Club Troppo

Richard Green is an honours graduate from Newcastle who is also an interesting and thoughtful fellow. He is eager for an audience for his work. So I’ve upped his permissions from ‘subscriber’ to ‘author’ so expect some posts from him in the early new year.

Aboriginal affairs in the NT has always been a mess. It certainly became worse after the 1976 introduction of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (Northern Territory) and the replacement of jobs with “sit down money”.

Then came a quarter-decade rule by the CLP, who were hamstrung both by the Act (supported largely by insipid latte-sippers) and their own happiness with allowing the whiff of racism to float about their policies in order to secure the skeptical, largely non-aboriginal urban seats. But calling CLP policies racist is actually a lazy copout, because the NT Government was powerless to change the policies — the Act and welfare — that made the difference.

There’s slow, very slow, change going on. Say what you like about the Intervention, it acted as a political circuit-breaker. What was previously unspeakable became discussable. Essentially, NT politics was a meeting point of political continents: the NT’s Legislative Assembly, the Land Councils and the Senate in Canberra. The Intervention was the earthquake that came after years of building pressure.

While the policies of the 70s were well-intentioned, they failed. It’s as simple as that. The prior policies of assimilation gave us the Stolen Generations, but the policies of the 70s-2000s gave us the Wasted Generations.

About six months ago the NT Government hired a “Remote Services Coordinator” in Bob Beadman, a long-time observer and participant in aboriginal affairs in the NT. His first report has been published, and it makes for refreshingly blunt reading. Usually these sorts of public reports are written by invisible shinybums, couched in the most obtuse and polished bureaucratese possible. But that’s not for Bob: he lays out his own opinions without the usual “it could be argueds”, “some have observeds” and “in some quarters”:

I want to hammer one final point, before turning to what I am supposed to be doing.
The building of houses and roads and sewerage systems is the easy part of this development effort; the social reconstruction, the rebuilding of people, the restoration of their pride and self-worth is the far more difficult, and more important.

And bearing in mind the old adage that the single most important social welfare measure we can take is to provide a person with a job, Governments must be even more proactive on the social side of the infrastructure/social scales, else all of this will be for nothing.
…
If, again, Indigenous people sit under a tree and watch this frenetic effort by government agencies of every kind with increasing astonishment, we will have squandered another opportunity for social reconstruction. We are unlikely to get another one with all of the features available to us right now. … As noted anthropologist Peter Sutton recently said the incentives for remaining outside modernity must be withdrawn.

(Continued)

I’m going to try to write some posts about public goods as part of writing something about the new age of public goods. As readers to this blog will know, I’ve got a bit of a thing about public goods, and most recently argued that Web 2.0 is the product of ‘emergent public goods‘.

But for now a taster. It’s funny when you investigate something and find something that really is very simple and basic and yet hasn’t been said before – or you haven’t seen it said before (but part of the point of this is that you can point out if it has been said before).

The textbook definition of a public good is that it’s something that’s both non-rival in consumption and non-excludable. And that textbook definition is wrong! It’s the definition of a (particular) public good problem.  To be a public good the good need simply be non-rival in consumption and whether or not it’s excludable it needs to be not excluded.  So Google,  G-mail, Twitter and Facebook are perfectly excludable – in each case the platform providers could exclude those who won’t pay them a subscription.  But in not doing so they choose to make these platforms public goods – and so maximise their social value.  It just so happens that they also make the judgement that their private value to them is maximised by maximising their social value – a nice confluence of interests.  But Google, G-mail, Twitter and Facebook are, I would argue, public goods notwithstanding their in principle excludability.

Anyway, I hope to return to this in some subsequent posts – in between watching the Pakistanis and the Australians battling it out on the field.

A bit of holiday trivia for you. I came upon a form of tourism I didn’t quite believe. “Travelling Gentlemen” accompanied their countrymen to the Crimean War, and set up out of cannon range from the battlefields with their wives and hounds and had a jolly good time of it. Their hounds were seen chasing the cannonballs around the battlefield on which the Battle of Alma was fought. I couldn’t run up much on the net about them, but feel free to fill me in with something a little more substantial than this mention. And in the meantime, if you want to hear Alfred Lord Tennyson reciting his poem The Charge of the Light Brigade – yes Tennyson himself on old Edison wax, just link through to the Wikipedia entry on the poem. I love listening so far back in time as it were. Everything seems so different. (He sounds like he’s in scuba diving gear, but I guess that’s 1890s recording techniques for you.)

Interesting stuff methinks:

In Growing up in a Recession: Beliefs and the Macroeconomy (NBER Working Paper No. 15321), co-authors Paola Giuliano and Antonio Spilimbergo substantiate the importance of the historical economic environment in shaping economic attitudes, affecting individuals’ views of the role of government, and influencing whether those beliefs change later in life. One of the key findings of their study is that individuals who grow up during recessions tend to form life-long beliefs, including that success in life depends more on luck than on effort.

Individuals who grow up during recessions also tend to support more government redistribution, but they have less confidence in public institutions. On the whole, the authors find, orientations formed during difficult economic times can help to determine the economic system, institutional outcomes, and the role of the government across countries, although this study focused on the United States.

One of the strongest results from this research is the long-lasting effect of recessions on individuals’ confidence in government and its role in society. For example, individuals have a significantly lower level of confidence in Congress and the executive branch of the federal government when they experience poor economic conditions while they are coming of age. But there are off-setting tendencies, too. “On the one hand, recession-hit individuals believe that the government should intervene more, so they lean more to the left. On the other hand, these individuals distrust institutions, believing them to be ineffective, therefore leaning more to the right.” And, while recessions substantially decrease the confidence in government institutions, they do not appear to have an effect on the individual’s level of generalized trust — that is, his or her trust in others or other sectors of society.

The authors also report that individuals’ propensity to distrust government institutions after macroeconomic shocks occur is highest when they are between the ages of 18 and 25. Although also possible between age 25 until roughly age 40, after that age people tend not to change their beliefs in response to negative economic shocks.

This research is based on data culled from self-reported individual answers collected by the General Social Survey (GSS) regarding individuals socioeconomic beliefs. The GSS conducts basic scientific research on the structure and development of American society using a standard set of behavioral and attitudinal questions, many of which have remained unchanged since 1972.

The researchers focus on the 18-to-25 age group who came of age in a recession. This age focus is based on social psychologists’ findings that these are among the most impressionable years, during which time one’s beliefs and values about how society and the economy work are formed. Guiliano and Spilimbergo match each generation’s responses to yearly economic events, nationally and regionally, and refine them to include other economic factors such as volatility, booms, and regional GDP growth. The GSS data also contain background information on each individual, including religion, family income, parents education, and location when the individual was 16, which the authors incorporate into their analysis of the respondents’ answers in the survey.

The lads from the BBC radio comedy  The Now Show, distill the essence of Copenhagen.

The English Blog has the transcript

I’ve been watching the Regulatory Responsibility Bill for some time.  ”What is the Regulatory Responsibility Bill?” I hear you cry. Well it’s one of the last gasps of the ideological fervour that grips our antipodean cousins across the trench in New Zealand.  As I observed in a couple of posts a couple of years ago, New Zealand seems to be a much more ideological place than the lucky country. We have our ideologues of both left and right hues, but the righties in NZ have had uncommon, and simple minded ascendency in their part of the ideological patch.  Where the Australian Business Council is a fairly traditional lobby group/peak body the NZ Roundtable is a right wing think tank which has been run by a single CEO for a long long time.  It functions like the CIS and IPA but where those august institutions have some CEOs barracking for them in the background the NZBR has CEOs centre stage – like the BCA.  The answers are always the same – lower tax generally and getting the top tax tax rate down.

But there’s been a strange reversal in the last decade or so. (Continued)

I’m dreadful at Christmas Cards. I don’t think much of signing hundreds and having them sent off by a secretary, so if I do write them I try to write a bit on them, otherwise I can’t see the point.

I’m dead late this year again – though with a bit of an excuse – and the cards are coming in like those eagle borne letters to Harry Potter’s address when he’s staying with the muggles. In any event it occurred to me it might be nice to send emails with Flickr pictures or any other creative commons licensed pictures in emails.  Please post links to such pickies – or just your favourite (nice) Flickr images for our delectation, and remember, thanks to our Webmeister Jacques handiwork, you can also post the images themselves up here in comments.

Here’s today’s column in the SMH which was slightly edited back from the original.

Who is Julie Hempenstall? She lives in Bendigo and she likes reading Australias historic newspapers. The National Library has hoisted its collection on the net and had them digitised by computers. I can see what keeps her there. Hard at work drafting this article I just spent the last hour reading about early Sydney about the Governors plan for a school for aboriginal boys and girls to improve the Energies of this innocent, destitute, and unoffending race. It wasnt a raging success.

Anyway, the computer digitisation of that article was full of mistakes. Why? Optical character recognition isnt perfect even with clean print and certainly not with two hundred year old, stained, yellowed newspapers with antiquated fonts or fontfs as it was printed in 1788. But people like Julie have pored over the articles and the Librarys clever crowdsourcing website allows them to correct mistakes they find.

Its addictive. I found the obituary of an extraordinary Englishman William Stanley Jevons who was an architect of modern economics. He turned up in Sydney in his teens in 1854 and was a busy fellow. He became assayer to our mint, was newspaper photographer in Australia (strictly a hobby) and the first to document the El Nino effect. Reading all the digitised mistakes I just couldnt help myself. He didnt gain an honorary degree from the Umversity of Odinburgh. It was the University of Edinburgh. Anyway its fixed now.

This bit of crowdsourcing has been a huge success. (Continued)