Author Archives: Nicholas Gruen

SqueakyWheelOcrasy

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Just as almost anyone has a near veto power in a bureaucracy even if they don’t have much power, so the street theatre of outrage can have a powerful effect on politics even if the majority of people think that the minority putting on some show are way out of line. When things are really bad this is a very good thing. I expect most people thought that civil disobedience in the early days of the civil rights movement was ‘going too far’, but it achieved a lot.

And now we have all sorts of nonsense. As Greg Mankiw reports from the Harvard Crimson:

For a Statistics 104 final project, a group of students asked 1,035 undergraduates to gauge their impression of Occupy on a scale of one to ten, with ten being most positive. They found that the average ranking of Occupy Harvard was 2.84 out of 10.

Now Occupy Harvard might not achieve much, but civil disobedience almost always has highly undesirable aspects of social holdup, whether it’s a picket line (effectively turning the collective action of workers into property rights in their jobs) or truckies surrounding Parliament House and preventing others using the roads in defence of various subsidies implicit or otherwise. Yet very often it works for its instigators.

Is this good? Like most things in life, it’s got it’s good side – and its bad side. As Alvy Singer’s mother says to his father in Annie Hall “Have it your own way, the Atlantic Ocean is a better ocean than the Pacific Ocean”.

Multidimensional trust

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Seems like an important paper – which I’ve not read yet.

Trustworthy by Convention, By: M. Bigoni, S. Bortolotti, M. Casari, D. Gambetta, URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bol:bodewp:wp827&r=evo

Social life offers innumerable instances in which trust relations involve multiple agents. In an experiment, we study a new setting called Collective Trust Game where there are multiple trustees, who may have an incentive to coordinate their actions. Trustworthiness has also a strategic motivation, and the trusters’ decision depends upon their beliefs about the predominant convention with regard to trustworthiness. In this respect, the Collective Trust Games offers a richer pattern of behavior than dyadic games. We report that the levels of trustworthiness are almost thirty percentage points higher when strategic motivations are present rather than not. Higher levels of trustworthiness also led to higher levels of trust. Moreover, strategic motives appear as a major drive for trustees, comparable in size to positive reciprocity, and more important than concerns for equality.

Mac Book Air mini-review and power useage bleg

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Having promised myself that I’d buy a Mac when they brought out a netbook sized MacBook Air, I did just that about nine months ago. I got forced out of Macdom many yearsafter I began on a Mac in 1986 I’ve been meaning to write a review of my experience FWIW but haven’t got round to it.

In summary

  • I was quite surprised at how much I had to figure out in making the transition from Windows.  There are a surprisingly large number of small differences and when you’re used to one way of doing things it’s surprising how often one way of doing things needs to be unbaked into memory and something else baked in.
  • Steve Jobs’ famous arrogance is on display with far more things that can’t be changed and customised to your own preferences.
  • I expected to find the Apple software better designed, but it’s not. If anything – and this is now after nine odd months, I think it’s slightly worse. The Task Bar in Windows was always a snappy device, but I didn’t realise how good it was till I discovered the dock is definitely worse. If you’ve got lots of windows open the task bar lets you navigate to different windows quickly. On the Apple it’s usually two rather than one click away. Sounds like a small thing but it’s irritating.  Still perhaps there’s a way of doing it I don’t know of. So generally I’d rate the operating system somewhat inferior to Windows in terms of convenience and intuitiveness.
  • The trackpad in the Apple is seriously better than Windows. However this isn’t a big deal for me because I use external keyboard, screen and mouse most of the time.
  • The Apple hardware is lovely.
  • Ultimately my experience hasn’t made me, like many a baked on Apple fan. But I’ll probably keep with Apple for a funny reason. I can’t stand the Microsoft Office ‘ribbon’ which is compulsory in Office from Office 2007 on. Of course the best thing to do is to simply transition out of Office but unfortunately it’s impracticable given how much I have to interface with people using Office and Open Office won’t read Microsoft Office documents without formatting glitches. However Apple has managed to get Microsoft to do for its Apple variant what it should have done all along which is to provide menus at the same time as indulging it’s obsession with the ribbon. Anyway, that means that until Microsoft changes its policy in the Windows world, I’ll probably stick with Apple computers.
  • Which brings me to the main subject of this post.  Until a week ago, my battery lasted around 3 1/2 hours. Now it lasts around 1 1/2 hours.  I don’t know of any setting  I’ve changed. The fan seems to come on more though even when it’s not on the meter seems to show much less time is left in the battery than before.  Anyway, this all suggests that, like old copies of Windows, the OS degrades in efficiency over time and needs reinstallation from time to time – if so that’s another reason I’m not happy but there you are. 1 1/2 hours is enough for most plane rides. Any clues O Troppolishous ones as to how I can fix this? (And yes, I’ve checked the power settings and there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly unusual in there.)

Media managing all the way to oblivion

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I’m doing a fortnightly column for the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald and here is the first column. Of course the thing that’s missing from the column is how I think they should have handled fiscal policy - which would have involved not just more straightforward and confidently assertive communications from them but would also have introduced some independent scrutiny of fiscal policy. Anyway, in writing it I realised how much I enjoy this genre. Like a blog post, but I often slave and sweat over each paragraph just to get the ideas across as briefly as possible, and to make it as much of a pleasure to read as one can.

EVEN as the contrast between left and right fades in mainstream politics, politicians continue ideological warfare like lions eat red meat. But somehow left-leaning politicians have become vegetarians. And they’re being eaten alive by the carnivores of the species.

Deep in the psyche of the electorate, the right is dad and the left is mum. Seriously! The electorate instinctively feels that the right is better with money while the left is better at ”caring” things such as health and education. The left’s desperation to avoid the right’s stereotype of them as feckless spendthrifts sees them continually hamstrung in articulating their case. Seeking to appease our economic anxieties they buy into the right’s way of framing the issues. In the name of managing the news cycle they give up more and more political and ideological ground.

Thus, for instance, to allay electoral fears about rising debt, US President Barack Obama suggested that, since American families and businesses were tightening their belts, the government should do the same. This is nonsense on stilts. By the very logic of his stimulus (and Bush’s cash handouts before him), the whole point of deficit spending was to reverse or counterbalance a temporary lack of private spending. As Paul Krugman argues, one can forgive Obama for compromising on the policy, but not on the truth; not, that is, for casually adopting his opponents’ framing of the issues that gainsaid the whole point of the stimulus in the first place.

Australia’s economic circumstances are different. Partly because our stimulus worked so well and also because of the surging resource sector, our central bank hasn’t needed to cut its cash rate to near zero. So it hasn’t run out of conventional monetary ammunition like the US Fed. So unwinding our fiscal stimulus makes sense.

Yet our left-leaning politicians can’t take credit for their greatest achievement because they’re forever thrusting their little vegetarian heads into the lion’s jaws of their opponents’ framing of the issues.

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