In case you haven’t seen it. And, to remind you of this blog’s ‘centrist’ roots, remember as you’re watching, it was Paul Keating who first introduced this style of advertising. Remember Bill Hunter clambering around the wide brown land telling us what a great thing ‘Working Nation’ was just before the 1996 election?
My brother and I both tried quite hard not to be economists. And we both failed fairly miserably.
He’s been busy producing some interesting graphs concerning the two intergenerational reports.
Not only is life tough but you try finding a parking spot in a busy shopping centre. Whenever I do I can usually find some place where they could have fitted an extra parking spot. And pretty obviously if theyd have done so I could park there. Well actually I couldnt. If there was an extra parking space, chances are it would be full too and I’d have to keep searching.
The housing affordability crisis is a bit like that. Of course if we can increase the supply of housing then we can all enjoy better housing. But when its in limited supply it has to be rationed. So if we increase the grants people get to buy houses, theyll all bid against each other and end up back where they started. Well actually theyll end up a bit further back than that because the new arrangements involve churning money through government coffers for no good reason and some level of waste is inevitable.
I’m having to remind myself of my parking rage when I think of the growing community anxiety to stop all this predatory lending thats driving people to the wall. You know the story. A comment by Graham Bell on a post on the sub-prime crisis and its implications for prudential supervision raised the issue.
I’m not accusing Graham of anything so heinous, but I cant help thinking of all those Jews sucking the blood out of Europe before Hitler sorted them out. Continue reading
Who said this?
Though it sounds paradoxical to say that . . . to prevent ourselves from making the wrong decision we must deliberately reduce the range of choice before us, we all know that this is often necessary in practice if we are to achieve our long term aims.
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In the biggest scandal since Phar Lap, Australia’s chance of a third rugby World Cup may have sunk this week, thanks to some Dirty Pierre infecting the great Bernie Larkham. Australia was always only an outside chance, assuming our champion 10 would be on the paddock, on song. Without Larkham, a Wallaby World Cup is not impossible, only unimaginable.
For Australia to be good enough to take the tournament, sans Bernie, the Wallabies will have to become something that we have literally not seen before. New forces will have to emerge. The players who still have latent potential will have to stand right up, fully realising themselves, immediately.
We do have guys still developing. Think of Matt Dunning, who has made so much progress. No question, there is more to come from Berrick Barnes. Adam Ashley-Cooper could fully arrive, or turn up like he did against the All Blacks earlier this year. Wycliffe Palu is growing through the tournament. Giteau is having the time of his life. There will come a day when Rocky Elsom will defeat one of the rugby superpowers single-handedly, as could Morts. Can Nathan Sharpe pull another finger out? George Smith is, perhaps, the only Wallaby who we definitely know can’t get any better, since he’s already the best.
The Wallabies can’t be written off. But the news of Bernie’s nobbling will have put a big smile on the face of every sheep in New Zealand, which has never defeated Australia in a World Cup match. In the meantime, Knuckles’ boys have a meaningless game against Canada this weekend, a hiatus, an effective gap in the schedule, into which we have sent the reserves, to break their cabin fever and get their names on the list of participants. There’s no point in even running any moves, as few of these players will be executing them, come the big time.
More interesting is England vs Tonga. Will the Poms become the first Cup holder to die in the following pool? A delicious humiliation may loom. The other hot game is Argentina vs Ireland. If the Argies get up, the Dirty Pierres will face the Blacks in a quarter-final in Cardiff, in their own World Cup! Think of Bernie, and call it Karma.
Go Tonga! Go the Argies!
Update: Rugby is a demanding template, and fans must endure many desulatory exhibitions, as we did last night in Australia’s horrible 37-6 win over Canada, about which the less said the better. With my spirit low, I met a friend for a drink afterwards, where I saw most of the Fiji-Wales game. From the mind-numbing to the utterly sublime. If you missed it, read Stephen Jones’ match report, which begins: “Well, how many greats do you want? Perhaps the greatest World Cup game ever played, perhaps the greatest feast of rugby and the greatest range of attacking palletes. Perhaps the greatest upset, and perhaps the final condemnation of all those who would rather that great rugby nations such as Fiji were given their own minor-countries tournament to mess about in. This was one of those games that you will need to sit with the video in a darkened room to believe that it ever happened.” And that’s just for starters. It was an epic. If it’s replayed, don’t miss it for quids.
Update: The quarter-finals are, in order of playing times: (1) Australia vs England; (2) New Zealand vs France (at Cardiff); (3) South Africa vs Fiji; (4) Argentina vs Scotland. As anticipated, this means that the sequence facing the Wallabies is: (1) England; (2) the All Blacks (or France); and (3) the Springboks, assuming that the Boks can get past supercharged outsiders, Fiji and Argentina. The end of the pools also means that the first consolation prizes have been distributed, with Tonga, Wales, Italy and Ireland securing automatic qualification for the 2011 World Cup. Go the Wallabies!
Bernie Watch: In comments, Fred Argy advises that, writing in todays (i.e. Monday’s) Canberra Times, Bernie says he is now jogging!
I’ve just been to see Hairspray – a cinematic version of a Broadway Smash – well I don’t know if it was a box office smash but it won lots of awards. It’s a musical set in Baltimore in 1962 about rock and roll and a plump girl who takes a rock and roll show by storm with her energy. It’s all against the backdrop of the great leap forward in civil rights for blacks.
It isn’t the kind of thing that I’d normally go out of my way to see – I went and saw it as a ‘family’ film. I thought it was bloody fantastic. It’s a kind of fantasy of social action and social progress at a time when basic justice broke through against what Martin Luther King called (if I’ve got the quote right) the sweltering heat of injustice.
I totally loved it.
And here’s a bit of YouTube of what I presume was the Broadway production.
For a fair while I’ve been interested in things like who appoints and pays for auditors of public companies and whether we’ve got it right (given that the information provided by auditors of companies for instance is a public or quasi public good when produced and firms have a conflict of interest in appointing their auditors).
The issue also arises in the context of ratings agencies – and the stinky situation in which agencies like Standard and Poors get so much revenue from the firms and products they rate.
I’d like to write a little more on this, but alas don’t have the time right now. But I can draw your attention to a very thought provoking post by Willem Buiter to which Brad Delong linked today.
It’s over the fold. Continue reading
I’m generally in favour of free trade. So are quite a few economists who have reputations for being against it – even though they are not. At one point Keynes, who was a strong free trader argued (I think in the context of England being constrained by fixed exchange rates) that trade restrictions were a lesser evil if they were necessary to underpin economic expansion during a downturn. This caused its share of uproar and outrage. Was he a free trader or not?
Likewise when I outlined a departure from the case for unilaterally reducing our car tariffs to zero, various economist commenters got quite agitated about it. One said it was outrageous and assumed that I didn’t know the very first thing about the economics of trade.
Dani Rodrik is also supportive of free trade though he’s frequently been taken to be against it. Rodrik thinks that incursions on trade can generate more benefits than costs if done right – particularly in the context of economic development. He’s got lots of interesting things to say and think about regarding the whole subject.
And a recent post of his drew readers’ attention to a paper by Robert A. Driskill (pdf) which anatomises some of the foibles of the case for free trade. Just to repeat, it’s not against free trade, but it does outline the various shortcuts that economists take in making the case for free trade. How loose the arguments are sometimes and how much gets left out. If you’re interested in this I strongly suggest a squiz of the paper. If you have no economic training, you may find the terminology a bit off-putting, but there are no equations or anything as nasty as that.
I can’t prove it, but remain convinced in the face of plenty of circumstantial evidence, that the tribalism that economists show on this topic is to be explained by a certain kind of psychology. Continue reading