Club Troppo

We examine how multitasking affects performance and check whether women are indeed better at multitasking. Subjects in our experiment perform two different tasks according to three treatments: one where they perform the tasks sequentially, one where they are forced to multitask, and one where they can freely organize their work. Subjects who are forced to multitask perform significantly worse than those forced to work sequentially. Surprisingly, subjects who can freely organize their own schedule also perform significantly worse. Finally, our results do not support the stereotype that women are better at multitasking. Women suffer as much as men when forced to multitask and are actually less inclined to multitask when being free to choose.

By: Thomas Buser (University of Amsterdam)
Noemi Peter (University of Amsterdam)
URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dgr:uvatin:20110044&r=exp

  Paul Krugman looks again at the relationship between deficit reduction, wages and employment in the USA. 

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/wages-and-employment-yet-again/

Yglesais says that a decline in deficit could lead to further employment expansion if it led to lower general wages (through a more flexible wage system) .

Krugman argues that this misses a key point: when you cut the price of something, it normally get cheaper relative to other things and this allows a redistribution of spending towards the cheaper good. But “when you cut the price of everything -which is more or less what happens when wages fall across the board – there is nothing to substitute away from”.

So, Krugman contends, the argument is not just morally wrong (because it inflicts further pain on people who are not responsible for what happened to the financial system) but it also technically wrong. It won’t have any positive effect on employment and could well prove negative.

This issue does not arise in Australia because (a) Australia has a much higher relative minimum wage than in the USA (b) we have a much stronger Fair Work Act and (c) Australian levels of unemployment are much lower than in the USA.

(Continued)

In the conference I attended in Wellington NZ I saw a presentation by Tim McNamara a Wellington developer who spearheaded what seemed like a very successful volunteer web 2.0 effort that arose in the wake of the Christchurch earthquake. Using Ushahidi an open source package initially developed to generate and disseminate information on electoral violence in Kenya – Ushahidi is Swahili for “testimony” – Tim and others put together a map which he and scores of volunteers – from around the world no less – populated with information about what was working and what wasn’t and generally anything they thought would be of value to the stunned citizens of the shaken city.

They got much of this information from local organisations – firms, government agencies and others as well as from 300,000 tweets. The 300,000 tweets were parsed by volunteers to detect those that contained some useful fact about an identifiable place that could then be represented on the map. It’s an interesting and inspiring story. Anyway in Tim’s write up of these endeavours he says this:

Vendor neutrality

. . . As far as I could tell, we were the only website providing service to the community without corporate logos. [Vendor] [n]eutrality meant that we a had high levels of trust and meant that it was safe for competitors to cooperate.

Our platform was neutral to non-code contributions also. This meant that we could provide non-essential community assets like bouncy castles in parks alongside critical information like water distribution points. The neutrality meant that while individual telcos had incentives to provide the locations of only their wifi hotspots, our incentive was to publish all.

In the end, most information in the system came from organisations reporting on their own facilities. They probably used Twitter as a medium to distribute that message. This message was picked up by our volunteers and plotted. Over time, businesses and the public sector began to input information directly. This distributes the burden for the information system to the organisations that have an incentive to keep it right, such as local business owners. Without neutral ground, the site would not have prospered as it had.

This echoes something that I came to understand was critical to the productivity that the internet delivers via net neutrality and open standards – something which is well illustrated in this article by Joi Ito as we quoted him in the Gov 2.0 Taskforce report. (Continued)

I love newspapers and read lots of them. But I don’t love any one newspaper so much that I’d pay hundreds of dollars a year to read it online. The kind of package I could be persuaded to pay for would be a subscription to a bundle of my favourite newspapers and magazines. But newspapers that are erecting paywalls seem to be stuck in the print world where readers start their day with one or two papers. And maybe the print world isn’t such a bad place to be.

Some commentators argue that the purpose of a paywall isn’t to keep online readers out, it’s to keep print subscribers in. According to Mathew Ingram: "the main driving force for instituting a paywall is to keep print readers from migrating away from buying the physical product (which still generates the majority of advertising revenue at most newspapers) to reading for free online, where their eyeballs are worth less than they would be in print."

Last year at Recovering Journalist, Mark Potts explained how only 35 people signed up for Newsday’s $5 a week online subscription plan. According to Potts, Newsday was happy to lose readers who were outside its target audience — people who live on Long Island. Owned by cable tv company Cablevision, Newsday gave away online subscriptions to print subscribers and Cablevision customers but saw little value in attracting readers outside of Long Island. Potts says the strategy seems to be working just fine.

In 2009 the American Journalism Review carried an article by Paul Farhi arguing that newspapers might be better off focusing on their print audience instead of persuading readers to migrate to an online product.

Recently there’s been a lot of discussion about the New York Times’ decision to erect a paywall. At Crikey, Margaret Simons writes:

(Continued)

As you may know, the Dunera brought a bunch of people out to Australia who settled in very nicely and added to the place.  A coach of olympic runners, numerous professors, some rich entrepreneurs. I don’t know if Fred Lowen and Ernst Roedeck got rich but they founded FLER and were a great duo – FL being the designer and ER being the engineer.  They brought modernist furniture to Australia – or rather invented it here, because I don’t know how much of it Fred had seen when he was back in Europe. Fred Lowen, who is no longer with us but whom I met once at an opening of his about ten or so years ago was a very nice man to meet.  He’s also written a book.

Ernst is still with us and it’s quite interesting (to me anyway) that at least as he tells the story, the dedication to Australian materials reflected a kind of ‘buy Australian’ as much as an aesthetic sensibility from the start. Ernst feels so strongly about buy Australian that he’s a strong protectionist.  He’s taken the trouble to reconstruct that protectionism to reflect the desirability of exports (arguably what enabled the protectionism of what was formerly developing Asia to become so successful).  I wrote about the policy of ‘balanced trade’ he advocates here when Warren Buffett proposed it for America.  In any event, Ernst thinks we should balance our trade so there you do. No borrowing for him.

Fred Lowen became enamoured of Scandinavian design (I think as much from books and magazines as having seen it) and you can see the lovely result above – his designs are still collected today.

Anyway ABC RN (is there a better broadcaster in the world?) has devoted one of it’s Hindsight programs to FL and ER.

Meanwhile, on the Dunera front, there’s the last of the 70th anniversary celebrations of the Dunera on Sunday May 15th at Tatura if anyone wants to contact me about it – there’s a museum there and all.

And Ken Inglis, Historian extraordinare is writing a book on the Dunera and is giving a lecture on it in Melbourne on April 14th which I hope to attend.  Perhaps I’ll see you there.  He seems to have turned up a very moving painting – or at least someone has posted a painting I’ve not seen. The artist is unknown, presumably an inmate at Hay after about three months in captivity. It looks better than Christmas Island.

Retired diplomat Bruce Haigh has a valid point when he refers to Gillard government threats to refuse to issue visas on “character grounds” to Christmas Island asylum seeker rioters as “revengeful”.  More accurately it’s cynical playing to the populist gallery on a par with Tony Abbott’s deplorably low standards on most things.

As I understand it, most of these rioters have already been found to be genuine refugees (i.e. people who face real risks of persecution or even death if returned to their homelands) but continue to be kept in detention on Christmas island while ASIO goes through a leisurely process of considering security clearances.  Some of them have been waiting 18 months since being found to be real refugees.  Going bananas, especially given the overcrowded conditions, is hardly surprising in the circumstances.

Why can’t they begin the ASIO assessments as soon as an application for protection visa is made, instead of waiting until applicants have been found to be refugees?  After all, more than 50% of boat arriving asylum seekers are found to be refugees, so it surely makes sense to commence ASIO assessments for all arrivals immediately.  That way the security clearance process would be completed at roughly the same time as the primary refugee assessment, and we wouldn’t then be deliberately inflicting surplus punishment on already traumatised people who we know to be real refugees not just “queue-jumping” economic migrants.

It brings back into sharp focus my previous suggestion that it’s time to seriously consider abolishing universal mandatory detention of boat-arriving asylum seekers.  The current policy isn’t succeeding in creating an impression of resolute toughness either with the asylum seekers or the aspirational voters at whom it is mostly aimed.  All it does is create a convenient focus for endless negative news stories including action TV footage.  As I’ve previously argued, abolishing mandatory detention and accommodating applicants in the community while they’re being processed may paradoxically make the asylum seeker issue less damaging politically for the Labor government.  It’s hard to imagine it would make it a bigger negative than it already is.  Boat-arriving asylum seekers may become as effectively invisible and uncontroversial as their air-arriving counterparts. No doubt some will take the opportunity to do a bunk but that’s also true of the air arrivals and for that matter a much larger cohort of Caucasian visitors overstaying their tourist or student visas, and absconding can be minimised by the use of electronic tracking bracelets and other measures.

Peter Whiteford is one of my favourite commenters. He rarely joins a thread without adding useful data or some telling insight. On Monday he showed up on Matt Yglesias’ blog to explain the difference between progressivity and redistribution in the tax system.

The debate was over a table Scott Hodge posted on the Tax Policy Blog. According to Hodge "the U.S. has the most progressive income tax system among industrialized nations." Yglesias argued that this was misleading. Here’s part of Whiteford’s reply:

… progressivity is not the same as redistribution. Progressivity measures how the distribution of the tax burden is shared, while redistribution measures how much the tax system reduces inequality. Redistribution is influenced both by the progressivity of taxes and the level of taxes collected.

In fact, the US system of direct taxes actually reduces inequality more than any other country as well. But overall, the USA reduces inequality a lot less than most other countries, because the other thing that you need to take into account is what taxes get spent on.

Now the US system of social security and cash benefits reduces inequality by less than any other OECD country except Korea. The US social security system is marginally less progressive then the OECD average, but the level of spending is very low – only Mexico and Korea spend less in the OECD.

So while the US tax system is progressive and reduces inequality, the US welfare state is much less effective at reducing inequality. And because the US has a very unequal distribution of income from capital and a much wider wage distribution than many other OECD countries, it ends up as a relatively unequal country after taxes and benefits.

Of course Whiteford is well placed to explain the data. As he wrote in his comment: "I am the person who wrote the chapter in the OECD report that is the basis of these figures."

Greg Mankiw reposts Whiteford’s comment in full. And there’s more discussion from Scott Sumner at The Money Illusion. The table is over the fold:

(Continued)

Well it’s an overused word right now but have a look at this if you’ve not seen it before – it’s lovely.

A while back I was asked if I would be the patron of the Australian Digital Alliance.  Well . . .  you could have knocked me down with a feather! Anyway, the ADA is a fine organisation which describes itself as follows on its website.

The ADA is a non-profit coalition of public and private sector interests formed to promote balanced copyright law and provide an effective voice for a public interest perspective in the copyright debate. ADA members include universities, schools, consumer groups, galleries, museums , IT companies, scientific and other research organisations, libraries and individuals.

It’s been a fairly lone voice amidst the madness of intellectual property maximalism as it has ravaged developed countries in the last few decades not least us Aussies who have shown ourselves capable of signing up to pretty much any old rubbish, including retrospective extensions of patents and copyrights which can’t possibly make economic sense (except for the rent seekers who seek them). And IP maximalism in the age of the internet is becoming sufficiently and obviously dysfunctional that we are starting to see more balance in the debate.

A decade ago those IP organisations like IP Australia and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) basically took it as read that their mandate was to promote IP – ie to extend it as a Good Thing whereever they could.  Today they take a much more enlightened view seeing it as their role to promote economic welfare through appropriate IP settings and administration. Here’s an excellent recent public speech by Australian Francis Gurry who is not only a prominent Australian intellectual property lawyer but also the head of WIPO.

Few issues in intellectual property or, if I may suggest, cultural policy are as important as the consequences of the revolutionary structural change introduced by digital technology and the Internet. Recently, as the number of people in the world with access to the Internet passes two billion1, support for addressing the consequences of this fundamental change has come from the highest levels. Both President Sarkozy of France and President Medvedev of the Russian Federation have called for the G20 to consider the issue. In his speech at Davos earlier this year, President Medvedev stated that “the old principles of intellectual property regulation are not working anymore, particularly when it comes to the Internet”. That, he stated, “is fraught with the collapse of the entire intellectual property rights system”.

Not to be outdone Australia’s Attorney General showed we were up to the challenge with his speech at the same function announcing that:

The Copyright Advisory Group has approached me for an additional exception to allow circumvention of technological protection measures for certain education purposes. In particular they have sought an exception that would allow schools to change the format of films from DVD to MP4 for teaching purposes. This review will assist me in deciding whether or not to amend the Copyright Regulations. My Department will invite submissions seeking views on whether any other new exceptions should be included, and I again invite those affected to take this opportunity to raise their issues.

But I digress.  The IP organisations like IP Australia and WIPO remain organisations which are constitutionally susceptible to a substantial amount of capture – their ‘natural constituents’ are firms that benefit from stronger IP (the benefits from less IP are far more dispersed throughout the economy and so don’t fund IP activism nearly as much as the IP boosters.)  Francis Gurry’s words were bold, but I expect it will be hard for WIPO to do anything all that constructive, though the new approach should make the wheels of IP maximalism a tad less well oiled.

Sadly, the natural counterweight to industry capture, at least in our country – Australia’s econocrats – have been missing in action. The PC has shown little general interest in IP except when sent a reference on parallel imports and, at least to my knowledge, the Treasury has likewise shown little interest.

Anyway, as newly anointed patron I could hardly say ‘no’ when the ADA asked for some concrete patronage in the form of a presentation to the ADA conference.  It turned out to be a very worthwhile  and enjoyable event. Speeches, including mine can be downloaded as mp3 files from this page with my slides being here

A couple of months ago I read Interstate 69, which is an unexpectedly interesting account of the advocates and opponents (neither of whom are really insiders) of an extension to the eponymous road from the American Midwest to the Mexican border and their attempts to gain the ear of policy makers. I was taken by this paragraph about the campaign by a couple in opposition.

The logistics required to run a statewide political operation would have drowned most activists, but the Stalls were  savvy and highly communicative. I once rode in their truck with David, who was a police officer for twenty-two years, and the front seat was a tangle of cords and wires connected to a ham radio and three or four cell phones. David had set up one phone with a 202 area code because he found people in Washington, D.C, were more likely to answer calls from inside the beltway.

It reminded me of this post from a couple of years ago by Nicholas.

Being the son of an academic I was brought up to believe that the most influential ideas were those that were best argued and which were advocated by people who did not have a direct interest in the stake of the argument, because then their advocacy was tainted. I told her that I had discovered that this was wrong. No-one took you seriously at all unless you had some position and even that was less important than representing someone great and powerful or at least large and wealthy.

I had discovered that this was true, not just with governments in general but even of organisations that, it seemed to me, ought to have the same values my father taught me – like the Industries Assistance Commission. In any event, it was not so. So I was in Melbourne visiting a large company who stood to gain significantly from the policy I was advocating. I was trying to persuade them to pay me to advocated the policy either on their behalf.

The difference of course is that this couple had discovered a cheap alternative for a think tank title, or that of an industry body or wealthy company or professional cartel. They could flag their ship as interested sophist (and worthy of entering the Port of State) with a simple numerical signifier.

Of course, it only would work as long as no-one else was doing it.

It is unfortunate that it’s hard to have a voice heard if you have no vested interests, if you’re not a player (though not impossible, as I found out). It’s not just that those in power want to deal with those with power, but also that fact that material interest makes for easily identifiable “sides” to give the false balance of he-said, she-said – not the mention of course that content is cheap when a PR firm paid for by the interests has produced it for you. It’s the latter I find more aggravating. We have, after all, long established mechanisms to keep the state to account, but which can be hamstrung or subverted when uncritical coverage is so easily available to the MCA or PCA or AMA etc.

But it is fun when people find partial ways to sneak into the port, like the Stalls above, or Nicholas. I just wish there were more ways to do it.