I do is valuable to someone, that someone trades money for that value, and my paycheck is some of that money.”

So work, by definition, is (must be) valuable. Or, put another way, if the work you’re doing isn’t valuable to someone, you probably won’t be doing it gainfully for long. The Faustian bit is that to get money, you trade time – and the more time you trade for money, the less you have left to do the things the money lets you do.

All of that comes back around to me, having stepped away from full time work “for a while,” not having a particularly satisfying answer to the question “what do you do?”

I’ve tried “I’m on a sabbatical,” “I’m taking a career break,” and even “I’m test-driving retirement.” They’re all basically true, and they all trigger the same follow-up: “what did you do?” which often quickly segues into “how do you fill your time now?”

It’s not unreasonable to ask. To try to find some sort of handle on “me.”

What’s surprising, and doesn’t feel entirely reasonable, is my emotional response.

The question makes me angsty.

Because, at least right now, all the answers I have fly in the face of a deep seated long standing belief that I should be doing “something valuable.”

It turns out I’m basically still that kid. Still struggling to take a break from my homework, despite knowing a break is sensible.

I’m really not sure how I fix this. It’s been “me” for as long as I remember. That doesn’t mean it’s right, it just means it’s hard to change.

Perhaps the nagging voice in my head is right – perhaps I do need to “find something valuable to do.” Either by deciding that something I want to do is valuable, or by finding something that’s valuable and deciding I want to do it.

Or perhaps I need to ignore this feeling for a bit and see if it goes away…

For the past few months I’ve been working with some like-minded watch enthusiast colleagues, and a couple of UK watch companies, on a design for a custom Axon watch. We’re getting really close to taking orders, so I posted about the project in a company wide Slack channel.

A colleague, who knows I’m leaving the company, messaged me and asked:

“Are you gonna buy one, or is the brand toxic now?”

I honestly didn’t find the question terribly surprising. What I found a little surprising was that I hadn’t really considered not buying one of the watches we were working on – even though I’ll be long gone from the company before it’s delivered. (Bespoke watches don’t happen overnight. It’s months between order and delivery.)

It’s tempting, and not entirely unreasonable really, to blame this on my watch … enthusiasm. Or on some variant of sunk cost – since I’d done most of the work on the project.

But I don’t think it’s either of those.

I think it’s an aspect of Annie Duke’s insight, that the right time to quit feels like quitting too soon, and that by the time it’s obvious you need to quit, you’ve waited too long.

We’ve probably all known people who’ve stayed at a company, or in a relationship, long past the point we think they’d be happier elsewhere.

We might be wrong… but we might also be right, and something is making them stay: a paycheck, or the promise of a payday around the corner; colleagues and friends they don’t want to lose contact with; the sense of prestige that comes from their title and role at a big-name firm that’s woven itself into their sense of self.

Whatever the reasons, they persist long past their “sell-by date.” And the motivation, belief, passion and commitment they used to feel twists and changes.

By the time they make the decision to quit – or the decision is made for them – all that’s left is disdain and a lingering sense of betrayal. That this was done to them. And that feeling colors everything that came before.

Many of us have experienced this a least once. For some of us it’s the experience every time we leave a job, or a relationship.

Acrimony and scorched earth.

I responded that I totally intend to buy a watch, and said “I’m not leaving ’cause I hate this place, I’m leaving ’cause my bet is that I’ll be ‘better out than in.’”

That led to a conversation about … all of this stuff. And specifically about how, for many of us, by the time we leave we’ve come to dislike the thing we’re leaving – at least a little.

I think we get there in the normal two ways – “gradually, then suddenly.”

The trick is to notice the “gradually” bit.

To spot that you’ve stepped onto a path that ends with wanting to burn everything to the ground.

My best advice, when you realize you’re on that path – when you notice that you’re keeping track of where the sticks & the marshmallows are in anticipation of the coming conflagration – is figure out how to fix it, or figure out how to leave.

It’s critical in those moments to remember that – job or relationship – past you chose to do this. It wasn’t done to you. It was your choice. Your decision. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

Things change. This version of this thing maybe isn’t the thing you’d choose, if you were choosing now.

That’s okay.

The best thing you can do now, to borrow some wisdom shared with me, is “wake up smarter,” and make a different choice.

Early in my career I had an uncomfortable couple months that taught me that the correct number of times to decide to leave a company is once.

Sometimes you can get away with twice.

More than twice is almost always a bad idea.

So having decided (again) to leave Axon, I don’t expect there to be another do-over.

I did some thinking while we were traveling over the holidays and came to realize that while I still want to be doing something, I was less and less confident that what I was doing was that something.

Annie Duke, professional poker player turned author, describes quitting as a prediction problem. You should quit, she argues, when you’d bet that your future not doing the thing is going to be better than your future continuing to do it. Sh argues that it often feels like we’re quitting too soon – but that if you wait long enough to be sure quitting is the right move, you’ve probably waited too long.

By the time we got home I’d thought about it as much as I thought thinking about it could help.

All that was left was to place a bet.

Sometime last year, quite by accident, Dawnise and I found ourselves looking at Edward Jenner’s house over his garden gate.

Jenner may not be a household name, none the less his work pioneering vaccination has literally – no hyperbole or exaggeration – saved countless lives.

Vaccination isn’t perfect. Vaccination isn’t infallible. Vaccination saves lives.

We know all of these things to be true beyond any reasonable doubt.

We know that vaccination saves lives. In the immortal words of Richard Dawkins, “it works, bitches.”

A wise magician described science as, “a careful, disciplined, logical search for knowledge about any and all aspects of the universe, obtained by examination of the best available evidence and always subject to correction and improvement upon discovery of better evidence.”

“What’s left,” he went on to say, “is magic. And it doesn’t work.”

Along with millions and millions of other people, I’m likely alive because I’ve been vaccinated against a cadre of diseases that could have killed me in infancy. And my parents, and likely their parents, were vaccinated against diseases they subsequently didn’t get.

Diseases that didn’t kill them. Didn’t maim or cripple them. Or change the course of their lives.

The diseases we routinely vaccinate against have become vanishingly rare in vaccinated populations.

Which is entirely the point.

They’ve become rare enough that many of us have never seen someone affected by any of them. Rare enough that some of us have the luxury of asserting the threat of those diseases isn’t real.

We’ve succeeded in making these afflictions rare enough that we’ve collectively forgotten that not very long ago tens of thousands of people contracted paralytic poliomyelitis each year. We’ve forgotten what a hospital ward full of people who need iron lungs to breathe looks like.

Rare enough that some of us believe, despite a preponderance of evidence, that the risk of being vaccinated outweighs the risk of the disease.

The universe, of course, doesn’t give a toss what nonsense you believe.

Thanks to some of the physicians in charge of America’s vaccination advisory committee – like Dr. Kirk Milhoan – who believes that an individual’s right to choose takes primacy over public health – we may soon have a chance to refresh our collective memory.

“Good news, everyone!”

For the record, I believe he’s wrong. And I believe everyone – not just the people who follow his advice and “exercise their right to choose” – are worse off for having people like him in positions of authority.

I also don’t for a moment believe any argument will change his mind.

His position isn’t objective, or rational. It’s not likely to change when confronted with evidence, or a well reasoned argument. Anyway, assuming for a moment he didn’t get his medical degree from a box of Cracker Jack he’s surely seen the data. He’s surely studied the evidence.

And he’s chosen to value individual choice over collective benefit.

Or perhaps he’s betting on magic over science.

He might as well argue that it should be a surgeon’s choice whether they scrub in for a procedure. Or that it’s a a city’s choice to keep sewage out of the drinking water supply.

After all, the “germ theory of disease” is just a theory.

Of course theory doesn’t mean “personal belief,” or even “someone’s wild-assed guess.” A theory – about anything – is the best explanation we currently have – consistent with all the evidence we currently have. A theory helps us reason about and ultimately understand the thing in question.

Doctors, of all people, know this. Doctors, and engineers, are the people who most directly put science into practice. They use it to solve (and prevent) real problems. They use it to hopefully make the world a little better.

So it absolutely infuriates me that he has the nerve – the utter fucking audacity – to call himself a doctor while actively undermining one of the most effective tools we have to protect health. He’s encouraging people in his care – people who look to doctors for trustworthy advice and guidance – to forgo the best protection against these diseases science has.

<deep breath>

So be it.

As America chooses to turn its back on vaccination, no other country can force them to reverse course.

What other countries can do, and should do, is work to ensure that their populations are protected from America’s choices.

The risks from an individual choice to be unvaccinated absolutely shouldn’t be imposed on others.

Acountry might, for instance, make proof of vaccination against diseases they routinely vaccinate against a prerequisite for crossing their border.

Want to enter such a country? Show evidence that you’ve been vaccinated.

Each time Dawnise and I have relocated internationally, proof of vaccination against some set of things has been demanded as part of our entry paperwork. No vaccination, no entry visa.

During the COVID pandemic we demonstrated that it’s completely possible to scale those inspection mechanisms up to everyone traveling between countries.

Many of us don’t have ready proof of childhood vaccination. The straightforward answer is to get re-vaccinated.

Getting (re)vaccinated, managing and checking records – none of that is free. But the cost are low compared to what’s at stake.

I recognize that there are some people who really actually can’t be vaccinated. People for whom the vaccination itself actually carries material risk. I even know a few such people.

I also know there are a bunch of people who demand, and are often given exemptions for religious or philosophical reasons.

To me the line is bright and clear: a bone-fide medical exemption permits travel. A religious or philosophical exemption does not. If your god, or your philosophy, preclude vaccination they implicitly preclude international travel.

Because magic doesn’t work.

When someone meets Dawnise and asks her “what she does,” she often responds “I go to the theater!” This usually elicits a chuckle from the person asking. That’s intentional, but the the answer isn’t entirely a joke. Supporting live performance (sounds better than “going to the theater,” right?) is one of Dawnise’s (many) hobbies – she’s seen hundreds of shows since we moved to London in 2019, and because she’s innately frugal the average price paid for a ticket is surprisingly low. She also sews, paints, reads, and has become the primary user of our Steam account, playing odd and interesting games involving lots of puzzles and exploration and fairly few bullets.

When it looked like I’d be taking some time off work, Dawnise and I would chat on and off about what I might do while I wasn’t working. I had precious few specifics to offer, but I wasn’t worried – I figured I’d have plenty of things to do and wouldn’t get bored – at least for a fair while.

I ended up postponing taking time off, but that nagging question – “what will you do?” – won’t quite leave me alone.

Trying to answer has made me realize I don’t really have what you might call “a hobby.” Computers were an early hobby that turned into my field of study and subsequently into my profession. That a hobby turned into over three decades of gainful employment has meant that for most of my working life what I do hasn’t generally felt like “work.”

All these years later, however, and it’s fair to say that some of the shine has come off. I no longer think of computers as a hobby.

Why? Well, I have a truly marvelous explanation that this margin is too narrow to contain…

At any rate, I’ve been thinking about hobbies. And I’ve decided that “I need to find a few.”

So I’m building a list of potential hobbies. Well, really, I’m building a list of evaluation criteria.

I’m open to things with moderate startup costs, and reasonable (low) recurring costs. Whatever it is needs to be space efficient, ’cause we don’t have a bunch of spare room knocking about. If it’s outdoors, it has to be “London weather compatible” (turns out, it rains here, and the winter is chilly), and it needs to be “reasonably flexible” to schedule.

I have a guitar – two in fact – I should find a teacher and learn to play. It requires some scheduling, and lessons are an ongoing expense, but supporting a teacher and learning something feels like a totally worthy investment of time and money.

I also have a camera. I take it with me when we travel, but I shouldn’t only take it out when we’re getting on a plane or a train. London is huge and much of it – not just the touristy bits – are stupidly photogenic.

I also have a car, and there are plenty of things to see (and photograph) beyond London proper.

I don’t have a motorcycle here – the lack of a good (read: reasonably secure and out of the weather) place to park one has kept me from seriously considering “fixing” that – but I love the idea of taking the camera with me on motorcycle rides around the country (and the contingent). So maybe I take another tilt and figuring out where I can park a bike that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg or make it so inconvenient to access that I never do.

Finally I think I’d like to find a TTRPG group. I’ve played and run games on and off since I was nine or ten but haven’t regularly played in over a decade. I expect this will be tricky, as it involves finding other people whose priorities (schedules) and play styles align with mine.

So I have the start of a list. I’m sure there are other things I should consider, and, if I’m lucky, maybe someone reading this will drop me a note and make a suggestion.

Maybe even you.

12-December

As I write this, Dawnise and I are a train back to Krakow. We spent most of the day at Auschwitz.

I can’t yet put words to the thing.

Deciding to visit was very much in the category of “things we feel compelled do as an adult” not “things we want to do.” And it’s certainly not a thing I’m in a rush to do again.

Auschwitz is a place that should not be. A thing that should only exist in nightmares.

The place, and the events that transpired there, are too terrible to contemplate. The horrors beyond imagining.

And yet it is.

Terribly soul-crushingly real. Refusing to fade into mist.

There were moments today I’ll likely remember forever.

And I was just a visitor.

We booked admission in November, once we’d decided to visit Krakow. Even well in advance there were no English tour slots available, so we booked individual entry.

A 90 minute bus trip from the Krakow central bus depot and we joined the queue, where our tickets and IDs were checked and we were ushered through a metal detector.

We stopped at the bookshop and bought the guidebook and entered the compound.

I may have taken a dozen steps before I felt tears on my cheeks.

When we emerged from the last building dark had fallen. The camp was eerily empty – I don’t think we saw anyone as we made our way to the exit. Any return buses had long since departed, so we walked through the freezing dark to the Oświęcim train station.

I chose to leave my camera at the hotel, and we took very few pictures. The place deserved our full presence and attention, without the comforting intermediation of a camera lens.

So we looked.

We saw.

And we will remember. We have no choice.

…

22-December

We left Krakow and met up with friends in Switzerland, spending most of a week between Basel and Zurich before returning to London.

I’m finishing this entry over a week later, and I still can’t put words to the thing.

So I’ll borrow some from the entry marker:

Genocide presents us with an image so appalling that it can be damaging even to look.

But we know we must look.

We know that repressing memory, willed forgetting, is perhaps the greatest danger we face as a species.

If we want to remain fully human, we have no choice but to confront and remember the past, to learn, and to act on what we’ve learned.

Steven Spielberg’s RIGHTEOUS PERSONS FOUNDATION

I was in Seattle last week, on what I expected to be my last work trip. While I was there, I was asked if I’d consider un-resigning and staying on to help with a thing.

If you read my post about about deciding to leave – and how I felt like I was leaving before I was “done” – you’d be forgiven for thinking staying would be an easy choice.

By last week I’d spent the better part of three months handing things off and starting to plan – ok, more imagine than plan, really – a new normal.

The idea of being “funemployed” had grown on me.

On the other hand, I meant what I said about wanting Axon to succeed.

I worked with someone, years ago, who said “show me you love me, don’t tell me you love me.” Investing (more) time and effort definitely felt like showing.

So I thought about it, got input from some colleagues, and Dawnise and I talked it through when I got home.

And this morning I agreed to rescind my resignation.

Is it the right choice? I’m not sure, but helping when someone asks for your help rarely feels like the wrong one.

Funemployment will wait a bit longer.