Club Troppo

It’s quite obvious, and has been so for a while, that the Chinese currency, the yuan, is undervalued. This is obviously of consternation to the United States, whom would desire a depreciation in their currency against the yuan – the policy is called beggar thy neighbour for  a reason, and the US is principal amongst those . During debate between those who attack the Chinese policy for it’s detrimental effect on the US economic health and those who attack straw men in reply, it’s quite easy to overlook that the policy is quite damaging to China itself.

The Chinese economy is currently facing inflationary pressures, pressures that would usually be alleviated by an appreciating currency.  I am quite certain that the technocrats and nomenklatura in Zhongnanhai know this – and may also fear that inflation may spark some degree of unrest.

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It was billed as a debate over the size of government. But within the first few minutes Congressman Paul Ryan had changed the subject. Focusing "just on size entirely misses the point", he said, "We should not be asking how big should our government be, we should be asking what is our government for."

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In this week’s Missing Link Friday — a brilliant idea for reforming the education system, old people, advice about grey hair and the need for teeth 2.0.

Skinner Box kids

"I was just thinking about schooling and I had a most brilliant idea", writes Joseph Clark. "If students were paid in cash for performance they would exert more effort, just like every other economic agent."

Apparently education reformers have been trying to motivate teachers with financial incentives, not realising that children’s lack of money means that an extra dollar given to a child will induce far more effort than an a dollar added to a teacher’s pay. "Why has nobody thought of this before?" asks Joseph.

Economist Joshua Gans is a big fan of economic incentives. He’s even used them to toilet train his kids. Every time his children went to the toilet, he rewarded them with candy. The older kids also got rewarded every time they helped the younger ones. Here’s how his daughter remembers the experience:

I realized that if I helped my brother go to the toilet, I would get rewarded, too. And I realized that the more that goes in, the more comes out. So I was just feeding my brother buckets and buckets of water.

When it comes to using rewards to shape behaviour, the real experts are psychologists. For decades they have been putting animals in boxes and rewarding them with food when they peck a button or press a bar. American psychologist B. F. Skinner had bold plans for education reforms based on the empirically tested principles of operant conditioning. But despite vigorously promoting his ideas, educationalists mostly ignored them.

But not everyone has ignored the power of rewards and intermittent reinforcement schedules. As the Escapist Magazine explains, operant conditioning is alive and well in games like Facebook’s Farmville. As Preston at Stop for a Thought writes, you don’t need to use real money to motivate behaviour:

What’s fascinating about these new games … , is that the rewards are all virtual. They are limitless and cost nothing to produce — ultimately just binary bits of data on server somewhere that somehow have the power to activate the reward centers of our brains the same way praise, food, or sex can (though I confess, all of those sound better than a virtual goat).

And getting back to Joshua Gans’ economic incentives — at Game Theorist he tells how a Thanksgiving visit to the grandparents’ place resulted in the repeal of his ‘candy tax’.

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An article by David Mallard at New Matilda reflects on some observations (canards?) by the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Judge (!!) about the allegedly malign influence of the Internet generally and social media in particular on the integrity of jury deliberations in the criminal justice system.

Deficiencies in the jury system have been discussed before here at Troppo.  The very future of the jury system has also come under discussion recently within the legal profession itself following a report by academic Judith Fordham on juror intimidation in Western Australia.  Malcolm McCusker QC responded in an article in Brief (not free online) which canvassed the possibility of abolition of juries.  An extract is over the fold along with further discussion.

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Peter Timmins reviews the progress through the Senate (or rather lack of same) of a proposed limited “shield” law to protect the confidentiality of journalists’ sources.

As Peter noted, I gave evidence and made a submission to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Committee on the Bills (there are two versions; one drafted by Andrew Wilkie and one by Liberal Senator George Brandis).  In general I strongly support the Bill/s.  Indeed the purport of my submission was to advocate a much broader journalist shield law, protecting sources not only when journalists are giving evidence before a court but at all stages of litigation and outside it as well e.g. when considering applications for search and other warrants and when police seek to access journalists’ telephone records – something which at present does not even require a warrant.

However one area where I opposed widening of the Bill’s ambit was in relation to an amendment proposed by Greens Senator Scott Ludlam which would extend the journalist shield law to cover bloggers and other “citizen journalists”, by protecting those engaged in “journalism” irrespective of whether they are professional journalists.  My submission on that aspect is set out over the fold, albeit that I expect it won’t endear me to some bloggers:

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Today is the anniversary of the battle of the Eureka Stockade. This is not a much remembered date. In fact, it was only brought to my attention by a letter in the AFR bemoaning the lack of recognition. This letter was penned by a Joseph Toscano of the  Anarchist Media Institute – the AFR is well known for it’s anarchist readership. As much as I sympathise with Toscano’s dismissal of other dates, such as April 25th and January 26th, I still find it very difficult to get excited about the whole Eureka escapade.

For a long time I dismissed interest in the entire episode as grasping by Australian historians, patriots and radicals. They seized on the stockade because it involved white people shooting at each other; REAL History, like they had overseas. I was already sufficiently impressed by the social conflicts and – more importantly – resolutions in Australian history already. I saw no need to ape the celebration of intra-European violence that was the orthodox benchmark for interesting history. Just because the Americans saw fit to dress a self interested tax revolt in hyperbolic and frequently hypocritical rhetoric didn’t mean we had to. The triumph of mild mannered competence in the Emancipist-Exclusionist struggle was more imspiring to me, and needed not glory in bloodshed or make  hagiography for flawed men (as all men are).

It didn’t help of course that the Eureka flag was appropriated by each and every fringe group that wanted it. Racists and anti racists; communists and anarchists; libertarians and corporatists. In appropriation they robbed it of any meaning it had had, just as the semiotics of their fringe culture would later be bled dry by hipsters.

It wasn’t until later that I learned how many of the Australians involved entered into and became a part of mainstream politics. It didn’t provoke me into celebration, but it did bring a smile. I can’t say that the way of doing things allowed them to fight for wondrous liberty, or that they even wanted to. But the grin was just for the fact that things kept muddling through. A series of messy outcomes and processes that kept things blundering along without further recourse to the kind of events that would provide Real History. Who knows, maybe a world we could hope for is one in which June 4th is as similarly meaningless in China – one in which jaded radicals manage to become part of a system that muddles through to outcomes that are somewhat better, even if they remain unglorious and unsuitable for celebration.

Maybe a date chosen from a random divison of a colonial parliament on a benign issue would be the greatest cause for celebration, were were to take a date from the pre-federation era.

Still, if I had to choose a date to celebrate, it would be the 16th of August, the stated date of publication for Daniel Deniehy’s speech on the Bunyip Aristocracy. It is after all, the closest we have to a pivotal date in the battle against our oldest enemy. Given that the current progeny of the Aristocracy are now buying Channel 10 with daddy’s money – either to celebrate themselves or attack those horrid oriental dragon ladies whom would rob them of said money – it’s a battle that bears remembrance. Even if no guns were fired between white people.

Letter to the Editor NT News:

I don’t hold any brief for the CLP, or Labor for that matter (although I did a long time ago).  However I have strong moral objections when I see someone’s reputation trashed unfairly.  That especially includes politicians, a human sub-species about whom most people love to believe the worst even though most pollies I’ve met on both sides of the fence are thoroughly decent, hard-working people with a strong sense of public service.

Now that the transcript of CLP leader Terry Mills’ conversation with former Lingiari candidate Leo Abbott has been published in full on the NT News website, I can’t help asking what the fuss was all about?

If that’s all that was said, there was certainly no “bribery” on the part of Terry Mills, or anything else that could possibly form a foundation for an allegation of corruption or illegality of any sort.  I don’t even think there was anything ethically or morally questionable about anything Mills said.  It was an entirely appropriate conversation for a Party leader to have with a problematic candidate who he was trying to persuade to step aside.

In the circumstances I can’t help wondering why the NT News continues to publish a story with a headline like “Mills secret chat to hand Abbott a deal”?

As I’ve said before, if you want to understand Hegel, for goodness sake don’t read what he wrote. You’ve got to find another way in. So I’m pleased to say that Alan Saunders has featured Hegel in his latest two Philosophers’ Zones. I’ve not yet listened to last week’s one, but I did listen to this week’s one – and it was terrific. Check them out. Now!

This is an article of mine that was originally published in the Melbourne Age on 29th November 2010.

Saturday’s election of a Coalition government is unlikely to have much impact on Victoria’s economic direction. As The Age’s economics editor Tim Colebatch noted last Friday, there was remarkably little difference between Labor and the Coalition in terms of the impact of their policies on the State’s finances: both plan to maintain operating budget surpluses of at least $800 million a year, and Labor’s net spending plans amount to 0.1 per cent more than the Coalition’s over the remainder of the current financial year and the following four years.

There were of course differences in the detail of the Coalition’s and Labor’s spending and saving priorities. Labor promised bigger spending on schools than the Coalition, while the Coalition promised larger spending on hospitals and policing. A Baillieu Government will take more out of recurrent government spending (including on advertising, IT, human resources management and consultants) than would have a returned Brumby Government. And it would use those savings to make bigger reductions in State taxes, especially the promised 50% reduction in stamp duty for first home buyers.

But these differences are not large enough to have a material impact on the prospects for the Victorian economy. The Coalition’s proposed cuts in stamp duty, for example, are as likely to result in higher prices for the types of dwellings favoured by first home buyers as have almost every other policy which allows home-buyers to pay more for their preferred dwelling than they could otherwise, without doing anything at all to lift home ownership rates.

Whoever forms Victoria’s next government, when the final votes are tallied and all the preferences have been distributed, will face an economic environment that is in some respects more challenging than at any time since the early 1990s.

The latest set of State Accounts published by the Statistics Bureau twelve days ago paints Victoria’s recent economic performance in a less flattering light than it had previously seemed. In particular, they show that although Victoria’s economy has continued to grow more rapidly than New South Wales’ (and Queensland’s) since the onset of the global financial crisis, this has been entirely due to its relatively rapid population growth. Strip that out, and Victoria’s real per capita economic growth rate was actually negative in both 2008-09 and 2009-10.

Victoria hasn’t experienced that since 1990-91 and 1991-92. Queensland has been the only other State to have recorded consecutive annual declines in real per capita gross product since the onset of the financial crisis. And although the labour force figures suggest that Victoria has enjoyed more rapid growth in employment, especially in 2009-10, than other States, the corollary of this is that Victoria’s productivity performance has deteriorated sharply, which does not augur well for the future.

During the election campaign the Coalition correctly pinpointed exports and business investment as the weak points in Victoria’s economic performance. Weakness in these two areas is likely to be accentuated as the mining boom passes Victoria by (since mining accounts for just 2.2% of Victoria’s economy, along with Tasmania the smallest of any State), while Victoria’s other trade-exposed industries (which account for a relatively high share of the State’s economy) are disadvantaged by a strong dollar and other sectors by relatively high interest rates. Confronting those challenges will test the economic management skills of Ted Baillieu and his colleagues in the new Victorian Government.

Well, they’ve done it again. Queensland-boy Julian Assange and his band of merry journalists and IT-nerds have flooded the internet once again with sensitive information that embarrasses several governments, most notably the US, by releasing the content of several hundred thousand diplomatic cables. The revelations in these cables range from salacious information about the ‘blonde Ukranian nurse’ that the Libyan leader Kaddafi hangs out with, to truly important stuff like the widespread misinformation that Arab leaders perpetrate on their own population in the form of covertly urging the Americans to invade Iran whilst openly washing their hands of American actions. This is the third time now that Wikileaks has managed to get an immense amount of public attention on the underbelly of government operations. And more has been promised in that we are to get the inside information on how a big American bank really does business.

What we have seen so far is still fairly benign. The leaks on the Irak and Afghan campaigns show what the term ‘fog of war’ really means, i.e. that mistakes are made, that nasty people can do nasty things if given discretion, and that civil war is not pretty. This is no surprise to those who study war, but it does go counter to the clean image that sides present of themselves in the media (including the image of the islamists: the number of tortured beheaded corpses found in Iraq was quite something. The released documents form an historical record of what Muslims did to each other). The same goes for the diplomatic leaks: few surprises to the insiders, but there is a distinct loss of face. Those who think the public can handle the truth and want open government in general should rejoice (though for reasons entirely unclear to me, some advocates of free information don’t ). The realists amongst us simply note that the ability of governments to maintain an image has just been reduced a notch. Not by much, but it is a reduction in the power of government relative to the discerning portion of their populations, which is of course why governments are displeased.

What will happen to the Wikileaks team? Are we in the age where governments will really be held accountable by their populations? Is the uncovering of sensitive information good or bad for our democracies and international security? These are the issues mused about below.

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