I’ve just been to see the film, and I’m afraid I wasn’t impressed.  It is of a piece with ‘Doubt’ which is very well acted but has a slick and ultimately superficial script. 

I had no idea what the film was about but somehow by osmosis I took in that  it was a Good Film and I wanted to see a film so I went to see it.  [Spoiler alert]

I didn’t know the holocaust wends its way rather definitely into the film and as some readers may remember, I think the holocaust is well nigh impossible to bring off in art or pretty much any re-creation.  Still, I watched and wondered, and didn’t wait for it to fail.

Essentially we are presented with a portrait of a haunted woman who has participated in horrible attrocities. This is all fair enough. I’m not against ‘humanising’ the perpetrators of attrocities. Rather the opposite.  But you see that’s where the difficulty lies. If you want to do this, you’ve got to know what you’re doing.  It’s dead hard – not in the sense of doing it according to acceptable standards of taste and decorum – which have no trouble looking after themselves.  It’s dead hard, because we don’t really know what goes on in the heart of such people.  I expect there are some good primary sources, but I don’t know them, and I don’t really know any bits of art that take them up – but there may well be some and I’d be interested to know if anyone can suggeset any (though I’m not offering to rush out and check them out.)  

In any event, the problem is that we get this sympathetic portrait of the perpetrator of the attrocities, but we’re not really left any wiser as to what the hell it was all about when she did it.  She seems a better sort than all the other mass murderers. She’s as honest as the day is long and has been merciful to our hero. She helps and saves people, gets them to read to her in the camp.  But then she sends them to their deaths in the next ‘selection’.  This is all very unsatisfactory because it’s a complete mystery to us what is going on here. 

Now that might work out OK I guess. In a sense this becomes a ‘point’ of the film.  But it’s not very enlightening, and becomes a kind of set piece bit of drama, a vehicle for virtuoso acting.  Kate Winslett is supposed to be a fave for an Oscar from this.  I can’t fault her acting.  It’s very good.  But then again all it has is a kind of static or superficial verisimilitude – because it cannot have any deeper verisimilitude because there is no deeper truth in the script.    I also discovered to my shock that David Hare was the screen-playwright.  Now I think he’s written some terrific things – like Plenty, Skylight and something else the name of which I can’t remember. I recognised it as a Hare film when I saw his name.  He has what I’d call a ‘courtroom drama’ style where your sympathies move back and forth as you try to figure out whose side you are on.  But unlike some of his other plays – Plenty and Skylight being two – you don’t really go anywhere towards figuring anything out.   (Continued)

A column published today in the Age. 

Its all shoulders to the wheel on the fires. Or is it?

On the weekend, Google, the largest internet company in the world and (how can it be?) one of the most agile offered Victoria a helping hand. It was turned away.

The Country Fire Authority (CFA) Web site wasnt coping with demand for its online list of bushfire updates. According to the story its Engineering Director Alan Noble told a Broadband and Beyond conference in Melbourne this week, Google proposed overlaying CFA data onto Google Maps to produce online, real-time mapping of the fires’ locations, and intensities. Especially in an emergency, why did it have to ask? (Continued)

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos displays the Kindle 2 e-book reader at an event Monday.

Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild.

I often wondered why The Tragedy of the Commons was such a recent article. After all, it’s not as if the idea is especially difficult or new.  Sometimes an obvious idea does the rounds and gets put in in asides and so on but someone has the chutzpah to write it up as their own idea.  And away they go, repackaged in a quotable meme form (Tragedy of the Commons, Hardin, 1968) – a much cited article is born. 

(I feel similarly about “The market for Lemons” although I admire its author much more. The market for lemons goes back at least to none other than Nicolaus Copernicus who anticipated Sir Thomas Gresham’s law by around 70 years. “Bad money drives out good”.)

Anyway, apropos of the Tragedy I was amused to see this write up of a particularly ferocious (and in some ways unreasonable) attack on it in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Ian Angus provocatively re-considers The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons.

Since its publication in Science in December 1968, The Tragedy of the Commons [by Garrett Hardin] has been anthologized in at least 111 books, making it one of the most-reprinted articles ever to appear in any scientific journal. . . . For 40 years it has been, in the words of aWorld Bank Discussion Paper, the dominant paradigm within which social scientists assess natural resource issues. . . Its shocking to realize that he provided no evidence at all to support his sweeping conclusions. He claimed that the tragedy was inevitablebut he didnt
show that it had happened even once. Hardin simply ignored what actually happens in a real commons: self-regulation by the communities involved. . . . The success of Hardins argument reflects its usefulness as a pseudo-scientific explanation of global poverty and inequality, an explanation that doesnt question the dominant social and political order. It confirms the prejudices of those in power: logical and factual errors are nothing compared to the very attractive (to the rich) claim that the poor are responsible for their own poverty. The fact that Hardins argument also blames the poor for ecological destruction is a bonus. The website of Monthly Review, August 25, 2008, at
http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/angus250808.html

 

The most recent column in the Fin.

We wont criticise Kevin Rudd for his Christmas break, but it was ironic that on the first day after his months leave he could only say, The government stands ready to take whatever action is necessary in the future. This must have been important: Rudd said it seven times in the one interview. But it is something you say when you have nothing to announce.

The Reserve Bank Board also had a Christmas interlude, despite urgent calls for further substantial interest cuts. Expect a fall today of at least one percentage point. A large reduction wont stoke inflation because, as the Bank reported on Friday, borrowing is contracting. Unfortunately, it wont recharge the economy either: there are too few investors and consumers. What we need is another spending package.

Contrast this holiday air with President Barack Obamas first three days. He decided that the government would regulate hedge funds, derivatives, mortgage brokers and credit rating agencies. He also resolved to curtail remuneration of executives of government-supported banks. The Rudd government has yet to pronounce on these matters. Then Obama obtained Congress assent to the final tranche of President Bushs US$700 billion intervention, equivalent to five per cent of the United States GDP, and he launched an US$819 billion dollar package (another 6 per cent of GDP) which he promised during the election.

True, the US needs are great and a fading mandate emasculated the Bush administrations capacity to intervene. But Obamas first try at meeting economic problems – he also actively addressed other issues – is impressive.

On January 20, Rudd at last had something to say. (Continued)

STOP PRESS: $55 last day!  Offer closes Tuesday 24th February 2007 (told you!) Now Closed.

Hi all,

It’s on again this year – with our group subscription running out, it’s time to resubscribe – if you want to. 

The amount you’ll pay is a function of how many takers we have.

Here’s the list of prices from Crikey.

• 3-5 subscribers – $95 each
• 6-9 subscribers – $85 each
• 10-20 subscribers – $75 each
• 20-49 subscribers – $65 each
• 50+ subscribers – $55 each

Please email me at nicholas AT gruenxxx DOT com DOT au – without the ‘xxx’s if you’re prepared to sign up at the ten plus level of $75 though I expect we’ll make the cut to the twenty plus level and perhaps even to the next one.

PS: We’re already over 10 subsribers and I hope heading into 20-49 territory.

PPS: Now over 20!

PPPS: Now up to 42 – help us get to 50!

PPPPS: 60 plus. 

Right now we’re trying to reduce savings (increase consumption) in the short term before doing the opposite in the long term.  So far so good.  How might one use the tools of ‘behavioural economics’ to help.  Here are a few ideas – none of which will surprise readers of this blog. 

• Green Christine Milne is reviving the idea of stamp scrip – which is effectively money that depreciates in value if you don’t spend it.  (When these things were used in the Depression, you had to get your money ‘stamped’ regularly to keep it valid, and the cost of the stamps gradually drove the value to zero – alternatively the coupon can just be worth less value with each passing period. Aparently the Obamanaughts thought of this and then decided not to go ahead.  It’s easy to point out that the rational consumer would just substitute spending the stamp scrip for their own money and then go back to spending their own money.  In effect they’d save the extra amount they’d been given but they’d ‘spend’ the specific dollars they were given. Anyway, as Joshua Gans has argued maybe presentation makes a difference.  I have no doubt that it would, though who knows how much?  Given modern technology I expect one could come up with some reasonable makeshifts.  But I doubt one could get them sorted in time.  Still a pretty useful halfway house I would have thought would be paying the money into people’s credit or debit card accounts.  This way there would need to be a deliberate decision to pay money elsewhere for it to disappear from the consciousness of their inner consumer and as a result it would likely be spent, if not immediately then via the process by which extra cash lying around ends up burning a hole in one’s pocket. 
• We could also lean on banks (and make any necessary regulatory changes) to reduce mortgage repayments in line with reduced interest payments.  Some banks will do this automatically, but it depends on their procedures.  You’d want them to do it ASAP and we should require them to do so except where they have obtained an explicit instruction from their client not to do so.  Naturally they’ll have to put them back up when rates rise – which would, at that point, also be healthy. 
• Then there are the old tricks with super I’ve referred to in the past.  I’d like to see ‘default’ salary sacrifice super payments fall to the compulsory level of 9% right now, and for this to be reversed to ratchet savings up again when we return to what should be regarded as normal for all but recessionary periods in the forseeable future.   Of course employees should be informed of this in advance and given some administratively easy means of opting out. 

Any other similar ideas out there?