A German aristocrat of my acquaintance has figured out that the price he will be paid for the output of a solar panel is so high compared with the price he will pay for his input of normal electricity, that he is thinking of rigging up powerful arc lamps to shine on solar panels on his extensive roof.
(HT: Bishop Hill)
John Quiggin makes an interesting argument in a recent post.
if you can’t get basic stats right, you can’t get economics right either
I’d like to think that’s right, but I know it isn’t. First specialisation and the division of labour suggests that it would/should be possible to get economics right and not stats. Second, Deirdre McCloskey and Stephen Ziliak have tested that hypothesis. From the introduction of their 2003 Journal of Socio-Economics article. Read more »
The Lowy Institute have put up a post asking whether there is a libertarian view on foreign policy.
what do libertarians believe to be the proper role of government when it comes to international affairs? Libertarians like their government small and out of the way, but they presumably agree that there are some things government ought to be good at, like defending the country and protecting its interests.
So get the discussion going, I thought some quotes from Ludwig von Mises would be in order. From Liberalism Read more »
Henry Ergas provides an FAQ on the Rudd health policy in the Australian. Read the whole thing – I especially loved this bit.
True, the states may not have the tax base to easily fund rising health costs. But if you believe the recently released Intergenerational Report, neither does the commonwealth.
Henry then provides some analysis of the money being stripped out of the State budgets.
The 2009-10 Intergenerational Report projects that GST revenue will average about 3.5 per cent of gross domestic product during the next 40 years. One-third of GST revenue would therefore be 1.15 per cent of GDP. The report also projects that commonwealth spending on hospitals amounts to 1 per cent of GDP in 2009-10, increasing to 1.1 per cent of GDP in 2019-20. Read more »
Michael Foot, former UK Labour Party leader, has passed away aged 96. In her autobiography Mrs Thatcher described him as being a gentleman.
Looks like we will be waiting a while for any meaningful or coherent tax reform
KEVIN Rudd has put the Henry tax review firmly on the backburner, confirming today that his $50 billion public health takeover plan is his top priority.
The Prime Minister said this morning he had not decided on a specific timetable for the release of the review, which was delivered to the Rudd government by Treasury secretary Ken Henry in December.
“I believe what Australian people wanted me to do is to get on with the business of delivering health and hospitals reform. Number one priority,” he told ABC radio.
“Each thing in its season, we’ve got to do one thing at a time.
“But in terms of specific timetables for doing it, no, I don’t have anything particular in mind.”(The Australian 04/03/2010) Read more »
I have an op-ed in The Australian today talking about the Rudd health policy. Like Samuel J I am underwhelmed by the proposal and believe it to be fundamentally flawed.
Do we really want some Canberra bureaucrat (note the “no net increase in bureaucrats” promise) determining how much should be spent on our health? Do we really want to have health spending allocated on the same basis that the Commonwealth Grants Commission divvies up the GST?
This policy is to be financed by one-third of the GST revenue. People may think that to be sensible, but hang on to your wallets. Rudd promised further ostensible reform. He identified that the gap between expected GST revenue and demands on the health system is expected to increase.
That’s code for a future increase in the GST rate. No doubt, through time the commonwealth will find that it needs to spend more and more on health. “GST up” will become the new perennial budget headline. Read more »
John Quiggin has just put up another post on the Phil Jones statistical significance issue. This time putting the boot into Richard Lindzen. It seems Lindzen is the originator of the claim that there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995. Jones agreed with that statement at the 95 percent level, but only just. Recall my discussion on that point here and here.
This is what John Quiggin says (emphasis added) Read more »
Peter Costello has a good article in the Age today.
Once you announce there is $2.7 billion of free insulation to be distributed, you can hardly be surprised when contractors materialise from thin air to take up the business. If the government’s plan is to shovel out money as fast as possible, then safety and training is not going to be their priority.
Nor was it a priority for the government when it announced the scheme on February 3 last year. The government declared: “The insulation program is expected to create a significant number of new Australian jobs. These jobs require limited retraining and so the benefits to the community can be realised quickly.”
What a tragic miscalculation that proved to be. The retraining was so “limited”, four young men tragically lost their lives and thousands of homes are now at risk. So where did the idea to insulate houses come from? Read more »
In Greek mythology, the gods were anthropomorphic. They were spiteful, vengeful and capricious. People knew that they had to offer sacrifice or earn the wrath of the god they offended.
When Zeus defeated his father Kronos and the other Titans, hurling them off to Tartarus, he established himself as the king of the gods.
But sacrificing to Zeus was insufficient – the other gods had their realms and needed offerings too.
Thanks to Prometheus, mankind enjoyed the best part of the meat that is sacrificed, with the offal and blood reserved for sacrifice to the gods.
The Greeks – and other civilizations with their own gods – knew how important it was to keep the gods happy.
Now, curiously, we have a reversal. It is the god Gaia that predominates, who the Greeks knew as the grandmother of Kronos and the great grandmother of Zeus.
Our sacrifice must be an emissions trading scheme. Failure to make deep cuts in carbon emissions, we are told, will cause Gaia to be upset and woe betide those humans that offend her dignity. Read more »
Roger Pielke Jr. linked to an old post today. In February 2009 he made these comments.
The political consensus surrounding climate policy is collapsing. If you are not aware of this fact you will be very soon.
…
The current shrillness that has been put on display by many politically-active climate scientists and the feeding-frenzy among their skeptical political opposition can be explained as a result of this looming collapse, though many will confuse the shrillness and feeding-frenzy as a cause of the collapse.
…
The climate scientists (and their willing allies) have taken their battle to the arenas of politics, waging a scorched earth campaign of bullying, name calling, threats, and obnoxiously absurd appeals to authority. The skeptics participate in similar fashion, and the result is an all out brawl that we see escalating still before our eyes. Read more »
The SMH has an op-ed today by George Williams arguing against the death penalty. Apparently the federal parliament is considering a ban. This would prevent any State or Territory government from reintroducing the death penalty. Putting this in context, the last person executed in Australia was hanged in 1967. The last jurisdiction to maintain the death penalty on the books was NSW (abolished in 1985) but the last time someone was executed there was in 1940. The last ANU election survey indicates that support for the death penalty has fallen below 50 percent. So what’s the problem?
This leaves Australian law in an unsatisfactory state and our citizens facing the death penalty overseas in an even worse situation. Equivocation on the death penalty by our leaders, such as by recognising it as appropriate for someone like Saddam Hussein, makes it harder to oppose the execution of Australians overseas. Read more »
Anecdotal evidence suggests that the introduction of cycle paths adjoining Canberra roads has led to an increase in bicycle rider injuries. Often cyclists travelling between 20 and 30 km/h are riding alongside cars doing 80 km/h.
A report in the Canberra Times cites a survey that found that:
Canberrans are more likely than anyone else in Australia to find cyclists to be a road hazard
and that cyclists make up around 1/4 of road accident related hospital episodes in Canberra.
I have observed some appalling behaviour by some cyclists – colleagues have observed similar behaviour. (Note I am an occasional cyclist too).
Bad behaviour in motorists and motorcylists is punished.
Motorists and motorcyclists are required to drive/ride roadworthy vehicles. They are required to meet competency standards. They are required to pay for a license and to register their vehicles. They are required to take out third party insurance. Read more »
Kevin Rudd went on Insiders this morning and did quite well I thought. The only time he looked in any trouble was when Barrie Cassidy asked him why he has misjudged how hard it would be to get things done. Rudd hadn’t expected that question. Clearly he had hoped to be able to make the otherwise sensible argument that things often take longer than you might first expect. Cassidy came back with the question was that naivity or inexperience that lead to that misjudgment? Good question; afterall Rudd had public service experience in the Goss government and should have had some idea about these sorts of practicalities.
There seems to be some confusion as to what Rudd promised on hospitals. In the interview he said he supports local control and he had only promised national funding. This is what he said at the ALP campaign launch in 2007. Read more »
This is prompted by Andrew Bolt’s alarm about teaching dreamtime stories and cognate mythology before exposing students to the periodic table.
Ron Horner turned up at Launceston Grammar from Manchester in 1960. He was appointed as Senior Science Master and also the Head of the Junior School.
On the side he started a Classical Music Club, a Science Library and a wandering Sunday cricket team that played village green matches around the country. This gave a handful of lucky boarders the chance to get some decent tucker one day a week. Read more »
The House of Commons Science and Technology committee is having an inquiry into the ClimateGate affair. Hearings start on Monday (although if a general election is called over the weekend then they’re off). The submissions are here. I haven’t read them all, but here is a sampling of two that comment on Phil Jones.
Hans von Storch and Dr. Myles R. Allen
The fact that we disagree with Professors Jones, Mann and others on some matters, such as proxy-based reconstructions, has no bearing on our respect for Professor Jones’ analysis of the instrumental temperature record.
That is a huge endorsement.
And we now see a department with a split personality.
One part of the department seeking to implement an emissions trading scheme with the aim to reduce carbon emissions
and
a second part of the department seeking to install insulation with the effect on increasing carbon emissions (see article by Hedley Thomas in the Australian of 26 February 2010 Woolly claims on insulation and that of Henry Ergas Energy Efficient, Benefit Deficient).
Only it seems that the insulation part of the department has been more successful in increasing emissions than the other part of the department has been in reducing emissions given the CPRS is dead.
Bizarre.
Canberra is now Constantinople under the Byzantine Empire.
I haven’t really followed this much. I did hear on the news that the Rudd government fears home-grown terrorism from individuals born in Australia – so that’s Jason and me off the hook. Greg Sheridan at The Australian has put in a good word for the report.
The point that he makes that shoud be shouted from the rooftops is this:
The best counter-radicalisation program is a good, open decent society.
He goes on
There are only two overt counter-radicalisation programs we should engage in. One is to provide intensive settlement assistance to people we take in under the refugee and humanitarian program. To bring someone from war and refugee camp-living in Somalia or Sudan, with no competence at living in our sort of society, and dump them in Footscray or Bankstown with a Centrelink leaflet is asking for trouble. Read more »
The Rudd government has been making the argument that their stimulus packages (there were two) have prevented unemployment from increasing to very high levels. They haven’t always been on message – poor Nick Sherry got his numbers mixed up and was quite insistant in early January that unemployment would rise above 8 percent in the second half of this year. Last November Treasury was forecasting 6.75 percent by the end of this year. That doesn’t look like happening. The unemployment situation has not been nearly as bad as was feared in late 2008. Rudd has even tried to claim that his government has created jobs. Well, no. Unemployment is higher than when they were first elected. Read more »
Barnaby Joyce has an op-ed in the Australian.
Debt is less of a problem when it is backed by an asset that is readily exchangeable to restore the wealth of the public coffers. However, I do not know how exchangeable the ceiling insulation will be when we need to repay the debt.
Robert Barro has an analysis of the US stimulus in the WSJ.
We need to ask whether the government’s spending reduced or enhanced private spending and whether public-sector hiring lowered or raised private hiring. This requires an empirical model based on the history of past fiscal actions in the U.S. or other countries. The administration must have such a model, but my own analysis makes me skeptical about the numbers they’ve reported about GDP increases and saved jobs.
…
Thus, viewed over five years, the fiscal stimulus package is a way to get an extra $600 billion of public spending at the cost of $900 billion in private expenditure. This is a bad deal.The fiscal stimulus package of 2009 was a mistake. It follows that an additional stimulus package in 2010 would be another mistake.
The Rudd government is trying to introduce a backdoor Australia Card. All school kids will be given a unique number that will allow the government to track their progress through the education system. I agree that using unique numbers is often more useful than using names – for example some universities use student numbers in examinations to anonymise exam scipts to prevent favoritism. Numbers also allow institutions to separate common names. People have a host of different numbers for different purposes. These numbers are usually either temporary or situation specific.
I can imagine Gillard’s unique student identifiers taking on a more permanent status. It also misses the point about school performance. The Australian has a ghastly op-ed today defending the program. Read more »
Boskin’s article in the Wall Street Journal is worth reading and outlines how politicians have been seeking to change statistical collections to achieve better results. Fortunately most people can see through such charades.
I have a significant concern that the wellbeing framework (which comprises the triple bottom line of economic, environmental and social) promoted by the Sarkozy Commission including Stiglitz will result in meaningless, symbolic statistics.
It would be nice to directly measure utility, but the Sarkozy approach is in the wrong direction. The status quo – national accounts with GDP etc – remains the most useful such statistic until an alternative is proven to be superior.
First some background from the WSJ.
IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard, in a recent paper, said maybe the U.S. central bank’s future inflation goal should be 4% instead. John Williams, head of the San Francisco Fed’s research department, argued last year that higher targets might be needed to provide a cushion for future crises.
The proposals underscore a broader rethink that is rumbling through the economics profession in the wake of the financial crisis. Many of the things economists thought they knew turned out to be wrong.
Ludwig von Mises addresses these points in his Economic Freedom and Intervention. Mises on what economists know (pg. 127) Read more »
The Calvary Hospital saga seems to be ongoing. You may recall that the ACT government planned to acquire the Hospital using some very dodgy analysis. Well the deal has fallen through.
Ms Gallagher says LCMHC also made it clear the Catholic Church would fight any plans for the Government to use compulsory acquisition to takeover the hospital.
MR HANSON: My question is to the Treasurer. Treasurer, on 17 December 2009, you issued a press release which stated:
But no one has been able to dispute the Treasury Analysis.
This is in reference to the Cavalry hospital purchase. Treasurer, Professor Sinclair Davidson was able to dispute your analysis on 28 October 2009—prior to your making that statement—when he said: Read more »
When I wrote that Peter Garrett’s position was untenable back on 11 February, I had assumed that he would have departed by now.
It seems that I might have been wrong with a common view now being put that Garrett will survive as a weakened minister because the Prime Minister can ill afford to lose a minister at this stage of the political cycle.
This is very sad. While I disagree with much of what Garrett stands for politically, I’ve always thought of him as an honourable person who had strong principles.
I can’t imagine why he wouldn’t resign. His conscience must be torn – he is clearly upset that his pet project has gone so awry. He is very aware of ministerial standards and responsibility for the design and implementation of the insulation program rests entirely on his shoulders. Is it so important to remain a minister? There are so many better things in life he could be doing. Read more »
Every now and then organisations get questions like, ‘How much ethic diversity is there in your organisation?’ or ‘How many foreign born staff do you have?’, or ‘What is the average age of your staff?’. These may well be interesting questions, but I often wonder why organisations would collect information like that. If we live in a world where discrimination on the basis of gender, age, ethnicity, religion etc. are all illegal its not clear what purpose any organisation would have in keeping information like that on file. I imagine the only purpose anyone would have for collecting information like that is for committing an offense. So why do it? On the other hand, I can understand why an organsation would collect information on the academic qualifications of its staff. So I wonder what Doug Cameron is up to? He wants to know from the Productivity Commission whether their staff attended public or private schools. Read more »
As Sinclair has posted below, our learned colleague Clive Hamilton has begun publishing a five part epic on the conspiracy of climate denialism. Either Clive has started writing satire, or else he has no sense of irony.
Part 1 of this series was called “Bullying, lies and the rise of right-wing climate denial“. The article details the threats and personal abuse that have been made against journalists and scientists involved in the climate change debate.
I agree with Clive that there is no place in the current debate for threats of violence and harm against those with opposing views. Anyone on either side of the debate who is threatening violence is doing their cause a great deal of harm and threats of violence or repeated harassment should be referred to law enforcement for appropriate action.
However Clive also complains about the fact that scientists are receiving abusive emails such as these: Read more »
You may have missed the excellent article by Frank Furedi published in Saturday’s Australian (see below) about the corruption of the peer review system.
For too long it has been asserted that the gold standard in scientific research is peer review.
That’s false. Peer review is second best to the true gold standard: where scientists undertake repeated research in controlled circumstances and present their analysis and full data for scrutiny. That is, that they seek to have their findings falsified. And the more times in which the analysis is subjected to rigorous testing and remains extant, the more confident we can be in the analysis. But it survives only until it is disproved.
Karl Popper is famous among other things for his falsifiability / refutability view. That is, something is not a theory if it cannot be refuted. My theory: all swans are white can be disproved by showing me a black swan. Obviously anthropogenic global warming is therefore not a theory – there is no evidence that could be presented that would be classed as refuting the AGW “theory”. Read more »
Retro is in fashion at the moment. The Age today has a retro-opinion piece. All the chestnuts so beloved by the left. Australian is a low-tax nation, taxation is good because it buys civilisation etc. etc. etc.
Many of us are clearly infuriated by the thought that people we know might be shirking their fiscal responsibilities…
Indeed. The best way to not shirk your fiscal responsibility is to get off your bum and get a job and get off welfare.
It is time for the Government to consider a voluntary tax bill.
How many times have you observed a prominent person bemoaning ‘the fact’ that Australians don’t pay enough tax?
Usually it is an ideological pretext to increase the amount of income redistributed.
What about those that accused the previous government of profligate spending because of tax cuts. Well yes, the previous government did have some silly and expensive programs. But a tax cut is not spending. It is a tax cut! A cut to revenue not an increase in expenditure.
What we need is a voluntary tax bill.
Those piously calling for increased taxes can then lead by example. Put their money to a good cause – taxation.
I propose that tax deductible contributions to the Australian Tax Office be permitted and indeed encouraged. And just like donations to say Opera Australia, the donor’s name should appear on the ATO’s website and in its annual report. We could even give donors different titles: a platinum donor for those paying voluntary tax above say $20,000. A gold donor for those paying between $15,000 and $20,000 and so forth. Read more »
The ACT Greens – fortunately with their power base confined to a relatively small part of Australia – want Canberra’s newest town to have a seven star rating with 30 km/h speed limits, bicycle “highways” and only one car parking space per household. Clearly the Greens want to rob us of cars.
Now it is all very well to have an energy efficient house if it is cost effective. But to impose dramatically increased costs on home building which swamp any energy savings is silly. And hits at the very people the Greens claim to represent: those that are less well off and want “affordable housing” whatever that means.
Imagine hosting a party in one of these utopian homes in Canberra – sorry you have to come by bicycle or public transport. And as everyone knows, the longest distance between any two points is an ACTION bus route.
The Parliament will soon consider a private members bill on gay marriage.
Both Labor and the Coalition are opposed to changing the marriage act to allow for same-sex marriages.
…
“I’m calling on Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd to allow their members to speak freely on the issue and to have a conscience vote. It’s important that our parliamentarians represent the wills and needs and desires of their communities and on this issue more than ever.”
My good friend Tim Wilson has done a lot of thinking in this area, even beating up Penny Wong on national television, and his idea of competitive marriage contracts should be seriously considered. Read more »
Jason and I had an exchange in the last open forum over the individual who flew a plane into an IRS office killing himself and an IRS employee.
Sinclair
This guy attacked the IRS. Waging war against the government over tax is the foundation activity of the US republic.
Jason
And tax is a necessary evil. No taxes, no civilisation, no military or cops or other things that everyone but nutty anarchists think should be provided by government.
Innocent people died in this act of domestic terrorism. You’re not seriously suggesting his actions are any less worthy of condemnation than that of the other nuts.
Sinclair Read more »
There was a good article the other day about Stephen Conroy aka the Dalek. It called for his dismissal.
He has been involved in a litany of disasters and poor public administration.
He has failed to serve the people of Australia in his present position - squandering billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money.
While there is no evidence that Conroy’s meeting with Kerry Stokes in a United States ski resort and subsequent granting of a $250 million gift of taxpayers’ money was corruption, the fact of the meeting itself is sufficient for Conroy to lose his job.
For we expect our Ministers to exercise good judgement. The fact that he thought it reasonable to meet a media mogul in an overseas resort shows extremely poor judgement. Even if, as stated, there is no corruption, the appearance of the meeting is sufficiently bad to reflect on his position.
Caesar famously divorced his wife Pompeia, declaring that Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.
Ministers too must be above suspicion.
Conroy must resign.
I have a book chapter coming out in the next few weeks where I write about the original ClimateGate email scandal. The chapter was written in late November, early December and the scandal has moved on considerably. Here is a section of the chapter where I talk about peer-review.
In a society characterised by the division of labour and specialisation mechanisms must be developed or evolved that facilitate trade. This is the classic ‘lemons problem’ in economics; how does anyone know that the person they are trading with is any good? The same problem applies to academic research; how can anyone know that any piece of work is competent and high quality research? The mechanism that has evolved in academic circles is the peer-review process. Academic freedom combined with the peer-review process is an evolved mechanism that ensures that research produces, over time, scientific results are more likely to be correct with error and falsehood being eliminated. Read more »
We often hear that we should give the planet the benefit of the doubt, and that we should, as Malcolm Turnbull said:
… given the basic common sense of taking out insurance for the sake of all humanity, why is it that we are seeing this surge in climate change denial?
That is, warmists ask us to suspend our doubt, and take action “against climate change” and to view this as a form of insurance.
This is like joining a religion and being pious as an insurance policy just in case there is a God that will punish you if you continue to deny His existence. This is Pascal’s Wager named because Blaise Pascal reasoned that a person should wager that God exists because he or she has everything to gain from doing so but nothing to lose.
But this is not the case in respect of climate change policy where action imposes significant costs. Read more »
Looks like the government is going for broke on the CPRS business. Penny Wong has just given a speech that denies the allegations and defies the allegators (I think Merton Miller first said that).
Red herrings and arguments at the fringes of the debate cannot dismiss the fact that that the world is warming, nor is it justification to ignore the range of scientific work on climate change.
A question all of us should consider is what will happen in 20 years.
In 20 years time, can we seriously look our children and grand children in the eye and say we sat on our hands because of a computer hacker?
To the best of my knowledge Wong doesn’t have any children, so that final sentence must be placed into the Clive Hamilton basket of weirdness. Read more »
Phil Jones February 15, 2010
I don’t think we should be taking much notice of what’s on blogs because they seem to be hijacking the peer-review process
Phil Jones March 31, 2004
Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.
George Graham Vest, a US Senator in the 19th century, delivered the following speech in a Court circa 1855. It remains as true today.
Gentlemen of the Jury: The best friend a man has in the world may turn against him and become his enemy. His son or daughter that he has reared with loving care may prove ungrateful. Those who are nearest and dearest to us, those whom we trust with our happiness and our good name may become traitors to their faith. The money that a man has, he may lose. It flies away from him, perhaps when he needs it most. A man’s reputation may be sacrificed in a moment of ill-considered action. The people who are prone to fall on their knees to do us honor when success is with us, may be the first to throw the stone of malice when failure settles its cloud upon our heads. Read more »
We are often very critical of David Gruen here at Catallaxy, so I thought I’d link to a comment he made that I totally agree with. Read more »
Senator Scott Ryan (Lib, Vic) asked some tough questions about internet filtering at Senate estimates the other day. It turns out our glorious leaders have internet filtering up and running in Parliament House. Read more »
October 23, 2009 – 7:07am
The story of the Trojan war is one of the great epics of the world. The Trojan Paris (son of King Priam) takes Helen who is married to Menelaus, king of Sparta. Whether Helen went willingly or was abducted is not clear from the sources. But the King of Mycenae, Agamemnon, leads the Greek forces to Troy to answer Paris’ insult.
The city of Troy is besieged for 10 years to no avail.
Then the Greeks hit on a stratagem and construct a wooden horse which they fill with warriors, including Achilles, and leave it outside the gates of Troy.
Despite the warnings of Cassandra – cursed by Apollo to speak the truth but for no one to take any notice – the Trojans open their gates, drag the horse inside as it is wonderful and as they fall asleep, the Greek warriors exit the horse and slaughter all the men and enslave the women (Agamemnon takes Cassandra as his concubine and is killed by his wife Clytemnestra on his return to Mycenae). Read more »
This will be interesting to watch.
Colin Brierley, 63, of Windaroo in the Gold Coast hinterland, says he suffered a massive electrical shock just a week after he had foil insulation installed in his home.He says the jolt of power went through his knee and exited his head, and he wound up in an induced coma in a Brisbane hospital.
Mr Brierley’s lawyers say he’s the first to take legal action against the Government, alleging its management of its rebate scheme has been neglectful.
Shine Lawyers, the firm representing the Windaroo man, has not revealed how much compensation is being sought. But the case will be lodged in the Supreme Court in Brisbane later today.
Mr Brierley says his doctors are amazed he survived the shock on October 6 last year, just a week after he had the foil put into his roof.
Jones et al 1998:
..we can only concur with Hughes and Diaz (1994) that there is little evidence for the ‘Medieval Warm Period’, although it is variably quoted as occurring between 900 and 1200…From the few reconstructions used prior to 1500 there is little evidence for the ‘Medieval Warm Period’.
Jones and Mann 2003:
To the extent that a ‘Medieval’ interval of moderately warmer conditions can be defined from about AD 800–1400, any hemispheric warmth during that interval is dwarfed in magnitude by late 20th century
warmth.Jones & Mann 2004:
Our assessment affirms the conclusion that late 20th century warmth is unprecedented at hemispheric and, likely, global scales.?
BBC interview 2010: Read more »
Phil Jones in a BBC interview.
B – Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
It would have been nice for him to have told us the exact significance level but he says ‘yes’ to the question no statistically-significant global warming since 1995. No cooling either.
C – Do you agree that from January 2002 to the present there has been statistically significant global cooling?
No. This period is even shorter than 1995-2009. The trend this time is negative (-0.12C per decade), but this trend is not statistically significant. Read more »
There is an excellent expose of carbon trading and offsets (particularly offsets under the United Nation’s Clean Development Mechanism) by Mark Schapiro in the Review section of the Financial Review of Friday 12 February 2010 (no link sorry).
I liked this: Read more »
George Soros has put some $50 million (probably small change from the floor of his car) into an Institute for New Economics
The Institute and conference were born when a group led by George Soros came together at the Bedford Summit to discuss the crisis in 2008. Concerns over a history of poor economic guidance revealed the need for continued conversations and a new forum. The conference will gather the world’s brightest economists and leaders to provoke innovative thinking and positive change.
The first big event is a conference at Cambridge (England) in April.
The invitation-only inaugural Conference is a landmark achievement reflecting the organization’s extraordinary commitment and dedication to invigorating the conversation around economic theory, method, and policy and to fostering the development of original and innovative contributions to economic thinking. Read more »
Legal Eagle has an interesting post on Peter Garrett.
I confess that I’ve never really held much brief for celebrity politicians. Of course, I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, so I try to cast my prejudice aside. But I can’t help thinking that if you’re a performer or an actor or a musician, you might not have had much experience actually running things. You don’t have to implement your ideas or make them work.
Another thing about celebrity politicians is that you inevitably end up feeling very disappointed in them. It’s easy to admire someone when they just have to put in a good performance, and they don’t have to make difficult decisions or let you down. However, the nature of being a politician is that you have to compromise, and make hard decisions which may end up hurting people in one way or another. You can’t be popular with everyone in politics. Read more »
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The Keynes vs Hayek rap. I like the bit where Hayek finds the General Principles in the drawer in his hotel room.
A nice series of recent posts from Organisations and Markets. BTW this site and its authors polled very well in a recent survey on the credibility and/or popularity of economics blogs
Calls for industry policy in the US.
The transformation of many Israeli kibbutzim into partially privatized, profit-seeking, professionally managed entities that act in capital, product, and factor markets just like private firms.
Problems with cap and trade schemes in Europe.
Happy Schumpeter day!
Missouri Economics Conference (meet Peter Klein).
From Conservative Teacher, an aid for students, the declaration of independence set to music, maybe a bit long but worth a look. Read more »
Tony Makin has kept up a consistent argument against the stimulus package on a mainstream macro-economic basis. He is at it again today in the Australian.
Fiscal stimulus is invariably justified by the depression economics of John Maynard Keynes. As a theory, simple Keynesianism focuses exclusively on the short term, emphasises aggregate spending as the source of economic growth, and largely ignores the future consequences of unproductive public spending and the fiscal deficits that result. This is in keeping with Keynes’s own comment that “in the long run we are all dead”. While that comment is undeniably true, what it fails to recognise is that the vast majority of us can in our lifetimes expect to suffer the consequences of the public debt legacy that Keynesian activism bequeaths, through higher taxes, higher interest rates and higher inflation. Read more »
It’s going to be a long year. So far it looks like the Liberals will run on law and order. Okay. Law and order is a problem; the number of Indian-bashings is a big problem and the police chief doesn’t seem to be taking the problem seriously, nor has the government. But you’d think the liberals might also want to mention Myki and public transport and the need to an independent anti-corruption commission and an inquiry into why Melbourne is running out of water and so on. Maybe we’re still going to hear about those issues. Read more »
ALP Workplace Health and Safety Election Platform November 2007
All workers have the right to a safe and healthy workplace. Every family has the right to expect their loved ones will return home safely at the end of the working day.
Julia Gillard April 29, 2008
The health and safety of Australian workers is a key concern of Australian governments at all levels.
All workers have the right to a safe and healthy workplace.
Lindsay Tanner February 10, 2010
I don’t think it’s right to say we should have sat back … dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s because we were in a crisis situation
Insulation hotline 131792 after 10am AEDT Thursday.
Something of a mixed message has gotten about over the schools computer program. Rudd went to the last election with two computer promises. The first was for a tax-break that allowed some parents (from memory those who could access Family Tax Benefit Part A) to buy a tax deductable laptop (or make other computer related educational expenditure). The second policy was that every school child in the last three years of high school would have access to their own computer at school. Presumably that would be a desktop.
By most accounts Monday’s Q and A was a disaster for Rudd.
At one point, Rudd almost lost his temper with a girl all of 16 years of age, who shook her head at his answer on school laptops, telling her with a sharp look and tone in his voice: “You’re shaking your head. Can I just say that is a fact, and if you ring up principals from around the country, it’s happening.” Read more »
The concern I have over this appointment is not so much Kaiser getting the job, but why on earth does an organisation which is 100 per cent government owned have a government relations manager in the first place, let alone one being paid $450,000?
While reading the story of Niall Ferguson’s marriage break-up this leapt out at me.
As a student at Magdalen College, Oxford, he was once so penniless he bought a wedding ring on his credit card and sold it to a pawn shop to raise some cash.
While not encouraging this sort of thing, that is very smart and gets around the punitive rates that banks charge on cash advances.
The other quote that should be emphasised relates the Furguson’s mistress Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
In all the years I have known Ayaan, she’s never had a boyfriend. She’s gorgeous, but with a fatwa, it’s tricky to find guys.
Yes. One would think so.
Update: Jason is onto this already.
You know that Canberra is different when a so-called Minister in the local government, Simon Corbell, can write in the Canberra Times today that
Measures to address climate change must not only be reasonably efficient, they must also be inspiring, and they must capture public imagination and empower individuals, communities and nations to make the shift to a sustainable future.
Unfortunately no, Simon. If you really believe that action must be taken to counter AGW – no matter how futile such action would be in Canberra – then efficiency must be the relevant test. What about an inspirational project that is ineffective and costly? Wouldn’t that – once understood – damage the credibility of the Government’s response to climate change?
What about this letter from Dr Bradford Sherman of Duffy, also in today’s Canberra Times. Read more »
The relative newcomer on the block, Menzies House, has some interesting material and claims:
Founded in January 2010, Menzies House is the leading Australian blog for conservative, centre-right and libertarian thinkers and activists.
Of course we at Catallaxy claim:
Australia’s leading libertarian and centre-right blog
Perhaps we are both right: after all post-modernism allows for all opinions to be equally valid.
But what about you, dear readers, how do you rate Menzies House and Catallaxy Files? What should we do to improve the quality of this blog (now that we have a relatively settled platform following some inconvenient problems with the website).
One of the more incorrect arguments put forward over the last few years has been the notion that only scientists can evaluate science. Everybody else must just believe. But we all read novels – and you don’t have to be a best-selling author to know the difference between good writing and bad writing. More or less that analogy applies to most things. Milton Friedman told us that we don’t have to understand trigonometry to play pool or mechanics to drive a motor car and so on.
The other point to emphasise is the public choice arguments made by James Buchanan. He makes the argument that economists give advice as if they were advising an onmiscient, omnipotent dictator. That advice isn’t always appropriate in a democratic society that requires agreement and cooperation. The convergence of these two ideas is crunching the AGW lobby at the moment. Read more »
One the differences between the Rudd government CPRS and the Abbott proposal is transparency. The Abbott proposal sets up a government clearing house so it is transparent that the taxpayer will picking up the tab for running the scheme. That hasn’t been the case with the CPRS. Until today.
The Australian Climate Change Regulation Authority group was formed inside the Department of Climate Change in June last year, and given $81.9 million this financial year.
Departmental papers said the authority must be ready to begin work ‘’should Parliament pass the relevant legislation later in 2009”.
The Coalition and Greens have twice blocked the bills designed to create the authority: in August and December last year.
But the organisation has continued to recruit staff and aims to employ about 200 people by June, ”to administer the operations of the proposed” authority. Read more »
Ronald Coase will turn 100 this year on 29 December. This video clip is a couple of months old. His mind appears to be sharp, it is clear that the infirmity of age has caught up with him.
The Ronald Coase Institute is here.
(HT: Peter Boettke)
The Coalition carbon pollution scheme was released a couple of days ago and has attracted a lot of media attention. Including the WSJ Asia (now with an annoying pay-wall on its op-ed page for the current day articles).
The political momentum behind cap and trade is melting away a whole lot faster than the Himalayan glaciers — so much so that Australia’s opposition leader has a big, new idea: Ditch the plan altogether and make the costs to taxpayers transparent.
… Mr. Abbott proposed Tuesday instead to set up a fund to pay companies that cut emissions and meet certain criteria, such as preserving jobs.
That’s still a plan for government to pick winners, as Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s cap-and-trade plan would. But Mr. Abbott’s proposal has the distinct advantage of limiting and defining the cost to the taxpayer. That’s impossible to do under cap and trade, in which emitting companies buy carbon credits at fluctuating prices and then pass that cost onto consumers. Read more »
The Rudd government is claiming to have created jobs. Not saved jobs, mind you, but to have created jobs.
“In the past year we have created 112,000 jobs.
“As we look around at the rest of the world’s data, in America in the same period of time, 5.8 million jobs were lost.”
Mr Rudd was marking the first anniversary of Labor’s $42 billion stimulus program.
When you look at the ABS data and the stock on employed people between December 2008 and December 2009 there is an increase of about 114,000 people so on that basis the statement may be correct. But the problem is that the unemployment rate has increased and the numbers are in the context of the stimulus package. Read more »
The New Scientist is reporting that Michael Mann has ‘been virtually cleared of professional misconduct by an internal university enquiry.’ The Penn State report is here.
The Penn State panel investigated four allegations against Mann, summarised as follows: Read more »
In a comment to my post on the intergenerational report/, Butters wrote
you regularly claim the labour market is re-regulated but produce no evidence.
It would be nice to see some.Labour productivity figures are not the ones to look at.
Perhaps you should read Ross Gittins before commenting again.
I replied Read more »
Daniel Pipes has a very scary op-ed in the Australian.
Obama’s attempts to “reset” his presidency will likely fail if he focuses on economics, where he is just one of many players. He needs a dramatic gesture to change the public perception of him as a lightweight, bumbling ideologue, preferably in an arena where the stakes are high, where he can take charge, and where he can trump expectations.
Such an opportunity does exist: Obama can give orders for the US military to destroy the Iranian nuclear weapon capacity.
There may well be good arguments for ‘doing something’ about Iranian nuclear capability – this is not ever a good argument. To be sure Obama needs to do something to save his presidency, but unlike Pipes I do think he should concentrate on the US economy. There are some very hard policy problems facing the US. Read more »
Contrary to my expectations the RBA did not raise interest rates this afternoon.
The Guardian is reporting that leaked emails from the University of East Anglia show some sort of cover-up.
A Guardian investigation of thousands of emails and documents apparently hacked from the University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit has found evidence that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed and that documents relating to them could not be produced.
Jones and a collaborator have been accused by a climate change sceptic and researcher of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that could cast doubt on a key 1990 study on the effect of cities on warming – a hotly contested issue.
Today the Guardian reveals how Jones withheld the information requested under freedom of information laws. Subsequently a senior colleague told him he feared that Jones’s collaborator, Wei-Chyung Wang of the University at Albany, had “screwed up”. Read more »
I have a letter in the AFR today responding to an op-ed John Quiggin wrote last week. The version below may differ slightly from the published letter. I have added the links.
John Quiggin does a magnificent job of destroying a straw man in his attack on Christopher Monckton (Tepid conspiracy theory, AFR 28 January 2010). Mind you he was unable to summon the courage to debate Monckton face-to-face when invited to do so by the prestigious Brisbane Institute.
Quiggin makes the claim that the CPRS will only raise about $10 billion a year and that no ‘credible economist suggests the economic impact will be more than marginal’. This merely invites us to imagine some incredible economists who have suggested otherwise. Read more »
The website of the Federation of Parents and Citizens’ Associations of NSW (PANDC) states that it is
committed to public education
Why? Shouldn’t a parents’ organisation be expected to be “committed to education excellence” or something like that?
What’s so special about public education? Surely most parents want their children to have a good education?
It has struck me that this Federation – purporting to represent the interests of parents – has come out strongly against the My School website launched by Julia Gillard which is probably the best reform undertaken by the Rudd Government to date.
The President of the Federation, Dianne Giblin, writes on the website:
Our concern of course is that the information will be misused, not as a source of information and celebration, but as means to construct school league tables.
Such paternalism – does she and the officers of the Federation really think that they know better than parents? Read more »
Apology must be Kevin Rudd’s favorite word. He is either making no apology for some or other policy, or apologising on behalf of the nation. Well it seems he owes Barnaby Joyce an apology.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has accused Barnaby Joyce of irresponsibility after the Opposition’s new finance spokesman suggested the United States may default on its debt and force the world into an economic meltdown.
…
Mr Rudd has demanded Opposition Leader Tony Abbott confirm or repudiate Senator Joyce’s comments.“For someone, as the alternative finance minister of Australia, to run around the place saying America could default, Australian state governments could default, that’s not responsible economic policy,” he said.
“That’s shooting from the lip, making it up on the run, I think being very, very irresponsible about basic Australian interests.” Read more »
So another day another IPCC scandal. The ABC – our ABC – have a great headline, UN climate claims ‘based on student essay’. At this point, you got to know they’re in trouble.
So there has been a huge lapse in quality control. How could such a thing happen? Perhaps because Rajendra Pachauri has been writing ‘adult literature‘. Field work for such an effort must leave one simply too exhausted to do anything else. More saucy details here. As Anthony Watts says
Time to kick Pachy to the curb, he’s not just toast now, he’s carbonized.
The more I think about, the more I believe he deserves that Nobel Prize he got 2007.
The AGW lobby would have us believe that the opportunity costs of their proposed policies are quite low. Just yesterday in a Financial Review op-ed John Quiggin wrote
No credible economist suggests the economic impact will be more than marginal.
Clive Hamilton describes the opportunity costs of AGW in a New Matilda piece (emphasis added, the Atkin paper is here)
I have often wanted to put the following question to sceptics like Don Aitkin: What if you are wrong? What sort of moral responsibility will the sceptics have if they succeed in their aim of stopping the world from taking action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Read more »
Barack Obama just gave his first State of the Union address. His comments on employment and job creation were not consistent with facts in the public domain.
Because of the steps we took, there are about two million Americans working right now who would otherwise be unemployed. 200,000 work in construction and clean energy. 300,000 are teachers and other education workers. Tens of thousands are cops, firefighters, correctional officers, and first responders. And we are on track to add another one and a half million jobs to this total by the end of the year.
The plan that has made all of this possible, from the tax cuts to the jobs, is the Recovery Act. That’s right – the Recovery Act, also known as the Stimulus Bill. Economists on the left and the right say that this bill has helped saved jobs and avert disaster. But you don’t have to take their word for it.
No let’s not take their word for it; let’s look at the promises and statistics. Read more »
Tyler Cowen points to a very interesting article on European economists at US universities.
One-third of the faculty of Harvard University’s economics department hails from Europe. At the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, half of the finance department’s faculty is European. And these schools aren’t alone: European economists are overrepresented at all first-tier American universities and have had a huge influence on economic thinking, doing cutting-edge research in areas ranging from modeling financial markets to assessing risk. Read more »
Rudd concedes his economic policies will increase interest rates.
“Australia was the only advanced economy in 2009 not to go into recession,” he said.
“That’s come off the back of strong action by ourselves through our national stimulus strategy, school modernisation plan and through the banks, to bring down interest rates as radically and quickly as they did.
“But obviously there’s going to be upward adjustment.”
No mention of a generation of economic reform that is more likely to have insulated the economy. But when you’re busy reregulating the economy you hardly want draw attention to little things like that. Read more »
It seems Tony Abbott has caused something of a kafuffle by advising his daughters not to engage in premarital sex. All the luvvies are out in force carrying on about how outrageous this is.* Mind you I’m sure many fathers of teenage daughters give exactly that same advice and failing that say ‘please be careful’. Of course, others might argue that Abbott is a hypocrite; afterall he speaks of his own behaviour as a young man in his recent book Battlelines. That’s life; its unfair and there do seem to be different standards for males and females. As in many of these differences the biological division of labour plays a large role.
Eric Crampton points to an interesting NBER paper (ungated version here). From the conclusion Read more »
A few things caught my eye this morning.
1) The UK Parliament will have an inquiry into the ClimateGate affair.
The Independent Review will:
1. Examine the hacked e-mail exchanges, other relevant e-mail exchanges and any other information held at CRU to determine whether there is any evidence of the manipulation or suppression of data which is at odds with acceptable scientific practice and may therefore call into question any of the research outcomes.2. Review CRU’s policies and practices for acquiring, assembling, subjecting to peer review and disseminating data and research findings, and their compliance or otherwise with best scientific practice.
3. Review CRU’s compliance or otherwise with the University’s policies and practices regarding requests under the Freedom of Information Act (‘the FOIA’) and the Environmental Information Regulations (‘the EIR’) for the release of data. Read more »
Yes. I think Bernanke should go. Let’s hear first from Bryan Caplan.
Contrary to my expectations, Bernanke’s been a disaster. At the same time, though, I can’t honestly say that his successor will be any better. Why then do I strongly favor firing my former teacher? Accountability. When someone fails as badly as he has, he’s got to be fired to send a message to his successors.
The problem with Bernanke goes back to his testimony to the US Congress in September 2008. These words were the problem
Despite the efforts of the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, and other agencies, global financial markets remain under extraordinary stress. Action by the Congress is urgently required to stabilize the situation and avert what otherwise could be very serious consequences for our financial markets and for our economy. Read more »
ABC Unleashed continues to dispense helpful advice to us all from those with greater wisdom and knowledge of the world than we have.
Simon Chapman the sociologist who made his career campaigning against tobacco suggests that we all set ourselves a travel reduction target to reduce our carbon footprint. He mentions an invitation he had a couple of years ago to travel, all expenses paid, to Geneva to speak for 15 minutes at a conference. He declined because “carbon footprint involved and the derisory speaking time”.
Now, most of us would reckon it’s a pretty dopey idea to go all that way for 15 minutes of talking, whether or not we cared about our carbon footprint. About two minutes’ thought would be enough to convince me that it was all a very foolish idea.
Long distance flights are no fun and they need a pretty good purpose before we consider putting ourselves through the discomfort and jetlag. Perhaps Chapman is getting to the age where flying has lost its excitement and is using his carbon footprint as a more worthy reason to stop than simple discomfort? Read more »
Japan Airlines has just gone into bankruptcy. Joe Sternberg at the WSJ wonders if this is a legacy of Japanese stimulus spending. He’s got a good point – the idea of stimulus is to spend a dollar on any project without worrying if that is a good or bad project.
During the lost decade of the 1990s, airport construction popped up in many stimulus plans. National and local politicians, not to mention the politically powerful construction lobby, wanted to put an airport in every prefecture. And ordinary airports wouldn’t do. Because Japan’s relatively small flat surface area is in such high demand, one airport after another was built on reclaimed land in the middle of the ocean at enormous expense. Despite periodic public fulminations about out-of-control costs, in practice “expensive” seemed to be viewed as a net positive. Read more »
Tim Lambert points us to this excellent analysis by John Nielsen-Gammon and the Glaciergate story is perhaps even worse than we first thought. This is not just a simple error or transcription problem.
the available evidence indicates that the IPCC authors of this section relied upon a secondhand, unreferreed source which turned out to be unreliable, and failed to identify this source.
Nielsen-Gammon also finds a remarkable consistency between the IPCC statement (on the left in the panel below) and a statement at the India Environment Portal (on the right in the panel below). Read more »
The Intrade market is predicting a Republican upset in the Massachusetts Special Election.
This is what the market looks like in the last 24 hours. Read more »
Not the excellent song of the same name by Ozzie Osbourne but rather a blog post by Robert Hall. It’s being sent around by email and makes good reading.
I’m tired of being told that I have to “spread the wealth around” to people who don’t have my work ethic. I’m tired of being told the government will take the money I earned, by force if necessary, and give it to people too lazy or stupid to earn it. Read more »
It seems that the Press Club is happy to have the Trade Unionist Paul Howes as its first speaker of 2010, followed by a succession of lefties: Gareth Evans, Peter Coaldrake, Malcolm Fraser, Geoff Lake, Susan Greenfield (who recently lost her job at the Royal Institution), Andrew Pesce but refuses to allow Lord Christopher Monckton to speak on climate change (see report on page 5 of today’s Canberra Times - sorry no link). Surely the Press Club – dedicated to free speech and debate – is mistaken to silence Monckton. Its aims include:
to provide a genuine national forum for the discussion of the issues of the day
If climate change is not an issue of the day, what is? Read more »
See part 4, the other segments can be seen here.
(HT: James Delingpole) Read more »
The Australian Education Union has released new “research” by Jim McMorrow (see also the report ) that purports to show that Government funding of public schools is less than Government funding of private schools. As usual, it looks once again only at Commonwealth Government direct funding – neglecting the fact that public schools are creatures of State and Territory governments and funded by State and Territory governments. Total government (taxpayer) funding of public schools is of course well above that of private schools.
This is grossly misleading and reflects badly on the credibility of McMorrow who has at once written a hagiography of the Rudd Government while promoting this nonsense. McMorrow writes: Read more »
Yesterday on Insiders Chris Uhlmann suggested that the Howard government had cut hospital spending. Joe Hockey denied that allegation saying that the States had increased spending over and above the Commonwealth spend, leaving Uhlmann mumbling something about spending share.
Today Paul Sheehan has this comment.
The big lie, repeated again and again, is that the Howard government stripped a billion dollars out of the health system. This claim cannot withstand scrutiny. Any government minister who repeats this mantra is lying. Read more »
The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) reminds us of the folly of minimum wages.
A higher minimum wage has the biggest impact on those with the least experience or the fewest skills. That means in particular those looking for entry-level jobs, especially teenagers. And sure enough, as nearly all economic models predict, the higher minimum has wreaked havoc with teenage job seekers, well beyond what you would expect even in a recession.
They provide a graph to illustrate their argument, but this graph from MJ Perry is even better.
Peter Martin, “economics correspondent for Australia’s two leading newspapers”, has the Henry Review in his possession. Well he either has the Henry Review, or he has pretended to have the Henry Review.
The final report of the Henry Review, with the government since December, is 10 centremetres thick printed on A-4 paper. It’ll look neater when it is bound and printed.
The question is ‘What are the terms of the embargo?’. Clearly the government is not going to release it anytime soon. Is the embargo indefinite? If not, I would expect “Australia’s two leading newspapers” to publish the Henry Review in total. It is a matter of national interest, and paid for by the taxpayer.
Eugene Fama has written an autobiographical account of his contributions to financial economics. Without doubt the man is a giant in his field. This is what he says about the EMH.
At the end of my second year at Chicago, it came time to write a thesis, and I went to Miller with five topics. Mert always had uncanny insight about research ideas likely to succeed. He gently stomped on four of my topics, but was excited by the fifth. From my work for Harry Ernst at Tufts, I had daily data on the 30 Dow-Jones Industrial Stocks. I proposed to produce detailed evidence on (1) Mandelbrot’s hypothesis that stock returns conform to non-normal (fat-tailed) stable distributions and (2) the time-series properties of returns. There was existing work on both topics, but I promised a unifying perspective and a leap in the range of data brought to bear. Read more »
Last September the Prime Minister announced that he wanted to turn the Australian Public Service into the best in the world. He commissioned his departmental secretary – Terry Moran – to head an advisory group to develop options for public service reform.
In due season, Terry Moran’s group has released a discussion paper.
Now it is a noble sentiment that the performance of the public service should be improved. All governments have said that – I can’t imagine a Prime Minister going out and announcing that he wants to make the public service less efficient.
Of course, the various diplomats posted to Canberra must have been chuckling in the breakfast about the conceit that Australia’s public service would be the world’s best. Read more »
as an AGW policy sceptic, I would very much welcome serious debate and commentary that seeks the truth w.r.t the existence of AGW and, then, what if anything to do about it.
Last year I was asked to speak at a conference on the CPRS and prepared some slides. The conference got cancelled at the last minute so I never got around to writing the paper. I suppose I should at some point, but the heat has gone out of the debate. Anyway in response to Tom’s point I’m posting a decision tree and some talking points that I had relating to the tree. It might be a bit wonkish for some tastes.
Read more »
Kevin Rudd November 14, 2007
I stand before you today as a candidate for the Prime Ministership of Australia. I am proud of the plan we have put forward for Australia’s future. And I am proud of the team that I lead – the team that will work with me implementing this plan.
The nation now needs new leadership for the future. The nation now wants new leadership for the future. And today, I stand before you ready to deliver that new leadership for Australia’s future.
Kevin Rudd February 28, 2010
So we need to lift our game – I need to lift my game – in terms of delivering on these undertakings. That’s fair criticism. The reason that we’ve had problems with this is we didn’t … we didn’t properly, I think, estimate the complexity of what we are embarking on.
On one side, the health package announced yesterday by the Prime Minister is just sleight of hand: reducing GST payments to the states and territories and using that to directly fund hospitals. That doesn’t provide more resources per se to hospitals. And, in any case, the Commonwealth could have under the status quo increased funding to hospitals in any case. So the only effective change from reducing the GST payments may be the split of the payments to the states, which is decided by the Commonwealth Grants Commission. Presumably the 30 per cent claw back will now be allocated among the states by a different formula – specifically through analysis and planning by the federal health department. Read more »
The WSJ has one of its characteristically snappy and devastating op-ed pieces on the Rudd Stimulus package. Unfortunately they now have a pay-wall.
When Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd unveiled a massive 42 billion Australian dollar ($38 billion) stimulus package last year, he sold it as a far better response to recession than “to allow the free market to let rip.” Now like other national leaders who sprayed out taxpayer cash, he’s finding government may not be as efficient a savior as the market, after all.
After a devasting critique of the home insulation debacle, the green-loans debacle, and the solar-panel debacle this is the bottom line.
None of this is a great surprise. Australia’s green stimulus, like its American cousin, was always more about promoting liberal visions of wealth redistribution than actually spurring sustainable growth. Australians are now paying for Mr. Rudd’s mistakes.
Steve has been a busy boy – writing books and papers and whatnot. His Macroeconomic Theory And Its Failings an edited volume on alternative perspectives to the GFC has just been published by Edward Elgar. Well done. Unfortunately EE has a business plan that focusses on selling books to libraries and not a mass market. It clearly works for them, but their books are on the pricey side. My understanding is that he’s got another two books coming out this year.
Some people might remember Steve Keen’s bold prediction about the collapse of the housing market. Now he is in a right pickle. The Charles Sturt (property) newsletter reports.
Sixteen months ago Mr Keen made a bet with Macquarie Group interest rate strategist Rory Robertson after claiming that house prices would dive by 40% when the GFC was at its worst.
Fortunately his predictions didn’t eventuate, and now Mr Keen will deliver on his promise to walk 224km from Canberra to the top of Australia’s highest mountain, Mt Kosciuszko. It remains to be seen whether he will wear a t-shirt saying “I was hopelessly wrong on home prices! Ask me how.”
Dr Keen was way off the mark. Australian home prices bottomed out by 5.5% from their peak in late 2008. Read more »
Amazingly, the leftwing blog Daily Kos has posted a really helpful gloss on the Hayek vs Keynes rap!
Ross Gittins seems to think libertarians have quietly watched as the Rudd government has bungled its response to the north Atlantic banking crisis and massively, irresponsibly expanded public debt (”Libertarians silent on insulation bungle”, March 1). Nothing could be further from the truth.
I gave this evidence to the Senate inquiry into the stimulus package in February last year: “In my opinion, the package does not contain enough stimulus relative to the spending that it contains, and the spending that it does contain is of poor quality. This kind of stimulus package has a very poor track record of success, and economically we cannot really expect it to succeed.”
I gave evidence again in September: “We have actually seen a very poorly implemented policy of a substantial amount of taxpayer money that has basically, to a large extent I believe, been wasted.”
In December, I told a visiting OECD delegation that, in addition to wasteful spending, three people had died in connection with the insulation program and many houses had burned down due to poor insulation practices. Read more »
Ross Gittins claims that libertarians haven’t spoken out against the pink batts program.
The government’s critics in the opposition, the media and the industry haven’t attacked its decision to offer the subsidy, but rather its failure to implement adequate training, licensing requirements, codes of conduct and inspection of work done. Their implicit and sometimes explicit assumption has been: any fool could have known the private sector isn’t to be trusted. So the government has been asked to bear all the responsibility for the shoddy work, fires and deaths.
Blame it all on Nanny, who was asleep on the job.
But all this is the opposite of what libertarians believe. They believe the private sector is always to be trusted; that rational firms always do a good job, that competition will soon drive the odd cowboy out of the industry and that government regulation of industries almost always does more harm than good. Read more »
The idea underlying all interventionist policies is that the higher income and wealth of the more affluent part of the population is a fund which can be freely used for the improvement of the conditions of the less prosperous. The essence of the interventionist policy is to take from one group to give to another. It is confiscation and distribution. Every measure is ultimately justified by declaring that it is fair to curb the rich for the benefit of the poor. In the field of public finance progressive taxation of incomes and estates is the most characteristic manifestation of this doctrine. Tax the rich and spend the revenue for the improvement of the condition of the poor, is the principle of contemporary budgets. In the field of industrial relations shortening the hours of work, raising wages, and a thousand other measures are recommended under the assumption that they favor the employee and burden the employer. Every issue of government and community affairs is dealt with exclusively from the point of view of this principle.
… Read more »
Matthew Lynn on Keynesian solutions in the UK.
The U.K. has produced notable economists over the years, but John Maynard Keynes, the guru of government intervention, was one of truly global significance.
So it may be fitting that the U.K. will also become the deathbed of Keynesian economics.
Britain has been following the mainstream prescriptions of his followers more than any developed nation. It has cut interest rates, pumped up government spending, printed money like crazy, and nationalized almost half the banking industry.
Short of digging Karl Marx out of his London grave, and putting him in charge, it is hard to see how the state could get more involved in the economy.
The results will be dire. The economy is flat on its back, unemployment is rising, the pound is sinking, and the bond markets are bracketing the country with Greece and Portugal in the category marked “bankruptcy imminent.” At some point soon, even the most loyal disciples of Keynes will have to admit defeat, and accept that a radical change of direction is needed. Read more »
Reflecting further on my previous post on the failed insulation program, perhaps we should consider the program from the perspective of putting the insulation industry permanently on the taxpayer life support?
Before the original insulation program, the industry existed nicely without government subsidies.
Then, on the pretext of insulating us from the global financial crisis (excuse the pun), the Government rolled out the insulation program in February 2009.
Now it is clear that even proponents of the stimulus program would find it difficult to justify further new stimulus measures.
We discover that the original insulation subsidy program is a failure for various reasons and the government rightly cancels it.
So why do we need a replacement? Has the Government turned the insulation industry from a subsidy-free industry into one – like the automotive industry – that has become addicted to subsidy?
Howard Bamsey is the Deputy Secretary of the Department of Climate Change and Special Envoy on Climate Change. He gave a speech to a CEDA debate this week on the post-Copenhagen situation. He is reported as having said (free 21-day trial registration required) Read more »
John Roskam stirred up a hornets nest on ABC Q and A. Apparently he quoted Phil Jones on climate change.
JOHN ROSKAM: Kevin Rudd is running a million miles away from the ETS. You had, the other day, one of the leading climate change scientists in the world say the world hasn’t warmed since 1995.
(GROANS FROM AUDIENCE AND PANEL MEMBERS)
JOHN ROSKAM: Now, we can run, and Malcolm you can sigh, Mungo you can sigh, those are not my words. The point is whether…
MUNGO MACCALLUM: Whose words are they?
JOHN ROSKAM: They’re Philip Jones, the head of the Climate Research University, the basis of climategate, so whether you believe in climate change or not, undeniably the public is losing faith in the debate.
Those who find fault with the EMH, and suggest that profit opportunities are available for exploitation, should be subjected to the empirical test. Are they billionaires or are they not? Yes, Warren Buffet passes that critical test. Others who put their faith in Buffet typically do not fare quite so well. Many others lose their shirts on their market gambles. Talk is cheap, and for the most part should be downplayed for what it is. Actual market success is a better guide; and remember that we define efficiency as a long-term concept, rendering transient short-term market successes less relevant for EMH. Read more »
When the so-called $42 billion ‘economic stimulus plan’ was announced on 3 February 2009, the Prime Minister stated that it was to support jobs during Australia’s response to a severe global recession.
One of the measures was the ceiling insulation program which has been badly mismanaged and now cancelled. The Government has announced a replacement program.
Yet we have not analysed the existing program for its efficacy and whether it met its objectives:
The Energy Efficient Homes investment will:
Install ceiling insulation in around 2.7 million Australian homes;
Cut around $200 per year off the energy bills for households benefiting from these ceiling insulation programs;
Reduce greenhouse gas emissions by around 49.4 million tonnes by 2020, the equivalent of taking more than 1 million cars off the road.
Did it meet these objectives (notice that the Prime Minister on 3 February 2009 used the word “will” not “should”? Read more »
Possum has a very interesting argument and analysis that suggests ‘no’. Well, at least, ‘probably not’.
What he does is compare the rate at which houses with insulation burn down and tries to differentiate between the stock and flow effects that we might observe. He actually comes up with the counter-intuitive result that the Garrett program has reduced the risks of house fire.
Under Scenario 1 where 90% of fires are attributable to new installations, 1 in 909 installs lead to fire. Under Scenario 2 it’s 1 in 1636 installs lead to fire while under Scenario 3 it’s 1 in 8182 installs.
Under the Garrett insulation program, the rate is 1 in 11,828 – a much smaller rate of fires than what existed before the program.
The Insulation Program Safety Multiple is simply the Garrett program rate divided by the 2008 rate – it shows how many times safer the Garrett program is compared to each of the three scenarios for 2008. Read more »
Earth Hour is this year being held on Saturday 27 March at 8:30pm. That otherwise sensible people can think that turning off their lights for an hour demonstrates their commitment to the fight against climate change shows the morphing into a religion is this cause.
And as the Canberra Times on 23 February demonstrated, it is symbolic. The article says that the ACT’s environment minister Simon Corbell said that Earth House was
more than a symbolic gesture.
Later in the article Corbell was quoted as stating:
Turning off lights for one hour is an important symbolic gesture to help protect the world from the threats of climate change …
So there you have it: Earth House isn’t a symbolic gesture, it’s an important symbolic gesture.
And finally we have it confirmed that the ACT government is a local council. By no less an authority than the WWF. Read more »
Rafe made this comment in the Peer Review thread.
The laws on libel or slander are scandalous in Britain, a whole book had to be pulped after threat of legal action by an Oxbridge academic who was described as “incompetent” for grossly misrepresenting the ideas of a group of scholars. He tried to do the same with the US edition of the book but the publisher was not intimidated.
This reminded me of a great op-ed in the WSJ. I can’t remember if I’ve linked to it before but, if I have, it’s worth reading again and again.
In 2005, Mr. Mahfouz sued me for libel in London, where my book had never been published or marketed. He chose London due to its antiquated libel laws, which are plaintiff-friendly. … These cases were never tried on the merits. Mr. Mahfouz’s litigiousness and deep pockets helped to silence and intimidate Americans and others who tried to expose his terrorist connections. Read more »
Part three of Hamilton’s Climate War article is up. Here he suggests that think tanks are involved in criminal behaviour.
The deployment of think tanks and sceptic websites to attack climate science has been a carefully planned strategy that was developed in the United States in the mid-1990s.
…
The hacking into computers at the Climatic Research Centre at the University of East Anglia is only part of a more extensive campaign of black ops organised by elements of the denial industry in the run-up to the Copenhagen meeting. Others include break-ins to the offices of climate scientists, an attempt to infiltrate the computer system at the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis at the University of Victoria by two people posing as technicians, and industrial espionage directed at US green groups. Read more »
Here is an interesting article about the perks of office available to some US public servants. Hopefully this is one fashion we won’t copy from the United States.
The New Yorker has a feature article on Paul Krugman – a fine economist. Read more »
Yesterday we were promised that we could discover who is behind the abusive email campaign that so troubles some climate change scientists and journalists. But it’s a bad soap opera – all in the antipicipation and nothing in the delivery.
Without access to ISP logs, it is difficult to trace the emails to a source. However, it is clear that hard-line denialists congregate electronically at a number of internet nodes where they engage in mutual reinforcement of their opinions and stoke the rage that lies behind them.
So he doesn’t know who it is, but he does know where they hang out. Read more »
I am a big fan of Deirdre McCloskey. One of the things she’s always carrying on about is ‘How big is big?’. She argues that in much empirical analysis that people confuse statistical significance with substantive significance. In a play on words, she describes this as being the standard error of empirical analysis. For readers who are not statistically literate the standard error refers to the precision of the estimate that the analysis has produced. McCloskey argues that it isn’t enough for an estimated coefficient to have a small standard error (i.e. be estimated with a high degree of precision) it must also have ‘oomph’. I agree. So a highly statistically significant relationship might actually have a very small effect and so not be of substantive importance. So it’s not really enough to just look at the statistical significance of any relationship, we also need to think about the size of the relationship. Read more »
Someone put the question the other day “What is the purpose of the Obama visit?”
I don’t recall the answer but it will provide an opportunity to compare and contrast the way that two men who swept into power on the back of landslide victories have visibly lost the plot in record time.
Of course it was apparent before they took office that they would be on the short list of the worst PMs/Presidents ever. This situation would be amusing except that people are being hurt and the fundamentals of good governance will remain under threat for some time to come (and that is an optimistic scenario).
The most disturbing aspect of the situation is the way that the mainstream media in both the US and and Australia have played favorites and largely given up on the task of feeding straight news and commentary.
Progressive/left leaning intellectuals have done the same.
When the disastrous records of Obama and Rudd are written up by the historians the working media and the left-leaning intelligentsia will have to take large share of the blame.
The principal argument for the economic stimulus was to help prevent a recession in Australia.
We have canvassed previously the efficacy of the stimulus program, which I maintain would have been better delivered through tax cuts.
One of the key arguments in favour of “go early, go hard go household” was because of a perceived need to support an economy with spare capacity. After all, that is the reason proponents think that Keynesianism works – where there is spare capacity in the economy Government activity can support the economy without crowding out the private sector.
This was also a reason behind the Australian Business Investment Partnership (Ruddbank) which was a topic in an early post that I put up that has been lost. In that, the Government claimed that the property sector (commercial in particular) needed the support of Ruddbank and naturally the Property Council and other such lobby groups were strongly in support of ABIP.
And one would also think that Government would benefit from bulk buying discounts. Read more »
The Rudd government are threatening to take Japan to court. Again.
“If we don’t get that as a diplomatic agreement, let me tell you, we’ll be going to the International Court of Justice,” Mr Rudd said.
“Secondly, if we don’t reach a landing point with the Japanese diplomatically, that action will occur well before the commencement of the next whaling season, which is this November, OK?”
I think he means November 2010 – after the next federal election. Maybe he’s meant November 2010 all along.
Labor leader Kevin Rudd believes the Government has taken no real action over 11 years to oppose whaling.
Since 2005, Mr Rudd and Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese have been pressing the Government to get the International Court of Justice to intervene.
WASHINGTON—The U.S. economy ceased to function this week after unexpected existential remarks by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke shocked Americans into realizing that money is, in fact, just a meaningless and intangible social construct.
The business section of The Onion brings this dramatic report from the US where POMO finally strikes at the heart of the economy.
A few other grabs from the same source.
Wayne Swan and Lindsay Tanner in the Updated Economic and Fiscal Outlook February 3, 2009
These jobs require limited retraining and so the benefits to the community can be realised quickly.
Monique Pridmore February 15, 2010
There was no safety training, no warning that it could be dangerous, absolutely nothing.
Lindsay Tanner February 10, 2010
I don’t think it’s right to say we should have sat back … dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s because we were in a crisis situation
One of our regular and valued bloggers, Homer, has regularly made the following statement:
I know understanding facts is foreign to you but if you actually understood how to look at economic statistics you would find that when Howard won office the period of economic growth was the longest period since the war. Hint other periods were curtailed by negative growth. Another hint it doesn’t start at 1990.
Since this is an assertion of fact, I thought it would be helpful to check.
The National Accounts are the official source of economic growth (GDP) statistics. There are the quarterly (cat no. 5206.0) and annual (cat no. 5204.0) versions.
Taking first the quarterly national accounts, and treating the March quarter 1996 as the start of the Howard Government we observe the following quarterly chain volume growth rates: Read more »
A US mining corporation is taking the US EPA to court.
Peabody filed a petition in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on Feb. 12 that seeks review of a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency decision Dec. 7 that greenhouse gases pose a danger to public health.
Quite right. The Obama Administration is trying to use regulatory powers to bypass the Congress. Stealth policy is fundamentally anti-democratic and should be resisted.
Peabody has put out a 240 page document making its case. From the executive summary. Read more »
Peter Costello puts the boot into Stephen Conroy. While I have no problem with the government lowering fees, charges and taxes this Conroy decision does look a bit iffy once we consider Costello’s description.
Here is the senator’s genius: the budget is in deep deficit, the government desperately needs money, and this week he announced a tax cut worth at least $250 million. Conroy announced it, not the Prime Minister or Treasurer. This tax cut will be shared between three companies. Never before has a Sunday press release delivered so much to so few.
Normally tax cuts are announced in the budget, the result of the government working out how much revenue it needs and, if it can cut tax, assessing competing claims between, say, retirees or carers or … television stations. The stations won’t have to go through the budget process. Nor will Conroy have to argue why media owners are more deserving of tax cuts than the poor or struggling families. Read more »
There were two interesting articles today, one by Michael Stutchbury and one by Terry McCrann.
Both despair over the lack of reformist zeal by the Government, and its fiscal profligacy.
The Rudd Government is more profligate than Whitlam, and less reformist than Fraser. That qualifies it as perhaps the worst government in Australia’s history.
Where is the courage exhibited by Whitlam, Hawke, Keating and Howard?
When Treasury Secretary Ken Henry bemoaned the lack of influence of Treasury in a famously leaked speech of March 2007, did he consider that Treasury would in fact be weakened under the Rudd Labor Government? That it would be used as an excuse for fiscal profligacy and economic luddism? That it would not rise to the defence of 25 years of economic reform? Read more »
The media like to portray Barnaby Joyce as a loose cannon – I don’t agree with all his views – but I think he’s been asking some good questions at Senate Estimates.
Look at the pictures, we’ve seen them before, and then read the transcript.
Read more »
Internationally acclaimed historian and Harvard professor Niall Ferguson will deliver this year’s John Bonython Lecture for The Centre for Independent Studies. Author of bestselling The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World and presenter of the same documentary series, Ferguson is famed for his ability to make the baffling accessible, exploring the origins of money, globalisation, power and financial crises with clarity and expansiveness. Ferguson will make his address at the Annual CIS Dinner in Sydney on Wednesday, 28 July 2010.
Last week we had a debate on child labour. Here is Steven Landsburg’s take.
As any historian could tell you, no society has every pulled itself out of poverty without putting its children to work. Back in the early 19th century, when Americans were as poor as Bangladeshis are now, we were sending out children to work at about the same rate as the Bangladeshis are today. Having had the good fortune to get rich first, Americans can afford to give Bangladeshis a helping hand, and there are plenty of good ways for us to do that. Denying Third Worlders the very opportunities our ancestors embraced, whether through fullfledged boycotts or by insisting on health and safety standards they can’t afford to meet, is not one of those ways.
(HT: Cafe Hayek)
While the federal government spends billions on school halls…
HSC students at Davidson High School in Sydney’s north were being forced to teach themselves maths online because of a teacher shortage. The students have been without a qualified 2-unit maths teacher for the first month of year 12, following the retirement of a teacher last year.
The latest pronouncements by Olivier Blanchard of the International Monetary Fund are concerning as it seems he thinks we should jettison decades of economic thinking and embrace higher inflation and activist fiscal policy in conjunction with greater regulation.
The news reporting of the Blanchard paper suggest that the IMF has called
for the overthrow of inflation targeting
yes the paper has the following disclaimer
Disclaimer: The views expressed herein are those of the authors and should not beattributed to the IMF, its Executive Board, or its management.
So let’s not yet assert that the IMF has embraced these views.
And if Blanchard thinks 4 per cent inflation is ok, why not 5 or 6 per cent? It is a slippery slope.
There was an interesting exchange in the Senate last week.
BARNABY JOYCE: Is it a fair statement that if we keep borrowing money and our debt keeps getting larger, that we will be putting upward pressure on interest rates?
KEN HENRY: Ah, well no disrespect Senator but that is a gross oversimplification of economic understanding of these matters and to illustrate you will recall that, um, during the early years of this decade as debt was being repaid, interest rates were steadily climbing.
So I think we should be um, we should be careful not to rush into simplistic relationships between levels of debt and interest rates.
Well yes. There are always ceteris paribus assumptions at work when economists debate issues. But I think Ken Henry’s answer was inappropriate. The correct answer to this question is, ‘Everything else being equal, yes’. Then speculate of why we don’t have to worry just yet – not that I’m suggesting that there might not be a debt problem. Read more »
During the debate over the Government’s stimulus program, many commentators, including the then Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull, said that tax cuts would be superior to increased government spending.
The Government eschewed such advice, insisting instead on one of the largest stimulus programs in the world (as a percentage of GDP).
Now the fruits of that are becoming apparent with the many examples of wasted taxpayers’ money, most recently with the insulation program.
Is this not further evidence that individuals are better at sensibly spending their own money than Government? Instead the Rudd Government thought it knew better on how to spend our money. This of course is an ideological issue – a government expanding the nanny state and intruding ever more into our daily lives. And using the global financial crisis as an excuse to expand the size and scope of government.
Malcolm Turnbull has been proven right: tax cuts would have been a far superior means of providing an economic stimulus.
It would be amusing to assemble a list of recent articles and speeches that are obviously wrong in their earnest? prognostication. So feel free to submit your examples.
Here are a few of mine:
Pachauri in September 2009
Pachauri in December 2009
Chris Richardson on 14 May 2008
Tim Blair in 2004 on Mark Latham Read more »
A bundle of books from Amazon, Mirowski More Heat than Light: Economics as social physics, Mirowski’s essays on science studies The Effortless Economy of Science and The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, eds Mirowski and Plehwe., Harvard Uni Press, 2009.
You probably thought that Pete Boettke and Steve Howwitz and their colleagues are just some regular guys with an eccentric take on economics and politics but you need to be warned that they are a part of “the most important movement in political and economic thought in the second half of the twentieth century”. (426). In other words, they are IMPORTANT and they are a worry! The Mont Pelerin Society provides the thread to organise the mass of intricate historical detail that the authors have compiled on the activities of the “neoliberal thought collective” and precursors such as a group associated with Walter Lippmann in France. Read more »
One of my colleagues sent me a link showing a documentary of North Korea. It is well worth watching.
CNN provide some background here.
I have a great interest in the Intergenerational Report which was a creature of the Howard/Costello government and became mandatory with the passage of the Charter of Budget Honesty Act 1998. The Charter requires the Government to publish an IGR every five years: there have now been three – 2002, 2007 and 2010.
But like so many things in life, more is not necessarily better, and it is only as useful as the analysis put into it. No one can forecast the future, but the IGR provides a sense of the direction of public finances based on what should be reasonable assumptions and on a no policy change basis. Both the 2002 and 2007 editions were sober documents which were helpful in this respect.
But I agree with Henry Ergas who writes in an excellent article today that the IGR has been politicised and should be produced by an independent organisation. Read more »
One of the broken promises from the Labor Party is to enhance the Reserve Bank’s independence. Here is a blog I wrote on 16 October 2009
Whatever happened to Labor’s promise to enhance the independence of the Reserve Bank? I write of the Reserve Bank Amendment (Enhanced Independence) Bill 2008 which was introduced with much fanfare on 20 March 2008, was studied and reported by the Senate Economics Committee on 11 June 2008, passed the Senate with helpful amendments on 23 June 2008 and has been languishing in the House of Representives ever since.
The Senate even passed a motion requesting the House to immediately pass the Bill on 19 March 2009, to no avail. The Government keeps the Bill down the bottom of the notice paper.
On 6 December 2007, the newly appointed Prime Minister and his Treasurer issued a press release entitled “Rudd Government announces new era of independence for RBA”. It said: Read more »
Peter Garrett’s position is untenable. With reports that he was advised a year ago of the risks of electrical misadventure on the installation of aluminium roof insulation, four people have now died from electrocution, others have been injured and an unknown number of homes have dangerous and potentially fatal electrical problems.
Now more taxpayers’ money is going to be spent (I shan’t say wasted as in this instance the audits are necessary given the incompetence in the original installation project) on home safety inspections.
Garrett cannot sing his way out of this hole. He will lose his job, it is now merely a matter of time. He may as well depart early and preserve some of his dignity. Read more »
James Buchanan has a new paper where he makes several points about economists and the GFC. While I agree with the notion that money should be neutral (as neutral as is possible anyway) I don’t agree with bringing back the Glass-Stegall laws or greater anti-trust for banks. Afterall the GFC impacted in the US and EU where very different banking regulation models are at work. But you don’t have to agree with his policy prescriptions to agree with his diagnosis of the problem. Read more »
When I penned my thoughts on the stimulus package last year I had this to say:
Stories are also beginning to emerge of micro-wastage. Over-charging by contractors will haunt these projects for so time.
A plumber friend of mine has recently tendered for a number of jobs created via the government school hall scheme. Despite having quoted 3 times his normal price he has won 85 percent of the tenders. However, in each of these tenders he has not included the cost of plumbing required to get to the actual hall. So once his job is complete no water will be able to travel to or from the building unless they engage him to do more work. He believes this will add an additional cost of 100 %.
If all the money is being spent on the halls themselves it is an open question as to who will pay for the water to be actually connected. No doubt, the Commonwealth will try to shift the cost onto the States or even the local school communities. A lot of lamington drives and school fetes are going to be needed to tidy up this mess. Read more »
I suspect this is supposed to be funny. This kind of fascism should neither be amusing nor admirable.
Click here to view the embedded video.
(HT: Andrew Bolt)
Andrew Bolt links to a magnificent scene from The good, the bad and the ugly. The score was written by Ennio Morricone. Here is another of his compositions.
This morning on Insiders* they were pointing out a Barnaby gaff. I had missed it during the week but Lindsay Tanner made a meal out of it on Meet the Press. Fair enough, numbers should be Joyce’s bread and butter. But Milton von Smith thinks there is much more to the story than first meets the eye.
Senator Joyce made the apparently unforgiveable error of saying that Labor’s spending over the forward estimates would be $1.4 billion, whereas the real figure is much higher: $1.4 trillion.
Labor’s attack on Senator Joyce would be hilarious if it wasn’t so pathetic.
The attack comes from a government that has increased real spending by 18 per cent over the last two years. This is the most rapid increase in spending since that economic powerhouse ? Gough Whitlam ? was in charge of our nation’s finances.
This from a government that has promised to spend over $1 billion per day in 2012-13. Read more »
The Centre for Independent Studies has a program of events includind presentations on research in progress.
The first event of the year was a report by Elise Parham on the proposed Bill of Rights. The report “Behind the Moral Curtain” is on line here and there is also an audio on the same page.
Of course everyone is in favour of rights but the question is whether rights can be engineered in a political process that has proved around the world to be a vehicle for special interests. The title of the report hints at the “trojan horse” nature of this kind of legislation that looks so good and turns out to be poisonous. Discussion on the night raised a number of horror stories of rights gone mad.
The conclusion of the paper: Read more »
Tony Jones got stuck into Penny Wong on Thursday night. I get the impression he was a bit annoyed by selective government leaking and felt that the government should be telling us more about their own policies and the costings of those policies. Fair enough.
TONY JONES: … You must have Treasury modelling which tells you what a 10 per cent reduction would be, a 15 per cent reduction, a 20 per cent, or even a 25 per cent reduction in emissions would cost in terms of cost-of-living increases. Do you have that modelling?
PENNY WONG: Well, we have put out modelling in October, 2008, which laid out the various Treasury modellings and different scenarios, and, yes, it is true the carbon price will change. But can I say, Tony, we at the moment have made very clear we will not go beyond 5 per cent unless the rest of the world makes a range of commitments that we are seeking. Because we know climate change is a global problem, we’ve said, “Look, we will do no more and no less.” Read more »
Kevin Rudd February 5, 2010
We’ve got to be very careful about industrial relations systems which enables people, incrementally, to be exploited
Matthew Spencer February 5, 2010
It doesn’t cater for kids like me who want to do 1.5 hours after school to get a little bit of money and get a taste for work.
(HT: Heath)
According to a report in the Australian, the OECD has expressed serious concerns over the $43 billion national broadband network because of the lack of a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis. For a government that has consistently stressed the importance of boosting Australia’s productivity growth that is damning.
As Treasury Secretary Dr Ken Henry said on 3 September 2009: Read more »
One of the most abused terms in Australia is ‘the independent umpire’ when referring to various tribunals and commissions and the like. Any criticism of these, usually state government, bodies that have judicial powers but few checks and balances is dismissed as failing to observe or respect the ‘independent umpire’. The High Court has just ruled on a case involving NSW OHS laws.
Another difficulty in setting up specialist courts is that they tend to become overenthusiastic about vindicating the purposes for which they were set up.
High Court judge Dyson Heydon went further
A major difficulty in setting up a particular court, like the industrial court, to deal with specific categories of work, one of which is a criminal jurisdiction in relation to a very important matter like industrial safety, is that the separate court tends to lose touch with the traditions, standards and mores of the wider profession and judiciary. Read more »
Yesterday was the first anniversary of the annoucement of the second stimulus package. In total $42 billion was allocated to be spent in order to stave off the greatest recession since the great depression. Yesterday the Commonwealth Co-ordinator General released a report into the progress of that spending as at December 2009. Very glossy, nice photos, long of claims but short on evidence.
The stimulus package was sold as being Timely, Targeted and Temporary. By definition it would be temporary because the government didn’t intend to continue spending money forever, but as the report clearly indicates the spending has not been Timely or Temporary – certainly not timely and temporary enough. Read more »
John Quiggin Australian Financial Review February 3, 2010
… I received an invitation from the Brisbane Institute on 12 January. I responded, seeking to determine conditions under which this debate could focus on Monckton’s conspiracy-theoretic claims, rather on scientific questions on which neither of us have any expertise.
John Quiggin January 22, 2010
…(I delayed in responding to my invitation, and it was pulled).
I went to the well attended presentation by Lord Monckton (and Ian Plimer) in Canberra yesterday. Both gave very polished performances – although I wish that Monckton would resist the temptation to play the man (his presentation did not need that part).
One interesting statement he made – which I haven’t separately verified – was that even if one took all of the IPCC estimates and projections at face value, and then one stopped the entire world economy for 41 years, then the temperature would be one degree Celsius below what it would otherwise be.
If true, surely this is a telling reason to oppose emissions trading schemes and rely on adaptation (and scientific research)? No one can seriously assert that we can stop all man-made emissions for 41 years.
Today’s article by Gary Johns is excellent and relevant.
Check out ABC “Late Night Live” this evening for Robert Manne’s reply to Keith Windschuttle’s claim that he should step down pending an inquiry into his reporting on the “stolen generation” issue.
Manne provided the best-known account of Commonwealth government policy on this topic. In his 2001 publication In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right, Manne said that in 1933, following a request from the Chief Protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory, Dr Cecil Cook, the Commonwealth endorsed a policy for breeding out the colour. Manne wrote:
The officials in Canberra and their Minister, J. A. Perkins, gave support to Cook’s proposal for an extension of the Territory policy to Australia as a whole. The Secretary in the Department of the Interior, J. A. Carrodus, composed a memorandum of his own. “The policy of mating half-castes with whites, for the purpose of breeding out the colour, is that adopted by the Commonwealth government on the recommendation of Dr Cook.” Read more »
Peter Klein at Organisations and Markets has listed some nice pictures to demonstrate the absurdity of the claim that we have lived through some decades of deregualtion, the retreat of the State, neoliberalism, yadda yadda.
One of the established memes about the financial crisis is that it demonstrates the failure of unfettered capitalism, the dog-eat-dog, laissez-faire environment that prevailed in the West over the last few decades, all driven by the ideology of “free-market fundamentalism.” This seems to be a truism among most of the Commentariat. Of course, as pointed out repeatedly on this blog, the truth is virtually the opposite: there was never any “deregulation,” the Bush Administration spent public money like a drunken sailor, and government continued to expand as it always does. But a picture is worth a thousand words, so try these on for size. (US data; click charts for sources.)
Samuel J has already had a go at the Intergenerational Report – now the journos get stuck in too.
I am not denying there will demographic changes – I am just saying we will easily deal with them, as we always have
These numbers are rubbish. Like the My School website, it’s another example of our tendency to reduce every issue to some numerical indicator that we can measure or project. The issues are real, but to reduce them to numbers just trivialises them.
KEVIN Rudd is damned and damned utterly by his own Intergenerational Report. It loudly proclaims we have a prime minister who hasn’t got a clue. Read more »
Andrew Leigh is one of the finest academic economists in Australia. He is also a good guy. All his work is evidence based and he does some very interesting research. Although he does think the ABC is a right-wing organisation. One of the things he has done is to consider the impact looks have on electoral outcomes. Read more »
The Charter of Budget Honesty requires that an IGR be produced every five years. The first IGR was published with the 2002-03 Budget. The second was published in April 2007. And today the third IGR was published.
It projects a huge increase in population. IGR 2007 projected a population of 28.5 million by 2047. This IGR upgrades that to 36 million by 2050 – effectively an increase of more than 25 per cent in the less than two years since the previous IGR.
That in itself is worthy of a blog – why should we trust the estimate of 36 million over that of 28.5 million? How can less than two year’s worth of data allow a lifting of the population estimates by 1/4? And what does this mean for the emissions reduction target (see my ealier post Population Estimates and the CPRS of 12 October 2009).
But the issue I want to raise is that of productivity growth. Because the Prime Minister and Treasurer have been recently banging away about the need to increase productivity growth. With that I agree. But their methods are likely to do the reverse. Read more »
Following on from the previous post showing Rudd government spending I thought I’d compare the budget forecasts for both revenue and spending from the first Rudd Budget to the Latest MYEFO. Of course it would be even better to compare the last Howard government MYEFO (October 2007) to the latest MYEFO, but the numbers are not entirely comparable. One of the better Rudd government decisions was to include the GST as a federal government tax and outlay in the Budget papers. So the comparison is not ideal, but a lot of the first Rudd budget would consist of what they’d inherited, so I don’t imagine too much difference between the two (although Rudd did suggest that the reckless spending must stop). Read more »
As we know the IPCC has been rocked by scandal – ClimateGate, GlacierGate and so on. Pat Michaels suggests IPCC-gate, and some wit I saw in a comments thread suggested FloodGate. The New Scientist has an editorial discussing these issues and the IPCC.
So let the IPCC embrace such debates, rather than retreat from them in the name of spurious consensus. Climate scientists have felt under siege from critics, as leaked emails last year amply demonstrated. But that is no reason to dismiss all criticism as necessarily unwarranted, uninformed or politically motivated. Read more »
Many people blame the global financial crisis on ‘free-market’ economics and the teachings of some economists. In particular the Chicago school has come in for some criticism. John Cassidy, for example, has a long piece in the New Yorker (subscription required) where he seems to lay the blame squarely at the feet of the Chicago school. Cassidy relies heavily on the opinions of Richard Posner. From the introduction Read more »
Earlier this week I put up a graph from the CBO via Mankiw that showed US Outlays and Revenues as a percentage of GDP over the past 40 years and going forward another ten years in forecasts.
So I was wondering what the Australian equivalent graph might look like. Read more »
In May of 2008 a series of emails were exchanged by the Team. First from Tim Osborne to Caspar Ammann.
Our university has received a request, under the UK Freedom of Information law, from someone called David Holland for emails or other documents that you may have sent to us that discuss any matters related to the IPCC assessment process. We are not sure what our university’s response will be, nor have we even checked whether you sent us emails that relate to the IPCC assessment or
that we retained any that you may have sent.
Okay, that seems fair enough, Ammann replies
Oh MAN! will this crap ever end??
Well, I will have to properly answer in a couple days when I get a chance digging through emails. I don’t recall from the top of my head any specifics about IPCC.
I’m also sorry that you guys have to go through this BS. You all did an outstanding job and the IPCC report certainly reflects that science and literature in an accurate and balanced way. Read more »
Paul Krugman is very upset.
And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.”
Well, yes. The issue here is Obama’s proposed spending freeze.
President Obama will call for a three-year freeze in spending on many domestic programs, and for increases no greater than inflation after that, an initiative intended to signal his seriousness about cutting the budget deficit, administration officials said Monday.
The WSJ is unimpressed. Read more »
Now that Catallaxy Files seems to have settled in at the new server, I thought I’d bring you all up to speed on what has changed “under the hood” and what is yet to be done.
First off, the site is now on a server shared with andrewnorton.info and skepticlawyer.com.au. It’s a “Mu” installation; the upshot of this is that user accounts are shared between these sites. If you’re logged in at one, you’re logged in at all three.
Secondly, there’s an improved backup plan in place. The upshot is that the database and files for all these sites are backed up every night. Should disaster strike ever again, it should be much easier to recover from. Club Troppo is backing up in the same fashion (though from a different server).
Thirdly, I’ve filled one common request and installed the WPTouch plugin. This means that those of you reading Catallaxy (or Andrew Norton, or Skepticlawyer) on mobile phones will get a different version of the site customised for small screens. Read more »
We all recall Phil Jones saying
Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !
It seems he wasn’t the only one playing hard and fast with peer-review. Following hot on the heels of GlacierGate, we have another IPCC scandal on our hands. GlacierGate revealed that the IPCC would copy anything off the internet and pass it off as peer-reviewed research. Well they have been caught out doing it again.
While fact-checking an Oxfam publication the UK group Climate Resistance have turned up another anomaly in the 2007 IPCC Report. In a guest post at Roger Pielke Jr’s blog Ben Pile tells the story. Read more »
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
“Which part of ‘no’ don’t you understand?” is a great political slogan.
It seems to have been a close thing; a 5 – 4 US Supreme Court decision in favour of free speech came through over night.
The Supreme Court threw out a 63-year-old law designed to restrain the influence of big business and unions on elections Thursday, ruling that corporations may spend as freely as they like to support or oppose candidates for president and Congress. The decision could drastically alter who gives and gets hundreds of millions of dollars in this year’s crucial midterm elections. Read more »
Hello all, Jacques here.
Some time in the next 24 hours I expect that Catallaxy Files will be moved from its current home at WordPress.com to a server I operate. This will involve some disruption, which I will aim to minimise.
Essentially, while this site (catallaxyf.wordpress.com) will remain as-is, the proper address of catallaxyfiles.com will begin to redirect to the new server instead of to here.
Posts and comments that have been made here will be transferred to the new server.
To avoid confusion, I’d ask you all to defer from commenting until the move to the new server is complete. You can go directly to the new server now, if you wish; its direct name is catallaxyfiles.ozblogistan.com.au.
As for recovering the archives, c8to has advised that unfortunately the original database is not available. I have been working on a screen-scraping script, but it is slow and fiddly going. I will keep you all up to date.
Additional: I have tried to lock comments temporarily to prevent any bon mots getting lost in transit. Read more »
The Rudd government’s White Paper into the CPRS at page 2-3 contains this statement now know to be false.
Melting of the Himalayan glaciers. These glaciers feed several of the most important rivers in Asia, which underpin the livelihoods of some of the most populous nations. Decreased freshwater availability could affect more than a billion people in Asia by 2050.
While the government has a disclaimer on the paper, nonetheless the greatest moral issue of our time can’t be based on a lie.
It seems the Garnaut Report also swallowed the Himalayan glacier story. At page 99 Read more »
Have you ever been in one of those meetings, on an important subject, when everyone is wandering all over the place, then one person takes charge and the rest want to fight over whether he or she had the authority to take charge, rather than work on solving the problem?
Seems to be happening in Haiti.
The French seem to have been arguing about clearance for flights evacuating French citizens. I understand that following the SE Asian Tsunami representatives of aid organisations were in some places tripping over each other looking for things to do.
In a crisis, someone’s got to take charge and pretty clearly in Haiti it should be the Americans. They are close and have the resources. Read more »
Yesterday the Australian had a front page story on the IPCC’s reliance on peer-reviewed studies to inform its reports. As we now know, there was no such reliance – it was wishful thinking at best. Today the Australian has a follow-up feature.
It was a sweeping, bold and alarmist prediction by the IPCC, and one that raised eyebrows among many of the small group of experts who study the behaviour of the world’s glaciers.
But the IPCC defended its glacier claims vigorously, with IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri recently describing those who cast doubt upon them as practitioners of “voodoo science”. Read more »
It is very pleasing to see the Prime Minister now pushing for economic reforms to boost productivity growth.
We should now expect the Government to wind back its labour market re-regulation and to bring back WorkChoices. Read more »
At the last election Kevin Rudd promised computers for all year 9 through 12 students and also a laptop scheme. At the time Alex Robson and I thought the scheme was underfunded but we got shouted down. It was always part of the Education revolution that computers would be used at school and at home. Here is Kevin Rudd at the 2007 Labor campaign launch.
The final step in the broadband revolution is to link school networks to students at home. For some students, this happens already. However for many, it doesn’t.
And one of the purposes of Labor’s Education Tax Refund is to encourage parents to invest in computers and internet connections at home. Because Labor understands that in the 21st century, information technology is not just a key subject to learn, it is now the key to learning all subjects. Read more »
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