Monthly Archives: March 2010

Hoisted from Archives: ABC 2.0

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I think this is the first post on Troppo that’s ‘hoisted from archives’ which is to say it’s an earlier post that I’m reposting. It was done as preparation for an interview with Michael Duffy and now as part of the washup of the Government 2.0 Taskforce I’m going to talk to ABC staff.  So I’ve very slightly rejigged the post so it can be ‘pre-reading’ for our talk.  Naturally enough it gives anyone doing their ‘pre-reading’ an opportunity to have their ‘pre-say’ or to contribute after our discussion.

In a recent post I argued that “Over the very time we were clearing away the detritus of the various collectivist institutions we cobbled together under the name of the Australian Settlement, or ‘protection all round’, while we proceeded with economic reform by deregulating markets to try to optimise the contribution of competitive forces, a whole range of things turned up in the in tray which were in effect new and very important public goods (or bads) – which markets might be expected to deal with badly.”

Although this is part two to that earlier post it also stands on its own – and was written in response to a request from Michael Duffy to discuss the future of the ABC on his program Counterpoint – this was in the context of an earlier discussion with him in which I argued that the ABC should try to be true to its role as a provider of public goods, but that it should take that mission into the wired world, or perhaps we should now be calling it ‘Wireless 2.0′.

So this post is about how the ABC might do that. And at the outset I should say firstly that my comments are based on what I know best – which is overwhelmingly Radio National and that I’m an admirer of the ABC. I admire what it’s done in the past, and I think it is one of the best national broadcasters in the world at least for the funding it receives (though that statement is obviously based on greater exposure to the ABC than any other broadcaster.) And I think at least until very recently the ABC has done as well as any national broadcaster I know to get into the digital (podcasting) age. But it could do more . . .

The ABC has always been a public good – provided via broadcasting. But now it’s a much more powerful public good as podcasting has relaxed two major restrictions on its ‘public goodness’.

  • First the ABC is now a global public good (albeit of higher average unit value to Australians than to foreigners) and
  • Second the ABC is no longer a time dependent public good. Podcasting allows indefinite time shifting at negligible cost.

So at least unless there’s a ‘part three’ to this post (this is almost inevitable and a part four and five and so on, but they may not turn up here quickly and they may not be called parts three four and five) this search for policy ideas for the ABC is obviously on a much more micro scale than the grand themes sketched out in part one of the post. Nevertheless the ideas might be seen as illustrative of possibilities elsewhere.

In any event I hope the ‘grand themes’ of part one are not entirely out of place, because the first recommendation from the line of inquiry in this post is obvious enough – you can’t podcast enough.

Recommendation One: The ABC should complete the Web 1.0 agenda and, as soon as practicable and affordable post its entire archive on the web for downloading by whomever wishes to download it – and keep the cost of doing so down with the P2P capabilities of BitTorrent. Continue reading →

Teaching the Test

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Last year I asked what broader social purpose is served by schools competing for position on NAPLAN league tables. I emphasised both the meaninglessnesss of the information (reiterated recently by David Hardie in Crikey) and the lack of any aggregate benefit from inducing families to compete in turn for places in high ranked schools. The prospect that class time would  be wasted on preparing kids for the test was only a minor problem I identified, and it wasn’t clear how significant a phenomenon this would be, at least in public schools.

Now the first round of tests in the Myschool era is approaching, and my impression is that the race is on, well and truly. Perhaps I just wasn’t paying attention, but I have no recollection of any significant in-class practice sessions taking place in previous years. But they are now. This is, I stress, only my impression. But we will have to rely on anecdotal evidence for the time being. Yesterday the Herald provided depressing evidence that Julia Gillard’s department has no interest in gathering information on any adverse consequences of publishing school averages on the tests.

In the meantime I’m exploring the avenues for civil disobedience, starting with this email enquiry to the Policy Liaison Ofifcer for the New South Wales Education Department. I’ll let you know instantly the reply comes through.

Dear Liaison Officer, Continue reading →

Brokers no more: arise ‘licensed advisors’

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People who’ve read this blog for a few years may be familiar with my take on the regulation of mortgage brokers. I’m in favour of simple regulation which puts front and centre the fact that brokers should be thought of in the same way as fridge salespeople in a department store. So regulation should focus on

  1. Identifying rogues and running them out of town
  2. Informing consumers that brokers have inherent conflicts of interest related to the extent of commissions they receive and
  3. Solving disputes in a more cost effective way than our ramshackle court system.

Sadly this is not the way things have gone.  Organisations representing credit consumers – draw attention to rogue brokers and say that something must be done.  The something is regulation and so the government consults with industry about what it might like.  And of course it would like National Regulation as state regulation is the death of a thousand cuts.  So we’re heading to national regulation – in fact we’re pretty much there. The regulation has been past and is being rolled out to the industry which is running round getting itself compliant.  Peach Home Loans which hasn’t had a customer dispute in ten years of operations has to have  a written complaints procedure – which is pretty easily managed.

Meanwhile the Loan Market Group is reported in the industry magazine “The Advisor” to have “thrown its support behind the industry’s move from broker to ‘adviser’. Continue reading →

The solidarity of capital

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From Mark Thoma’s blog:

David Frum and the Closing of the Conservative Mind, by Bruce Bartlett: As some readers of this blog may know, I was fired by a right wing think tank Called the National Center for Policy Analysis in 2005 for writing a book critical of George W. Bush’s policies, especially his support for Medicare Part D. In the years since, I have lost a great many friends and been shunned by conservative society in Washington, DC.

Now the same thing has happened to David Frum, who has been fired by the American Enterprise Institute. I don’t know all the details, but I presume that his Waterloo post on Sunday condemning Republicans for failing to work with Democrats on healthcare reform was the final straw.

Since, he is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel free to say publicly something he told me in private a few months ago. He asked if I had noticed any comments by AEI “scholars” on the subject of health care reform. I said no and he said that was because they had been ordered not to speak to the media because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do.

It saddened me to hear this. I have always hoped that my experience was unique. But now I see that I was just the first to suffer from a closing of the conservative mind. Rigid conformity is being enforced, no dissent is allowed, and the conservative brain will slowly shrivel into dementia if it hasn’t already.

Sadly, there is no place for David and me to go. The donor community is only interested in financing organizations that parrot the party line, such as the one recently established by McCain economic adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin.

I will have more to say on this topic later. But I wanted to say that this is a black day for what passes for a conservative movement, scholarship, and the once-respected AEI.

As below, so above

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One of the things I like about Journey to the West (one of the four great Chinese classics, but better known here as the basis for Monkey Magic) is the way it delves into almost every conceivable corner of Chinese cosmology. Characters venture to the courts of dragon kings, to heaven and to the netherworld. In each of these places they come across the same universal constant.

Bureaucracy.

The entire universal order is run by bureaucracy.. Official records of death get amended by clerical staff in the afterlife in order to resurrect the dead; dragon kings appoint humans lost in their realms as administrators with such supernatural responsibilities as irrigation; and pivotally the destabilising Monkey takes umbrage with the lowliness of his official post in the bureaucracy of heaven. It’s not hard to see why Arthur Waley’s translation/adaptation presented this as satire. There is plenty of great humour in the work already, and the conceit has also been used by the likes of Tim Burton and Tim Schaefer. But it is simply a reflection of the world view of the society in which it was written. Creation myths often involve birth because we extrapolate what is natural to us, and obviously any god is an anthropomorphisation to some extent. A society with such a long history of central government and administration that claimed cosmic legitimacy by it’s good governance would find bureaucracy as natural as birth to extrapolate to the cosmos.

Continue reading →

Krugman – again

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This column makes me think of the craziness of the South – which while building a slave based economy also built a terrorist society in which people got bumped off for having the wrong political views, a society that was crazy in its refusal to compromise – all the North was seeking at the time was a freeze on the expansion of slavery outside the states where it had become entrenched) and it’s constant aggression until it managed to provoke a fight it couldn’t possibly win and which, after losing the civil war institutionalised extreme racism for almost another century by way of terror – the terror of the lynch mob.

Going to Extreme

By PAUL KRUGMAN
I admit it: I had fun watching right-wingers go wild as health reform finally became law. But a few days later, it doesn’t seem quite as entertaining — and not just because of the wave of vandalism and threats aimed at Democratic lawmakers. For if you care about America’s future, you can’t be happy as extremists take full control of one of our two great political parties.

To be sure, it was enjoyable watching Representative Devin Nunes, a Republican of California, warn that by passing health reform, Democrats “will finally lay the cornerstone of their socialist utopia on the backs of the American people.” Gosh, that sounds uncomfortable. And it’s been a hoot watching Mitt Romney squirm as he tries to distance himself from a plan that, as he knows full well, is nearly identical to the reform he himself pushed through as governor of Massachusetts. His best shot was declaring that enacting reform was an “unconscionable abuse of power,” a “historic usurpation of the legislative process” — presumably because the legislative process isn’t supposed to include things like “votes” in which the majority prevails. Continue reading →

Watching what goes on in China is a vital part of the global ‘big picture’

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(Originally published in the business pages of the Melbourne Age and Sydney Morning Herald, 24th March 2010)

When I first began writing about the global economy, more than twenty-five years ago, what would be considered a reasonably comprehensive coverage for an Australian audience required a discussion of the United States, Japan, Germany and Britain. Those four countries accounted for about 55% of the world economy, and took about 45% of Australia’s exports. They were the major sources of foreign investment into Australia. Their central banks were the only ones whose decisions mattered to us; the exchange rates among their currencies were the only ones in which we took a keen interest; their stock markets set the tone for ours.

These four countries are still important today, of course, but less so (especially from an Australian perspective) than they used to be. They account for about 42% of the world economy, and take less than 30% of our exports. These days, any analysis of the global economy – and especially one intended for an Australian audience – would be considered grossly deficient if it did not devote considerable attention to China. China is now the world’s second biggest economy; it is the world’s largest exporter, and second-biggest importer; it has the world’s largest foreign exchange reserves, and is the US Government’s largest individual creditor; the decisions of its central bank can move markets around the world; and the exchange rate between its currency and the US dollar is a matter of keen interest to governments and investors alike. For Australia, China is now our largest single trading partner; it is a major influence on the prices we receive for many of our most important commodity exports; and it is likely to become an increasingly significant source of foreign investment.

Developments in the United States remain as important as ever to prospects for the global economy and the tone of financial markets; and neither Europe nor Japan can be ignored. But it’s surely telling that (by way of example), the roughly 1000-word discussion of the international economic environment in the Reserve Bank’s most recent quarterly Statement on Monetary Policy devoted a little over 200 words to economic conditions in each of the United States, China and other emerging East Asian economies, and about 125 words (plus a special two-page supplement) to India, but only about 125 words to Europe and fewer than 90 to Japan. Continue reading →

Competence and likeability and how increased power can make you worse off

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One of the great benefits of Web 2.0 is the way in which it facilitates collaboration and information exchange in all manner of ways.  And one of the upshots of this is that it improves the market for reputation.  It does so by speeding up the process itself – so people who have something to say can publish and be noticed pretty much immediately – instead of waiting ages to build their reputations and careers.

Also, it has this habit of cutting through lots of other things which in some sense should be extraneous.  Some of the guys who won the NetFlix prize ($1 mil for producing a 10% improvement in the NetFlix algorithm for making recommendations of movies to watch based on past choices and ratings by a customer) were rank amateurs who were keen enough to get themselves up to speed to help win the prize. This isn’t how you make progress in academia or in most of the private sector (You can of course can start your own business, but that’s a big commitment, and it is the nature of many intellectual contributions that their value cannot be ‘monetised’ effectively).

As we argued in the Government 2.0 Taskforce Report, “the ethic of voluntarism coupled with the openness of online collaboration has typically led to a culture in which status and recognition are a function of the quality of contribution. This is judged by those who share an interest in the common ambitions of the community or network itself.”  I tried to represent this in the attached slide, which shows how, so long as there is stable identity to a person’s contributions to a discussion (including pseudonymous identity) reputation builds quickly which leads to the source of the insight gaining some more or less appropriate level of authority.  Almost none of the people who read and quoted ‘Tanta’ including researches for the US Federal Reserve knew her by any name other than that, but that was enough because her numerous contributions on the blog ‘Calculated Risk’ were so obviously well informed and devoid of any interest in misleading anyone.

We all know that in organisations this is, <<irony>>very occasionally<</irony>>, not the way things work. You know the kind of thing – where keeping your nose clean is more important than doing a good job, where, to use Keynes’ line, failing conventionally is a better career move than succeeding unconventionally. Continue reading →