Or indirectness of means is a subject to which it turns out I’ve given a lot of thought over the years going back at least to Charles Lindblom’s attacks from the 1960s on upon what he called the ’synoptic’ method of policy decision making by imagining that one could automate the process into a kind of giant cost-benefit analysis.  I had a (rather inarticulate) crack at some of the issues here.  I’m pleased to see that the very terrific John Kay has now written a book about it using a wealth of illustrations from his extensive knowledge of history of various corporates with which he’s been engaged, or which he’s studied. Read more »

White to play Carlsen vs J Smeets 33. ? See game for solution.

I couldn’t work it out – and I could see! Read more »

"Hug a hoodie" — For years Conservative leader David Cameron has struggled to live down the catchphrase. In 2006 he made a speech about crime and young people in “hoodies”. While bad behaviour must be punished, he insisted, we also need to show a lot more love and understanding to those at risk of criminal offending. Before long, Labour MPs and the media had distilled the message down to three short words.

A leader writer at the Telegraph decided that they knew exactly what Cameron meant — and didn’t approve:

The idea that society is to blame for criminal behaviour is passé. It flies in the face of common sense, empirical evidence, Christian doctrine and modern evolutionary biology. Read more »

Gather round and listen to this tale.

One of the promises made by the current government in opposition that they managed to get in place without much difficulty was the Lobbyists Register.  This was to make the whole lobbying process more transparent. Any firms wanting to lobby the parliament would have to register themselves, and their staff and their clients and update it three times a year.

Whatever the benefit of these regulations, they seem to entail alot of red tape, particularly for smaller firms, or those for whom lobbying is only part of their activities. New regulations are meant to be assessed by a Regulatory Impact Statement.

I asked to see it. There wasn’t one.  I asked why.

A long process followed.

There was alot of prodding of the Finance Department who would prod the Office of Prime Minister and Cabinet whom would be elusive until prodded again after prodding from me.

Fully 6months of prodding resulted in this. Read more »

Well, I probably won’t be there, but I must say this is coooool. Very cool.

An auction of old old radios. They’re little bundles of nostalgia these little guys. What about this one!

Or perhaps you’d like it in blue. Blue we can do.

Joel’s, the auctioneer reckons they’ll go for around 1.5K.  Then again this cherry red Emerson AU 190 Cathedral will set you back 8-12K.

Most of the initial reactions to Tony Abbott’s maternity leave proposal have focussed on its political motivation, on how it squares with his personal ideology, and on reactions of the business lobby.

As far as the politics are concerned, it looks like standard Howard era populism, seizing on the winds of prevailing opinion.

As for the financing, the interesting aspect is not that business will pay for it. In fact, it would take it a bit of detailed modelling to work out how the incidence would ultimately fall. Businesses forces to pay the levy would recover part of it from salaries and part from consumers via higher prices, with shareholders paying the balance. The cost will fall failrly broadly on the community as a whole, just as it would if it were taxpayer funded. Read more »

The Great Troppo Migration of 2010 continues to be approximately 10,000 times more stressful than planned.

The latest episode of madness was an attempt to more fully bring across user details from the previous database.

The proximate cause of my woes has been that export/import tools built into Wordpress are, basically, crap. This is not a total surprise coming from the “programmers” behind this pretty-but-buggy system. It probably worked fine on the trivial little click-around tests they ran on their computers. It is functionally broken in real world use due to combination of PHP limitations and pisspoor design.

What it does in the trivial, tiny migration is fantastic. It brings a user, their posts, their categories, their tags and all the comments for their posts across in a single file without a hitch. However it doesn’t work if that file is too big. By themselves, Ken and Nicholas have posted too much for the facility to handle. Read more »

It’s never been easier to check quotations. With tools like Google Books and the Yale Book of Quotations there’s no need to publish spurious or out of context quotes.

But even today, books, newspapers and academic papers are full of quotes that are just wrong. Here’s an example from Catherine Lumby’s and Duncan Fine’s book Why TV Is Good for Kids: Read more »

Lots of readers of this blog will be regular readers of Tyler Cowen. I’m not, but that’s just my taste. He often has interesting things to say and there are just too many such people in the blogosphere so he’s not on my feedreader. Anyway, Tyler Cowen is often a good read and a thoughtful guy. When I was killing some time in an international airport last year I came across a hardback copy of the newly released Create your own economy: the path to prosperity in a disordered world by the said T Cowen. Read more »

A great column by the great Paul Krugman – who should have got the Nobel Prize for Journalism.

So the Bunning blockade is over. For days, Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky exploited Senate rules to block a one-month extension of unemployment benefits. In the end, he gave in, although not soon enough to prevent an interruption of payments to around 100,000 workers.

But while the blockade is over, its lessons remain. Some of those lessons involve the spectacular dysfunctionality of the Senate. What I want to focus on right now, however, is the incredible gap that has opened up between the parties. Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally. Read more »

Remember my famous catchcry, “Victory!”

The one in the post just below Nicholas on G2.0.

Yep. I trusted Wordpress to do the right thing. Silly me.

It thoughtfully dropped everyone’s email when migrating you to the new server. This means that the approach I’ve used previously — “here’s the link to reset your password, it will email you a new one” — doesn’t work.

So, friends and Troppo authors, if you’re having trouble logging in, please email me first so I can restore your email details to the system.

I’m going to make a second attempt to migrate Troppo to the new server this weekend.

I have two alternative strategies to look at. One involves chopping bits out of Wordpress that prevent the export/import system from working in the way I want them to.

The other involves a few hours of tedious SQL munging.

You may see Troppo go offline on Saturday or Sunday.

There will be transient locking of comments, so please hold off on the conspiracy theories about moderation policies for the duration.

Update 3.25pm WST: I investigated option 1. It’s still not very good. Luckily the SQL munging was made simpler by TextMate’s macro facilities and column selection feature. From hours down to minutes. I am now going to place the site into a gentle lockdown for a few hours to run through the process.

Update 6.50pm WST: Victory! My new most-favourite commandline tool is iconv, which converts text files from one encoding to another. The trick to this migration was that I needed to run it twice on the same file as there were two layers of character-set shenanigans taking place.

Two years ago I posted a bleg asking for tips on buying an ultralight laptop.  I ended up getting an ASUS U2e which has not been particularly good.  Anyway, it may have been Vista that was the problem but it’s a pretty underpowered machine – with a 1.07 Ghz Intel Core-Duo processor.

So I’m gonna buy another one.  I’d consider Apple but for the fact that their approach to the ultra-light strained to maximise screen size. I don’t want to maximise screen size because Read more »

The New Yorker has just produced this profile of Paul Krugman.
In it we read the following passage.

It isnt that freshwater types believe that actual people are perfectly rationalthey just believe that making that assumption enables a more rigorous economics than is possible without it. After all, while there is only one way to be perfectly rational, there are an infinite number of ways to be irrational, and how do you choose? It all begins to look awfully arbitrary.

Hurrah! An non-lazy portrayal! Read more »

In December 2009, the official ABS Labour Price Index was running at about 3% per annum. This represents a continued trend decline in private sector wage rates (although less so for the public sector).

Wage rates refect the subdued labour market. In September 2009, about 26% of part-time workers wanted to work more hours, compared with 23% in September 2008. And the mean preferred number of extra hours per week for under-employed part-time workers was up to 14.1 hours, compared with 13.4 hours in September 2008. The part-time proportion may have increased further in recent months.

In short, we are still left with plenty of spare capacity. The recent decline in unemployment rate is a bad measure of the underlying rate of under-utilisation (number of hours worked). The economy is likely to achieve a trend growth rate of below 3% in the first half of this year. Stronger private recovery is likely to be offset by the lessening impact of fiscal and monetary policy contraction. There is no immediate need for further interest rate increases until our economy starts to record 3% to 3.5% increases.

The Sydney Morning Herald has been trumpeting a study they supported by on the future of Sydney’s public transport and urban structure. Beneath the being overly pleased with themselves, with “we’re above petty politics” harrumphing there is a genuine effort to talk about the policy issues in depth. That’s a big relief compared to the usual scandal mongering and whinging vox pops that we usually get from the media on the issue. Read more »

By Maggie Koerth-Baker. HT: Peter Martin

I always suspected that Tony Abbott was a sheep in wolf’s clothing, a bit of a wimp when it came to the crunch.  Now it’s been confirmed. Read more »

As I travel the country preaching the great things about Web 2.0 it’s great to see a really interesting Web 2.0 app being launched from sunny Melbourne. Well actually I guess it was launched while its creator was living in Sydney but he’s just moved down to Melbourne where he and I had lunch the other day – we went on for a surprisingly long period of time.

I don’t know how many Troppodillians are aware of Innocentive – but it’s a site that brings together people with technical problems to solve and people to solve them. Kaggle is the Innocentive of data.  It will begin by hosting data competitions which will get that market for econometric skill humming along. I invited Anthony Goldbloom to send me a guest post for Troppo and he obliged with the post below. Read more »

Given that Troppo has relaxed its comments policy, some of you may be puzzled as to why your comments weren’t being posted.

Well there’s two things. First, the Akismet anti-spam service still sometimes comes up with false positives which need to be fetched from the spam bin.

The second thing is that the Wordpress default is to require at least one comment from a ‘new’ commenter to be approved before they go through “on the nod” in future.

I’ve just cleared out about 14 comments from the moderation queue and will keep an eye on it over the next few days.

Ever since I read his marvellous The Truth about Markets I’ve been a fan of John Kay – an economist who doesn’t like to get too far away from reality. He’s also not a zealot for any particular view of the world, except that pathetic kind of vagueness and pluralism to which I aspire myself. Perhaps he might even be a Conservative, Liberal Social Democrat after my own heart. Read more »

While we’re waiting for Ken’s dissertaion on the ethics of forcing minors to watch this, here are a few comments on the program.

Kevin Rudd and Tony Jones looked like twins, both prematurely white, bespectacled and beaming, standing on either side of the Speaker’s chair in Old Parliament House. Coalition partisans would have been enraged to see the two of them, the Labor PM and the government salaried Labor propagandist, using public money and airtime to propagandise to an assembly of impressionable young minds.

Rudd obviously enjoyed the encounter. You couldn’t say he had the audience eating of the palm of his hand, but the rapport was good. I don’t know how the audience was selected, but see no reason why it wouldn’t have been a representative cross-section of 15-25 year olds, in terms of political background. Rudd clearly sees himself as their kind of guy, and not without justification. Read more »

It is relatively easy for economists to debate efficiency issues e.g. when we discuss privatisation.

But when we are discussing a host of particular economic issues – such as the distribution effects of labour market deregulation, or the role of health care, or the role of investment in education, or why a government stimulus is needed (when interest rates are up against the zero bound) – one problem keeps coming up. Has economics now become so “mathematized and divorced from moral philosophy” that it is no longer concerned with trade-offs between equality and efficiency? (Something Greg Mankiw recently reminded of this).

Does it now mean that, within the Paretian framework, there is no reason why a person B does not need to care about the effect of government public policy on the welfare of another person B – so long as person B can theoretically be made materially better off?

This leaves us with an economics literature that “few people …can truly understand, either in its content or its relevance the important moral and economic arguments that confront us today”? Read more »

I have been arguing here that America is different to other countries, and in particular that the right wing party (one can hardly call it conservative) is different. Here’s some hard evidence. It is as Markos Moulitsas says, tragic. Read more »

William Hardy Wilson is a fairly well regarded Australian architect of the 20th century and is such usually afforded a few paragraphs in biographical dictionaries and encyclopaedias. These will mention in passing a few well regarded buildings and pay brief mention to an unrealised effort late in his career to create a new architecture combining European and Asian aesthetics.

This does us a great disservice! Hardy Wilson’s later work was an attempt in his own mind to do no less than save civilisation. His own historical theory of everything, which dictated this work, was amazingly bizarre and for this alone is worth recounting. But he also held strong visions of a future Eurasian Australia. The parallels and contrasts with our own multicultural society are striking in both superficial and deeper ways. Read more »

Google removes Aboriginal flag from winning Doodle 4 Google entry

Last year 11 year old Jessie Du won Google’s Doodle 4 Google competition with her entry ‘Australia Forever’. Displayed on Google’s homepage for Australia Day, the doodle features Australian animals formed into the letters g-o-o-g-l-e. Read more »