subito constitit ante eltum tegumentum ferreum corporis tam occupatus fuerat in effugiendo e biblioghecca ut non animadvertisset quo iret. fortisan quod tenedbrae erant, haudquaquam agnovit ubi esset sciebat tegumentum ferreum corporis esse prope culina, sed debebat eesse quinque tabulatis altior illis.

Where does this paragraph come from? (And warning, I may have mistranscribed something above. I’m not being paid to work here so you’ll have to cope.)

As usual the prize is a Mercedes Sports of the Troppo editorial board’s choosing (I’ll be proposing to the board that you can have the one Ken’s driving). In addition, the winner will be flown first class to London to receive his Mercedes sports in an awards ceremony from the UK’s latest  Tony Blair clone, smooth new PM David Cameron.

Well I can complain about the media till I’m blue in the face, they’re after ratings, entertainment and so on.  Anyway, I said to one journalist that it was ‘crazy’ that public servants who I knew read Troppo didn’t comment, not because I don’t understand that they don’t want to get embroiled in controversy – that is generally speaking fair enough, but because they can stop way short of any of that and still participate.  Anyway, my guess is that the journo in question led with the word ‘crazy’ because it was a good word to lead with, and the subbie did the rest with this headline. ”

Public servant blog mentality ‘crazy’: Gruen (Continued)

One of the big mistakes responsible for the outbreak of WWI was that existing Western powers actively tried to contain the influence of emerging powers. England and France tried to hold on to all their colonies and keep Germany out of the colonial game. Conversely, Austria and Germany were wary about Russia’s growth and housed opinions that advocated war as a means of halting the growing threat. The notion of aggressively holding on to the current division of the spoils was a large factor in the outbreak of WWI. It seems a valid question to ask whether we are making the same mistake with China and India now, or whether ‘we’ have apparently learned our lesson.

Thinking about the openness of markets, the West has learned its lesson well. Export growth of China and India is hardly contained by new trade barriers at all, even surviving the recent financial crisis. Comparing this to the collapse of trade relations during the great Depression of the 1930s, one has to see this as a victory of reason. Slightly worrying is that this support for continued relatively ‘free’ international trade had to be carried by elites (governments and economists) rather than by whole populations. Lessons might have been learned, but apparently not by whole countries.

Thinking about access to resources, the question is whether the West is allowing China a growing share of overseas spheres of influence in order to secure its supply of raw materials, i.e. is China allowed to encroach upon the traditional overseas dependent territories? Here again, it has to be said that the West is not making great efforts to keep the Chinese from gaining footholds in the regions of great natural resources. The explicit Chinese program of investment in natural resource sectors of other countries has not been opposed, and the buying up of mineral deposits in Africa and Latin America of the Chinese is still proceeding relatively unopposed (for a discussion of China’s investment in Africa and Latin America see here). It is the case that the recent introduction of the resource tax effectively means we Australians have cheated the Chinese out of some of their expected profits from investing in Australian mining, but in the scheme of things this is small potatoes.

Thinking about ego-rents, it is also clear that the West is allowing both China and India their ‘place in the sun’. The Olympics were in Beijing; skilled Chinese and Indian migrants are welcomed in Australia and the US; China has a permanent veto at the UN security council; Taiwan and Tibet are not recognised as separate countries by most Western countries; thinking about the future, Taiwan will clearly be abandoned as an ally to appease the Chinese and no-one will seriously interfere in Tibet; Western governments are not talking up the threat of Chinese investments in their army; etc.

On balance, you would have to say that the West seems to be applying the main lessons of WWI when it comes to China and India. It recognises that China is the next world superpower and is letting it happen without too much fuss.

You’ve probably noticed some slowness in the past 2 hours. That’s me, your loving Ozblogistan admin / tyrant, trying to debug a plugin. Apparently asking for debugging information is too much for PHP and MySQL to bear, so they threw an unedifying tantrum which choked the site.

It’s pretty obvious that if science involves standing on the shoulders of giants (and the odd pygmy) then exclusive rights to ideas can slow down innovation. Still it’s quite hard to demonstrate this. Some econometric studies are persuasive that it does. But there are presumably cases where patents do at least generate incentives which are instrumental in getting innovation funded. Pharmaceuticals is probably the best example, though patents may be far from the optimal arrangement even there. But the burgeoning of new areas like software and the extension of patents in other areas – the extension of patents to 20 years under TRIPs and patent extensions in pharmaceuticals – has been thoroughly craven and stupid public policy. Sad, but true.

And here’s some hard evidence of the damage gene patenting does.

Intellectual Property Rights and Innovation: Evidence from the Human Genome by Heidi L. Williams – #16213 (AG HC PR)

Abstract:

This paper provides empirical evidence on how intellectual property (IP) on a given technology affects subsequent innovation. To shed light on this question, I analyze the sequencing of the human genome by the public Human Genome Project and the private firm Celera, and estimate the impact of Celera’s gene-level IP on subsequent scientific research and product development outcomes. Celera’s IP applied to genes sequenced first by Celera, and was removed when the public effort re-sequenced those genes. I test whether genes that ever had Celera’s IP differ in subsequent innovation, as of 2009, from genes sequenced by the public effort over the same time period, a comparison group that appears balanced on ex ante gene-level observables. A complementary panel analysis traces the effects of removal of Celera’s IP on within-gene flow measures of subsequent innovation. Both analyses suggest Celera’s IP led to reductions in subsequent scientific research and product development outcomes on the order of 30 percent. Celera’s short-term IP thus appears to have had persistent negative effects on subsequent innovation relative to a counterfactual of Celera genes having always been in the public domain.

Vietnam is the site of a rapidly emerging and evolving capitalism, something we may as well date to the introduction of Doi Moi (fn1) in the mid 80s.. Given my own interests, and continuing exposure to discussions about Adam Smith’s ideas on the marketplace and sympathy, it’s natural that my visit provoked some substantial thoughts on my part. [Warning - This post is quite optimistic. Don't think I was viewing things through rose tinted glasses (I certainly wasn't), this is just a focus on the positive]

Despite my optimism, the marketplace remains disheartening for some

Commerical life is absolutely everywhere. It throngs the street and intermingles with private homes in a way that I don’ t think  has been seen in English speaking society since the demise of the old style public house of Pepys day, when they were merely people selling beer in their own home. The costs of entry for many industries, particularly those that are encountered in everyday life such as retail or services are also far lower than here due, both for reasons of regulation (including licensing) and an apparent lack of demand for genuine premises/uniforms and other peripheral aspects to what is being sold. Jane Jacobs would most likely approve.

As a result you’re vastly more likely to be dealing with a owner operator or a very small business than in Australia. This is interesting because it results in far greater prevalence of market behavior.  this means that you are interacting in the market with another person who is also operating in the market. This is largely not the case in Australia. Here you are more likely dealing with an employee. This means you are operating in a market, but interacting with a person who is operating in a firm, or corporation, which is then operating in the market. The social norms and incentives they face in the firm are different from those that are faced in the marketplace. The firm is influenced by the marketplace it is in, but the prevalence of market influence on social and economic behavior is lessened. (Continued)

Iris Murdoch and her very literary husband John Bayley had a term for going to literary festivals and talking on panels with names like “whither the novel”. They called it ‘whithering’. The Sydney Morning Herald asked for 1,500 words of withering on the tax system, which I structured around what I liked and  didn’t about the Henry Review. Unfortunately, it turns out, they didn’t, in the end, want 1,500 words.  Of  the 1,000 odd words on Fairfax websites, even fewer made it into the paper and, as is the way with such things some things got garbled.

But that’s the game with papers, so there you go.  At least I get to post it up here.  So here it is below the fold in its full 1,500 word glory.

(Continued)

Yes Troppodillians, you know what I think about this. So you may want to skip it, but I thought it worth putting my oar in on the subject. It seems so sad, with all the elements in place to blow the idiocy of fiscal populism away – to the enduring advantage of the ALP Governments around the country, but the spin doctors are too blinkered to see it. But I’ll keep banging on. This is from yesterday’s Crikey.

Listening to Julia and Tony debating immigration and the anxieties of the outer suburbs my mind went back to one dawn during 217 BC. Hannibal lured his adversary into a long shallow valley along the shores of Lake Trasimenus after which his troops emerged from the fog and slaughtered an entire Roman army driving it into the lake.

The Coalition Party’s populism on public debt sets a similar trap for them. But so far, for years and years now, the ALP have been so busy optimising the next 24 hours, so timid and reactive to the Opposition’s spin about ‘Labor’s debt’ that they’ve missed the opportunity to emerge from the fog and dominate the next decade or so of politics.

While immigration can be a diversion, what the inhabitants of the outer suburbs really need and know they need – while they pay inflated tolls on stupidly privatised roads and wait in traffic jams – is old fashioned government infrastructure.

The ALP has tried half-heartedly to make itself the party of infrastructure. But without a chequebook it’s largely spin. (Continued)

I have it under control.

I flatter myself I can judge a film from the trailer, but I got it wrong in this case. It looked like a bunch of fancy special effects strung together with some half-baked premise about hacking people’s dreams. I expected tedious chase scenes, endless explosions, and a general spectacle of death and destruction.

Then all of a sudden laudatory reviews appeared (we’ll skip naming names), so I went all out and watched it at the IMAX (not in 3D) to ensure maximum impact. A good decison: the film is a visual feast with a heady Hans Zimmer music score, and demands a huge screen and several thousand speakers to do it justice. Leonardo DiCaprio gives one of his best performances, against some stiff competition: he knows how to draw you into the character’s soul, but he can do Indiana Jones too when the moment calls for it.

As far as the story goes, the first thing to say is that it’s bloody hard work making sense of it all. There were numerous key points I didn’t get until Francis, 13, explained them in the car going home. But we’d both need to see it again to understand everything. And we probably will: a good marketing ploy, to be sure, but it only works if the audience cares enough in the first place.

That’s assuming the story is all graspable. Should we expect these dreams to be fully intelligible anyway? In practice, it appears so — the collaborators who wrote the synopsis on Wikipedia have sketched the plot without resorting to ‘Then, inexplicably…’. I think it’s intended to be explicable too, at least insofar as a series of Escher stairs is explicable. This is proper science fiction, in the sense that every phenomenon and connection is properly thought through. It’s even possible that the film is proposing a science of dreams that makes them intelligible, as a first step to controlling them. (Continued)

Popper is often perceived as an eccentric kind of positivist who adopted a slightly different take on the demarcation of science with the criterion of falsification in place of verification. People like Habermas and the late Richard Rorty regarded Popper as a positivist for all practical purposes.

That view does not do justice to the full extent of  Popper’s program, starting with the first step which can be described as a full-blooded “conjectural turn”, to claim that even our best theories may be rendered problematic by new evidence, new criticisms and new theories. This anticipated the “hermeneutic turn” when appreciation of the theory-dependence and framework-dependence of observations and arguments became more widespread in the wake of Kuhn and the modern French theorists.

Consequently to understand Popper it is necessary to take on board the “conjectural turn” which dates from 1935 with the original German version of The Logic of  Scientific Discovery and some other moves as well. These include the “objectivist turn” to break with the obsession with the justification of beliefs and instead to focus on the strengths and weaknesses of  theories that are stated in a public, inter-subjective or “objective” form. Then there is Popper’s “social turn” to examine the function of institutions, traditions, conventions and “rules of the game” in science and society. this has been spelled out by Ian Jarvie. And finally the “metaphysical turn” to recognse the pervasive influence of  philosophical or metaphsical ideas which are the framework assumptions or presuppositions of  thought.

(Continued)

Dear editor

I wonder how many of the 84% of NT News respondents who think NT courts are too soft on criminals are aware of any of the following indisputable facts:

1. NT judges and magistrates are tougher on crime than other states and territories. The NT has an imprisonment rate almost 4 times higher than the Australian average, while the crime rate per head for both property and violent crimes is around twice the national average.
2. We have many more police per head of population than any other jurisdiction.
3. Crime rates for property crime actually rose while mandatory sentencing was in force for those offences up to 2001 (although that’s probably a coincidence).
4. Crime rates have fallen in most categories of property crime over the last 5 years, while robberies and assaults have risen significantly and homicides and sexual assaults have remained about the same.
5. The Territory has higher crime rates overall than other parts of Australia because we have a much younger population, many more indigenous residents, a much higher population suffering significant socio-economic disadvantage, and much higher levels of alcohol consumption.  All but the last of those factors is almost completely beyond the control of any Territory government irrespective of what actions it may choose to take.

Yours faithfully

Ken Parish

I have just returned from a two week holiday in Vietnam expectedly with a wide range of observations with which to tire friends and relatives. There are a few though that relate heavily to economics and the sociology of markets and capitalism which are probably more of interest to a Troppodillian audience (and can thus mask my self indulgence). So here’s a handful of minor ones with another longer one Vietnamese capitalism and sympathy in a day or two.

There is an almost universal tendency for buildings to be very narrow and very tall (3 metres at most wide, and four stories at least tall). I am told that this is due to land tax that is levied based on footprint. The unintended effect of this regulation in many urban environments is to create an atmosphere as appealing to me as the sprawl caused by regulation here and in the US in unappealing. The extensive street level commerce (there is still an astounding lack of real commerical real estate) also contributes. 10 points to both Adam Smith and Jane Jacobs. On the other hand when there is a lonely slim tower emerging from a rice paddy like the last fang of a geriatric tiger, the effect is mainly bemusing.

What is not appealing is the unruly and disturbing masses of powerlines, many of which trail loose wires and are used by vendors to suspend goods and equipment. I was also told the majority of the wiring is dead, and when wiring died it was replaced without removing the old wire. This is a sort of accelerating public goods problem. The more people fail to contribute by removing their old wire, the more costly it becomes for others to find their own old wire and contribute by removing it. The example in the photo is far far far from the worst example we saw.

Walking in Hanoi traffic is a wonderful lesson in the efficacy of simple informal rules followed universally. The wide boulevards of Saigon, which also had traffic lights, were far less pedestrian friendly, despite having navigable footpaths.  (Continued)

Evidence-based policy is a buzzword that conjures up images of responsible government: difficult decisions taken after a careful examination of the evidence, tailored local experiments, and then implemented using the best advice available. Sounds good, no? As a buzzword, it is a clear winner and something we all want more of.

But how much can we really expect of this buzzword and what will it actually lead to? Let’s have a look at the dangers and benefits.

The dangers and limitations

The first thing to note about the buzzword is that its main association is with rational control. In order to have evidence based policy, you must gather evidence and have a policy process. That means hiring more bureaucrats to do the gathering and the processing. Hence the buzzword is first and foremost a means for a bureaucracy to get their hands on more resources.

The buzzword also works to legitimise more power to a centralised bureaucracy: if you are going to have evidence-based policy, you must be able to implement the centrally-decided policy. Hence it is an excuse to take independent decision-making power away from local actors to the benefit of a supposedly rational centre. One might note the inherent contradiction here: with less power to local actors comes less local experimentation, meaning less policies are tried out and less possibilities for learning. Evidence-based policy is hence an engineer’s view of how an organisation learns (top-down). An alternative view could be that an organisation learns by following successful examples within the own organisations, which is a more organic but far less ‘evidence-based’ view. One might not know why something works and have no evidence that it will work in other places, but by simply following previous successful examples one can nevertheless reasonable hope to improve over time. That is how evolution works (what accidentally happens to fit its environment gets to procreate) and how many markets work: not by a rational gathering and analysing of information but by an almost blind mimicry of accidental success.

These initial thoughts mean that adopting the word ‘evidence-based’ policy implies increased bureaucracy, increased centralised control, and decreased local experimentation.

Then, let us consider the limits of ‘evidence’. New events that have no clear precedent but to which one must react are clearly outside the scope of evidence. What is one supposed to do then, wait until evidence is gathered? For instance, the recent Global Financial Crisis had no clear known precedence. It only vaguely resembled previous recessions. Should this then mean that all kinds of policies that were not implemented before and for which there was no evidence should not have been implemented? Should there have been no fee for the bank guarantee? Should we have stopped migration? Should we have started government work programmes (which were deemed so successful during the Great depression)? Or should we have done nothing for 50 years during which we gather more evidence?

It is clear that in the case of new major shocks hence, evidence-based policy has no meaning. We react to these based on vague rules-of-thumb and a vague understanding of how the whole economic system behaves. Such vague knowledge, based on vague historical evidence, can hardly be called evidence-based, but it is all we have to go on in such situations.

Then, onto the plus side:

(Continued)