Maya Forstater

Unbelievable. To my naive mind, it would seem a simple thing for tax campaigners to police these numbers so Maya doesn't have to.https://twitter.com/MForstater/status/940150326115684352 …

Crimes to police: presenting gross flows as forgone tax; applying estimates from middle income countries to LDCs, attributing everything to multinationals, using numbers after they've been dubunked.

Yes to all of the above. But also there’s the “brown M&Ms” thing. The fact that these bleeding obvious errors (as @LarsKoch says) are not being picked up reflects a bigger dysfunction in the debate I think.

I agree with you re attention to detail. I still think tax avoidance, tax competition and other theft are huge issues for all countries.

But they are *not even remotely slightly nearly* as important as is being shrieked about. A whole order of magnitude less important, as an upper bound!

Certainly more important than aid in quantity. And other factors also relevant incl state capture, citizen accountability etc. The campaign is in part to persuade devt sector and northern govts to focus less on aid more on structural issues such as this.