I’m pleased to say that we have taken possession of several container loads of these items which Ken has suggested using as prizes instead of the Troppo Mercedes.
Anne Summers’ essay on Andrew Bolt in The Monthly is free access for 24 hours. A key extract:
Media and politics today are less a contest of ideas and more a continuing conflict of opinion. “Bolt’s genius is that he’s always finding the fault lines and finding an argument,” Lachlan Harris, press secretary to Kevin Rudd when he was prime minister, told me. The resultant toxicity of our politics is only going to get worse. “In 2004, we estimated that people were getting 70% of political information from news outlets, television or papers,” says Harris. “Now it is flipped: most people get most of their political information from opinion, from a medium that is dependent upon division of opinion.”
Although Bolt describes himself as a conservative columnist, he is less a William Safire than a Billy Graham. He is like an evangelist, providing fixed points of reference for people who feel confused in a world where certainty has eroded. He tells people what they should be thinking – and hordes of followers lap it up.
Like the Fox jocks, Bolt tends to stick to just a few themes – “no stolen generation”, “honour the Churches”, “frown on divorce”, “crack down on welfare”, “stop the cult of victimhood”, “stop immigration”, “end multiculturalism” – and to hammer them over and over. Top of the list in the right-wing songbook, though, is the non-existence of climate change. Bolt is utterly obdurate when it comes to the subject. “I thought he wrote too much about climate change,” says Bruce Guthrie, “but he was immoveable.”
The OECD are entertaining the readers of their newsletter by asking them whether the worst is over.
Apparently only 10% of people don’t know. That’s one informed readership. Nothing like having a few clairvoyants on board.
| Yes | 18% |  |
| No | 72% |  |
| Don’t know | 10% | |
At CDU Law Online – Colourful lawyers, police and the media (the Adam Houda wrongful arrest saga).
In light of Paul Frijter’s sketpticism about the possibility of co-ordinated international action on carbon emissions and his recent offer of a wager on the outcome of international action, I thought I’d try to put the economic problem into some of the language of International Relations. After all, the problem is international, and Paul’s wager should extend to specialists therein who are willing to take it. How would the question be framed in IR.
The problem in economics terms is that of a global public good, or tragedy of the global commons. We have a resource that is not privately owned (or can not be owned) such as a village commons, fishery or atmosphere. If we assume homo economicus, or rational self interested agents then the resource will be depleted or polluted. The agents will derive private benefit in doing so, but the costs of their actions are shared amongst everyone and are therefore not taken into account. The aggregate result is not good, but this does not affect the decisions made by each individual. The desire to free ride prevents collective action. To achieve a optimal outcome when agents are homo economicus and the resource cannot be privatised, it is necessary for an external coercive power (i.e the state) to take action and ensure each person takes into account the costs of their decisions.
Now lets move to the international sphere. Instead of individual people as agents, we have sovereign states. When we assume that these states are acting only in regard to their own self interest (as civitas economicus, to coin a barbarism) we get something very similar to the assumptions of Realism. In realism the international system is anarchy because of the absence of a global state to enforce laws. The atmosphere cannot be taken under the ownership of a single sovereign state. Self interested states will free ride, and there is nothing to force them to do otherwise. Thus under the basic assumptions of rational choice/realism, the global commons will be depleted. (Continued)
Seen any great blog posts recently? Written something you want to share?
I’m a bit tied up today so this week’s missing link belongs to you. Post your links in the comments thread.
From the Sydney Morning Herald this morning.
Paris-style train plan for city
Jacob Saulwick October 6, 2011
RAIL services on the north shore, inner west, Bankstown, Hurstville and north-west lines would operate as single-deck, high-frequency metro-style trains under a plan being drawn up by Transport NSW.
An image is then captioned “Change for the better”. “Paris style” is one way to describe using single deck carriages to increase service frequency. For another way we turn to the Sydney Morning Herald of three summers ago.
Secret plan for return of red rattlers
Linton Besser Transport Reporter
November 14, 2008THE CityRail network is to be converted to single-deck trains – which could cost $5 billion in signalling work and billions more for new trains – despite a $9.5 billion contract for 626 double-deck carriages that are yet to be delivered.
Forty-four years since the first double-deck trains arrived in Sydney, the Transport Minister, David Campbell, has confirmed to the Herald secret plans to begin buying single-deck trains.
The decades old, deafeningly noisy diesel machines where the doors could be opened mid journey were returning because new trains might be single-deck, and it’s a secret plan. Thankfully the plan is now Paris Style instead.
I really do feel for the pubic servants who put in all the hard work trying to develop good policy, or ministers that make good faith attempts to implement it. Here substantially the same idea is squeezed through vastly different prisms and given vastly different treatment, by the same “quality” newspaper. I don’t know whether it’s because of the journos mood, or an attempt to appeal to audiences prejudices about the capability of government or a no sacked subeditor. If a paper can have a news section that verges so dramatically in the portrayal of a single policy, it’s not a quality paper.
But I guess that quality transport coverage now merely means “We didn’t attempt to ruin the minister’s private life over a personal vendetta”.
I attended the Federal Government’s Tax Forum in the last two days which was quite worthwhile.
I was supposed to have two goes at the ‘inner circle’ where you got to talk, but one of these two goes was subject to Julia Gillard not wanting a go. Turned out – on the question of personal tax she did want a go, so I didn’t get to take her seat – she did. Anyway the people in the inner circle were the ones engaged by the facilitators but as a consolation prize they threw to me on super.
I said that we should both walk and chew gum and that as a consequence as we were increasing the amont of compulsory super we should also allow people as they first began saving in their 20s and 30s to access their super to meeting their very first major investment need – a deposit on their house.
I also said that this would be a lot better than the Mickey Mouse scheme for a housing deposit the government had set up. And that further, since we were looking for savings, when one did this it would be a good time go get rid of the First Home Owners’ Scheme. Anyway, it was all I said. Shortly afterward I was rung by James Massola who said he wanted to write it up. He asked if I helped put together the super scheme back in the old days. I told him I was in the Treasurer’s Office when it was happening so if he wanted to say something regarding that, he could say that, but not that I was otherwise involved.
Anyway, entertainment is a higher priority than anything else so James story came out with the customary up beat reporting and in the bold print introducing the story . . . well I ended up being “a Keating-era economics adviser who helped devise Australia’s super plan”. Being a generally quite nice person and the furthest thing from a conspiracy theorist short of someone with a lobotomy, I suspect a stuff up – well not exactly a stuff up a slip-shod piece of subbing.
The text that got it wrong was the introductory bolded text. I’m guessing that the subbie either extracted it or wrote it cold from the article. And who cares if it slightly changes – ie makes up – a fact? This is a small price to pay for a bit more egging of the pud.
Then it got a little more egg in Adelaide Now. “GENERATION Y should be allowed to use their superannuation savings as a deposit for a house, according to the man who helped devise Australia’s current super scheme.
Anyway, for the record, I didn’t help devise Australia’s current super scheme.
My blogging time over the last few days has been absorbed by creating a “social media presence” for my employer CDU Law School. It involves not only a blog but also Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn facilities. It’s been something of a struggle to convince the powers-that-be that it’s a good idea but we finally achieved it. We’re even employing a consultant to teach us how to link them together to maximum benefit, given that my knowledge of Facebook, Twitter etc is fairly scanty because I’ve tended mostly to steer clear of them (apart from a desultory effort at using Twitter as the vehicle for a short-lived revival of Missing Link).
Anyway, this time a group of law academics has decided to share the load of maintaining a flow of blog posts and tweets, with admin staff moderating comment box activity. Accordingly with a bit of luck the whole thing might be sustainable.
I will probably mostly post over at CDU Law Online for the next couple of weeks at least, with links here at Troppo. Thus I’m drawing attention to a post I wrote today titled Catgate Unhinged. It’s worth a read IMHO, and I’d also value any feedback readers may have on the overall site. Feel free to post a comment too; no-one has as yet. Some of you might also be interested in subscribing to the Twitter feed which aims at abstracting a wide range of legal stories and cases each day.
The political fight over climate change policies continues to rage in our parliament, with the shadow minister for Climate Action apparently threatening a double dissolution of parliament if that is what it would take to repeal the current policies. The deeper question for analysts in the background is whether emission policies are a political feasibility, not just at the world level but even within Australia.
Some public commentators believe that reducing carbon emissions is possible and that we are on the right way with the current policies. Others, like me, see carbon emission policies as a political dead end and advocate geo-engineering and adaption. Hope versus realism one might say. Endless debates full of emotions and hot air ensue, yet how can an outsider tell who is right?
In the best of Aussie traditions, I propose a set of gentlemen’s wagers. For each one, the stake is 1000 AUS to a favoured charity (mine is Amnesty International). The propositions[1] which I offer to any Australian scientist active in the climate change debate are:
Conditions: first come, first served; names are made public; scientists active in the debate only; I win if and only if, measured in 2021, the proposition holds; disputes to be settled by ESA peers; offers close end of October 2011.
Proposition one should appeal to Labor politicians who write flowery speeches about how the government’s emissions policies are good policies that are going to work. I am calling those policies symbolic wastes of time that are not going to achieve anything substantial, like delivering our promises. The bet is on domestic emissions because there is some chance we will pay other countries to pretend they are reducing their emissions, which should not count.
Proposition two is a judgment on world developments and is a challenge to anyone who believes serious international cooperation to reduce emissions is going to happen. Note that there are various non-political events that could deliver the outcome: a major world recession or a technological breakthrough could also tilt emissions down, so one gets several bites at the cherry.
Proposition 3 is a direct challenge to those who believe Australia is serious or will become serious about carbon emission reductions: the whole point of emission trading schemes is to get to a situation where we stop digging up our fossil fuels and leave them unburnt in the ground. The wager is that neither Australia nor the world is going to actually do this.
Why am I offering these wagers? Because I have found that scientists often dodge the question of whether their policies are politically feasible. They debate on the basis of the policies they want to see succeed rather than on the basis of what could succeed. The arguments are thus emotional, involving the intricacies of climate science, or how we owe it to the next generation to do something. Yet, precisely when you truly believe the doomsday scenarios and our inter-generational obligations, you need a calm look at what is politically feasible in this world: whoever thinks carbon emissions policies are not going to work given the political realities of this world, owes it to the next generation to say so and move on to advocating things that might work. If those emotionally defending current policies believe their own words, they should be brave enough to take up the offered wagers.
I would advocate more bets on this debate and others debates in which the number of participants is too small to sustain a commercial betting market. Bets are an open signal to the public as to where the balance of probabilities lies on complex questions. They are a quick way to force scientists to stop posturing and have a calm look at the political realities of the world, which in turn should help to focus the policy debate on what is workable.
Besides, Australia is the betting capital of the world and we should make that national trait work to our benefit.
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