Club Troppo

"Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying" philosopher Richard Rorty once said. Earlier this week journalist Johann Hari discovered he’d made a mistake about what was true and what wasn’t.

Guy Beres at Larvatus Prodeo writes: "When I read an interview, I should have the right to assume that what it has been reported that the subject contemporaneously said is what they actually said". And with Johann Hari interviews that’s not always the case. As Hari explains:

When you interview a writer – especially but not only when English isn’t their first language – they will sometimes make a point that sounds clear when you hear it, but turns out to be incomprehensible or confusing on the page. In those instances, I have sometimes substituted a passage they have written or said more clearly elsewhere on the same subject for what they said to me, so the reader understands their point as clearly as possible.

Hari now admits this is wrong: "Why? Because an interview is not just an essayistic representation of what a person thinks; it is a report on an encounter between the interviewer and the interviewee."

(Continued)

Tonight’s 7:30 Report featured a story on gay marriage (yes, I know the “report” bit has been deleted, presumably to signal the new post-Red Kezza regime).

Strangely though, it didn’t even mention in passing the fact that there is significant doubt as to whether the Commonwealth Parliament even has constitutional power to legislate for gay marriages.

The Commonwealth only has power to enact laws on areas of activity listed in the Constitution itself.  One of those is “marriage” (Constitution s 51(xxi)).  But what does “marriage” actually mean?  There’s no doubt what the vast majority of the “Founders” understood when they used the expression way back before 1901.  They meant a union for life between a man and a woman.  They didn’t mean a union between two blokes or two women.  They would have agreed emphatically with Paul Keating’s trenchant observation that “two jokers and a cocker spaniel don’t make a family”.

But does that mean the Commonwealth doesn’t have power to legislate for gay marriage?  It depends how the High Court majority end up viewing their task of constitutional interpretation.  Is it simply to decide what the drafters intended (which would clearly preclude gay marriage)?  Or is the task more complex than that?  The predominant High Court view is that it is strictly bound by the central or core meaning of constitutional expressions, often referred to as the “connotation” or “concept”, but has some flexibility in relation to the peripheral or expanded meanings, sometimes referred to as the “denotation” or “conception”.  But what the hell does than mean?  Certainly the dominant High Court approach seeks to avoid Justice Michael Kirby’s Humpty Dumpty or “living tree” approach to constitutional meaning:

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’

Justice Michael McHugh mused about the scope of the Commonwealth’s marriage power at some length in Re Wakim in 1999, and precisely in the context of gay marriage:

(Continued)

I’m thrilled to say that we raised over $30,000 for Africa. Troppo itself initially raised a little over $2,000 to which would have been matched the contribution I’d promised, but in the last day I also said to the fund raisers that if they could get some more funds in by referring their clients to the site I’d match them. They proceeded to come up with some substantial and one very large donations. This took me to my maximum exposure – which was bounded by half the amount needed to fund all the kids shown which took Troppo’s contribution to over $11,000 with the final result being over $30,000 for the kids of Kibera. Pretty good huh? And thanks to all for participating.

And of course it’s not to late to give. Just download this pdf for the bank details and follow the instructions on the previous post and off you go.

I love finding links between equity and efficiency – there are lots around. Here’s another . . . . (it seems).

Early Non-marital Childbearing and the “Culture of Despair” by Melissa Schettini Kearney, Phillip B. Levine

This paper borrows from the tradition of other social sciences in considering the impact that “culture” (broadly defined as the economic and social environment in which the poor live) plays in determining early, non-marital childbearing. Along with others before us, we hypothesize that the despair and hopelessness that poor, young women may face increases the likelihood that they will give birth at an early age outside of marriage. We derive a formal economic model that incorporates the perception of economic success as a key factor driving one’s decision to have an early, non-marital birth. We propose that this perception is based in part on the level of income inequality that exists in a woman’s location of residence. Using individual-level data from the United States and a number of other developed countries, we empirically investigate the role played by inequality across states in determining the early childbearing outcomes of low socioeconomic status (SES) women. We find low SES women are more likely to give birth at a young age and outside of marriage when they live in higher inequality locations, all else

equal. Less frequent use of abortion is an important determinant of this behavior. We calculate that differences in the level of inequality are able to explain a sizable share of the geographic variation in teen fertility rates both across U.S. states and across developed countries.

My first smartphone was an Apple iPhone.  I’m rather proud of being a technology laggard – it’s nice to have others at the bleeding edge.  Anyway, just before doing the Govt 2.0 Taskforce I thought I’d better get a bit hip and get a smart-phone and only one appealed – the iPhone – by then the latest version was a “2S” I think. Anyway I managed to leave it in a public place briefly and that was the end of it – for me anyway.  Someone had a second hand Android phone for sale so I bought it and have been very happy with it.  It was an HTC Desire.  I was happy with it until recently when it occasionally takes it upon itself to reboot – including when you’re in the middle of doing something.  At its worst it cycles through boot ups and downs until you take the battery out.  Not good. And HTC have been the soul of uselessness claiming that my phone has a British IMEI or whatever the number is called, so I have to take it up with an international HTC centre.  Which is more than I can be bothered with. So I need a new one.

Should it be an Android or an iPhone?  The Android is not quite as well integrated or designed, but it’s cheaper, more open and the most important features work better. The most basic thing for me is that the default browser in the Android is really excellent with by far the best feature that it reformats carriage returns as you zoom in.  Someone told me that the iPhone’s browser is built on the same open source platform as the Android’s one, but it doesn’t do that.  Neither does the iPad’s browser (nor the third party browser I’ve so far downloaded – Atomic). Completely beats me why they don’t do it, but there you go – Steve Jobs is the billionaire not me, so I’m sure it’s an entirely frivolous feature that I’m after – enabling me to read different lines by just moving my eyes, rather than scrolling left and right twice for each line.

The other thing which is really useful on the Android is the four button ‘global menu’ built into the hardware.  I’m not sure why Apple sticks to its one button solutions long after more buttons are so clearly demonstrated to be superior – but there you go.  The Android also synchs all things in the cloud, which is just much better than having to synch through the iTunes which is bad enough as music synching software and a joke as a synching program for a smart phone.

Anyway, I’m thinking of getting the Samsung Gallaxy II S which has had rave reviews.

Your mission, gentle reader, should you decide to accept it, is to answer the following questions.

1. Should I buy the phone I’m thinking of, or another one and if so why?
2. Where is the best place to buy it – presuming as I think I should that buying it outright is the best way to buy it.
3. Is there anything else I should know?

HTC

"I arrived with fellow baboon researcher Monica yesterday night, after a fairly smooth trip starting in St. Louis and passing through Atlanta and Johannesburg." That’s primate biologist Kenneth Chiou writing about his trip to Pioneer Camp outside Lusaka. Chiou has been blogging for over a year now. In a recent post he reflects on what it means to blog under his own name:

… my name is now irreversibly tied to whatever thoughts–the insightful, the whimsical, the passionate, the comical, the brilliant, the personal, the insensitive–that I lay down on this site.

(Continued)

Antinomies are discomforting things. If you haven’t run into them before, they were a topic of debate and discussion introduced into modern philosophy by Kant (Unless he had some forebear of which I’m unaware), though you might say that they bear some resemblance to Zeno’s paradoxes, or that Zeno’s paradoxes are perhaps the product of the antinomies.

Here’s Wikipedia’s explanation of Kant’s First Antinomy:

in the First Antinomy, Kant proves the thesis that time must have a beginning by showing that if time had no beginning, then an infinity would have elapsed up until the present moment. This is a manifest contradiction because infinity cannot, by definition, be completed by “successive synthesis” — yet just such a finalizing synthesis would be required by the view that time is infinite; so the thesis is proven. Then he proves the antithesis, that time has no beginning, by showing that if time had a beginning, then there must have been “empty time” out of which time arose. This is incoherent (for Kant) for the following reason. Since, necessarily, no time elapses in this pretemporal void, then there could be no alteration, and therefore nothing (including time) would ever come to be: so the antithesis is proven. Reason makes equal claim to each proof, since they are both correct, so the question of the limits of time must be regarded as meaningless.

I suspect my own approach is a dumbing down of Kant’s loftier and more metaphysical intentions, but I think of the antinomies as illustrating the limits of reason. We always think that if we can only nut something out properly we’ll get the answer.  Well the antinomies suggest that there are limitations to that – that you may begin with perfectly good concepts, or concepts that are helpful in one domain and end up tangled in paradoxes. Hegel regarded them as an example of the way in which too much wit outwits itself.

And disciplines other than philosophy have pursued their own logic, helpful as it may be in in making practical disciplinary progress all the way to a point where they end in paradoxes. Here are two examples.

The search for logical foundations of mathematics ended in tears, or at least in paradoxes, like Russell’s paradox. The set of all sets that are not members of themselves both contains itself and doesn’t contain itself. Later Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem demonstrated that “For any formal effectively generated theory T including basic arithmetical truths and also certain truths about formal provability, T includes a statement of its own consistency if and only if T is inconsistent.” (Wikipedia)

Economics too has its antinomies, though in a far more prosaic way than those above. Perfect competition is probably the best example. Perfect competition is a mathematical construct which takes to its logical conclusion the tendencies that competition produces in the market – leading to price equalling marginal cost.  But the thing that we end up with is a place where there is no incentive to compete!. For the market price is given – so one produces as much as one wants to and then no more. One gains nothing by taking someone else’s market.  Firms may as well co-operate as compete, but there’s no incentive for them to co-operate either as each producer is at the technology frontier, so they have nothing to offer each other. And being at the technology frontier they have no incentive to innovate, and if there was a need to innovate, their production would generate no surplus with which to invest to innovate. For this reason, perfect competition also fails to do one of the most central things that competition does in the real world, which is to motivate search – the search for better ways of doing things.

There are plenty of other antinomies in the world . . . .

Paul Krugman recently gave a speech, Mr Keynes and the Moderns on several aspects of the legacy of the General Theory, including both the ways it has been read, and how it has been ignored. The latter is a recurring theme after the financial crisis as it became apparent that a great deal of the criticism of “Keynesianism” and aggregate demand analysis (and thus fiscal and monetary policy) was instead aimed at caricatures and strawmen and based on simple and long dead fallacies.

The following passage, describing the post Monetarist era of the Independent Central Bank caught my eye.

And this worked for a while – roughly speaking from 1985 to 2007, the era of the Great Moderation. It worked in part because the political insulation of central banks also gave them more than a bit of intellectual insulation, too. If we’re living in a Dark Age of macroeconomics, central banks have been its monasteries, hoarding and studying the ancient texts lost to the rest of the world. Even as the real business cycle people took over the professional journals, to the point where it became very hard to publish models in which monetary policy, let alone fiscal policy, matters, the research departments of the Fed system continued to study counter-cyclical policy in a relatively realistic way

I feel he is talking of American Economics rather than Economics. My reaction a few years ago was close to Joshua Gans’ in this 2008 post. I was taken by how much of the econocratic establishment in Australia both had a sufficient understanding of AD macro, and also that such a large proportion swung behind fiscal policy. The old fallacies were still around of course, but they didn’t seem to be coming from people who should be expected to know better. If the Western Empire in America had descended into a dark age, we were at least in Byzantium.

But why is this so?[fn1] Why were we having a debate about how much was too much and how well what was spent whilst in American economics there was a dispute about whether recessions, involuntary unemployment and output gaps even existed? (Continued)

Last Christmas, instead of sending gifts to its clients, the multi-billion dollar conglomerate that is Peach Home Loans sent them donations to Women for Women in Africa in lieu thereof. I found out about it because a wonderful man, Peter Toms, who used to be the Principal of my son’s Primary School was increasingly involved with them in his retirement from the school.  So the money we used to pay the Fred Hollows Foundation went there.

Not being a slouch as a charity, they followed up with an end of financial year fund raising letter.  It consisted of the information below and the invitation to contribute.

So I thought I’d throw it open to all and offer to match any contributions Troppodillians make.  So here’s the deal.  Download this pdf for guidance on how to make a donation. If you intend making a donation, please comment with the amount below, or if you don’t want to do that, email me on ngruen at gmail and let me know how much you donated. If you don’t want to do that, please email Marguerite Anne Ryan who is on ma DOT ryan AT bigpond DOT net DOT au with your name and where to email a tax invoice to.  Donations are tax deductible. (Continued)

How persistent are cultural traits? This paper uses data on anti-Semitism in Germany and finds continuity at the local level over more than half a millennium. When the Black Death hit Europe in 1348-50, killing between one third and one half of the population, its cause was unknown. Many contemporaries blamed the Jews. Cities all over Germany witnessed mass killings of their Jewish population. At the same time, numerous Jewish communities were spared. We use plague pogroms as an indicator for medieval anti-Semitism. Pogroms during the Black Death are a strong and robust predictor of violence against Jews in the 1920s, and of votes for the Nazi Party. In addition, cities that saw medieval anti-Semitic violence also had higher deportation rates for Jews after 1933, were more likely to see synagogues damaged or destroyed in the ‘Night of Broken Glass’ in 1938, and their inhabitants wrote more anti-Jewish letters to the editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer.

From ”Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany”, by Nico Voigtlaender, Hans-Joachim Voth, NBER Working Paper No. 17113