Club Troppo

The global warming debate has morphed into Mondo Bizzaro.  Rudd is capable of mounting a succinct and persuasive explanation of his emissions trading scheme but chooses not to do so,  preferring to shift the electoral focus to subjects the pollsters tell him are more unequivocally propitious.

Tony Abbott, who thinks man-made global warming is “crap”, nevertheless promises to spend billions of taxpayers’ dollars in dealing with it, even though his predecessor rightly labels the Mad Monk’s policy as  “a recipe for fiscal recklessness on a grand scale” that would increase taxes and fail to reduce emissions.  Of course, the cognoscenti know that Abbott’s policy is just a minimally plausible figleaf he has no intention of ever implementing, but which allows him the elbow room to orchestrate a rerun of Labor’s 1998 GST scare campaign by labelling the ETS a “great big new tax”.

Only Turnbull bothers to present a considered, analytical case for the ETS, but no-one listens because he’s yesterday’s man and neither policy nor principle nor even intelligent discussion are of the slightest interest to the reptiles of Australia’s political media.  Politics is just a footy game for nerds.

It currently seems highly unlikely that an ETS or any other effective policy to combat man-made global warming will be implemented in the near to medium term, either in Australia or elsewhere, something Paul Frijters has presciently been saying here at Troppo for a rather long time.  No wonder they voted him Australia’s best young economist.  Maybe the time really has come to start seriously canvassing geo-engineering solutions to global warming, as Paul has previously canvassed here and here.  I’ll come back to that point in a moment.

(Continued)

While we’re waiting for Ken’s dissertation on the ethics of forcing minors to watch the Prime Minister’s appearance on qanda, here are a few comments on the program itself.

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 youngsters 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.

Not entirely, anyway. (Continued)

Remember me?  That grumpy old bloke who once obsessively spewed forth half-baked opinions here at Troppo?  After being AWOL for some time a comeback of sorts seems imminent.  I’m experiencing fitful urges to post, usually on very silly topics like whether Jen may have committed reportable child abuse by forcing young Jessica to watch KRudd being quizzed by members of James Farrell’s dumb generation on Q & A.

Pending one of these strange mental formations actually crystallising into a semi-coherent blog post, I’m warming up by making a major CT housekeeping announcement.  After deep introspection between Nicholas Gruen and myself, we’ve decided to abolish (on a trial basis) the requirement for readers to register before making comment box contributions.  It’s a decision we might come to regret, but our subjective impression is that the incidence of truly destructive trollery has been significantly reduced across the ozblogosphere in recent times.  It may be that the loss of spontaneity and freedom that inevitably flow from forcing readers to register before they can participate in discussion is a price we no longer need pay.  Anyway, time will tell …

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 the comments by Maxine Udall.

The February edition of The Monthly is out, including Robert Manne’s eagerly-awaited ‘Comment’ on Windschuttle.

Windschuttle attacked Manne in January’s Quadrant, saying that he should stand down from his position at La Trobe, then on Monday went on ABC radio’s Counterpoint to summarise the general case against the stolen generations ‘myth’ that forms the thesis of his Volume III. The debate is a bit hard to follow, because Manne has responded to Windschuttle’s print arguments on radio, and to his radio arguments in print. That is, Manne replied to Windschuttle’s personal attack on Late Night Live, and, contrary to Phillip Adams’ advice, it turns out that the piece in The Monthly adds nothing to that — it’s just a general critique of Windschuttle’s book. (Continued)

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. These are the attitudes of self identified Republicans.

Serving it up to the hyperconnected generation

I read The Dumbest Generation over Christmas, though it came out in 2008. It’s a very satisfying polemic, as well as thoroughly researched — to the extent that I’m competent to judge — and its author Mark Bauerlein is a cut above the average as a stylist.

The title refers to American teenagers and young adults up to about 30, and the book is as provocative as it suggests. Bauerlein presents four theses:

1. The generation in question is indeed dumb, in the sense that they know very little about history, politics, current affairs and literature. This conclusion is based not on anecdotal evidence, but on a mass of academic research that Bauerlein painstakingly surveys. Furthermore, the youth of today are unabashedly ignorant, scornful of books, and bemused that previous generations endured the tedium of reading and absorbing such patently boring and irrelevant material.

2. The source of the trouble is, of course, the amount of time youth devote to electronic interaction, or engrossed in cyberspace amusements. It isn’t just that these activities absorb time that would be better spent on reading books; they foster a focus on ephemeral peer preoccupations, an impatient preference for instant gratification, and a narcissistic fascination with adolescent culture. All this serves to stunt vocabulary, conceptual growth and intellectual stamina, while shutting out adult influences and other sources of enduring wisdom. There is no shortage of sage social commentators ready to respond with ‘Ah, but our youth are developing new and wonderful kinds of intelligence and literacy — creative, empowered, dynamic [etc., etc.]‘. However, contrary to the impression given by Michael Duffy, who doesn’t seem to have penetrated very far into the book, Bauerlein is perfectly aware of these arguments, and takes on a phalanx of apologists, harpooning their inflated claims one after the other. (Continued)

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. (Continued)

The headlines all warn that core inflation “remains high” and that the futures market is predicting a 78% chance that the RBA will increase rates next week.

We need to keep things in perspective.

First, after three annual increases in interest rates and with the gradual easing off in fiscal policy, inflation poses no immediate concern. “Underlying” inflation is slightly below the Reserve Bank’s management bracket. The “trimmed means” percentage change of 1.4% in the December half-year can be represented as 2.8% on an annual basis. The figures are likely to go down further in subsequent quarters.

House prices, while excessive, are bound to slow down with the end of the stimulus package. Other asset prices are subdued.

And the Reserve Bank does not simply look at the unemployment rate: it looks equally at the overall under-utilisation rate (totals hours worked). In fact, hours worked per member of the labour force have declined by 4% relative to what it was when the recession hit in mid-2008. There is ample spare capacity.

Finally, there is no sign yet that real Gross Domestic Product is accelerating to more than 3% per annum, which is the threshold spending target used by the Rudd Government. The latest IMF’s growth forecast for the Australian economy is under 1 per cent in 2009 and 2.5% growth in 2010 (compared with earlier over-optimistic forecasts by the RBA of 1.75% and 3.25%).

The RBA would be wise to keep interest rates on hold for the time being.

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.

Attentive Google visitors soon noticed that something was missing. Jessie’s original entry included the Aboriginal flag but this has been removed from the image on Google’s homepage. But before readers start throwing around the ‘R’ word, here’s Google’s explanation:

You may have noticed that the Google Doodle on the homepage today is slightly different to Jessie’s original entry, because that one contained copyright imagery that we weren’t able to publish on the homepage today. However, I think you’ll agree it’s still absolutely beautiful, and inspires lots of wonderful ideas about the Australia of our future.

The Aboriginal flag is protected by copyright. In 1997 the Federal Court of Australia recognised Harold Thomas as the flag’s author. The flag may only be reproduced in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968 or with the permission of Mr Harold Thomas.

Update: Asher Moses at the Sydney Morning Herald has the story including an interview with Thomas:

Thomas, who lives in Humpty Doo in the Northern Territory, said he refused only because Google did not approach him in a respectful way and had demanded to reproduce the flag without charge.

"I said well you can use it but there’s a fee component and the [Google] person said: ‘Oh we can’t do that, we can’t pay for it, we’ll have to ask the girl to change it [the logo] if we have to pay for it,’ " Thomas said.

"So ever since that time we’ve been argy bargying over how we should go about it and in the end it was a pittance offer so I decided why bother?"

Another update: Dogs like to dig holes.

Yet another update: Valeri at Typeboard has more, including a comment from Jessie.

But wait … there’s more: The BBC has picked up the story. But they’re a little confused about the origins of the Aboriginal flag:

Mr Howard designed the flag in the 1970s as a symbol of the indigenous land rights movement in Australia.

They mean Mr Thomas.

Two apparently unrelated articles by superstars of the 1980s and 90s in their respective fields which share a common theme – the market’s aversion to serious innovation, it’s tendency to move incrementally towards lower levels of innovation leaving really fundamental and speculative innovation to others.

Bill Gates points out that ‘efficiency’ as in improving insulation and lowering fuel consumption is not going to reduce CO2 emissions by 80% by 2050, only serious innovation can.  That’s a (possible) justification for regulation which targets breakthrough technologies like zero emissions cars (though just identifying the potential case for it, doesn’t mean you have that case, or that politicians and policy makers won’t screw up such policies).

One of the reasons I bring this up is that I hear a lot of climate change experts focus totally on 2025 or talk about how great it is that there is so much low hanging fruit that will make a difference.

This mostly focuses on saving a little bit of energy, which by itself is simply not enough. The need to get to zero emissions in key sectors almost never gets mentioned. The danger is people will think they just need to do a little bit and things will be fine.

If CO2 reduction is important, we need to make it clear to people what really matters – getting to zero.

With that kind of clarity, people will understand the need to get to zero and begin to grasp the scope and scale of innovation that is needed.

However all the talk about renewable portfolios, efficiency, and cap and trade tends to obscure the specific things that need to be done.

To achieve the kinds of innovations that will be required I think a distributed system of R&D with economic rewards for innovators and strong government encouragement is the key. There just isn’t enough work going on today to get us to where we need to go.

Meanwhile, in a marvellous and heartfelt article the great Gary Kasparov reviews Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind by Diego Rasskin-Gutman. He tells some great stories – can anyone find the game he talks about with Topolov, I couldn’t find it on Chessgames and the Chess Database was down. Anyway Kasparov’s theme is the same.

ith the supremacy of the chess machines now apparent and the contest of “Man vs. Machine” a thing of the past, perhaps it is time to return to the goals that made computer chess so attractive to many of the finest minds of the twentieth century. Playing better chess was a problem they wanted to solve, yes, and it has been solved. But there were other goals as well: to develop a program that played chess by thinking like a human, perhaps even by learning the game as a human does. Surely this would be a far more fruitful avenue of investigation than creating, as we are doing, ever-faster algorithms to run on ever-faster hardware.

This is our last chess metaphor, then—a metaphor for how we have discarded innovation and creativity in exchange for a steady supply of marketable products. The dreams of creating an artificial intelligence that would engage in an ancient game symbolic of human thought have been abandoned. Instead, every year we have new chess programs, and new versions of old ones, that are all based on the same basic programming concepts for picking a move by searching through millions of possibilities that were developed in the 1960s and 1970s.

Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism and the demands of the market. Brute-force programs play the best chess, so why bother with anything else? Why waste time and money experimenting with new and innovative ideas when we already know what works? Such thinking should horrify anyone worthy of the name of scientist, but it seems, tragically, to be the norm. Our best minds have gone into financial engineering instead of real engineering, with catastrophic results for both sectors.

One thing I’ve been at pains to stress is that Web 2.0 platforms – like Wikipedia, Blogger, Google Search, Google Calendar, Facebook – are public goods. Further, although a core function of government is to build public goods, none of these public goods were built by governments.  To avoid misunderstanding, my point is not that governments should have built them or any other web 2.0 platforms, but to highlight this important new phenomenon of privately built public goods.  (And to pose a question which is what role – if any – government agencies might evolve for themselves to help the growth of such public assets.  In this regard I’m not really thinking of capital G government agencies like the Treasury, but rather agencies like the National Library or the ABC).

In any event, I have one main point I want to make in this post – and a question to ask. The point is that it seems to me on reflection that what we’re looking at is not just an issue with governments, but also with large established organisations.  For if one looks over the panoply of Web 2.0 platforms, not only are government agencies thin on the ground but so are any long established large agencies.  I think that’s true of large established IT companies – not one of them established a Web 2.0 platform (except for those like Google which got big by establishing such platforms and those like Microsoft that imitated or bought Web 2.0 ventures).

I wonder how true this is even of philanthropic enterprises. In any event, I’d be grateful for people’s reflections and any counter-examples.

As we lurch from one disaster to another, I think Mark Thoma quoting Chris Blattman, hopping into David Brooks gets it exactly right.

Chris Blattman:

David Brooks saves the world in 1000 words, by Chris Blattman:

Haiti, like most of the world’s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust…

We’re all supposed to politely respect each other’s cultures. But some cultures are more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them.

…it’s time to promote locally led paternalism. In this country, we first tried to tackle poverty by throwing money at it, just as we did abroad. Then we tried microcommunity efforts, just as we did abroad. But the programs that really work involve intrusive paternalism.

These programs, like the Harlem Children’s Zone and the No Excuses schools, are led by people who figure they don’t understand all the factors that have contributed to poverty, but they don’t care. They are going to replace parts of the local culture with a highly demanding, highly intensive culture of achievement — involving everything from new child-rearing practices to stricter schools to better job performance.

That is David Brooks selectively quoting the development literature.

His confidence makes me uncomfortable. To paraphrase, unkindly: These Haitians need to be more like hardworking, thrifty Americans. We’ve spent five decades learning that everything we thought would work in aid did not. Clearly it’s time to get tough. I read about some people who made this work in Harlem, so it’s obviously the answer for Haitians, whom through newspaper reading, I have deduced are also resistant to progress.

Don’t misunderstand me: Brooks could be right. In fact, I’m starting one randomized control trial to test the idea. I’m a little further from propounding it as God’s honest truth on the pages of the Times.

Sometimes the  problem with big development solutions is they spring from hubris and certitude rather than caution and humility. …

I’m slightly terrified now that Bill Clinton, special envoy to Haiti, has said David Brooks is his leading intellectual light.

Intrusive Paternalism worked so well in Iraq and other places, especially when combined with forced free market solutions introduced with no supporting institutional structure, and without consideration of local culture, history, or social relationships, that I guess conservatives like Brooks just can’t wait to try it again.

A lot of folks on Facebook have been sending me links for a new website called “Menzies House”. According to the blurb, it’s the “leading Australian blog for conservative, centre-right and libertarian thinkers and activists”, which must come as news to the mob at Catallaxy (which is still in technical exile).

A perfunctory investigation reveals that the domain name is registered to one Henry Marsh on behalf of the Dallan Investment Trust. Who they are, Google doesn’t know. The Australian Business Register says they’re in SA.

I don’t want to sound like I’m putting down a good initiative, but nevertheless I will wait to see how it pans out. I dislike inorganic ventures, website-wise, and pre-emptively declaring yourself “the leading” anything before you even launch is suspiciously marketer-esque. Not my favourite profession.

Update: Tim Andrew spills the beans.

Google’s announced that they were the subject of a precise and sophisticated attack, apparently aimed at getting access to the GMail accounts of pro-democracy critics of the Chinese Communist regime, both living in China and abroad.

Google don’t think that the accounts were compromised but can’t be sure.

In response Google have said that they are considering pulling out of China entirely — shutting down the self-censored Google.cn website and closing their China office.

It’s about bloody time they realised they’re dealing with gangsters and thugs.

Update: Google arch-rival Microsoft have said that the attack may have exploited a hitherto unknown flaw in Internet Explorer. They’ve been working with Google on the whole situation. It’s heartening.