If you are running a primary budget deficit (excluding interest payments), then as far as I see it default brings on the problems that you have been dealing with through the austerity package. If no one is willing to lend you money then your tax revenue and your spending have to coincide within a couple of months at least i.e. instant austerity.

Of course if you have your own currency then you can print money (to pay public servants and pensioners), but if it takes a couple of years to establish a separate currency, then you have a period of all the costs and none of the benefits of default.

Having said that, the same large sample will also amplify tiny defects in your experimental design. To measure small things you need equipment built to a better tolerance than what you are measuring. Frankly I don’t believe there is any intelligence test that can deliver such precise results… especially not on a one-dimensional axis when intelligence comes in many flavours.

I remember that infamous bell curve graph where various racial groups were compared using an intelligence test (you know, the one where the Asians were supposedly the smartest). Didn’t that get widely condemned? Does it mean the test is biased toward some particular result, or some other factor in influencing the outcome? There’s no way to tell. I strongly suspect there never will be a way to tell. As racial groups become more mixed by interbreeding it will only get more difficult to discover an answer, and perhaps pointless to try. Half-breeds tend to show better vigour than both their parents.

Ian Milliss wants to talk about prison statistics, well go to the land of incarceration, and checkout the stats for racial groups in prison vs racial groups in outside society. Does this prove genetic programming for violence? Or does it show blatant prejudice in the justice system? Could be either, could be both, you would need a controlled experiment to be able to figure that out.

I have one suggestion for an experiment (another of my randomized trials that would work but no one has the guts to discover the answer). Every defendant facing trial is given the option of volunteering to become an experiment subject. If they say “yes” then a random number is generated and their skin tone is adjusted by stage make-up to be randomly slightly darker or lighter than their real skin tone (not by a large amount, and done by professional artists so it looks real), or in some cases no adjustment is made. Then over time you correlate the random adjustment against trial outcome… for a large sample size if the make-up has no effect you would see a flat distribution when you plot the guilty/innocent percentages against the colour adjustment.

Obviously this adjustment needs to be kept secret from the court and the jury until after the trial, which should not be too difficult if you are careful not to go overboard with the adjustment.

1. How may of The Global Mail’s Australian articles couldn’t have been written by a Club Troppo blogger sitting at their desk?

Patrick says none. Does that figure of zero include Ellen Fanning’s fairly epic two-parter on power prices? The site definitely lacks ball-tearers, but to try to claim that it could all be replaced with blogs is just silly.

I refer that matter to Einstein.

However, the long run solution to their problem is their problem, and it cannot be anyone else’s to decide.

This report documents one study which looked at the external environmental costs not incorporated into packaging.

Table 5.2: Estimated price effect
of a container tax, 1989
prices (1993–94 prices)
container type tax in cents
2 litre HDPE bottle 0.15 (0.16)
375 ml aluminium can 0.02 (0.02)
600 ml refillable glass 0.11 (0.12)
1 litre one way glass 0.96 (1.03)
1 litre carton 0.11 (0.12)
2 litre PET bottle 0.26 (0.28)
Source: Hatch and Mules (1993)

Here’s the net resource depletion figures from Lateral Economics’ HALE Index (pdf)

Table 8: Calculating the value of net resource depletion
$ billion (real/volume terms) 00-
01
05-06 06-07 07-08 08-09 09-10
Land degradation -0.4 -0.4 -0.4 -0.4 -0.4 -0.4
plus Subsoil asset discoveries 2.2 4.8 6.1 n/a n/a n/a
less Subsoil asset depletions
20
-2.5 -4.3 -4.2 n/a n/a n/a
less Cost of mineral exploration 0.5 1.4 1.9 2.4 2.2 2.2
plus Consumption of Fixed
Capital (COFC) on mineral
exploration
-2.2 -2.3 -2.4 -2.5 -2.7 -2.8
equals Net resource depletion
adjustment
-2.3 -0.7 1.1 -0.3 -0.6 -1.05

Greenhouse is the only really serious issue, and in our index this is what we ended up concluding – at p. 30 of the same report linked to above.

7
Australia’s annual GDP for 2009-10 was $1,283 billion. Using our methodology, the net
present value of future climate change in 2009-10 would range from $731 billion under the
moderate warming (2-degree scenario) to $1,103 billion for unmitigated climate change. These
figures look extremely large, compared with annual GDP or GNP, but that is because we are
comparing a stock with a flow. The values we are looking at here are capital values or values of
the extent to which climate change might degrade our natural environment considered as an
asset. Such damage being done over the nearly 90 years to the end of the century would
equate to much smaller shares of annual GDP. For example, even in the unmitigated climate
change scenario, the negative effects of climate change would reduce annual GNP in 2025 by
1.0 per cent, increasing over time to reduce annual GNP in 2100 by 7.4 per cent compared to a
no climate change scenario.

Of course several things can be added.

1) species extinction and so on are incommensurate with income and so one can argue that it’s not all reducible to numbers.

2) if the damage is bad enough the damage could generate political instability including between countries – for instance if some lose out badly. And us humangoes have a habit of turning small costs into large ones once we start disagreeing.

But at least from an economic point of view, it’s as I said above, not the drama it’s made out to be.

with greenhouse if it is bad enough econmi

In submissions references have been made to the role of the TIO, a Gov’t insurance office in the NT, as the only surviving such body. The TIO website clearly states that they are “guaranteed” by the NT Gov’t. However, they even put it in the qualifying quotation marks which I would think at least inapproriate by any standard.

The committee chairman (Perret) has stated that Wayne Swan would be surprised by insurance industry claim that there may be a C’wealth guarantee on the TIO. But if the NT are claiming a (free?) guarantee and given its status as a territory not a state. Is there indeed such a C’wealth guarantee on private catastrophy risk in the NT??

However, the material discussed was largely based on a post that I wrote for Australian Policy Online, and reposted here.

A piece in a newspaper has to have a particular structure, be balanced, introduce the back story etc etc. There’s a form to it, and I think journalists sometimes think people are interested in the form rather than the content.

All that gumph is stripped away in blogs, which is thoroughly refreshing. The focus is on the content, not the form that the content is in, which actually ends up making the content more enjoyable.

It will probably be a bit too ethoretical for some, though.

Good questions [GratuitousPedantry] but if you know the answers to the questions wouldn’t that suggest that they ARE rhetorical questions?

Yes, it would. What I’m saying (tyops and all) is that I don’t know the answers. I really don’t. I have some impressions, and the third question is my draft formulation of a test for new local media usefulness. But my impressions and drafts aren’t always right.

Neither is my accuracy, nor my usage. When I wrote “ethoretical”, what I intended to write, of course, was “pratcical”.

1. How may of The Global Mail’s Australian articles couldn’t have been written by a Club Troppo blogger sitting at their desk?

None.

2. How may of the articles by The Global Mail’s foreign correspondents contain insights for Australians that we couldn’t have gleaned from other foreign media sources already publishing on the Web?

None.

3. To what extent do the answers to the first two questions determine the theoretical usefulness of well-funded Australian-based journalism ventures like The Global Mail?

The theoretical usefulness of another well-intentioned source of soft-lefty groupthink is always nil.

And I have a question of my own:
4. Will well-funded Australian-based journalism ventures like The Global Mail ever offer anything greater than this humble blog on its lonesome?

Good answers to that question may address, for example, Peter Whiteford’s comments on social spending, or Ken Parish’s analysis of con law and refugee and Aborigine issues or NG’s analyses of regulatory and economic policy or Paul Frijter’s comments on economic analysis of government action, etc. Or for that matter David Walker’s comments on media.