Club Troppo

Well blow me down. If it isn’t Jevons in the Powerhouse Museum coming here as the son of a bankrupt family and making good as Assayer to the Sydney mint, becoming the first photojournalist in Australia, discovering the El-Nino effect, writing an ethnography of the uncouth of Sydney Town before hightailing it back to the UK where he reinvented economics, built a computer out of wood and promptly drowned while on a recreational dip, it’s Malthus.

In this very interesting edition of Hindsight historian Alison Bashford was thumbing through Chapter 3 of the second 1803 (hugely enlarged) edition of Malthus’s ‘Essay on the Principle of Population’ she found references to the Hawkesbury which she initially took to be references to something British. It turned out that a lot of Malthus’s second edition was preoccupied with the population practices of Sydney’s aboriginal population. AS the blurb says

Alison Bashford began to realise that there was a great deal more in Malthus’s thesis than had been assumed-his study of the New World raised questions about colonialism, occupation, land, and how we share it- deeply moral and enduring concerns, which the contemporary world continues to grapple with.

Definitely a good listen. Malthus hated slavery too. Like Smith before him and Mill after him. I’m not too sure Ricardo cared too much, but perhaps someone can set me straight on that.

The Senate Economic References Committee has this week released its findings on the supermarket milk discounting war. The main findings, blessedly, were that cheaper milk really is good for consumer,s and that there was nothing obviously awry with the competitive market that gets milk to them:

Dairy farmers do not appear worse off from the growth in private label milk that has occurred over time. While there may be some short-term uncertainty due to changes in private label milk contractual arrangements between the major supermarkets and the processors, this appears to be a separate issue. The ACCC’s 2008 report concluded that the lower price of private label milk over time has appeared to shift margin away from processors (with benefits for both the major supermarkets and consumers), while not resulting in a reduced farm gate price.

It’s amazing that farmers’ complaints on this issue were ever taken seriously. Indeed, the obvious takeaway from the report is that people in the farming business are all too ready to point to economic and regulatory issues that don’t actually exist.

Were farm groups embarrassed by any of this? Not a bit. They reacted as they so frequently do, posing at the same time as rugged individualists and pitiable victims of capitalist forces beyond their control.

Given the evidence, we would do better to employ a lot more scepticism when farm groups make statements on economic issues.  They played a decent role early in the campaign to remove tariff barriers, but since then have been a source of much lousy policy for a quarter of a century.

Supporters of decent policy for the Murray Darling Basin will be able to cite plenty of examples where farm group have taken unjustified control of policy. But as a public policy disaster, probably nothing in Australia will ever top the farmers’ self-regulated wool price scheme, which so many woolgrowers believed in long after it became perhaps the worst financial disaster ever to hit the country.

If any other group in Australian society had perpetrated such a fiasco, people would still be making jokes about it. Yet I haven’t hear anyone so much as mention the wool price disaster since about 1995.

No-one hesitates to criticise unions or big business for lousy policy ideas – of which, it must be said, they have plenty. But farmers, despite a long history of backing dumb ideas, seem somehow off-limits.

Tell me what I’m missing here.

Un-occupy: Nearly 70 students walked out of Greg Mankiw’s economics class at Harvard on Wednesday afternoon. According to the Harvard Crimson’s Jose Delreal, "The walkout was meant to be a show of support for the ‘Occupy’ movement’s principal criticism that conservative economic policies have increased income inequality in the United States." Sinclair Davidson comments.

What did they miss? "Ironically, the topic for today’s lecture is the distribution of income, including the growing gap between the top 1 percent and the bottom 99 percent", writes Greg Mankiw.

Are you in Australia’s top 1 percent? "According to the ATO’s tax statistics, if you earned $248 192 or more in 2008-09, you were part of the top 1%", writes Matt Cowgill.

Conservatives and freedom: "The Tea Party alliance between libertarians and conservatives gives the misleading impression that conservatives care about individual freedom", writes the Philosopher’s Beard.

Why Will Wilkinson isn’t a liberal: "I’ve come to accept … that diffuse cultural forces, such as racism or sexism or nationalism or intergenerational poverty, can deprive an individual of her rightful liberty without any single person doing anything to violate her basic rights. This takes me a long way toward standard liberalism. But I find that my gut nevertheless leans right on issues of personal responsibility." Will Wilkinson at the Moral Sciences Club.

Keeping the state out of your bedroom: Libertarians say they want to keep the state out of your bedroom. John Quiggin doesn’t believe them.

Lying to ourselves: According to psychologists, "self-deception evolved so that we can effortlessly tell lies without getting caught." And that’s a good thing, says Chris Campbell.

Tim Blair on vegetarianism : Back in 2008 Tim Blair linked to a story claiming "Scientists have discovered that going veggie could be bad for your brain – with those on a meat-free diet six times more likely to suffer brain shrinkage." Sandy Szwarc wasn’t convinced.

Scientists explain Tim Blair: "You would think we would admire do-gooders who are truly motivated by morals, values and beliefs. But you would be wrong. Recent research compares the attitudes of meat eaters to vegetarians. Meat eaters don’t really like vegetarians. We think they judge us. So we make fun of them." Rita Handrich, The Jury Room.

Irrationality virus spreads to Australia: The Australian conservative movement is becoming infected by an irrationality virus, writes Harry Clarke. It’s "a development which threatens both its intellectual viability and our future."

Perhaps it’s the Christian roots of our civilisation. Perhaps it’s innate in many  of us, but I’ve never understood the business about to forgive is divine. It’s natural. Even if people have done really bad things, if you think they are genuinely sorry, your heart goes out to them. I think of people like LBJ saying (IIRC) “I guess the kids were right all along”, or what I fondly imagine was Alan McAlister’s mortification at his own racism. Anyway, here’s John Skully on how wrong he was.

Scully: Looking back, it was a big mistake that I was ever hired as CEO. I was not the first choice that Steve wanted to be the CEO. He was the first choice, but the board wasn’t prepared to make him CEO when he was 25, 26 years old.

They exhausted all of the obvious high-tech candidates to be CEO… Ultimately, David Rockefeller, who was a shareholder in Apple, said let’s try a different industry and let’s go to the top head hunter in the United States who isn’t in high tech: Gerry Roche.

They went and recruited me. I came in not knowing anything about computers. The idea was that Steve and I were going to work as partners. He would be the technical person and I would be the marketing person.

The reason why I said it was a mistake to have hired me as CEO was Steve always wanted to be CEO. It would have been much more honest if the board had said, “Let’s figure out a way for him to be CEO. You could focus on the stuff that you bring and he focuses on the stuff he brings.”

Remember, he was the chairman of the board, the largest shareholder and he ran the Macintosh division, so he was above me and below me. It was a little bit of a façade and my guess is that we never would have had the breakup if the board had done a better job of thinking through not just how do we get a CEO to come and join the company that Steve will approve of, but how do we make sure that we create a situation where this thing is going to be successful over time?

My sense is that when Steve left (in 1986, after the board rejected his bid to replace Sculley as CEO) I still didn’t know very much about computers.

My decision was first to fix the company, but I didn’t know how to fix companies and to get it back to be successful again.

All the stuff we did then were all his ideas. I understood his methodology. We never changed it. So we didn’t license the products. We focused on industrial design. We actually built up our own in-house design organization, which they have to this day. We developed the PowerBook… We developed QuickTime. All these things were built around Steve’s philosophy… It was all about sales and marketing and the evolution of the products.

All the design ideas were clearly Steve’s. The one who should really be given credit for all that stuff while I was there is really Steve.

I made two really dumb mistakes that I really regret because I think they would have made a difference to Apple. One was when we are at the end of the life of the Motorola processor… we took two of our best technologists and put them on a team to go look and recommend what we ought to do. (Continued)

I know you’re all on the edges of your seats about how Kaggle is going.

The answer is “very well”. We’ve just announced the closure of Series A funding.

And you can read all about it in the New York Times, the Independent or Gigaom.

Further information from our newsletter below the fold:  (Continued)

Games seem frivolous. They can stand as metaphors for life, but typically, the outcome of games doesn’t really matter. I wanted Collingwood to win it’s last game this year, but it didn’t and that’s that. Doesn’t matter. Still as I gradually realised when working on the Government 2.0 work in 2009, the element of play is critically important and not just to high level ‘brainstorming’ activity, but to seizing the opportunities for innovation of all kinds from major disruptive innovation to the most minor improvised improvements in the way things are being done.  That’s why I thought things like mashups were so wonderful – they are low cost ways of breaking things up, and inviting others into play with one’s assets (or copies of them while the ‘real’ ones remain on the official website or otherwise in the system somewhere.

And with games becoming so much more prominent in young people’s use of their time, it’s not surprising that educators are arguing that games teach a new kind of literacy. Gamification is all the rage in Silicon Valley. As Wikipedia explains, gamification is

The use of game design techniques^[1] and mechanics to solve problems and engage audiences. Typically gamification applies to non-game applications and processes (also known as “funware“)^[2], in order to encourage people to adopt them. Gamification works by making technology more engaging^[3], by encouraging users to engage in desired behaviors^[4], by showing a path to mastery and autonomy, and by taking advantage of humans’ psychological predisposition to engage in gaming.^[5] The technique can encourage people to perform chores that they ordinarily consider boring, such as completing surveys, shopping, filling out tax forms, or reading web sites.^[3]

Michael Neilsen’s new book on Reinventing Discovery has this to say about Foldit, a very clever gamification of the arduous task of figuring out how proteins fold  which has generated new scientific insights about the formation of proteins.

I was skeptical when I first heard of Foldit. it sounded like the dull educational computer cames I saw in school when I was growing up in the 1980s. But I downloaded the game and spent hours playing it over several days. . . . . People play the game because it’s good.  It has the compelling, addictive quality all good computer games have: a task that’s challenging but not impossible, instant feedback on how well you’re doing, and the sense that you’re always just one step away from improvement.” (p. 146.)

But you can argue that games are more important than that. (Continued)