Club Troppo

I recall when on the Cutler Panel into innovation being presented with lots of ‘sentiment analysis’ on the content of submissions – all 700 of them!

I was rather sceptical of what could be got out of them.  But I expect this is a more legitimate use of such techniques – which is some machine that scans twitter and other social media and tracks how things are going for the leaders. I only came upon the site yesterday and so with yesterday’s and today’s readings (today’s is around -20% for Abbot and +20% for Gillard) I’ve got the impression the latter is smoothly out-performing the former.

But it’s a more complicated picture.  Anyway it does seem to confirm that the Coalition’s early campaign management is in disarray – and/or my own observation that Julia is a smooth operator.

This may well be like the 1996 election. If Julia wins it, if I were a Coalition supporter I’d be pretty dispirited.

Anyway, who knows, it’s early days.

An honours student approached me to interview me on an interesting thesis she is writing currently entitled “The conceptualization of political participation by advocates of Government 2.0″.  Naturally enough I agreed to what turned out to be an excellent interview (I do like it when people actually ‘get’ what I’m saying even if it’s a bit subtle, a bit conceptual). The distinction between government and politics is a difficult one and something that I’ve given quite a bit of thought to, even though it only appears implicitly, and even then very sotto voce in the Taskforce report.

Anyway, before the interview could take place I was asked to fill out this form (pdf).

One of the reasons I have always steered clear of academia is this kind of petty minded nonsense – which in my day manifested itself not so much in this sort of thing but in the creation of endless rules around courses.  Because I funded myself through uni I was forever coming across problems, for instance for deferring my course or switching from this to that, which would have been OK if I’d been on some funding arrangement (Why? No reason, but it had different rules). The way I was brought up I had a kind of naive belief that when presented with the idiocy of it all, the academics would do what they could to make sensible things happen. After all, they were devoting the best part of their waking hours to the rational exercise of the mind.

Alas . . .

Some of the best minds in the country apparently have nothing better to do than to sit around and administer the filling out of consent forms of people who have agreed to an interview . . . . Then again, perhaps it’s some bureaucrat or politician sitting somewhere else. Anyway, it wasn’t too bad. I told the student that I gave her all the permissions she would like and did not want to sign the form, and that was OK.  And I enjoyed the interview.

HT Michael Neilsen Tweet via one of my favourite websites.

Ghana’s New Patriotic Party went to the 2008 presidential election with a new slogan: "Moving Forward". Christiana Love’s song ‘Moving forward‘ was played at party events and there was a dance that might be oddly familiar to Australians:

Look at the way the New Patriotic Party (NPP) supporters dance at their rallies. They stretch both arms in front, bend their elbows and launch into brisk hops forward to imitate the Black Stars’ celebration dance they borrowed from the Hawks of Togo who also copied the kangaroo mode of locomotion.

Far from it being a victory dance for the politicians, the kangaroo is used to illustrate the concept of "moving forward" which is not different from the age -old CPP slogan, "Forward ever, backward never."

The publication of Peter Coleman’s collection of essays with some memories and reflections is a reminder of his remarkably productive career as a public intellectual. Those who do not share his politics should note that his first book in 1974 was a scathing critique of Australian censorship.   Obscenity, blasphemy, sedition: censorship in Australia.   

This demonstrates that he  is not a conservative of the kind piloried by Hayek, but a true classical liberal. Duffy and Snelgrove reprinted the book “because of its entertainment value (due to Coleman’s wonderfully light but effective style, and the intrinsic interest of its subject matter), its importance as a work of popular history, and its new relevance at a time when there are increasing attempts to censor the Internet.”

The Russian Revolution and its aftermath was the defining issue of the 20th century to assess the integrity and credibility of journalists, commentators and intellectuals. The  overwhelming majority failed the test. Peter Coleman and Robert Manne did not. This prompts the idea of an essay to compare and contrast the careers and contributions of  these two public figures.

“Peter Coleman and Robert Manne are Australia’s two most interesting public intellectuals. Discuss”.

They were both prepared to make the hard yards when it was very unfashionable in intellectual and academic circles to tell the truth about communism. Later on Robert Manne lost the plot, but that is another story.

I just want to suggest that Peter Coleman is our most productive public intelectual, if not the  most rich and famous. Check out the record.

In sporting terms Coleman was probably never the best on the field, or the winner of medals at the end of the season but it would not be a surprise if his team mates voted him the “game ball” for the effort and the example that he provided.

1974 (reprinted in 2000) Obscenity, blasphemy, sedition: censorship in Australia. Brisbane: Jacaranda Press. 211 pages. 

1978 with Les Tanner  Cartoons of Australian history. West Melbourne: Thomas Nelson.

1980 (reprinted recently) The heart of James McAuley: life and work of the Australian poet. Sydney: Wildcat Press. 132 pages.  

1984 Memoirs of a slow learner. Pymble: Angus and Robertson. 166 pages.

1989 The Liberal Conspiracy. The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe. New York: The Free Press (Macmillan). 333 pages. 

2008 With Peter Costello  The Costello Memoirs. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. 400 pages.

The latest, a rich and varied collection of essays and reviews.

More of his books and editorial contributions are listed here. Such as:

The collection of essays on Australian Civilisation which he edited (the introduction which he wrote was on line but the link is now dead).

His biography of Barry Humphries. Chapter 1 and Chapter 20 on line in the Rathouse.

The biography of Bruce Beresford Instincts of the Heart, 1993.

The recent biography of Heinz Arndt.

Editor of a collection of “incorrect essays” by unfashionable thinkers.

Editor of Quadrant for many years, plus editorial roles with The Bulletin and other periodicals.

Here’s a chart that appeared recently on the net – so you may be able to go find it or have already seen it. If you haven’t, can you figure out what it might be of?  The prize for winning is the usual (a Mercedes Sports).

Hi all,

I’m occasionally after people to help me make diagrams look flasher or more compelling than I have the talent, tools or time to do. I have one such task right now. It’s probably not more than an hour’s work right now but if you can do a good job of it I’m bound to have more work from time to time. If you’d like the work, please drop me a line on [ngruen AT gmail DOT you know the rest].  You don’t have to be a pro, you just have to like designing and have some flair for it!

Having visited the OECD and observed the strange way in which views are arrived at and prosecuted, I read all OECD commentary with a grain of salt. The OECD staff spotted my stuff for the BCA on independent fiscal policy in 1999 and flew me to Paris to present to a Senior Finance Officials meeting. I presented away and made my points. No-one seemed to really disagree with them, but it was clear that I’d been invited as a kind of variety act, someone to spice things up with a new idea which could then be chatted about but not taken seriously. No Senior Finance Officials thought the idea would play all that well back home.  So it never really got considered.

When it’s doing reports, the OECD has some of the conflicts of interest of a journalist – trying to maintain good sources, and is in many ways a consensus organisation. And then it’s often in the country it’s studying being paid by the country as a consultant as it was recently in Australia studying regulation review.  It’s bad manners for consultants to be rude about their clients. And like so many such organisations, the writers of OECD reports are forever worrying about their ‘messaging’.  I sometimes wonder whether there’s any more than messaging to such people’s work.  It certainly takes up a lot of their headspace. Perhaps that’s approrpriate.

The OECD were told of lots of things that were not to flash about the way we regulate. But they decided early on that their ‘messaging’ for their client, the Australian government would be more generous.  This wasn’t just their consideration for their client – or even mostly that. It was mainly because Australia’s regulation review performance has been good if you compare it with its OECD peers, and in that context it would have been unfair and gauche ‘messaging’ to have the OECD report rehearse a long list of complaints and inadequacies from the people it talked to. And fair enough too.  But it did have the effect that the report wasn’t, IMO a very insightful guide as to how the Australian Government might do better.

Anyway, another role of the OECD is a kind of group cheer squad for the central agencies of their client countries. Perhaps it is in this role that, in the report extracted below – and it seems yet to be posted on the OECD website – the OECD hands out high praise for the deficit reduction efforts of the UK Government. Indeed it leads off “The comprehensive budget announced by the government on 22 June was courageous and appropriate”.  At least from my knowledge, I’d say it was emphatically neither.  It’s inappropriately timed – consolidation should cut in later. And it’s ‘courage’ is born of political cowardice, it’s the courage of politicians who, like John Howard in 1996 are putting the fiscal pain as far as possible between themselves and the next election.

Meanwhile, that idea I put to the Senior Officials back in mid 2000 has caught on: (Continued)

Pretty interesting . . .

Abstract:
This paper documents a shift in the nature of innovation in the information technology (IT) industry.  Using comprehensive data on all IT patents granted by the USPTO from 1980-2002, we find strong evidence of a change in IT innovation that is systematic, substantial, and increasingly dependent on software.  This change in the nature of IT innovation has had differential effects on the performance of the IT industries in the United States and Japan. Using a broad unbalanced panel of US and Japanese publicly listed IT firms in the period 1983-1999, we show that (a) Japanese IT innovation relies less on software advances than US IT innovation,(b) the innovation performance of Japanese IT firms is increasingly lagging behind that of their US counterparts, particularly in IT sectors that are more software intensive, and (c) that US IT firms are increasingly outperforming their Japanese counterparts, particularly in more software intensive sectors.  The findings of this paper thus provide a fresh explanation for the relative decline of the Japanese IT industry in the 1990s.  Finally, we provide suggestive evidence consistent with the hypothesis that human resource constraints played a role in preventing Japanese firms from adapting to the shift in the nature of innovation in IT.