"claims of severe talent shortage in Big Data http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230472330457736... Ok... where are the high salaries (500k$ a year)? No? No real shortage."

https://twitter.com/#!/lemire/status/196245665951649793

Business has a shortage of "big data" folks in much the same way I have a "huge sailboat" shortage. Neither of us want to pay for it. We want it, but not for the going rate. Only one of us has a media platform, though.

I'm not sure that the kinds of employees that this article describes will ever be a large number. There could be more of them in the future, but someone who is top-notch at all of statistics, programming, and data-presentation has long been less common than someone who's good at one or two of those. Companies might consider looking at better ways to build teams that combine talent that exists, instead of pining for more superstars.

I'm reminded indirectly of an acquaintance of mine who works on repairing industrial machinery, where companies complain of a big skills shortage. They either fail to realize or are in denial about what that means in the 21st century, though. It might've been a one-person job in the 1950s, a skilled-labor type of repairman job. But today they want to find one person who can do the physical work (welding, etc.), EE type work, embedded-systems programming (and possibly reverse engineering), application-level programming to hook things up to their network, etc. Some of these people exist, but it's more common to find boutique consulting firms with 3-person teams of EE/CE/machinist or some such permutation. But companies balk at paying consulting fees equivalent to three professional salaries for something they think "should" be doable by one person with a magical combination of skills, who will work for maybe $80k. So they complain that there is a shortage of people who can repair truck scales (for example).

The implied but never fully-articulated point of this article is that high-tax domiciles resent it when rational actors having a choice in the matter will routinely structure their business affairs to incur tax to the maximum extent possible in low-tax as opposed to high-tax domiciles.

The issue becomes almost formulaic. Given (1) rational actors, (2) freedom to choose and to structure business affairs using a multiplicity of entities for different purposes, (3) resources with which to hire and pay for the talent needed to sort out the tax issues and their complexities, (4) a business goal of maximizing after-tax profits, (5) a multiplicity of domiciles from which to choose, and (6) a ready means by which to direct resources from one domicile to another (as with digital assets), it inevitably follows that every sophisticated company meeting these criteria will avail itself of the tax avoidance/minimization strategies. As the article notes, it is perfectly legal and every big company does it (see, e.g., this similar write-up from a couple of years ago on Google's comparable tax strategies: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1815195).

Nothing, of course, stops a given company from voluntarily subjecting itself to higher tax rates by declining to follow this formula but why would it? Big companies will routinely want to avoid high taxes if they can. So too do small businesses. People may have social views that higher taxes are desirable but, as individual economic actors, they will seek to avoid them. This may be right or wrong but it is reality.

This means that high-tax domiciles will have no choice but to continue to remain frustrated that they cannot have unchecked means of taxing their citizens. As long as people have freedom, governments have to strike a balance that people can live with. And that is not a bad thing.