Club Troppo

Tyler Cowen’s e-bookette, The Great Stagnation is being debated around the various blogospheres, even by people who haven’t read it. I do dig the way it exploits the format of ebooks, being allowed to be longer than an essay, but not padded out into a book. A huge number of best sellers based on essays (Like The End of History) would have benefited from being able to do the same.

But on the substance of his argument, I have a question about the premise.

In short, Cowen’s argument is that for the past 30 or so years there has been little progress in the US and other rich economies. He also uses the kitchen test (noting the lack of progress in the average kitchen over the past decades compared to progress in earlier decades) that Robert Merkel in the link above describes as bunk but, as Labor Outsider in the comments protests, he does prefer median income and other statistical measurements. He attributes this slowdown in progress to the absence of low hanging fruit. Innovation is harder (you can’t invent nanotechnology in a garage) these days, we’re already educating everyone who can be educated etc. Countries that are progressing faster are running in the slip stream of advanced countries by adopting their ideas. When they catch up they too will slow down, just like Japan.

The does seem plausible. But then again, there’s a large number of places in history where I may have thought it plausible. There’s the infamous quote by Duell in 1899, “Everything than can be invented has been invented” and the lower classes always seemed like clay unsuitable to be be moulded by education until they were educated. And as Robert discusses, the Kitchen Test, if not bunk, is rather shoddy.

I have a large question about the data. Cowen says he is talking about a slowdown compared to the growth that followed the Industrial Revolution up to the early 1970s. But this is not the data he shows. He actually compares the past 37 years to the period 1947 to 1945. There’s good reason to do this because the data is better. But I think it is misleading. China’s growth is faster than the US because of catch up, but so was the post war boom.

This is somewhat similar to the logic of Friedman’s plucking model[fn1]. The magnitude of a boom is determined by the magnitude of the bust that precedes it. The reason being the capacity of the economy has stayed the same. You’re merely catching up to where you were. Now if innovation and progress were continuing even whilst the bust meant there was no growth (like we assume with Okun’s Law), this means that not only can you catch up to where you were, but the new capacity is even greater than when you went into the bust. You grow rapidly by picking the fruit that had grown in recession, but which you were prevented from picking.

And what happened before 1947? The Great Depression and World War II. Imagine how much fruit we had left unpicked during 18 years of distraction. We had a very large way to catch up. Cowen has remarked a few times on his blog that the 30s was still an innovative time, and his essay quotes a Charles I Jones who states that most of the growth in that period was from “previously discovered ideas”. He should be aware this is a question that needs to be addressed. (Continued)

I wonder why oz theatre icon David Williamson reacted with complacent high dudgeon to a bitchy review on Crikey of his latest turgid thespian offering Don Parties On?  After all, the Murdoch and Fairfax reviews were almost as negative, and redoubtable blogging theatre critic Alison Croggon posted a splenetic masterpiece.  Croggon is married to someone with a real claim to be Australia’s leading contemporary playwright in Daniel Keene, so you’d imagine her undisguised contempt for Williamson’s writing would sting rather more than the somewhat amateurish scribblings of some callow youth on Crikey.  Here’s an extract from Alison’s review:

In Don Parties On, all his writerly clumsiness is writ large – the dire expository dialogue, the stereotypical characters, the almost neurotic repetitiveness, the constant machinations of getting people on and off stage. Much of the dialogue – the pronouncements on baby boomers, greenies, Australian politics and so on – in fact sounds as if it’s been cribbed from some of Australia’s more active political blogs. The people-moving is about as clunkily done as I’ve seen – characters are constantly announcing that now they must go into the garden to show each other photographs of their children, or to the bedroom to check on someone hysterical, or to the study to watch a DVD, so that two or three people can be left on stage to reminisce or reveal something shocking. Alternatively, you get rows of frozen actors standing on stage watching as two or three others do their dialogue.

Robyn Nevin’s direction makes as decent a fist as is possible of this stylistic rubble – I left feeling that it could have been a lot worse. The actors fail to make the characters credible, but it’s hard to blame them given that they are all written as walking cliches; although Sue Jones gives some feisty life to the character of Jenny. But for me, there was no escaping the creeping numbness as the evening wore on.

Naturalism this certainly isn’t. Considered as a comedy of manners, it lacks the grace, wit and formal mastery that gives the form its champagne fizz. A direct comparison with Don’s Party starkly demonstrates how stale Williamson has become: the lively colloquialism of the original, its chief virtue, has long leached out. This really is zombie theatre, devouring the brains, not only of its audience, but of its own playwright.

Links to follow developments : BOM map and updates; Yasi Twitter feed compiled by ABC

The frightening power of even a modest cyclone has to be experienced to really understand just how big a threat such a weather event poses. Having been through a couple of small-ish cyclones in Darwin myself (but thankfully not Tracy), my thoughts are very much with people in north Queensland today as Cyclone Yasi approaches.

That’s especially the case because the 2 academics sitting in the offices immediate adjacent to me here at CDU, Shaune and Tanjil, have recently relocated here from Cairns and haven’t sold their house there yet.  Fortunately it isn’t in a cyclone surge zone but it’s an old Queenslander that probably isn’t built to current cyclone code, so it might well suffer major damage if the winds hit Cairns at anywhere near Category 5 intensity (280-300kmh).  It currently looks very likely that very destructive winds WILL hit Cairns even though the most likely path at present takes the centre over Innisfail just to the south, because Yasi is so large that very destructive winds will extend a long way north and south of the centre.

Even newer houses built to current Building Code may well be at risk from a Category 5.  Apparently new houses in north Queensland have been required since 1982 to be constructed to withstand Category 4 winds (200 kmh or thereabouts), but that may not help if the winds are 30% stronger than that.  There’s a recurring controversy here in Darwin as to whether our Building code should require engineering new buildings to Category 5 standard, because here too the Code only requires Category 4 despite the devastation of Tracy (whose strength no-one knows for sure because it destroyed all the measuring intrumentation!).

Personally I don’t have a problem with only requiring building to Category 4 on ordinary precautionary principles.  The probability of being hit by a Category 5 appears to be relatively low, it’s much more expensive to engineer to Category 5, and in a worst case scenario losing your house isn’t the end of the world as long as you’re adequately insured and take your precious photos and the like with you when you evacuate.  Problems only occur if you unwisely decide to stay put in a house whose survival in a large cyclone is questionable, or if you leave your departure until too late.  That happened to us in one of the Darwin cyclones we went through.  A tree blew down across our driveway just as we were about to evacuate to a city hotel for the duration, so we had to stay put.  It was fairly nerve-racking given that the house where I then lived was only a couple of metres above sea level and right on the waterfront.  Fortunately that cyclone veered off and missed Darwin.

(Continued)

Not so long ago I published a post titled: The future of journalism and blogging – chapter 957.  Essentially I argued that, despite all the despairing navel-gazing and prognostications of doom for MSM news and political journalism posed by free content on the Internet, especially social media and citizen journalism,  the opportunities these developments offer to the existing media far outweigh the undoubted short-term threats.

Now that theme has been taken up in an ARC-funded study for SBS conducted by a group of media academics headed by Terry Flew and including blogging media academic (and fellow Best Blog Posts 2010 judge) Jason Wilson.  The study bears the catchy title: Rethinking Public Service Media and Citizenship: Digital Strategies for News and Current Affairs at Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service.  I’ve copied some key extracts over the page, but the whole thing is worth reading.

(Continued)

Of all the products advertisers and marketers have pitched over the years, the one most vital to their survival, and the one they have been most successful at convincing people the utility of, is marketing. Without selling advertising and marketing, there is no industry at all. We have great faith in advertising, and this, I think, is to the detriment of our thinking.

This is a blindingly obvious point, but one that is strangely obscured. There is no shortage of people in the world who have a firm belief that advertising can convince consumers of their need for products that are useless or superfluous, that marketing has the ability to create demand out of nothing and that adverts, beyond informing, can persuade through skilled deception and psychology. They rarely reflect on that this vindicates every claim that advertisers would make in their core pitch for their main product. Are they being deceptive in their claims about the utility of the products they sell for others, but truthful about the utility of their own product?

xkcd

The idea that “advertisers can make people buy anything” is common, although I suspect it is tacitly phrased “advertisers can make people (other than me) buy anything”. I’m a bit wary of any idea that professes an insight or self awareness in the speaker that is absent in the great unwashed. On one hand, if you are skeptical, why assume that the average person is a credulous sheep? What makes you special? On the other hand, if you accept that you are still susceptible to the charms of advertisers regarding other products, should not you question your acceptance of their claims about their own?

It also raises another question. If advertising can sell anything, why doesn’t it? Why do so many (in fact a majority) of products fail, whether in food lines or film,music and literature or electronics? There’s a conversation at the moment (here, and here for instance) pointing out the lack of genuinely new products from the past 50 years in any normal kitchen. They’re discussing why the new technologies (electric can openers etc.) have only been disappointing. But if we were to believe that advertising had great power, surely they could convince us of the need for the electric can opener or the Breville Tea Makers that are currently advertised endlessly on SBS. Were they simply not trying? Are all the brands and products in the dust bin simply the result of off days? (Continued)