Monthly Archives: September 2008

Meanwhile back in the department of double standards

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Some of the things reported in this post may not be true.  But how many Troppodillians can put their hands on their hearts (well that’s tricky in itself if taken literally but you know what I mean) and say that if there was as much half way credible dirt flying around on Obama that he’d be a snowflake’s chance of it not being all over the papers. It would, naturally enough, be a ‘character issue’. Some of Kathy G’s links provide pretty amazing reads.

Who is being bailed out? Who benefits?

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The way the proposed bailout is being talked up, you get the impression that the whole world depends on the Bush administration and the Fed coming to the party with the best part of a trillion dollars. The US economy depends on it, our economy depends on it, the capacity of the US to resist wicked people in foreign lands, even the ongoing success story of the Chinese powerhouse (and hence our mining sector) etc. The implication is that we are all being bailed out.

But there are dissenting voices, claiming that the bailout of badly managed financial institutions will have more downsides than upsides, in the form of inflation and further damage to the dollar, plus the message that the US Government will come to the rescue whenever serious mistakes are made by large numbers of borrowers and lenders (a la the Savings and Loans debacle). Continue reading →

Why bailouts are difficult

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HT Mark Thoma: via Justin Fox (and I note with weeping gratitude the pundit’s confession that he doesn’t know enough to pass any decent judgement on the arguments).  Me too.

Australian money manager John Hempton owned Washington Mutual preferred shares and was thus wiped out when the bank was seized and flipped to JP Morgan Chase last week. But he’s not mad about that. He’s mad about what happened to owners of Wamu bonds. By also wiping out senior debt holders at Wamu, he argues, the government has now botched things in a profoundly serious way: Continue reading →

Architecture and beauty: some thoughts

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Parliament House - Melbourne by Dean-Melbourne.

A few weeks ago I spent an afternoon in the Victorian Parliament building discussing regulation and, though I think I’ve looked in it quickly before, I was completely blown away by how magnificent the Legislative Council is.  I mean just take a look at those pictures.  And it reawakened some pondering I’ve been doing for a long time.  

I wonder why I really love great architecture.  And I wonder about a question that I heard the architect and social philosopher of sorts Christoper Alexander ask. Why is it that virtually every building – well so many buildings anyway – built before 1940 is beautiful and virtually every building built after – say – 1950 is ugly?

This is a pretty interesting question I think.  

One clue that I got was when I was at a roundtable put on by the Victorian Competition and Efficiency Commission on liveability.  After lots of discussion about ‘metrics’ for capturing livability, I mucked up a little and said that I hadn’t heard anyone mention the idea of beauty.  This was not regarded as a very helpful comment and it nonplussed several people at the roundtable. They said that people disagreed about what was beautiful, and after a little perseverence from me and some face saving gestures from one of the hosts, including the offer to mention the word in the report, the issue was politely dropped.

On thinking about this at least for me this seems to encapsulate some real failure of the elites that run our society. This was an elite gathering.  Full of economists, social planners of various descriptions, a writer and an academic or two.  The group was chosen for its breadth. All of the rest there would have had tertiary education and most of them were relatively senior.

But building a city to be beautiful, well that was pretty esoteric stuff.  My sexuality wasn’t questioned.  Indeed, everyone was very polite.  But it was a little as if I had said that it is impossible to have a great city without a giant statue of a camel.  

So what is going on?  I think what is going on is that the things that a government might plan or impose on its citizenry require some kind of ‘objectivity’.  So they emerge from accepted processes which meet various objective standards of integrity, due process including the introduction of appropriate expertise.  An architect might be involved, and that might give you at best a bit of bolt on beauty. But an architect is mostly there as a building and design expert.  You might get a lovely building out of it, but the chances of that are slim indeed.  What will be got is someone’s credentials on a certificate saying that this structure was designed by a 100 percent muesli eating architect.

So this is my first take out. Well it’s my first assertion. Continue reading →

Beyond the Tropposphere

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From Universe Today, here’s the Wednesday quiz. 

It’s time for another “Where In The Universe” (WITU) challenge to test your visual knowledge of the cosmos. This one might be relatively easy, but I’m feeling generous today. Guess what this image is, and give yourself extra points if you can guess which spacecraft is responsible for the image. As always, don’t peek below before you make your guess. Comments on how you did are welcome. Continue reading →

Wither neoliberalism . . .

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Whatever that is.

Anyway, John Quiggin is salivating at the implications of the current schemozzle for ‘neoliberalism’. It’s finished he reckons. So too the ‘Washington Consensus’. I have my doubts. I guess some of the worst excesses of this time around will be a cause for lessons to be learned. But as for something more fundamental?

I was going to try to articulate my doubts a bit more fully, but haven’t the time. But I do have the time to link you to Steve Randy Waldman’s more pessimistic view. Of course I expect Steve Randy Waldman’s perfect world would be quite different from John but that aside, I think SRW’s (what am I supposed to call this guy – ‘Steve’, ‘Randy’ or ‘Steve Randy’ – what is it with these Americans?) presumptions about how the world works are more consistent with my experience of the world than John’s.

You see rather than be cured, these things metastasise. People have been dancing on the grave of the Washington Consensus for a long time. But it keeps reinventing itself, most recently in the ‘institutions’ view of development. There’s nothing terribly wrong with quite a bit of the Washington Consensus or the ‘institutions’ view. But these perspectives should be starting orientations, rather than formulas for fly-in fly-out fixes. Imposed in a Procrustean way their results are often disappointing, and sometimes disastrous.

The fondness for dogma, rather than trying to figure out in a pragmatic way what the issues are and the most efficacious ways of dealing with them – a pragmatism proposed by people like Dani Rodrik (one economics many recipes) – will metastasise again and again. Add to this the rampant mixture of corruption and log rolling that is American politics and it’s hard to see much that is particularly terrific coming our way. But no doubt some of the problems will be cleaned up – like the Savings and Loans problems of the 1980s ;).