Well, I probably won’t be there, but I must say this is coooool. Very cool.
An auction of old old radios. They’re little bundles of nostalgia these little guys. What about this one!
Or perhaps you’d like it in blue. Blue we can do. 
Joel’s, the auctioneer reckons they’ll go for around 1.5K. Then again this cherry red Emerson AU 190 Cathedral will set you back 8-12K.
Most of the initial reactions to Tony Abbott’s maternity leave proposal have focussed on its political motivation, on how it squares with his personal ideology, and on reactions of the business lobby.
As far as the politics are concerned, it looks like standard Howard era populism, seizing on the winds of prevailing opinion.
As for the financing, the interesting aspect is not that business will pay for it. In fact, it would take it a bit of detailed modelling to work out how the incidence would ultimately fall. Businesses forces to pay the levy would recover part of it from salaries and part from consumers via higher prices, with shareholders paying the balance. The cost will fall failrly broadly on the community as a whole, just as it would if it were taxpayer funded. Read more »
The Great Troppo Migration of 2010 continues to be approximately 10,000 times more stressful than planned.
The latest episode of madness was an attempt to more fully bring across user details from the previous database.
The proximate cause of my woes has been that export/import tools built into Wordpress are, basically, crap. This is not a total surprise coming from the “programmers” behind this pretty-but-buggy system. It probably worked fine on the trivial little click-around tests they ran on their computers. It is functionally broken in real world use due to combination of PHP limitations and pisspoor design.
What it does in the trivial, tiny migration is fantastic. It brings a user, their posts, their categories, their tags and all the comments for their posts across in a single file without a hitch. However it doesn’t work if that file is too big. By themselves, Ken and Nicholas have posted too much for the facility to handle. Read more »
It’s never been easier to check quotations. With tools like Google Books and the Yale Book of Quotations there’s no need to publish spurious or out of context quotes.
But even today, books, newspapers and academic papers are full of quotes that are just wrong. Here’s an example from Catherine Lumby’s and Duncan Fine’s book Why TV Is Good for Kids: Read more »
Lots of readers of this blog will be regular readers of Tyler Cowen. I’m not, but that’s just my taste. He often has interesting things to say and there are just too many such people in the blogosphere so he’s not on my feedreader. Anyway, Tyler Cowen is often a good read and a thoughtful guy. When I was killing some time in an international airport last year I came across a hardback copy of the newly released Create your own economy: the path to prosperity in a disordered world by the said T Cowen. Read more »
A great column by the great Paul Krugman – who should have got the Nobel Prize for Journalism.
So the Bunning blockade is over. For days, Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky exploited Senate rules to block a one-month extension of unemployment benefits. In the end, he gave in, although not soon enough to prevent an interruption of payments to around 100,000 workers.
But while the blockade is over, its lessons remain. Some of those lessons involve the spectacular dysfunctionality of the Senate. What I want to focus on right now, however, is the incredible gap that has opened up between the parties. Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally. Read more »
Remember my famous catchcry, “Victory!”
The one in the post just below Nicholas on G2.0.
Yep. I trusted Wordpress to do the right thing. Silly me.
It thoughtfully dropped everyone’s email when migrating you to the new server. This means that the approach I’ve used previously — “here’s the link to reset your password, it will email you a new one” — doesn’t work.
So, friends and Troppo authors, if you’re having trouble logging in, please email me first so I can restore your email details to the system.
I’m going to make a second attempt to migrate Troppo to the new server this weekend.
I have two alternative strategies to look at. One involves chopping bits out of Wordpress that prevent the export/import system from working in the way I want them to.
The other involves a few hours of tedious SQL munging.
You may see Troppo go offline on Saturday or Sunday.
There will be transient locking of comments, so please hold off on the conspiracy theories about moderation policies for the duration.
Update 3.25pm WST: I investigated option 1. It’s still not very good. Luckily the SQL munging was made simpler by TextMate’s macro facilities and column selection feature. From hours down to minutes. I am now going to place the site into a gentle lockdown for a few hours to run through the process.
Update 6.50pm WST: Victory! My new most-favourite commandline tool is iconv, which converts text files from one encoding to another. The trick to this migration was that I needed to run it twice on the same file as there were two layers of character-set shenanigans taking place.
Two years ago I posted a bleg asking for tips on buying an ultralight laptop. I ended up getting an ASUS U2e which has not been particularly good. Anyway, it may have been Vista that was the problem but it’s a pretty underpowered machine – with a 1.07 Ghz Intel Core-Duo processor.
So I’m gonna buy another one. I’d consider Apple but for the fact that their approach to the ultra-light strained to maximise screen size. I don’t want to maximise screen size because Read more »
The New Yorker has just produced this profile of Paul Krugman.
In it we read the following passage.
It isnt that freshwater types believe that actual people are perfectly rationalthey just believe that making that assumption enables a more rigorous economics than is possible without it. After all, while there is only one way to be perfectly rational, there are an infinite number of ways to be irrational, and how do you choose? It all begins to look awfully arbitrary.
Hurrah! An non-lazy portrayal! Read more »
In December 2009, the official ABS Labour Price Index was running at about 3% per annum. This represents a continued trend decline in private sector wage rates (although less so for the public sector).
Wage rates refect the subdued labour market. In September 2009, about 26% of part-time workers wanted to work more hours, compared with 23% in September 2008. And the mean preferred number of extra hours per week for under-employed part-time workers was up to 14.1 hours, compared with 13.4 hours in September 2008. The part-time proportion may have increased further in recent months.
In short, we are still left with plenty of spare capacity. The recent decline in unemployment rate is a bad measure of the underlying rate of under-utilisation (number of hours worked). The economy is likely to achieve a trend growth rate of below 3% in the first half of this year. Stronger private recovery is likely to be offset by the lessening impact of fiscal and monetary policy contraction. There is no immediate need for further interest rate increases until our economy starts to record 3% to 3.5% increases.
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The Sydney Morning Herald has been trumpeting a study they supported by on the future of Sydney’s public transport and urban structure. Beneath the being overly pleased with themselves, with “we’re above petty politics” harrumphing there is a genuine effort to talk about the policy issues in depth. That’s a big relief compared to the usual scandal mongering and whinging vox pops that we usually get from the media on the issue. Read more »
By Maggie Koerth-Baker. HT: Peter Martin
I always suspected that Tony Abbott was a sheep in wolf’s clothing, a bit of a wimp when it came to the crunch. Now it’s been confirmed. Read more »
As I travel the country preaching the great things about Web 2.0 it’s great to see a really interesting Web 2.0 app being launched from sunny Melbourne. Well actually I guess it was launched while its creator was living in Sydney but he’s just moved down to Melbourne where he and I had lunch the other day – we went on for a surprisingly long period of time.
I don’t know how many Troppodillians are aware of Innocentive – but it’s a site that brings together people with technical problems to solve and people to solve them. Kaggle is the Innocentive of data. It will begin by hosting data competitions which will get that market for econometric skill humming along. I invited Anthony Goldbloom to send me a guest post for Troppo and he obliged with the post below. Read more »
Given that Troppo has relaxed its comments policy, some of you may be puzzled as to why your comments weren’t being posted.
Well there’s two things. First, the Akismet anti-spam service still sometimes comes up with false positives which need to be fetched from the spam bin.
The second thing is that the Wordpress default is to require at least one comment from a ‘new’ commenter to be approved before they go through “on the nod” in future.
I’ve just cleared out about 14 comments from the moderation queue and will keep an eye on it over the next few days.
Ever since I read his marvellous The Truth about Markets I’ve been a fan of John Kay – an economist who doesn’t like to get too far away from reality. He’s also not a zealot for any particular view of the world, except that pathetic kind of vagueness and pluralism to which I aspire myself. Perhaps he might even be a Conservative, Liberal Social Democrat after my own heart. Read more »
While we’re waiting for Ken’s dissertaion on the ethics of forcing minors to watch this, here are a few comments on the program.
Kevin Rudd and Tony Jones looked like twins, both prematurely white, bespectacled and beaming, standing on either side of the Speaker’s chair in Old Parliament House. Coalition partisans would have been enraged to see the two of them, the Labor PM and the government salaried Labor propagandist, using public money and airtime to propagandise to an assembly of impressionable young minds.
Rudd obviously enjoyed the encounter. You couldn’t say he had the audience eating of the palm of his hand, but the rapport was good. I don’t know how the audience was selected, but see no reason why it wouldn’t have been a representative cross-section of 15-25 year olds, in terms of political background. Rudd clearly sees himself as their kind of guy, and not without justification. Read more »
It is relatively easy for economists to debate efficiency issues e.g. when we discuss privatisation.
But when we are discussing a host of particular economic issues – such as the distribution effects of labour market deregulation, or the role of health care, or the role of investment in education, or why a government stimulus is needed (when interest rates are up against the zero bound) – one problem keeps coming up. Has economics now become so “mathematized and divorced from moral philosophy” that it is no longer concerned with trade-offs between equality and efficiency? (Something Greg Mankiw recently reminded of this).
Does it now mean that, within the Paretian framework, there is no reason why a person B does not need to care about the effect of government public policy on the welfare of another person B – so long as person B can theoretically be made materially better off?
This leaves us with an economics literature that “few people …can truly understand, either in its content or its relevance the important moral and economic arguments that confront us today”? Read more »
I have been arguing here that America is different to other countries, and in particular that the right wing party (one can hardly call it conservative) is different. Here’s some hard evidence. It is as Markos Moulitsas says, tragic. Read more »
William Hardy Wilson is a fairly well regarded Australian architect of the 20th century and is such usually afforded a few paragraphs in biographical dictionaries and encyclopaedias. These will mention in passing a few well regarded buildings and pay brief mention to an unrealised effort late in his career to create a new architecture combining European and Asian aesthetics.
This does us a great disservice! Hardy Wilson’s later work was an attempt in his own mind to do no less than save civilisation. His own historical theory of everything, which dictated this work, was amazingly bizarre and for this alone is worth recounting. But he also held strong visions of a future Eurasian Australia. The parallels and contrasts with our own multicultural society are striking in both superficial and deeper ways.
Read more »
Google removes Aboriginal flag from winning Doodle 4 Google entry
Last year 11 year old Jessie Du won Google’s Doodle 4 Google competition with her entry ‘Australia Forever’. Displayed on Google’s homepage for Australia Day, the doodle features Australian animals formed into the letters g-o-o-g-l-e. Read more »
One thing I’ve been at pains to stress is that Web 2.0 platforms – like Wikipedia, Blogger, Google Search, Google Calendar, Facebook – are public goods. Further, although a core function of government is to build public goods, none of these public goods were built by governments. To avoid misunderstanding, my point is not that governments should have built them or any other web 2.0 platforms, but to highlight this important new phenomenon of privately built public goods. (And to pose a question which is what role – if any – government agencies might evolve for themselves to help the growth of such public assets. In this regard I’m not really thinking of capital G government agencies like the Treasury, but rather agencies like the National Library or the ABC). Read more »
A lot of folks on Facebook have been sending me links for a new website called “Menzies House”. According to the blurb, it’s the “leading Australian blog for conservative, centre-right and libertarian thinkers and activists”, which must come as news to the mob at Catallaxy (which is still in technical exile).
A perfunctory investigation reveals that the domain name is registered to one Henry Marsh on behalf of the Dallan Investment Trust. Who they are, Google doesn’t know. The Australian Business Register says they’re in SA.
I don’t want to sound like I’m putting down a good initiative, but nevertheless I will wait to see how it pans out. I dislike inorganic ventures, website-wise, and pre-emptively declaring yourself “the leading” anything before you even launch is suspiciously marketer-esque. Not my favourite profession.
Update: Tim Andrew spills the beans.
The other day I was at Toby’s Estate’s Wooloomooloo outlet when I became inordinately interested in the menu pricing.
From my notes (I did mean inordinately) :
Short Black/Ristretto : $2.20
Long Black/Piccolo Latte : $3.00
Latte/Flat White/Cappuccino : $3.50
Here’s my puzzlement. It’s clearly not marginal cost pricing. Whilst the extra labour and milk obviously add a slightly greater cost to the flat white compared to long black, these extra costs are also present to a marginally smaller extent in the piccolo latte which is priced the same. And the effort involved in adding already heated effectively free water to a cup for a long black can’t represent an 80 cent cost on top of a short black.
But we don’t expect perfect marginal cost pricing in many places anyway. Read more »
On Sunday I wrote: "It’s never been easier to check quotations". It’s time for an update.
While checking some of my own words on Monday, I discovered that many of my old blog posts had been attributed to Danger Mouse and Admin. A part of my online identity had been sucked down the memory hole.
While it’s easier than ever to check quotes from well known figures like John F Kennedy, Groucho Marx or Winston Churchill, it can be surprisingly difficult to check quotes from bloggers. As John Quiggin notes, some bloggers try to fend off criticism by stealthily correcting their mistakes. And some blogs just disappear. Read more »
It’s always nice to get a name for something that is rummaging round in one’s mind. Autoantonymy has – believe it or not been doing that in my tiny brain for many years. So I’m greatful to the great Three Quarks website for giving me the word (and grateful to Ingolf for telling us all about Three Quarks many moons ago).
As explained on the site: Read more »
For some time now I’ve been arguing that we should do for information what we did for competition in the 1990s – adopt a national information policy in the image of national competition policy. National competition policy was a trawl through our economic institutions presuming that more competition was better than less and then requiring arrangements that restricted competition to be reviewed and then either justified or removed. We also built institutions to entrench such an approach into policy making at all levels of government through COAG.
We could do the same with information. We should presume that more is better than less, that open is better than closed and further that independence in the creation and dissemination of information is better than its creation and disemination by vested interests. Of course such an agenda would be large – as competition policy was. And it would also be more complex than competition policy. So while it sounds like the NCP it would be a larger, more diverse undertaking and would probably unfold over a longer period. Read more »
I participated in an enjoyable discussion on open government on Late Night Live last night. If one has been thinking about things for a long time and wants to get certain ideas across, it can be pretty challenging doing this effectively – which is to say without misunderstanding – on a panel program, though I can’t complain. Phillip Adams was moving the discussion along, as is his job, and I wasn’t usually the victim of being cut-off. Read more »
OK – I posted the code, but the video didn’t embed. In any event, you can watch and read all about it at much greater length Slate:
Herewith a column of mine for Government News arguing that with Government 2.0 ‘open government’ is making the transition from being essentially an agenda of constitutional hygiene and civil rights (perhaps regarded as an economic luxury) to being a micro-economic reform issue – though at the same time the arguments from constitutional hygiene and civil rights remain as valid as they ever were.
We’re all in favour of openness – at least as Sir Humphrey might say “in principle”, but of course it means different things to different people. The original US Freedom of Information Act was passed in 1966 in the US though it took until 1982 for something similar to find its way into Australian Law. Read more »
Hi all,
I was going to take a breather from the crikey annual group subscription this year, but couldn’t help myself. I’m beleaguered with people asking me if I’m doing it again. Because it’s not hard to do I’m doing it again.
Please email requests to join in with your name and email address to mwilliscroft AT lateraleconomics DOT com DOT au
And we’ll then send them off to crikey who will then be in touch with you with an automated way for you to pay your (reduced) subscription.
A nice piece on how political coverage gets sucked onto the nihilism of race-calling.
HT Brad Delong: George Packer: The Top of Our Game: Read more »
It is surely elementary that the collapse of the financial system in 2008 caused a huge downturn in private debt and that public debt was forced to get into the act to help prop up demand.
If one combines the sum of private and public debt, Australia will look high relative to other countries (as Australia is a debtor country). See Barnaby Joyce’s piece in the Australian.
But the combination of public and private debt remains below (relative to GDP) what it was in the Howard years. Without public debt, we would be in oddles of trouble.
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Regarding the Australian government’s attitude to the war in Afghanistan, Hugh White had this to say on Lateline last night:
I think they understand perfectly well that continuing to support the United States there is fairly important for our alliance management, but I don’t detect much enthusiasm in the Government to really trying to turn Afghanistan around and convert it into a stable, prosperous democracy. I think most people in the Government privately regard that as a pretty quixotic aim. Read more »
One needs a full cost-benefit analysis (including all externalities such as secondary effects n health premiums) to form an intelligent view on whether to sell Medibank Private.
In the meantime, it makes no sense to say that “reducing the level of government debt quickly is essential for the future prosperity of all Australians”, as Joe Hockey argues. The level of debt is not an appropriate measure of balanced sheet strength (public or private). Rather the focus should be on government net worth (assets minus liabilities) and earning power of the assets – the dividends earned relative to public debt interest.
Well it’s not that beautiful, but then lots of bird’s tails are not that beautiful. But make a few simple evolutionary rules and somewhere amazing things happen. Like this website on accommodation in Chester that thinks that if it republishes Paul Frijter’s post on engineering solutions to climate change, that it will (presumably) work it’s way up Google’s rankings. Presumably there’s some method in it. Anyway, it even acknowledges where it plagiarised the content so I guess you can’t complain.
I’m occasionally asked by local ABC Morning Show host Leon Compton to be a panellist on a Friday segment titled “3 Big Questions”. It involves three local media or superannuated political luminaries musing about political and sometimes more general issues of the day.
I was on it yesterday, and the third “question” was both Valentine’s Day-related and rather personalised, springing from a private email exchange I’d had with Leon. It was:
Ken Parish is becoming a Grumpy Old Man. I am noticing the signs in myself too ((my)lady says..’hmmm how could we use that leftover chocolate mousse’. She winks. I say ‘think of the ants’.
Finish this sentence….You know you’re becoming a Grumpy Old Man when…. Read more »
Tomorrow (Saturday) I will be moving Troppo to a new server. During the day you will see intermittent connectivity. Once we’ve moved across I’ll update this announcement.
In 1934 an Aussie school teacher wrote a little ditty about Kookaburras that was enjoyed and sung by school kids for decades. She made pretty much no money out of it all, as it was, and is, still legal for kids to sing a song at school without paying the composer, thank the lord. In 1980, Men at Work had a huge hit whose main hook was a catchy vocal melody and some parochial references to vegemite and chunder that, for one brief summer, somehow captured the imagination not only of we happy folks Downunder, but much of the world. Read more »
The global warming debate has morphed into Mondo Bizzaro. Rudd is capable of mounting a succinct and persuasive explanation of his emissions trading scheme but chooses not to do so, preferring to shift the electoral focus to subjects the pollsters tell him are more unequivocally propitious. Read more »
Remember me? That grumpy old bloke who once obsessively spewed forth half-baked opinions here at Troppo? After being AWOL for some time a comeback of sorts seems imminent. I’m experiencing fitful urges to post, usually on very silly topics like whether Jen may have committed reportable child abuse by forcing young Jessica to watch KRudd being quizzed by members of James Farrell’s dumb generation on Q & A. Read more »
The February edition of The Monthly is out, including Robert Manne’s eagerly-awaited ‘Comment’ on Windschuttle. Read more »
Serving it up to the hyperconnected generation
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I read The Dumbest Generation over Christmas, though it came out in 2008. It’s a very satisfying polemic, as well as thoroughly researched — to the extent that I’m competent to judge — and its author Mark Bauerlein is a cut above the average as stylist.
The title refers to American teenagers and young adults up to about 30, and the book is as provocative as the it suggests. Bauerlein presents four theses: Read more »
The headlines all warn that core inflation “remains high” and that the futures market is predicting a 78% chance that the RBA will increase rates next week.
We need to keep things in perspective.
First, after three annual increases in interest rates and with the gradual easing off in fiscal policy, inflation poses no immediate concern. “Underlying” inflation is slightly below the Reserve Bank’s management bracket. The “trimmed means” percentage change of 1.4% in the December half-year can be represented as 2.8% on an annual basis. The figures are likely to go down further in subsequent quarters.
House prices, while excessive, are bound to slow down with the end of the stimulus package. Other asset prices are subdued.
And the Reserve Bank does not simply look at the unemployment rate: it looks equally at the overall under-utilisation rate (totals hours worked). In fact, hours worked per member of the labour force have declined by 4% relative to what it was when the recession hit in mid-2008. There is ample spare capacity. Read more »
Two apparently unrelated articles by superstars of the 1980s and 90s in their respective fields which share a common theme – the market’s aversion to serious innovation, it’s tendency to move incrementally towards lower levels of innovation leaving really fundamental and speculative innovation to others.
Bill Gates points out that ‘efficiency’ as in improving insulation and lowering fuel consumption is not going to reduce CO2 emissions by 80% by 2050, only serious innovation can. That’s a (possible) justification for regulation which targets breakthrough technologies like zero emissions cars (though just identifying the potential case for it, doesn’t mean you have that case, or that politicians and policy makers won’t screw up such policies).
One of the reasons I bring this up is that I hear a lot of climate change experts focus totally on 2025 or talk about how great it is that there is so much low hanging fruit that will make a difference. Read more »
As we lurch from one disaster to another, I think Mark Thoma quoting Chris Blattman, hopping into David Brooks gets it exactly right.
Chris Blattman:
David Brooks saves the world in 1000 words, by Chris Blattman:
Haiti, like most of the world’s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust…
We’re all supposed to politely respect each other’s cultures. But some cultures are more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them. Read more »
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