Club Troppo

Sinclair Davidson has extracted a concession from David Gruen at the Treasury regarding some purported evidence for the efficacy of recent fiscal policy, that appeared in the Budget Papers. But before we consider the specifics, it’s worth thinking through how one would discover in principle whether the stimulus worked.

If a laboratory experiment was possible, we would re-run history over a two-year period without the fiscal stimulus and measure the growth of GDP under those conditions. But we can’t, so what’s the next best thing? There are three basic options:
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The recent signings of Rugby League players to the expansion clubs of the AFL has me thinking about the history of football (used here generically for all codes) and just what makes Aussie Rules distinctive in the current world.

Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson has a interesting account of football has it changed from a vaguely defined and informal village game into codified forms played by clubs and public schools.  What is of note is the virtues that were ascribed to the sport. It was a bulwark against excessive intellectualism, against solipsism. It promoted exertion over thought and exercise over mental masturbation. It was an important part in fostering Muscular Christianity and Anglo Saxon virtue.

The informal village forms all allowed the use of both hands and feet to propel the ball against the physical impediment of the opposition. The closest modern from to this is Harrow Football. Different codes began to emphasize different form of exertion rather than skills or tactics. A split occurred when Northerners, who favoured grappling disagreed with the Southerners who preferred hacking at the shins of the opposition, resulting in the codes of Rugby and Soccer respectively. Each then felt obliged to produce further rules to promote the aspects. The offside rule in soccer to prevent passing forward instead of dribbling, and the offside and forward pass rules in Rugby and offshoots to emphasize running.

Here I begin enter my own speculation.

These rules were designed to deemphasize in favour of physical prowess, but ensured the future of tactics. These extra rules provided far more structure to the game, and thus to the defence which became a wall. The return for a person who could think a way through or around that wall suddenly became much higher than someone who continued to try and barge right through. Such a person wasn’t in England at the time, but as Wilson describes, soccer expanded to places where the dichotomy between athlete and academic was less strong they were quickly found. First in Scotland and then amongst Jews on the continent whom were far too uncultured to realised how gauche thinking was. It was these who then expanded their teachings to South America where managers are still addressed as Doctor. Belatedly even England, after decades of humiliation, had to fall in line. The running codes, which remained in the English speaking world, took longer, but as professionalism made victory more lucrative first American Football, then Rugby League in the 70s and Union (belatedly) in the 90s began to produce coaches who could develop a game plan. In retrospect, it is amazing how much of Rod Macqueen’s success in Rugby Union stemmed from the adoption of the most basic tactics from Rugby League. (Continued)

Well, the Israelis have been at it again. Boarding a humanitarian flotilla that was bringing humanitarian supplies to a besieged population on the Gaza strip, the Israeli military shot at least 9 people dead and once again displayed a worrying degree of disdain for UN resolutions and basic human decency. It has been roundly condemned in the Western media.

Yet, similar things happen elsewhere in the world with much less media attention given to it. UN humanitarian convoys in Africa are ambushed frequently without making the international headlines. By the standards of that region in recent times, the behaviour of the Israelis shows immense restraint and civility. So I ask myself why Israelis are held to higher moral standards than others; who are we to make any judgments on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at all; and why should we care at all? As Australians we seem to be outsiders to this conflict, have limited understanding of the history of the conflict, and little political power in the world to influence these events. By what moral code should we then judge the actions in that little corner of the world?

The first moral lens we can use to look at the conflict is a selfish historical one: the bigger the conflict and the more directly Australians are affected, the more it should matter to us and the more entitled we are to a moralising opinion, even if that opinion is uninformed. Through this lens we should be unconcerned by the conflict.  The conflict seems to have little, if any, historical importance at all to us, since we live far away with very few Jews and Palestinians within our borders. So we must be concerned by it because of other moral lenses.

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This is a note to myself, which I hope to come back to. The internet has the power to revolutionise a lot of industries. Print and software are two that have been revolutionised – and, in areas that could be ‘commoditised’ have led to plummeting costs. In health and finance, there’s plenty of innovation of various kinds, including using the internet. But there are no huge areas where costs are plummetting (that I know of). Much more could be happening but isn’t. If you want a one word explanation – it’s government and regulation. OK – a three word, one and a half concept explanation but no-one expects the Spanish Inquisition.

I’ve argued that payments could be commoditised here.

And a lot more could be being done in healthcare as this abstract suggests.

Where Are The Health Care Entrepreneurs? The Failure of Organizational Innovation in Health Care by David M. Cutler – #16030 (HC HE IO PR)

Abstract:

Medical care is characterized by enormous inefficiency. Costs are higher and outcomes worse than almost all analyses of the industry suggest should occur. In other industries characterized by inefficiency, efficient firms expand to take over the market, or new firms enter to eliminate inefficiencies. This has not happened in medical care, however. This paper explores the reasons for this failure of innovation. I identify two factors as being particularly important in organizational stagnation: public insurance programs that are oriented to volume of care and not value, and inadequate information about quality of care. Recent reforms have aspects that bear on these problems.

For years I’ve watched people poke and prod at the internet, trying to get it to cough up enough cash to support careers in professional journalism. But in a world where even Rupert Murdoch complains about not getting paid, it’s no surprise that most fail. At Crikey Margaret Simons writes about the latest casualty — New Matilda:

… it joins a long list of independent commentary sites, from Margo Kingston’s pioneering Webdiary, founded in 2000 before the word “blog” was mainstream, up to the present day. [New Matilda editor Marni Cordell] rejects the word “fail”, making the point that longevity is not the only measure of success.

It is a fair point. Kingston’s Webdiary, for example, not only worked out many rules of the game that others have followed or had to reinvent, but also led to the development of several writers who made their mark elsewhere. New Matilda can claim the same success.

The coming and going of independent sites is part of new media. All those commentators who periodically claim that blogging is dead (because so many blogs thrive for a year or two and then go quiet) are necessarily wrong. Individual blogs may die, but blogging is here to stay (although I suspect we will soon come up with a different word for the activity, or rather a range of different words).

Simons is right. Just because online publications like Webdiary and New Matilda failed to find a sustainable business model doesn’t mean that they failed to achieve anything of value. Margo Kingston’s achievement was to recruit her readers as participants in an online conversation. It’s a conversation that’s survived the death of the original Webdiary.

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