Club Troppo

I’m going to make a second attempt to migrate Troppo to the new server this weekend.

I have two alternative strategies to look at. One involves chopping bits out of Wordpress that prevent the export/import system from working in the way I want them to.

The other involves a few hours of tedious SQL munging.

You may see Troppo go offline on Saturday or Sunday.

There will be transient locking of comments, so please hold off on the conspiracy theories about moderation policies for the duration.

Update 3.25pm WST: I investigated option 1. It’s still not very good. Luckily the SQL munging was made simpler by TextMate’s macro facilities and column selection feature. From hours down to minutes. I am now going to place the site into a gentle lockdown for a few hours to run through the process.

Update 6.50pm WST: Victory! My new most-favourite commandline tool is iconv, which converts text files from one encoding to another. The trick to this migration was that I needed to run it twice on the same file as there were two layers of character-set shenanigans taking place.

Hi all,

I was going to take a breather from the crikey annual group subscription this year, but couldn’t help myself. I’m beleaguered with people asking me if I’m doing it again.  Because it’s not hard to do I’m doing it again.

Please email requests to join in with your name and email address to mwilliscroft AT lateraleconomics DOT com DOT au

And we’ll then send them off to crikey who will then be in touch with you with an automated way for you to pay your (reduced) subscription.

Two years ago I posted a bleg asking for tips on buying an ultralight laptop.  I ended up getting an ASUS U2e which has not been particularly good.  Anyway, it may have been Vista that was the problem but it’s a pretty underpowered machine – with a 1.07 Ghz Intel Core-Duo processor.

So I’m gonna buy another one.  I’d consider Apple but for the fact that their approach to the ultra-light strained to maximise screen size. I don’t want to maximise screen size because

1. Except when I’m on planes and in hotel rooms I use an external screen.
2. When I’m in a plane, space limitations make a large screen a nightmare in economy class

So I’m back in the market for another ultra-light laptop.  It’s possible that a netbook would be good enough, but it’s my main machine so I don’t mind spending more money than that.  I want reliability, light weight and enough power to multi-task happily though I’m not a serious power user and don’t want it for any more fancy gaming apps than chess! I’d also prefer an external optical drive, but if there’s a drive in it and it’s light, that’s OK.

So any suggestions you have would be gratefully accepted . . .

A nice piece on how political coverage gets sucked onto the nihilism of race-calling.

HT Brad Delong: George Packer: The Top of Our Game:

David Broder had a devastatingly unremarkable assessment of Sarah Palin in the Post the other day. Her speech at the Tea Party convention in Nashville showed off a public figure at the top of her gamea politician who knows who she is and how to sell herself…. Broder wasnt analyzing Palins positions or accusations, or the truth or falsehood of her claims, or even the nature of the emotions that she appeals to. He was reviewing a performance and giving it the thumbs up, using the familiar terminology of political journalism. This has been so characteristic of the coverage of politics for so long that it doesnt seem in the least bit odd…. It would be strange if the Timess coverage of the financial crisis, which has been stellar, focussed entirely on things like Richard Fulds handling of his P.R. problems while Lehman was going down. And it would be strange if the papers coverage of Afghanistan, which has also been stellar, focussed entirely on things like Hamid Karzais use of traditional Pashtun rhetoric in his effort to ride the wave of public anger at the Americans. Imagine Karzais recent inaugural address as covered by a Washington journalist:

Speaking at the presidential palace in Kabul, Mr. Karzai showed himself to be at the top of his game. He skillfully co-opted his Pashtun base while making a powerful appeal to the technocrats who have lately been disappointed in him, and at the same time he reassured the Afghan public that his patience with civilian casualties is wearing thin. A palace insider, who asked for anonymity in order to be able to speak candidly, said, If Karzai can continue to signal the West that he is concerned about corruption without alienating his warlord allies, he will likely be able to defuse the perception of a weak leader and regain his image as a unifying figure who can play the role of both modernizer and nationalist. Still, the palace insider acknowledged, tensions remain within Mr. Karzais own inner circle. At one point during the swearing-in ceremony, observers noted that Mohammad Hanif Atmar, his interior minister, seemed to ignore the greeting of Amrullah Saleh, the intelligence chief. The two have been rumored to be at odds ever since last years controversial election. A palace spokesman, speaking on background, denied that the incident had any significance. The sun was in Hanifs eyesthats it, the spokesman said.

A war or an economic collapse has a reality apart from perceptions, which imposes a pressure on reporters to find it. But for some reason, American political coverage is exempt…. [A]s an exercise in accountability, political journalists should ask themselves from time to time: Would I write this about a war, or a depression? In the same vein, a government official once told me that the best way to cover Washington is as a foreign capitalas Baghdad, or Kabul.

The New Yorker has just produced this profile of Paul Krugman.
In it we read the following passage.

It isnt that freshwater types believe that actual people are perfectly rationalthey just believe that making that assumption enables a more rigorous economics than is possible without it. After all, while there is only one way to be perfectly rational, there are an infinite number of ways to be irrational, and how do you choose? It all begins to look awfully arbitrary.

Hurrah! An non-lazy portrayal!

The article continues to talk about macro, but in relation to micro the problems associated with the assumption of rationality are evidently huge, but critiques have often irritated me because they imply that neoclassicism adopted the concept either through sinister ideological motives or willful stupidity. It probably feels good to imply this, but it doesn’t help us produce something better unless we understand why the flawed tool we want to use was adopted in the first place. We haven’t been using internal combustions engines through willful stupidity, it’s just they were the best/least worst option around for most of the last century. We’ll stop once there’s something better.

Granted there has been a process of discursive collapse where the RET kiddies don’t understand the tools they’re using, but we won’t get anywhere unless we address the reasons behind why their academic fathers (gendered language intended economics is regrettably a sausage fest) created them.

Behavioral Economics does do this by giving systematic shape to the relevant irrationalities, despite constantly being portrayed as disproving the homo economicus straw man. Perhaps agent based modeling can do the same.

I’m just glad there’s been an honest appraisal in the public sphere as to why a weak idea like assumed rationality has been prevalent.

It is surely elementary that the collapse of the financial system in 2008 caused a huge downturn in private debt and that public debt was forced to get into the act to help prop up demand.

If one combines the sum of private and public debt, Australia will look high relative to other countries (as Australia is a debtor country). See Barnaby Joyce’s piece in the Australian.

But the combination of public and private debt remains below (relative to GDP) what it was in the Howard years. Without public debt, we would be in oddles of trouble.

In December 2009, the official ABS Labour Price Index was running at about 3% per annum. This represents a continued trend decline in private sector wage rates (although less so for the public sector).

Wage rates refect the subdued labour market. In September 2009, about 26% of part-time workers wanted to work more hours, compared with 23% in September 2008. And the mean preferred number of extra hours per week for under-employed part-time workers was up to 14.1 hours, compared with 13.4 hours in September 2008. The part-time proportion may have increased further in recent months.

In short, we are still left with plenty of spare capacity. The recent decline in unemployment rate is a bad measure of the underlying rate of under-utilisation (number of hours worked). The economy is likely to achieve a trend growth rate of below 3% in the first half of this year. Stronger private recovery is likely to be offset by the lessening impact of fiscal and monetary policy contraction. There is no immediate need for further interest rate increases until our economy starts to record 3% to 3.5% increases.

Regarding the Australian government’s attitude to the war in Afghanistan, Hugh White had this to say on Lateline last night:

I think they understand perfectly well that continuing to support the United States there is fairly important for our alliance management, but I don’t detect much enthusiasm in the Government to really trying to turn Afghanistan around and convert it into a stable, prosperous democracy. I think most people in the Government privately regard that as a pretty quixotic aim.

As Obama’s troop surge takes effect, the war in Afghanistan is intensifying, producing more civilian casualties and promising more deaths for the occupying forces. With little to show from eight years of fighting, and every reason to believe that the war strategy is being dictated by American domestic politics , NATO members and other US allies are at a cross-roads. The Dutch are pulling out. Australia is only staying to make yet another down payment for American protection from a future invasion from the north.

The problem is that the Administration hasn’t articulated a credible plan to stabilise Afghanistan. Notwithstanding the high hopes of those who cheered the passing of the Bush era, the new president hasn’t pulled any magic solution out of a hat. Nor has any compelling course of action revealed itself in the meantime. Voices calling for acceleration, withdrawal and a continuation the status quo seem to be equally loud and equally convincing, depending on who is making the case. (Continued)

One needs a full cost-benefit analysis (including all externalities such as secondary effects n health premiums) to form an intelligent view on whether to sell Medibank Private.

In the meantime, it makes no sense to say that reducing the level of government debt quickly is essential for the future prosperity of all Australians, as Joe Hockey argues. The level of debt is not an appropriate measure of balanced sheet strength (public or private). Rather the focus should be on government net worth (assets minus liabilities) and earning power of the assets – the dividends earned relative to public debt interest.