Club Troppo

This film won both the Palme D’Or and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film last year. Paul Martin endorsed it a couple of months ago, but since it’s approaching the end of its run in Australian cinemas, I thought one last recommendation wouldn’t hurt.

I find myself in complete agreement with Paul for a change. The White Ribbon turned out to be as grim and disturbing as I was led to expect, but an enriching experience all the same. Any film that can maintain its integrity in the face of remorseless global Hollywoodization deserves applause. People will call this depressing, but it’s the formulaic and predictable films that are depressing, not the ones that shine a torch into dark places in search of truth.

For the benefit of anyone who hasn’t seen it, the story is set in 1913, in a fictitious German farming village called Eichwald, which is afflicted by series of mysterious accidents and violent crimes. The events are reconstructed from hazy recollections after the passage of many decades by a now elderly man, who was the village schoolmaster at the time. What is established beyond doubt as his narrative unfolds, however, is that this community at the time he portarys it is almost devoid of warmth and kindness. Psychological cruelty seems to be the village’s basic currency. The children, who bear the brunt of this, and various amounts of corporal punishment and sexual abuse, are the focus of the story. Their teacher is one of the few adults who offers them some kindness, but he is largely a helpless bystander to their emotional rape. (Continued)

Here are the first three dot points in the UK Coalition’s new agreed policy document (pdf) on “Business”.

We will cut red tape by introducing a ‘one-in, one-out’ rule whereby no new regulation is brought in without other regulation being cut by a greater amount.

We will end the culture of ‘tick-box’ regulation, and instead target inspections on high-risk organisations through co-regulation and improving professional standards.

We will impose ‘sunset clauses’ on regulations and regulators to ensure that the need for each regulation is regularly reviewed.

The first was promised by Tony Blair over a decade ago and ran into the sand. What does it mean? Nobody knows.

The second was a major policy of the Labor Party which was implemented with some vigour – I guess the Coalition reckon that they can do more – or that they can say they can do more.  Perhaps as a new government they can.

The third promise has been rattling around for decades. Think about sunsetting.  Most regulation is introduced to deal with some ongoing problem. Speed limits on roads for instance. Think about sunsetting them and you can understand why talk of sunsetting is cheap, but mostly hot air.

As Amble and Chittenden put it in a report (pdf) commissioned by the British Chambers of Manufacturers put it in 2007:

Both [sides of politics when in power] approach deregulation (removing existing laws) with enthusiasm, learn little or nothing from previous efforts, and have little if anything to show from each initiative.

Paul Bloom raises a fascinating question in his recent essay The Pleasures of Imagination: Do we enjoy imaginative experiences because at some level we don’t distinguish them from real ones?

Bloom’s question makes me wonder about the way politicians harness the imaginative techniques of fiction to build support. Do we sometimes suspend disbelief for a leader with a particularly engaging story?

(Continued)

Arthur C Brooks launches a creative defence of small government in the National Review. He argues that people value money because it is a symbol of earned success. And because it is earned success rather than money that makes people happy, redistributing income from the rich to the poor won’t promote happiness.

But Brooks isn’t just worried about income transfers, he’s worried that the United States will abandon the “traditional free enterprise system” and embrace “European-style social democracy”. What’s he’s hoping to avoid is increased government funding for services like child care, education and health care.

The problem with Brooks’ vision is that children from disadvantaged families often miss out on the opportunity for ‘earned success’ as adults because as children they miss out on the care and education that they need in order to fully develop their human capital. A 2007 UNICEF report on child well being showed that the United States ranked poorly against other developed nations (pdf).

A growing body of research shows that social mobility is lower in the United States than in countries like Denmark, Norway and Canada. Americans who start out at the bottom of the income distribution have a harder time working their way up than those in most other developed countries.

In a 2009 paper for the OECD, Justina Fischer reported that the United States was significantly less mobile than Nordic countries like Denmark and Norway (pdf). Rather than offering a high mobility alternative to ‘old Europe’ the US’ performance was similar to Italy and the United Kingdom.

International surveys of happiness don’t help Brooks’ case either. While average happiness scores are high in the US, they tend to be lower than those in the best performing northern European nations — nations like Denmark.

What the United States needs is a vibrant free market and a set of welfare state institutions that make sure opportunities created by the free enterprise system are open to everyone. Brooks’ mistake is to carry on as if it’s impossible to have opportunity-enhancing services funded through taxation without reducing the population to serfdom. Why would anyone think, for example, that funding Danish levels of early childhood care would lead to French levels of labour market regulation?

(Continued)

Andrew Leigh has posted on what a good idea it would be to do some random tax audits. “Don’t they already do this”, I hear you cry.  No they don’t, not in Australia.  As part of our ‘we know what we’re doing’ approach, the ATO pursues people whom it’s modelling, and perhaps its hunches suggest will be good targets for an audit – people who’s tax returns or lack thereof suggest that they are more likely than you’re average taxpayer to be cheating.

Nothing wrong with a lot of targeted auditing, but random tax audits would be a useful way of scanning for new patterns and we could use them to observe a bunch of other things as they have elsewhere – as documented in the abstract in Andrew’s post. Now here’s something else we could do to improve compliance, offer to publish the details of those caught cheating as these results (pdf) suggest.

The economics-of-crime approach usually ignores the emotional cost and benefit of cheating. In this paper, we investigate the relationships between emotions, deception, and rational decision-making by means of an experiment on tax evasion. Emotions are measured by skin conductance responses and self-reports. We show that the intensity of anticipated and anticipatory emotions before reporting positively correlates with both the decision to cheat and the proportion of evaded income. The experienced emotional arousal after an audit increases with the monetary sanctions and the arousal is even stronger when the evader’s picture is publicly displayed. We also find that the risk of a public exposure of deception deters evasion whereas the amount of fines encourages evasion. These results suggest that an audit policy that strengthens the emotional dimension of cheating favors compliance.

Well, after a week and a half of our HIV progression comp we beat the best available model of HIV progression.  Now the best entry in our Eurovision comp picked the winner. That’s not so amazing because it was a pretty one sided affair. What was worthy of note is that Kaggle‘s best entry did better than the betting markets!

From the Kaggle blog:

Interestingly, Kaggle’s statisticians outperformed the prediction markets, selecting seven of the countries that finished in the top ten, compared with five for the prediction markets.

One reason that statisticians may have outperformed the punters is that number crunchers can better assimilate voting patterns. Georgia and Greece, both countries that benefit from voting partnerships, appear in the Kaggle top ten but not in the betting markets top ten. Meanwhile Israel, a country that has no obvious voting partners appears lower down in the consensus ranking. Some have argued that the new voting system has put an end to political voting. However, it’s not difficult to pick out patterns in this year’s data. (Unless you think Georgians saw something that others missed in Belarus’s soporific performance when they allocated the maximum 12 votes to Belarus – the other 38 countries collectively awarded Belarus just six votes.)

??Another reason why the consensus among statisticians may have been more accurate is that prediction markets may be skewed by sympathies, while models tend to screen out emotions. Doubters might argue that individual punters may be emotional but that emotions average out in a large prediction market. This is likely to be true to an extent, however it’s almost certainly the case that emotion plays a greater roll in betting markets than in a consensus among statisticians.? (The existence of the favourite-longshot biassuggests an emotional aspect to betting markets.)

Finally, the betting-market data itself might have an impact on the outcome. This year, pre-contest favourites seemed unwilling to allocate votes to each other. Azerbaijan awarded Germany just one vote when other countries awarded Germany an average of 6.5. Germans returned the favour by not sparing a single vote for Azerbaijan.

We’ve got some more comps in the pipeline . . .  watch this space.

Yes folks. I’ve mentioned this before on Troppo.  Having read of this bout, I can see how it could be quite exciting.  Strange business. Play through the game here and the commentary has a little spice to it – as the two players get up from the board and try to beat each other senseless. They’re both pretty well qualified – as boxers and chess players. They could beat me at chess without even before they started beating me up.

On a recent visit to Washington, or ‘D.C.’ as our aficionados (and efficionados) call it, I had my iPhone stolen. So I need a new smart phone. Here are my impressions of the market and I’d be happy to be corrected and/or have my knowledge extended with a view to deciding what I want to replace the phone with.  I’m leaning in the direction of some Android based phone – perhaps the HTC Desire perhaps partly as an ideological and practical punt on openness.  A guy with that phone yesterday showed me that the browser zooms and re-formats text for reading within the window, which is surely a pretty important feature which the iPhone does pretty inconsistently.  Anyway the alternative theory is that a bit of closedness and vertical integration can look after user experience better and the apps all work better, even if one is occasionally blocked from certain features – like Flash and use of Skype on 3G networks (I’m not sure if a Desire will enable me to use Skype on my Optus account – which was for an iPhone and for which the iPhone blocked Skype on the Optus Network.  Perhaps I’ll find out. Anyway here are a few more propsitions for you to challenge, reinforce or add to.

1. The iPhone is likely to continue to provide the best overall experience for a while yet, perhaps forever and likely for the life of the phone (I seem to be consuming gadgets quite a lot faster than I did, so maybe I’ll replace this in a couple of years.
2. If I buy an iPhone I should probably wait till the next model, which will be released globally in the next couple of months someone’s told me.  Any firmer news on that, and/or knowledge on when it will make it’s way to Australia.
3. Android apps seem cheaper – there seem to be more free ones. I know there are fewer of them, but I expect all the important ones are there.
4. The Android will be better integrated with a net experience - I use a lot of Google net features to live my life – particularly gmail, reader and calendar and they should integrate rather better (iPhone’s iTunes and ‘synching’ is a ridiculously antideluvian way to interact with a smart phone – and even more ridiculous when running Windows.)  Do other smart phones have decent software for PCs where one is not held at quite such a distance from the phone itself?
5. The Android is supposed to not have a very user friendly mp3 player.  That’s important I guess, but presumably someone will come along and offer something better.  Meanwhile, iPhone provides problems in downloading single podcasts and listening to them unless one ‘subscribes’ to a bunch of them and the website supports the facilities to do so. You can do it, but the only way I’ve been able to do it, they appear in ‘music’ and then need further arrangement into playlists to be able to get at easily – a pain in the neck.
6. What the hell is Google’s Nexus One up to?  It seems these critters are difficult to buy in Australia. Here’s a site that sells them unlocked from T-mobile (a US carrier). But they seem to have some issues.  Thus the site I’ve just linked to says this: “One other note: multitouch has not been included here, so while the functionality is supported in Android 2.0 and up, we’re still dealing with a one-finger-at-a-time experience… which leaves something to be desired when you’ve got a beautiful touchscreen like this to play around on.” [I presume this means two finger zooming is out - which is bad news indeed.] “While most UI details look and feel the same, from just a bit of typing the keyboard does seem more responsive and accurate, and we’re guessing the Snapdragon helps there as well. Throughout the phone there are also new animations and flourishes which make Android 2.1 feel way more polished than previous iterations (including the Droid’s 2.0.1), though it’s still got a ways to go to matching something like the iPhone or even Pre in terms of fit and finish. Regardless, it’s clear Google has started thinking about not just function but form as well, and that’s very good news for Android aficionados.” [Will I just be able to install Android 2.2 over the top of Android 2.1 to solve these things - which it's supposed to do.]
7. Should I be thinking of some other phone?