Club Troppo

I was struck by Krugman’s column on greenhouse. I’ve been working myself up into a lather of pessimism on greenhouse. Not only is this a really really hard problem to solve, but the way we’re going about solving it is just so awful from so many perspectives, it’s hard to innumerate all the problems. But the central problem, it seems to me, is that we’re developing massively dysfunctional international institutions to deal with the problem. Start by giving all signatories to the UNFCCC equal votes in determining UNFCCC ‘policy’ or resolutions and then exempt all but a small few from binding commitments.

What do you think might happen? Well the unbound will call for stronger commitments from the bound. And so it’s been going on – for twenty years now. The developing countries have remained intransigent, and the greenies are so wedded to the politics of victimhood that this is a truth that dare not speak it’s name. It’s always about ‘us’ – the developed countries.

Meanwhile the developed countries like to talk tough, but there’s plenty of evidence that the kind of long range targets to which they’re committing themselves are the same kinds of targets to which countries have routinely committed themselves – only to completely ignore them – like the Brandt Commission targets on aid, or dare I say it the latest round of commitments in which we all have rock concerts designed to make poverty history.

Meanwhile in Australia we have locked ourselves into the follies of trying to compensate industries for their emissions of carbon . . . Now if you know anything about economics you know that this undermines the whole point of an ETS. (Continued)

David, Cate and Andrew in happier (very recent) times – from SMH

It’s always sad when heroic high achievers begin to lose their powers, still more when they fail to age gracefully and succumb instead to bitterness and envy. But so it seems to be with David Williamson, once said to be Australia’s greatest playwright.

On the same day the Sydney Theatre Company’s season of new wunderkind Andrew (Lantana) Bovell’s blockbuster When The Rain Stops Falling opened at the Opera House to rave reviews, Williamson was bitching in the SMH about the poor judgment of the STC under the tutelage of Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton in preferring “dazzle theatre” and “capital-T theatre” over the sort of “storytelling theatre” of which Williamson sees himself as the epitome.

Although the STC has just finished a revival run of his vintage play The Removalists, it appears Cate and Andrew were less interested in staging Williamson’s newer works penned since he revoked a previous 2005 decision to retire from the playwrighting caper.   As a result, Williamson has taken his theatrical bat and gone home via Kirribilli’s Ensemble Theatre, which is about to stage his new work Let the Sunshine (why all these weather metaphors? – it must be the zeitgeist).  The plot summary tells you all you need to know about why Cate and Andrew didn’t want it for the STC:

Let The Sunshine, starring William Zappa, Georgie Parker, Andrew McFarlane and Kate Raison, is a comedy about two ideologically opposed couples living in Noosa, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, who are forced to get on when their children marry and have a child.

“It is a rerun of Romeo And Juliet,” Williamson says. “It’s the Capulets and the Montagues but my star-cross’d lovers don’t come to an horrendous end. Comedy is based not on life-shattering events but ordinary people muddling through their problems.”

Sounds more like an attempt to recycle Travelling North by making the protagonists sea-changing Babyboomers instead of old codgers while grafting a confected ideological conflict onto an already tired concept. 

(Continued)

Andrew Leigh asks: "are smokers more likely to vote for parties of the right (because they believe in individual liberty) or parties of the left (because they tend to be poorer than non-smokers)?" The answer in the United States is that smokers are more likely to vote Democrat than Republican (but it’s not clear why).

A recent study by Harvard researchers S V Subramanian and Jessica Perkins analyzed data from the 1972 -2006 General Social Surveys. Respondents were asked questions about their political affiliation and whether they smoked. After controlling for "demographic and socioeconomic factors", Republicans were 15% less likely to smoke compared with Democrats.

In his book Democrats and Republicans – Rhetoric and Reality, Joseph Fried cites a number of surveys showing that Republicans are not only more likely to be non-smokers, but are also more likely to have brushed their teeth three or more times in a single day and more likely to belong to a health club. In short, Republicans seem to lead healthier lives than Democrats.

While Republicans may believe in individual liberty, this doesn’t always extend to tolerating smoking in restaurants, hotels and motels. A 2005 Gallup survey found that Republicans were more likely to support smoking bans in these places than Democrats. Data for Australia is harder to find, but a small study in Bunbury Western Australia reported that:

… Liberal Party and Green Party supporters were much more likely to be in favour of a total ban [on smoking in smoking in hotels, bars and nightclub] than Labor Party supporters. These differences reflect smoking status rather than political affiliation (i.e. more Labor supporters than Liberal and Green supporters are smokers).

Subramanian and Perkins write that: "It does not seem implausible … that conservative values at the individual level may be health promoting". For example, it may be that Republicans place more emphasis on self discipline and personal responsibility than Democrats. But it’s difficult to know what is causing what. It may be that Republican allegiance and healthy lifestyle behaviours stem from a common cause.

Many years ago, as we were looking at a scrum in a rugby game being played in Towoomba of all places, a friend of mine commented that it looked like the quintessentially British institution!

The other wise observation I have for you is that political think tanks on both sides of the fence don’t do very well with cartoons because their cartoonists are so often too crudely didactic to be funny. New Matilda has been doing quite well however (though it’s lucky because most cartoonists I would imagine are left of centre.).  And I certainly liked this cartoon.

I can’t think of any good cartoons from the right leaning think tanks, though I’d be pleased to be proven wrong, and of course the comment facility allows you to post images.

Grollo’s Amazing Melbourne Tower was lambasted by the soft left as phallic. Perhaps it was. Perhaps it’s because I’m a boy, but I just lerve things that are so big it makes me go ‘Wow!’. (Unless they’re unusually ugly, which they usually aren’t). 

And we seem to get towards finishing the greatest monuments – they capture that strange complacent but frenzied world of the financial bubble – just as the next cataclysm hits.

So it is with the extraordinary tower that is nearing completion in Dubai. And now check out this floating successor to the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth in the 1930s.  Click on the picture for a better look. 

Click the image to enlarge the illustration

This New Yorker cartoon by Australian cartoonist once plying her trade in the Good Weekend and now made good in the Big Apple is good fun on it’s own. Turns out it’s also a comp. I presume a caption comp.  No reason we can’t participate.

Today’s Canberra Times has a very pertinent article by John Pitchford on the benefits of the fiscal stimulus (no links).

He makes three points:

(1) Rudd’s anti-recession economic stimulus package has effectively prevented much lower output, profits and employment (200,000 Australians off the dole, according to Treasury’s most recent estimate in the Australian);

(2) Rudd’s attempt to boost activity may even have avoided an even larger debt level than otherwise, as the multiplier effects of lower activity spreads through the system; and

(3) it reduced the potential level of “hard core” unemployment (the unemployed who lose credibility and skills in the workforce)

This is what he calls “balancing the budget over the cycle” – the very thing Howard was sworn to.

Read it. It is standard economic theory but it’s good when it comes from the master himself.

From Mark Thoma.  Click through to his site or read over the fold. (Continued)

With black to move, the threat of white capturing the f7 pawn in this position makes for an inevtiably wild ride. Even Fischer has lost as white in a good looking position. But I’ve never seen anything like this madness.  The guys who fight this game out seem to have form.  Here’s a rematch twenty five years later.