Club Troppo

One of the most widely accepted tenents of tax theory is that it is most efficient to tax immobile factors of production such as land. Such taxes cannot be avoided, and so they do not distort behaviour. Consequently, most economists would argue that an annual land tax is preferable to a tax on land transactions such as stamp duty. The latter, it is argued, discourages people from moving to more suitable dwellings and consequently has many undesired consequences. And yet stamp duties remain a major source of tax revenue for state governments and there seems little likelihood of them being replaced by land taxes any time soon. Why is this?

Ross Gittins has a piece arguing that this conventional view is wrong because economic orthodoxy ignores important facets of human behaviour.

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I can’t think of a single song of his that is a really big favourite of mine. But has there ever been any big star who was more of a genius as a dancer? Surely not.  Not even Fred Astair comes close.

Australia is in the midst of a flat-screen TV crisis, says Clive Hamilton. Driven by an insatiable desire for "stuff", we spend more time chasing money and less doing the kinds of things that would really make us happier and more fulfilled — spending time with friends and family, getting involved in the local community, and developing our skills and creativity. Greed and materialism are making us miserable.

But there’s no evidence that people in affluent countries like Australia are greedier or more materialistic than in the past. The major reason we buy more stuff is because stuff has become cheaper. The increase in working hours is not being driven by an increasing desire for stuff but by increases in the cost of things like housing and services.

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I read Disgrace before seeing the film; thanks to that, once again, the film didn’t have much impact in its own right. It was well made, as expected, and faithful to the novel. So the principal interest was in judging its merits as an adaptation, discovering small points of deviation, and seeing how the film interpreted the rather puzzling motivations of the story’s characters.

As far as the deviations go, although I heard Margaret Pomeranz say in a radio interview that they’d fiddled with the ending, there were no significant changes at all, except for a reversal of the order of the final scenes — which was a harmless and justified exercise of cinematic license.

As I saw it, there was only one moderate departure: the first half of the film makes the main protagonist David Lurie more unsympathetic than he is in the book. The Herald’s Sandra Hall, who gives no indication of having read he book, finds him too ‘icy’, althugh she attributes this in part to John Malkovich’s portrayal.

This is not to say that he’s very appealing in the book. But at least we are privy to his thoughts, and so can see things from his point of view; nor is the reader influenced by any visceral response to Malkovich’s thin voice and reptilian facial expressions. (No matter how good a job he’s doing in any part, I’m afraid he will always be John Malkovich first and the character second.) In the novel Lurie isn’t despicable. He is essentially Don Juan: you might not like his convictions, but you admire his courage in them. Long as his catalogue of sins may be, he does not intend to add hypocritical remorse to it. (Continued)

By the author of the Pictures for Sad Children webcomic.

Troppo’s Paul Frijters, too self-effacing to push his work on Troppo, has a new paper on the effect of the internet on quality news content.  I discovered it on a newsletter of new papers. Looks interesting, so I’ll have to have a closer squiz when I get the time.

Is the Internet Bad News? The Online News Era and the Market for High-Quality News
Date: 2009-05
By: Frijters, Paul
Velamuri, Malathi

We review and model the impact of the internet on the production and uptake of high- quality news. Our review of trends in the market for news suggests 3 stylized facts: i) particular quality news markets are dominated by merely a few providers, ii) demand for quality news appears stable, but provision of news has become specialized; mainstream news is decoupled from quality news, and iii) the dominant business model of internet news mirrors that of radio, television, and newspapers in that costs of news production are recouped via advertising. We build a stylized model that rationalizes these facts. Our model captures three conflicting effects: (1) economies of scale in the production of news lead to monopolies on particular markets, (2) easy access to information on the internet makes it cheaper to provide high-quality news and to disseminate it via the web, which increases the production of such news; and (3) the existence of bloggers and news aggregators who recycle the stories of news-providers reduces the effective property rights of high-quality news producers, thus forcing the business model of the internet to be advertising-based. For the most likely cases, our model would imply that the internet does not constitute bad news for the provision and uptake of quality news.

Several years ago I posted a graphic plotting countrys GDP per head against mean lifetime and drawing attention to the tragic loss of life in southern Africa, mainly due to AIDS. There is a fantastic data visualisation tool called GapMinder that tells this story and other  stories-  much more clearly. And it is really fun to play with.

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I subscribe to Learn out loud’s newsletter and so receive lists of books that you can get audio files of to podcast to yourself.  You generally have to pay for these files, and because I have more than enough ways of spending my time including listening (well trying to listen) to way more free podcasts than I have time to listen to, I’ve not bought anything from them.  But they do send bargains down the wire giving me free audio books every now and again – like Ben Franklin’s autobiography, which, sad to say I’ve not yet listened to.

BTAIM, I note that the latest newsletter has a long list of economics audio content.  So I thought I’d share it with Troppodillians below the fold.

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