Club Troppo

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.

(Continued)

Gutless. The government and the opposition joined forces in the Senate to vote down Senator Xenophon’s proposed inquiry into the Church of Scientology.

Both the ALP and the Coalition have folded like cheap garden chairs in the face of organised evil. Shame on both of them.

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.

The other day I was at Toby’s Estate’s Wooloomooloo outlet when I became inordinately interested in the menu pricing.

From my notes (I did mean inordinately) :

Short Black/Ristretto : $2.20

Long Black/Piccolo Latte : $3.00

Latte/Flat White/Cappuccino : $3.50

Here’s my puzzlement. It’s clearly not marginal cost pricing.  Whilst the extra labour and milk obviously add a slightly greater cost to the flat white compared to long black, these extra costs are also present to a marginally smaller extent in the piccolo latte which is priced the same. And the effort involved in adding already heated effectively free water to a cup for a long black can’t represent an 80 cent cost on top of a short black.

But we don’t expect perfect marginal cost pricing in many places anyway.

But the prices don’t reflect what I’d expect from typical price discrimination either. (Continued)

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 forced 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 fairlly broadly on the community as a whole, just as it would if it were taxpayer funded.

Therefore, what is interesting from an economic point of view is the insurance aspect — that there would be no connection between what firms pay and whether their female employees take maternity leave. The alternative private-sector funded scheme might have been a compulsory scheme in which each employer pays for its particular employees who took leave. That would have created a disincentive for firms to hire potential new mothers, and Abbott’s scheme avoids this.

At the aggregate societal level, it amounts to subsidisation of working mothers, in the form of six months’ free time, by the rest of the population. I had a go at unpicking the welfare implications a couple of years ago (and Paul Frijters before that), and this seems an apt moment to review the issues briefly. (Continued)

On Sunday I wrote: "It’s never been easier to check quotations". It’s time for an update.

While checking some of my own words on Monday, I discovered that many of my old blog posts had been attributed to Danger Mouse and Admin. A part of my online identity had been sucked down the memory hole.

While it’s easier than ever to check quotes from well known figures like John F Kennedy, Groucho Marx or Winston Churchill, it can be surprisingly difficult to check quotes from bloggers. As John Quiggin notes, some bloggers try to fend off criticism by stealthily correcting their mistakes. And some blogs just disappear.

Online content is more ephemeral than paper and ink. So an interesting question whether a shift away from physical texts to online texts will make checking some sources more difficult.

(Continued)

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.
(Continued)

It’s always nice to get a name for something that is rummaging round in one’s mind.  Autoantonymy has – believe it or not been doing that in my tiny brain for many years.  So I’m greatful to the great Three Quarks website for giving me the word (and grateful to Ingolf for telling us all about Three Quarks many moons ago).

As explained on the site:

Antonyms, of course, are pairs of words that have meanings opposite to each other. Autoantonyms, in turn, are single words thatthemselves can mean either one thing or its opposite. This can happen either by convergence –e.g., the English verb ‘to cleave’ comes from two separate but similar Anglo-Saxon verbs, and today can mean either ‘to separate’ or ‘to latch on’– or it can happen through a cleavage, so to speak, within a single lexical item– thus ‘to dust’ means either to remove the dust from something or to cover something, perhaps that very thing, with dust or a dust-like substance. You might think that autoantonyms of the latter sort are rare birds in the dictionary, but in fact they are all over the place, particularly when the opposition between motion and rest is in question. Thus the adjective ‘fast’ means both ’swift with respect to motion’ and ‘bolted down’, i.e., ‘motionless’. A little reflection will also convince you that most prepositions are capable of autoantonymy. This in fact may have happened to you already: when confronted by a well-intentioned fund-raiser in the street, who tells you that she is raising money ‘for breast cancer’, does a little part of you not wish to reply: ‘Sorry, no, I’m against breast cancer’?

The thing with a lot of the autoantonyms in the article is that they typically do not lead to ambiguity or problems in conveying meanings because context and/or the form of the sentence makes it clear what meaning is intended.  To cleave a marriage in two and for one partner to cleave to the other are opposites in meaning using the same word, but in each case we know what is meant.

The autoantonym that’s always bugged me (since we’re already in the bowels of pedantry here perhaps I should say autoantonymic clause!) is the expression “if not”.  When this expression is used it is generally the case that it could mean either what was intended, or its opposite (here again, pedantry leads me to say that the expression ‘opposite’ is being used slightly loosely to mean not ‘the negation of the proposition’ but ‘the assertion of a proposition at direct odds with the stated proposition).Anyway, consider the statement:

He was a good player, if not a virtuoso.

Here the expression ‘if not’ could either intensify ‘a good player’: “He was a good player, so much so that he might even be called a virtuoso”. By contrast it could signify the downplaying of the description as a good player: ”He was a good player, even if you couldn’t say he was a virtuoso”.

I guess with ‘pure autoantonyms’ like that it’s a case of “we report, you decide”.

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:

Take a guess who said the following about children. They ‘love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and and love chatter in place of exercise’. Worse, they ‘no longer rise when elders enter the room’, ‘they contradict their parents’, ‘tyrannise their teachers’ and spend their time scoffing down treats. It sounds like something you could rely on almost any shock jock to say any day of the week. But actually it’s the Greek philosopher Socrates talking about young people sometime around 399 BC.

A quick check of Respectfully Quoted at Bartleby.com shows that the quote is probably bogus. According to the The Yale Book of Quotations: "Researchers have never found anything like it in the words of Socrates or Plato."

(Continued)

For some time now I’ve been arguing that we should do for information what we did for competition in the 1990s – adopt a national information policy in the image of national competition policy. National competition policy was a trawl through our economic institutions presuming that more competition was better than less and then requiring arrangements that restricted competition to be reviewed and then either justified or removed.  We also built institutions to entrench such an approach into policy making at all levels of government through COAG.

We could do the same with information.  We should presume that more is better than less, that open is better than closed and further that independence in the creation and dissemination of information is better than its creation and disemination by vested interests. Of course such an agenda would be large – as competition policy was.  And it would also be more complex than competition policy.  So while it sounds like the NCP it would be a larger, more diverse undertaking and would probably unfold over a longer period.

Perhaps one might think of Government 2.0 as the first cab off the rank as we move to developing the economic value of information assets in the possession of the government. But there are any number of other fronts. Improving information flows in financial markets.  We should move beyond regulation of mandatory disclosure – as important as that is – and start asking ourselves how we can assist the development of standards against which information is reported, the independence with which it is audited and the accuracy with which reputations are acquired.

The same goes for reputations in markets for important professional services, like medicine.  We’re starting to do it for schools.  And we already have the information to do much more in tertiary education.

Then there are the conflict of interest issues and issues of bias, deliberate or inadvertent. The way we gain information on the performance of drugs is incredibly inefficient because guess who we get to generate the information – the drug companies themselves. But similar problems arise in all softs of places. I was put in mind of these things by these articles on the ways in which forensic science is done in the legal system and ways information flows could be restructured to introduce checks for bias and conflicts of interest.

There’s one other similarity with competition policy.  The NCP was a formalisation of ideas that had been with us forever and which we were becoming more active on long before they became a conscious ‘national policy’.  Ditto National Information Policy.

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.

Well if there were a book to illustrate that old proverb that you can’t judge a book by its cover it’s this one. In fact the cover is not just a cover, it’s a cover up! The book, as you may know if you’ve read it or about it elsewhere is Cowen’s paean to autism.  If that surprises you it certainly surprised me. As I read on I figured it would broaden from his own ‘outing’ of himself as high functioning autistic or perhaps others would call it Aspergers Syndrome – into broader themes.  But it never really does. In fact there is one mention of autism on the cover on the second of the four ’shouts’ on the back cover (and nothing whatever on the front). That’s all the warning you get. I presume this isn’t Cowen’s fault.  I presume the publisher cooked up the cover-up (making Cowen’s point about the stigmatisation of autism).

In one of the back cover ’shouts’ the book promises to “weave Facebook, Zen Buddism, Sherlock Holmes and so much more into a compelling argument”. Well it certainly seemed intriguing so I bought the book.  The ‘compelling argument’ that Cowen weaves is that all these things can be related in some way to autism or Aspergers. The internet generally is encouraging classification of all and sundry – classification being an autistic trait, Sherlock Holmes is autistic – a case which Cowen argues compellingly. Zen Buddhism gets a guernsey in there somehow, though it’s a while since I read that bit.

Anyway, Cowen makes a good case that autism is stigmatised and that that is 1) cruel and unfair to autistics and 2) stupid because high functioning autistics have contributed an unusual amount to human civilisation. I think he makes his point well.  I have a few criticisms for what they’re worth.

• I don’t know if this book had its origins in an article, but this is one of those books that should have just been an article to elaborate and argue the thesis and perhaps some blog posts to expand examples. Unfortunately the panoply of examples didn’t really build a richer picture of his argument and so it palled as a book.
• Cowen’s call is ultimately one for balance between cognitive skills, which is unarguable. And good on him for having the courage of his convictions – and his cognitive style. But, perhaps as one might expect, in arguing the case for greater emphasis on what autistic approaches can bring to the world, he does not report to his readers that some people think that his own discipline is already too autistic. In fact there’s a whole movement started in France at the turn of the century calling for a “post autistic economics“. As Wikipedia observes the movement has “has been criticized for using the medical diagnosis, autism, as a derogatory expression.”  Fair enough too, but the point being made is a serious one. In a book about the appropriate balance between different cognitive orientations, or ‘neurodiversity’ as Cowen pithily calls it, it’s a pity that Cowen couldn’t have discussed this possible weakness in contemporary economics.

I participated in an enjoyable discussion on open government on Late Night Live last night. If one has been thinking about things for a long time and wants to get certain ideas across, it can be pretty challenging doing this effectively – which is to say without misunderstanding – on a panel program, though I can’t complain. Phillip Adams was moving the discussion along, as is his job, and I wasn’t usually the victim of being cut-off.

Even so, the one thing that concerned me when I’d concluded was that I wasn’t able to directly discuss the idea that one of the panelists – Andrew Podger – seemed to suggest. I’d preface what I’m saying by saying that I’ve met Andrew on a number of occasions, and, like many people in Canberra, I have a very high regard for him. Andrew seemed to think that the idea of public servants blogging was really a bit alarming, perhaps flip. He was concerned that there was no room for public servants to be blogging about what they were briefing ministers about. I would generally agree. But then this really illustrates my argument – articulated briefly on the show – that when we debate this issue we don’t really deliberate on where and how social media like blogging could add value. Rather we focus on the extremes, and on what can go wrong and the default rapidly becomes a silence that is in no way compelled by the public service values we’re trying to defend.

There is much more that public agencies do, and much more that public servants do other than offer confidential and potentially politically contested advice to ministers. What I was at pains to try to point out was that the default right now is silence and that that foregos a lot of exciting opportunities.

I generally agree that there needs to be some government ‘privacy’ if you like around what public servants are advising governments. In a world of confrontation between Opposition and Government, all played out in the context of a media hungry for the only story they really want to write about – conflict – not doing so would compromise the advice. On the one hand it would tie the hands of politicians and make it harder for them to come to their own decision on what to do if it did not accord with their official advice. On the other, and in response, a lot of pressure would be put on public servants to provide the ‘right’ advice – the advice the ministers want to hear.

But there are so many other ways in which blogging and other uses of Web 2.0 could be useful. Especially in a small country, there’s a limited pool of people with real expertise about any number of things – say a technical matter like the management of tropical rainforest. Say provisions of the Tax Act.  Now it is quite possible to imagine discussion about such things that is politically partisan.  And so it should be avoided as contrary to the aspirations of the public service.

But it also possible to imagine professional discussion of such things that is focused on information sharing and professional discussion and that is not politically partisan. (Continued)

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.

Take the question of helping the unemployed in the middle of a deep slump. What Democrats believe is what textbook economics says: that when the economy is deeply depressed, extending unemployment benefits not only helps those in need, it also reduces unemployment. That’s because the economy’s problem right now is lack of sufficient demand, and cash-strapped unemployed workers are likely to spend their benefits. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office says that aid to the unemployed is one of the most effective forms of economic stimulus, as measured by jobs created per dollar of outlay.

But that’s not how Republicans see it. Here’s what Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, had to say when defending Mr. Bunning’s position (although not joining his blockade): unemployment relief “doesn’t create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.”

In Mr. Kyl’s view, then, what we really need to worry about right now — with more than five unemployed workers for every job opening, and long-term unemployment at its highest level since the Great Depression — is whether we’re reducing the incentive of the unemployed to find jobs. To me, that’s a bizarre point of view — but then, I don’t live in Mr. Kyl’s universe. (Continued)

OK – I posted the code, but the video didn’t embed. In any event, you can watch and read all about it at much greater length Slate:

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.