Club Troppo

I paid a visit to Catallaxy earlier today after my Google reader informed me that Rafe Champion had awarded me and Jason Soon something called the HL Mencken Award. Although it’s evidently not intended ironically, I was a bit taken aback given that my last interaction with Rafe involved threatening to sue him for defamation for falsely accusing me of conspiring to secretly alter a blog post about global warming.

In any event that seems to be ancient history now.  Rafe even graciously apologised, while I’ve restored his commenting access here at Troppo (a magnanimous impulse I may live to regret next time we host a global warming thread).

While I was over there, I noticed that some of the Catallaxians seem to have a bee in their collective bonnet about the constitutional validity of the Gillard government’s appointment of former Treasury head Ken Henry as a special adviser to the Prime Minister under Constitution s 67.  See this post by Sinclair Davidson and this one and this one by Samuel J.

I’m not at all sure why they’re worried about it.  Presumably Henry is seen as a class traitor for taking a job with Juliar.

In any event the discussion provoked my interest because I’d never looked closely at s 67 before. Samuel J’s argument appears to be that s 67 should be regarded as a transitional provision whose effect was spent once the first Public Service Act was enacted in 1902.  He appears to rest that argument mostly on the introductory words “Until the Parliament otherwise provides, …” .  However those words also appear in s 96 (Financial assistance to States) and no-one argues that the Commonwealth no longer enjoys the power to make grants to the States under it.  It’s certainly true that section 41 (Right of electors of States) was held to be a transitional provision whose effect was spent once the Commonwealth Parliament met and enacted the first comprehensive electoral legislation to provide for the franchise for federal elections.  But that’s essentially because it was clear that that was the Founding Fathers intention.

By contrast, it is abundantly clear that the Founding Fathers did NOT intend s 67 to be a mere transitional provision.  See the relevant part of the 1897 Convention Debates starting at page 916. As the ANU publication Public Sector Employment in the Twenty-First Century relevantly observes:

(Continued)

The ABC’s Australia Talks program ran a show this week about the troubles of the Australian book industry. Its starting point was that the local bookselling and book publishing industry is in a heap of trouble. Not for the first time, the program did a deal of hand-wringing about the current state of affairs. On its bad days, at least, it really ought to be called Australia Frets.

Few could argue with this particular show’s basic premise.  Online book sales and e-publishing threaten book printing and book publishing. Like many people, I started buying books online in the 1990s – old books, niche books, cheap books. And like many people, I’ve now begun using Amazon’s Kindle e-book system. Amazon has 80 per cent of the e-book market. The Kindle format is annoyingly proprietary and rights-managed but incredibly convenient.

You can see where this is going, for me and others. I have a huge wall of books at home here which I rather like. It saddens me a little, but I will simply not be adding to my collection at such a rate in the future.

But then: so what? Saddle-makers aren’t doing as well as they used to, either. The Australia Talks discussion seemed to hint that the move to digital sales would rob authors of money, but never produced much evidence. Meanwhile, it gave very short shrift to the possibility that electronic publishing might help Australian authors get their ideas and creativity out to the rest of the world. It gave less attention still to the idea that cheaper books might help Australians compete in a global knowledge economy. It gave pretty much no time at all to the notion that an open society and digital technology allow ideas and creativity to flow more freely today than ever before.

This is the same lack of imagination and sheer spinelessness that bedevils the newspaper debate, and that Ian Rogers and I have opposed in our submission to the Independent Media Inquiry. It’s the foolish fear that the moment some familiar artefact disappears – printed book, printed newspaper – people will lose all desire to read, to think, to ask questions about their world. In my experience, people are better and more reliable than that.

The good news is that this as more people use the new technologies and channels, the success stories are piling up. The Australia Talks program’s comments section featured a telling story from an Australian author:

I am the author of 10 books. My books have sold to major foreign publishers and I was able to write full-time. But my disappointment was with the marketing of my work.  The covers too were terrible.

In the last year I have converted all my books into e-books and created my own covers that are a huge improvement on those supplied by the major publishers I was originally published by. I am also responsible for my own marketing and feel so much more in control of my own career. I don’t receive opaque royalty statements that even my agent admitted she couldn’t follow. So instead of relying on publishers who are always looking for the ‘next big thing’ instead of developing writers they already have, I can see with one click how my sales are going. – and I’m delighted to say that my career is flying again and I can access huge markets.

I can only say- thank you Amazon.

Update: Charlie Stross nicely describes Amazon’s strategy in book publishing. Summary: Jeff Bezos wants to crush competitors, and he has a strategy for doing it.

(Regardless of what Charlie says, we probably do need some sort of DRM system if authors are to publish ebooks and be paid for their work. As Charlie notes, there is ultimately no foolproof DRM system for books, or anything else. This is why thrillers are usually offered as e-books, while programming and IT titles frequently are not.)

This made me laugh

White Ribbon Day: "In an afternoon in Montreal on December 6th 1989, a man massacred 14 of his female classmates. From this horrific action, a nation was brought to the forefront of an issue that had been severely underreported for too long."Lip Magazine.

"White Ribbon Day promotes change by highlighting the positive role that men can play. It encourages all men across the world to take an active stance against violence against women. This Friday, 25 November, is White Ribbon Day, a day when men say it is not okay to use violence against women, when men speak out to change the attitudes and behaviours which allow violence against women to occur and when taking action to address violence against women is celebrated, supported and encouraged." Andrew Leigh.

Louis Althusser and socialist strategy: "Althusser’s career ended in a squalid tragedy when, under the influence of a mental illness that had grown more intense over the years, he strangled his wife, Hélène." Lenin’s Tomb.

Issue of Violence Divides Occupy Protesters: "Is there a place for violence in the Occupy movement?" asks Sayre Quevedo at Turnstyle.

Violence and disruptive power: "We understand the sheepishness about speaking of violence in social movements" writes Lenin in a post on Occupy and disruptive power. "It is not a comforting or politically sympathetic thought that popular violence has been productive; that without it, unjust systems would not have been overturned."

Martin Luther King and non-violent protest: "When is violence justified as a response to manifest and apparently immovable injustice? My answer, with Martin Luther King is: Never, or almost never." John Quiggin.

Pepper spray parodies: When the Lieutenant John Pike used pepper spray against protesters at University of California, Davis, photos of the incident quickly became raw material for satirists. Shane Greenstein at Digitopoly. and tigtog at Hoyden about town have more.

Structural Violence and the US health care system: "The subjective violence of a personal attack, of war, terrorism, or torture is easy to see and to condemn. Structural violence is less visible, more subtle and therefore harder to critique and change. The structural violence of the health-care system in the United States violates distributive justice." Valerie Elverton Dixon, God’s Politics.

Here’s a paragraph I wrote about fifteen years ago.

The culture of economic expertise places inadequate weight on integrating insights from multiple perspectives, that it frequently places an unreasonably high ‘burden of proof’ on heterodox views, and that it has a penchant for spelling out the normative implications of its analysis by way of ‘peremptory rules’ which narrow the scope for dialogue.

This is just a sketch of a post, because I don’t have time for more, but for some time I’ve wanted to put down a marker about one of the ways in which results from Kaggle are instructive. The winners of Kaggle competitions often win not by trying to build the One True Model of the phenomena they’re trying to model, but rather by building a large number of models all of which have some explanatory power and which are independent of each other and then aggregating their insights. Random forests approaches often perform very well. One might call it a ‘wisdom of algorithmic crowds’ approach.

In any event, this is the antithesis of much economic modelling which involves reaching for the One True Model and then parameterising it.

I was reminded of this by David Colander’s latest piece urging humility on economists (pdf). His proposal? That instead of thinking of themselves as analogous to dentists (which Keynes suggested) economists should think of themselves as engineers:

An engineer’s approach to modeling such a complex system as the macro economy would likely focus much more on statistical models and methods of pulling patterns out of the data. It would explore a wide variety of formal models to gain analytic insight, and then would integrate the many variety of models with the statistical models to interpret the patterns. That would involve a fundamentally different way of doing macro and of thinking about macro problems. Similarly, with micro. Economists focus much of their applied micro policy discussion on Pareto optimal solutions even though we know that all actual policies will violate Pareto optimality. We can contort our micro policy models designed to provide Pareto optimal solutions to provide insight into non-Pareto optimal solutions, but, generally, that contortion comes at a cost. It means that we spend less time discussing other models that betting fit not Pareto optimal solutions, but “reasonable person solutions” that more closely reflect society’s value judgments. An engineering applied microeconomics would likely have an entire branch devoted to measuring society’s value judgments and integrating those judgments into applied policy instruments. Our scientific applied micro leaves the topic almost totally undiscussed.

Quite.

Other required reading on the point is this paper entitled “Identification Problems in the Social Sciences and Life”.

I made the latter point in a discussion of discursive collapse a while back.

Adelaide’s “Festival of Ideas” last month featured a useful discussion of the mining industry’s contribution to the economy, since replayed on the ABC program The National Interest.

Towards the end there was a brief discussion of how mining damages prime farming land. Asked an audience member: “How does farming start again on land that has been desecrated by lots of open-pit mines or coal gas seam mining?” Economics journalist Paul Cleary, now also a researcher at the ANU, responded by agreeing, calling it “heartbreaking” that some farmers had sold out to mining companies – “and they have sold out for three times the value because they’ve got huge debts, and it is heartbreaking to see those people leaving their land”.

I’m a fan of Cleary, who has a fine history of picking the right issues on which to go against the prevailing wisdom. And his comments drew warm applause from the audience.

But I found this whole line of inquiry puzzling. Yes, mining causes environmental damage. Yes, it can cause severe damage, notably when mine waste interacts with naturally-occurring water. Yes, coal-seam gas poses a bunch of special risks, and we need to find out whether its benefits are worth the potential damage. But overall, the scale of the damage that ensues from the typical mine seems relatively low compared with the scale of damage resulting from farming, for a given unit of GDP. (Note that I’m using relatively in its true sense, to imply a comparison rather than an absolute level.)

Farming’s great environmental impact is simple – habitat destruction. Forget climate change for a minute here: habitat destruction seems a more urgent problem. As ecologist Daniel Simberloff wrote a few years ago in American Scientist, “by far the major single cause of recent species extinction and current endangerment is habitat destruction”. Simberloff is a pioneer of sophisticated statistical approaches in ecology, famed for bringing a new mathematical rigour to the field. I could be wrong, but I think he understands the relative quantities and I don’t think his position is very controversial amongst ecologists.

And the simple reality is that farms take up a lot more space than mines for a given unit of output. I don’t have figures to hand, but the difference is fairly huge. Mining doesn’t destroy much habitat, because mines, even big mines, aren’t that big. Stand on the edge of the pit at Yallourn, say, and you can see a pretty big hole. But cast your eyes out to the horizon, and most of what you see is farmland cut out of the bush.

In short, mining seems to provide much greater economic benefits per unit of damage than farming. And awful though it sounds, in a world of massive habitat destruction, we need to think about how to get the biggest economic bang for the smallest environmental damage. So all other things being equal, environmentalists ought to prefer mining to farming.

And if a bunch of miners buy up farmland, my bet is that the economic value per unit of environmental damage rises sharply. On top of that, the farmers at least walk off their land with some money. Their debts wouldn’t be any less crippling if miners weren’t there to buy them out.

I’ve spent a lot more time on marginal farmland than I have on minesites, and I don’t know the literature as well as I’d like to. What am I missing here?

The ethics of the second oldest profession – new post by me at CDU Law and Business Online.

Apparently some US journalism academic named Tanni Haas  has written a book called Making it in the Political Blogosphere: The World’s Top Political Bloggers Share the Secrets to Success .  I’m not interested in the subject per se, because I long ago concluded that the recipe was both obvious and inherently boring: adopt a predictable, aggressively tribal stance that will attract a loyal audience wanting to have its prejudices confirmed in a way that allows members to see themselves as the true cognoscenti without ever actually needing to think, question or doubt.

I’m much more interested in the comments of a couple of “top political bloggers” about the greatly increased tribalism evident today by comparison with the early days of the political blogosphere.   Kevin Drum, for example, says:

When I started out, there was much more of a tendency to engage with the other side.  Liberals and conservatives would attack each other, but we’d also engage with each other in at least a moderately serious way.  Today, you get almost none of that.  There’s very little engagement between left and right.  And what engagement there is tends to be pure attack.  There’s no real conversation at all.  That’s a difference that I think professionalization has brought about.  The political blogosphere has become more tribal.

Tyler Cowen agrees with the observation but has a slightly different explanation:

A good point, but I blame professionalization less than Kevin does.  Maybe some of us are simply are a bit sick of each other, and the accumulated slights and misunderstandings weigh more heavily on our emotional responses than does the feeling of generosity from working together in the same “office.”  I predict that a given experienced blogger is likely to feel more sympathy for new bloggers, but on average I doubt if the new bloggers are better or more tolerant.

Which means we mostly have ourselves to blame.

As I’ve already foreshadowed, in my view it’s unquestionably true that that there’s much less “inter-tribal” communication than there was when I first started blogging around 2002.  However I’m less sure of the reasons than Drum or Cowen.  Troppo tends even now to retain a greater level of “inter-tribal” communication than most other Australian political blogs, but it’s certainly at a much lower level than it was years ago.  I must confess I don’t miss visits from the Bolt/Blair attack dogs or their extreme left equivalents, but there were also at least a few occasions when interesting conversations actually occurred.  I have always regarded the ideals of deliberative democracy championed by Habermas and others as a tad naive, but I ‘m still attracted to the notion of “agonism” (as opposed to antagonism) propounded by Mouffe and Laclau:

(Continued)

With the Media Inquiry in full swing and the Greens’ Bob Brown complaining loudly about News’s lack of fairness and accuracy, now might be a good time to travel back in time 20 years. Let’s visit another era when a powerful paper was unashamedly boosting one side of politics – the left.

In 1992, Joan Kirner’s government was in its dying days: state government debt had ballooned, and many ministers seemed frequently to be denying reality. One newspaper, however, resisted the consensus that change was needed. The Age stuck by Kirner, took its initiatives seriously, derided the government’s critics and Opposition Leader Jeff Kennett in particular. Some of its best journalists, on beats like national politics and business, looked on in despair. But the state reporters and commentators would not be swayed. Balance consisted of criticising the Kirner government from the left as much as from the right.

The Age had many fine journalists in that era, but working on state issues there sometimes had an air of unreality. When Kennett won the 1992 election in a landslide, some of the paper’s reporters seemed not quite to believe it had happened. Only one of the paper’s Melbourne-based political journalists – the cheerfully professional Sue Neales – appeared to have cultivated contacts within the Coalition. ALP reformers like John Brumby thought the Cain/Kirner government had stuffed up; quite a few at The Age did not. On my third day working for the paper in Melbourne in 1993, I turned down a request from a news editor to write an opinion piece explaining that the new government’s budgetary tightening was unnecessary and dangerous. When Kennett’s initiatives succeeded – he ran one of the most successful privatisation processes ever – many at The Age seemed determined to ignore them. Steve Bracks and John Brumby knew better; on assuming government, they kept the best of the Kennett government reforms firmly in place.

Alan Kohler, appointed editor in 1992 to bring the paper back to a more centrist line, struggled against the power of the paper’s welded-on sympathy for the left. Kohler’s successor, Bruce Guthrie, an aggressive newsman, made Kennett the target of much of his aggression.

The point is not that The Australian’s frenzied campaigning against the current federal government is warranted. (I don’t think it is, and neither do many journalists at The Australian.) It’s not even that The Age’s approach in the early 1990s damaged democracy (the News-owned Herald-Sun was pro-Kennett, and frequently manically so, throughout this period). The point is simply that newspapers have campaigned against governments at regular intervals in Australian history, and campaigned at least as hard as The Australian is campaigning against the federal government now. If a newspaper or an owner has a duty to be even-handed, no-one noticed in the early 1990s. Certainly not Bob Brown.

New post by me at CDU Law and Business Online.