Club Troppo

Here’s my presentation at the O’Reilly Government 2.0 Summit last week.

And a copy edited transcript is below the fold. (Continued)

Alex Stewart has had his 15 minutes of fame, but may live to regret it. Earlier this week he posted a video on Youtube. It showed him smoking lawn-clipping cigarettes that were fashioned out of pages torn from the Bible and the Koran. He compared the taste “scientifically” and was statistically astute enough to regret not having smoked a page of Bertrand Russell’s complete works as a control.

(Continued)

When we discuss public transport and public transport planning in the public arena we tend to either fall into whinging or into desires (or yearning) for big sexy projects. This is extremely so in Sydney. The NSW malaise has allowed it to be conventional wisdom that the public transport system is an unmitigated disaster – although it moves a greater proportion of the population than any other in the country [fn1]. Debt phobia and burnt political fingers (or active sabotage) that have prevented major projects over the past 80 years have also led to a deep yearning and dreaming for these prospective heavy rail lines, or the ghosts of trams goneby, or other panacaeas.

But not everyone is doing this.

The past two years have seen the advent of the Metrobus.  These are high-frequency, limited stop bus routes that address many of the problems with existing bus travel whilst retaining the benefits. The routes are do not meander like other routes and tickets are not sold on board, so they become much faster. But they are also simple to deploy. Existing infrastructure (roads) are used, and no specialist machinery is required, so there is no tortuous process of resumption, development and tendering. They can also slip nicely into suburbs whose development were shaped by the now absent trams. I guess that’s what they are – unromantic and inexpensive trams.

Moreover, they go a certain way to overcoming some of the original sins of Sydney transport. By avoiding routes that terminate in the city or at interchange points by instead passing through they combine two routes into one and cut down congestion by idle buses where it is least needed. Furthermore, the routes slated to come in next year finally begin to address the flaws of a radial transport system and the dream of a city with multiple centres, so commuters can far more easily travel between these centres without changing in the city. The need for this has been apparent for ages and filled with broken dreams like the Parramatta-Chatswood rail link, or the Hurstville Strathfield link. This may be a real attempt on the ground.

Are the metrobuses sexy? No. Are they a panacaea? No. But are they pragmatic and a good policy under very large constraints? Yes.

So to the anonymous planners in State Transit who developed these [fn2] and pushed them through despite a disfunctional government and  public debate that can see only pessimism and pies in the sky, but never pragmatism.

We need technocrats like you.

[fn1] I liked reading this quote from Solow, where he describes the tendency for lower relative growth in Britain to cause an outbreak of amateur sociology.  Similar outbreaks occured in regard to America between the oil shock/Watergate and the dot com boom, and in Japan post bubble. When a society that once considered itself foremost in the world is hit by one issue (macroeconomic strife, or political disfunction) all else that was positive or benign in the “good times” becomes typical of all that was bad, even if nothing has objectively changed apart from the first issue which colours the rest.

[fn2] Presumably too the minsters, the departed John Watkins and the terribly unfortunate David Campbell.

Urban legend has it that the hemline is correlated with the economy. In times of decline, the hemline moves towards the floor (decreases), and when the economy is booming, skirts get shorter and the hemline increases. We collected monthly data on the hemline, for 1921-2009, and evaluate these against the NBER chronology of the economic cycle. The main finding is that the urban legend holds true but with a time lag of about three years. Hence, the current economic crisis predicts ankle length shirts around 2011 and 2012.

Here’s the paper.

Readers will know that I’m not a big fan of Tiger Airlines. Still, sometimes they offer the best time of travel or such large savings that you are tempted. And tempted I’ve been to travel back from Canberra to Melbourne tomorrow night.  Having reflected on how stupid it if of Tiger to ‘cut costs’ by doing things that add to their costs (like not allow people to check in on line) I got to the counter the last time I had the misfortune, and was informed that because I’d not checked in on line (I guess they’d told me to in clause 378 of the contract I’d agreed to, because I certainly didn’t receive any email from them reminding me to) I had to pay them $20 for seat allocation at the airport.  I stacked on a tantrum and was in fact, and I’m speaking physiologically here, completely enraged with the well known hormone enragus totalis coursing through my system. Anyway it made no difference and I had to cough up the extra dough. Now I have got myself my boarding pass for tomorrow night’s trip. So I have a question to ask. Tiger take great pleasure in chucking their passengers off the plane if they don’t turn up an hour before it goes (OK they don’t chuck them off, they just don’t let them on-board). The principle here is that they are a discount airline, so if they can’t make someone’s life miserable, they can’t be doing their job. Anyway, there’s been some relenting, and they now say on the boarding pass and I quote.

We love being on time! To help your flight depart on time, please ensure that you’re through security and at teh departure gate 45 minutes before flight departure.  If you don’t you’se can get stuffed.

OK I added the last sentence.  Anyway, what do you think will happen if I turn up with 30 minutes to go? Does anyone have any knowledge of this brave new world of customer service that Tiger is entering?

It won’t get published because it’s too long, but worth saying just the same:

Dear Sir,

Peter Murphy’s always entertaining pro-CLP spin doctoring column sometimes obscures issues that really warrant more serious reflection.

This week’s column (12 September) blaming Warren Snowdon and Jenny Macklin for all the accumulated ills of Aboriginal affairs is a case in point.  Murphy not only ignores the fact that the Howard government was in charge of the area until 3 short years ago, but also that Labor has largely continued the Howard government’s NT Intervention policies.  In fact many commentators assess that Labor’s embrace of the Intervention is a major reason why Snowdon experienced such large voting swings against him in remote communities.

However, should those electoral reverses now lead to a wholesale expedient abandonment of Intervention initiatives?  My own view is that they shouldn’t.  The Intervention was like the curate’s egg; good in parts.  More police and medical services and much greater (if botched) spending on housing were undeniable positives, as was the crackdown on alcohol, drugs and porn.

Income management is more problematic.  It would have a valuable role to play if applied only to welfare recipients persistently acting irresponsibly, but not when arbitrarily and indiscriminately imposed on everyone.

More generally, many Intervention initiatives have been imposed on communities with little or no involvement of Aboriginal people themselves. Long experience, not to mention unchallenged research by the Productivity Commission, shows that the only initiatives that work in remote communities are ones created by “partnerships” where communities have a genuine sense of “ownership” of the program or enterprise.

Community ownership needs to be matched by full accountability for the way programs are actually run , but without genuine partnership and mutual respect nothing sustainable is ever achieved.  Those lessons appear to have been forgotten in the panic to be seen to be doing something to attack child sexual abuse and endemic Indigenous disadvantage.

If Murphy was delivering a real evaluation rather than a partisan puff piece he would acknowledge that none of these problems are susceptible to a quick fix and neither political party has yet found a magical solution.

A late call on the passing of Sol Encel, a tireless writer and public intellectual, acknowledged as the father of  Australian sociology. He died suddenly and peacefully at home, aged 84, still engaged in a range of writing and research projects.

He came from Poland at the age of 4 and touched just about every  base that a high achieving academic and public intellectual could achieve. He was a prolific reader, writer, academic empire builder, networker and public intellectual on the social democratic side of politics. The worthy causes that he embraced are too numerous to list in a short post, they are treated  here.

(Continued)

Saturday 11 to Wed 15, 10 am to 5 in the Great Hall.

My treasures: all in practically “as new” condition.

Peter Medawar, Pluto’s Republic (not a missprint). $3. Review. The editor of the Age Monthly Review would not let me write that the cover photo depicted Medwar demonstrating how he held the ball for his off-break.

John J  Ray, Conservatism as Heresy (1974). $2. An absolute classic! Many years ahead of its time. You can read it all on line at John Ray’s website.

The chapter on the 1974  election is a surprise.

(Continued)

Paddy McGuinness once opined about the chasm between consultant and academic speak in the realm of economics. I think it was in the context of the battle between the mush served up by the consultants which became BCG in Australia in the late 1980s (Pappas, Carter, Koop, Telesis – apologies for any misspellings) and Garnaut’s ‘North East Asian Ascendancy’ report to the Government. Where Garnaut argued for zero tariffs with a background in economic theory, the consultants genuflected in this direction but at the same time had to do the bidding of their client which was the Australian Manufacturing Council. IIRC they argued for twenty percent tariffs on a range of industries adding all the usual kinds of justifications (let me see, um . . . let’s try ‘giving the industry time to adjust’ to ‘reinvest’, um to meet the challenges of the future and um, to build a strong base [domestic oligopoly anyone?] from which to export).

Anyway, the thing is that economics hasn’t had anything of great usefulness to say about what has always seemed to me to be one of the most important economic transformations of my lifetime. Just as Hayek and Mises were right to argue that modern economies were too complex to be centrally planned, innovations in the modern corporation were a sign of the same kinds of limitations within firms as existed within states. Increasing complexity put a premium on effective and creative co-operation between those involved in economic production and so, as Yochai Benkler puts it in the video above “social practices that have always been part of human life moved from the periphery to the core of economic life”. This is a very big statement. It’s also true. Any manager of a firm knows this, but it’s not very effectively engaged by economics. Benkler is an academic, but he’s a lawyer, not an economist. Likewise people like Clay Shirky has mined some of the wisdom of institutionalists like Coase in thinking about what goes on within and outside firms. He’s in academia like Benkler, but he’s a ‘public intellecutal’ to use an unfortunate phrase, more than an academic.

And today I read a great essay by a consultant with McKinsey, Shoshana Zuboff. It’s after what Don Arthur calls (perhaps he’s quoting someone else?) the conceptual scoop.  It’s got some catchy names ‘i-space’ and ‘distributed capitalism’. In comments she even has a passage specifically written to irritate me.

Smith understood that innovation in the old framework could no longer address the requirements of wealth creation in a society newly marked by industrialization and rising household consumption. Instead, he put forth a new vision of capitalism based on new essential functions such as free enterprise, entrepreneurialism, profit, and the division of labor and specialization. In other words, Adam Smith set out to challenge a dying form of capitalism that was no longer appropriate to its time, yet maintained a stranglehold on the economy and imagination of a civilization.

Well Shoshana, yes and no. But, I thought it was a really good piece and reckon you should go and read it. And I’ve highlighted the conceptual scoop for you in italics below (btw, your mind usually needs a bit of conditioning to conceptual scoops, meaning that you’ve often heard them before, anyway, it’s a good piece).

The consumption shift in Ford’s time was from the elite to the masses; today, we are moving from an era of mass consumption to one focused on the individual. Sharp increases in higher education, standards of living, social complexity, and longevity over the past century gave rise to a new desire for individual self-determination: having control over what matters, having one’s voice heard, and having social connections on one’s own terms. The leading edge of consumption is now moving from products and services to tools and relationships enabled by interactive technologies. Amazon.com, Apple, eBay, and YouTube are familiar examples of companies solving today’s premium puzzle. Lesser-known companies like CellBazaar (in emerging-market mobile commerce), TutorVista (in tutoring), and Livemocha (in language education) also abound.