Earlier the Daily Mail enraged readers by reporting the study’s findings. The Guardian’s Charlie Brooker called it a deliberate act of trolling. In the US, Live Science ran the story provoking scorn and ridicule in conservative forums like Free Republic.

It started with a paper by Gordon Hodson and Michael A. Busseri in Psychological Science: ‘Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact’ (pdf). The researchers conclude:

Our synthesis demonstrates that cognitive ability plays a substantial role not only in predicting prejudice, but also in predicting its potential precursors: right-wing ideologies and authoritarian value systems, which can perpetuate social inequality by emphasizing the maintenance of the status quo, and a lack of contact and experience with out-groups.

Here’s a few of the online responses to the paper and the debate that followed.

Low IQ & conservative beliefs linked to prejudice: "There’s no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy." Stephanie Pappas, Live Science.

Conservatism is linked to low intelligence; but the real idiots are the progressives letting it win: "There is plenty of research showing that low general intelligence in childhood predicts greater prejudice towards people of different ethnicity or sexuality in adulthood. Open-mindedness, flexibility, trust in other people: all these require certain cognitive abilities. Understanding and accepting others – particularly ‘different’ others – requires an enhanced capacity for abstract thinking." George Monbiot.

George Monbiot’s worst-ever Guardian column – and that’s saying something! "The first thing to be said about this supposedly definitive piece of research – Moonbat calls it ‘embarrassingly robust’– is that the authors, Gordon Hodson and Michael A Busseri, rely to a great extent on a measure of intelligence that has been discredited." Toby Young, The Telegraph.

Monbiot is aping old Right-wing elitists: "It was traditionally the authoritarian wing of the Right which wrote off its opponents effectively as retards, claiming that their ‘base motives’ would infect and destroy proper politics." Brendan O’Neill, The Telegraph.

Leftists don’t know what conservatism is: "What is going on of course is that Leftist psychologists swallow hook line and sinker of Leftist propaganda about conservatives. They believe that conservatives really are as Leftist propaganda describes them. It would appear that they never bother to talk to any actual conservatives to find out what they really think." John J Ray, A Western Heart.

This sort of research is essential and insightful: "We need to understand the patterns of cognitive variation, whether it be intelligence or personality, which may result in differences of opinion. At the end of the day no opinions may change, but one may be able to construct a crisper argument when taking into account the genuine roots of one’s political opponents viewpoints, rather than your own ill-informed caricature." Razib Khan, Gene Expression.

Truly, statistics can ‘prove’ anything: "What makes the study ludicrous, even ignoring the biases, manipulations, and qualifications just outlined, by the authors’ own admission the direct effect size for ‘g’ on ‘racism’ is only -0.01 for men and 0.02 for women. Utterly trivial; close enough to no effect to be no effect, their results statistically “significant” only because of the massive sample size." William M Briggs.

On second hand cars, in 2002 or thereabouts, the Productivity Commission recommended that the prohibitive tariff on second hand cars remain, that we subsidise the industry – roughly as we now do – all in order to reduce tariffs down to 5% which will probably generate more costs than benefits. So much for economics. Over the fold is the PC’s explanation for why we should prohibit the import of second hand cars.

To prevent “undue disruption” (This is from memory, but I’m in a hurry. Hopefully someone can look up the specific words used.).

This caused the predictable avalanche of nonsense in the media. Tom acted pretty kindly, didn’t sack the silly idiot who had tweeted on his account, and then published this account. It ends in these propositions.

8. The intern has not been sacked nor was she ever going to be. She’s young. We all make mistakes.
9. I know her well enough to know she’ll never do this sort of thing again.
10. And yes, I know I should have logged out. I really do. Thank you to the people who pointed that out.
11. For those that have asked – all my tweets, other than the two this morning, are my own.
12. Though my account wasn’t technically ‘hacked’, yes, I do understand the irony of what happened.
13. Once again, I am sorry.

Now the British are different to us.  They’re more sticklers for form. So if Tom wants to apologise, then technically yes, the buck stops with him. He runs the office and ‘takes responsibility’ for what happens.

But beyond that?  He’s in his own office and I don’t agree that he ‘really should’ have assumed that one of his staff would hijack his online ID, even for a joke, just as he shouldn’t assume that she would forge his signature, or (for that matter) video a visiting guest on the dunny. As for ‘irony’ – Tom’s role as a minister in the Blair Government was to promote these online tools and train others in them. Well OK, admit the irony, but strictly speaking there’s not much irony. Someone stuffed up.

I can’t help thinking that a right leaning politician wouldn’t be bowing and scraping. Enough of the apologies Tom. Leave them to Rupert Murdoch – even if he doesn’t mean them.

Now one can go through their catalogue and their timetable and then high-tail it off to Google or Rotten Tomatoes and read film reviews. But is there a better way? At one stage I talked Paul Martin who wrote a great blog on Melbourne films to post on Troppo.  A couple of posts later came this on his site:

In essence, I am finding my own truth, my core self, and understanding how my life experiences have veiled me to that truth. I realise now how deluded and clouded much of my personality has been, including my writing in this medium. My writing will now have a greater personal integrity and be aligned to the Spiritual content and values of whatever I place here whether it be critiquing a movie or chatting to you about the events of my life as this blogger.

Stay tuned – my mentor says actions will speak louder.

And that was the end of that.

So if someone can rustle up a film critic for Troppo that would be just fine.  And would anyone like to make any recommendations of what films I should see in the coming French Film Festival and explain why?

Greece is the worst affected, with a government debt to GDP ratio of about 160% and getting worse. It is clearly now on the other part of the Laffer curve and further tax increases will not lead to more tax revenue, but less tax revenue. Whilst for other countries, an ECB bailout is the most likely scenario, Greece is on a collision course with an official default that it can no longer turn away from. No one seriously believes the Greeks are going to pay their loans back. Greece is drifting irrevocably into the situation whereby it will officially default and simply not be able to pay the wages of its civil servants, the pensions of its elderly, and have Greek banks collapsing around them as well, unless the ECB bails them out completely, which now seems unlikely. Re-introducing a Greek currency would mainly add huge capital flight to the woes and solve nothing in the short run. It really is looking rather bleak for Greece at the moment, whether it manages to trick the rest of Europe into another stay of execution or not.

Here, I want to point to particularly interesting political processes that have locked Greece into a default death spiral: political paralysis, civil service paralysis, and population paralysis. And at the heart of them are the special interest groups that dominate Greece.

What do I mean by special interest groups and their hold on Greek society? Iannis Carras wrote a hilarious and informative piece on how it works in Greece. Iannis relates the story of how a particular set of rent-seekers conspired to divert water from Western Greece to Thessaly by means of large construction projects. Diverting this water via large dams and reservoirs was done against the wishes of local residents, against EU planning rules, and against the ruling of the Greek high court judging it to be illegal. How did the rent-seekers get round this? They nominally broke the project of water diversion from one region to another into several smaller ones and simply kept going. And what drove this project? European cotton subsidies! Cotton is very thirsty and so water was diverted to the area more suited for cotton. Who drove it? Construction companies, Thessaly major farmers, and Greek politicians, all happily flaunting Greek law. Worse, it turned many a Greek politician and former farmer into a pure rent-seeker. And once they got into that game, they kept going. A favourite means of extorting money out of their own government is now for Greek farmers to simply block the roads until someone gives them money!

Other examples abound. Greece is now full of museums, ports, and roads which no-one uses, paid by the European Union and spawning groups of entrepreneurs everywhere whose main income in life comes from lobbying either the EU or any other major institution. Indeed, in a quite cruel illustration of the increased power of vested interests in these times, Carras notes that the only real reforms being implemented in Greece are all in favour of the construction industry. The most recent such example is the removal of environmental obstacles to build houses, effectively allowing large-scale theft of government natural reserve land by private companies,  which in turn makes a mockery of the intended sale of that same government land. A sale which was hoped to reduce the government deficit!

Iannis Carras’s sobering conclusion is that ‘EU aid has strengthened the position of intermediaries and rent-seeking elements in the Greek economy.’

Then the issue of paralysis, whereby the main thing to say at the outset is that paralysis mattered because it prevented structural reforms from happening.

Importantly, structural reforms could have tilted the balance of whether default was inevitable, but it has turned out to be impossible to legislate and enact structural reforms. By structural reforms, I mean tackling tax evasion, opening the economy up by means of labour market reform, and dismantling the legal apparatus supporting strong special interest groups that paralyse the professional service sectors and the civil service. Such structural reform was needed to get economic growth going, has been advocated by virtually all intelligent observers inside and outside of Greece, and initially would have involved pretty simple off-the-shelf legislation. Yet, it has not been done and it now clearly wont be done, even though the consequence is a disaster for the country.

The first and probably most important lock-in process is the civil service: the need for quick spending cuts meant that the public sector had to reduce in size and freeze wages. What do you think happens inside the ministries when this occurs? That the lesser-paid remaining employees are going to do their utmost for their country by devising and enacting radical reform legislation, or that those who remain will be the weaker ones who couldn’t get decent jobs elsewhere and whose principle worry is not to rock the boat and retain their job? The right answer is the latter.

As a result of this paralysis of the civil service, the sheer capacity for structural reform has been strongly eroded, as was nicely illustrated in this excellent piece on the impossibility of reforms. Greece, and to some extent also Spain and Italy, is now less able to legislate and support structural reform than 2 years ago. All that remains is austerity packages, which are technically easy: bit less money here, slight increase in tax rate there. Nothing new has to be set up or thought through.

The second lock-in effect is a gradual paralysis of the political system. At the start, when it became clear to the elites of Greece that they were looking at a major loss of status for their country if they kept going as before, the political elite had a kind of ‘we must stop this’ mentality. This moment came about 2 years ago for Greece.

Yet, just as more recently in Italy, Greek politicians forgot the crucial lesson of Machiavelli about reforms that go against vested interests: you need to implement them with lightning speed whilst the political will is there.

What Machiavelli warned his audience about happened in Greece: by being too slow, they alerted all those who would lose from reform, which cemented opposition to them. As a result, Greek politicians have basically done nothing in the last year and Greece is in complete political paralysis with no-one daring to offend the rent-seekers.

It is instructive to think a step deeper and ask why Greek politicians see it in their best interest to do nothing. The major political reality in Greece is the anger of voters who see their standard of living go down with plummeting housing prices, increased unemployment and decreased welfare, and who blame whomever is in charge, whatever they did or are trying to do about the problem. Such voters might want the country to avoid the shame of a default, but that sentiment is dwarfed by blind anger towards anything associated with the loss they are having to endure.

Interestingly, this public sentiment has only strengthened the hand of the special interest groups: when faced with high uncertainty, workers became more militant within their unions; major corporations increased their attention to political lobbying to make sure they wouldn’t lose out; the professions mobilised such that the legislation favouring them was safeguarded; etc. Since the early pain fell on the politically weakest, i.e. those not organised in special interest groups, the relative power of the problem groups has only increased within politics, the civil service, and the world of work. It is now only via the popular vote that there is potential mileage for a politician in advocating real change, but the popular vote is uncertain and easily swayed by the relentless media lobbying of the special interest groups. Hence, as a calculating Greek politician, not implementing any real reform and blaming the foreigners is an optimal strategy.

The Greek politicians were not alone in being too slow to reform: the Italians are making the same mistake. Italy just in the last 2 months shows how this goes: Mario Monti was explicitly appointed as a technocrat to do what needed to be done. To his lasting shame, he wasted his first salvo in December 2012 on a simple austerity package without any structural reform. By now, the major unions and interest groups have organised against him.

Monti’s latest round of reform is a good illustration of what he now does. In grandiose media style, he promised 5000 more pharmacies, 500 more notaries, and what looks like no more than a few hundred extra taxi licenses. This is really nothing more than symbolism: Italy needs millions of jobs, not a few thousands! Worse, Monti made a big point out of extending bakery opening hours to Sundays, which is peanuts in the scheme of things. Hence the story there so far is no real reform whilst minor reform is puffed up to be the real thing, and meanwhile it’s getting late and Monti’s political backing in parliament is slipping.

To be fair, other European politicians also were not quick enough in realizing long-run realities. Some 18 months ago, when informed observers already knew that Greece could never pay back its debt, what did the Northern European leaders do? They pretended vociferously that Greece would not default, that ‘Europe would stand behind Greece’, and they exposed their own banks and countries much more to a Greek default by direct loans to the Greek government and to support the buying up of Greek bonds by the ECB. This policy, which is the height of folly in hindsight, only made sense at the time within the logic of a political elite that had no idea what was going on and that bought into its own rhetoric of Greek competency. And the parliaments all approved this!

A final fascinating aspect of the Greek death spiral is the return to full posturing once it became clear to the senior politicians that a default was inevitable because the road to structural reforms was political suicide.

Greece, quite incredibly, in January 2012 had a PM who was openly threatening Eurozone leaders that Greece would pull out of the Euro if he didnt get more bailout funds. This is much like a thief threatening to no longer enter your house if you don’t send him more of your valuables! The cheek of the man has to be admired, but the cold political calculator should drily note that such posturing is entirely for domestic consumption and a clear indication that the PM is preparing his country for a ‘blame the foreigners’ story, even though in reality these foreigners have propped up the Greek government by well over 200 billion Euro in loans in recent years!

In Italy too, the PM is adopting posturing mode. The minister of finance and the PM both announced that they want the markets to ‘recognise’ Italian efforts. You might as well demand of the weather to recognise your need for summer! Merkel, astonishingly, echoed their voices.

Indeed, the Italian government now and then resembles pantomime-mode when it comes to reforms. The PM, Mario Monti, has announced ‘rolling reforms’, sector by sector, one sector per month. He is just these weeks going to ‘talk to the unions’ about labour market reforms. This is so counter to Machiavelli’s prescript of swift and unexpected reforms that it is almost laughable. It is like Jason in the Friday 13^th movies saying to all his intended victims ‘I am coming to get you….. in 6 months time!’. The act keeps the handouts coming from the ECB and the rest of Europe, but we will see how long it works without real reform. So far, Northern Europeans seem to be buying it, just as they did with Greece….

Writing these reports is frequently difficult, but Finkelstein and Ricketson have a particularly intriguing task. It’s more difficult because they clearly want to rein in a few of traditional media’s worst excesses – and they want to do it just at a time when that traditional media is shrinking in importance in the face of an Internet-driven explosion of information availability:

1. Finkelstein and Ricketson have to examine what the terms of reference call “the effectiveness of the current media codes of practice in Australia”. That’s tough enough on its own, because it’s hard to think of a more effective system which isn’t also more restrictive of freedom of speech. The head of Curtin University’s journalism department, Dr Joseph Fernandez, has made this point well – see the transcript of his evidence here. Fernandez perhaps understands these issues clearly because he spent 14 years editing newspapers in Malaysia, a country where editors face real experience of freedom-of-expression issues.
2. They must examine the codes of practice “in light of technological change that is leading to the migration of print media to digital and online platforms”. Their problem here is that technological change is leading to an explosion of content that undermines the case for even existing restrictions on publishers. This is a point that Ian Rogers and I have tried to make at length in WorkDay Media’s submission to the inquiry. Traditional media had a level of oligopoly power over information distribution. These days anyone can publish. There is no longer any such thing as “the media” – rather, there is a huge and messy range of information forms, sources and channels with different levels of reach, frequency, engagement, audience trust and motivation. This is great for citizens: the “marketplace of ideas” has never been closer to being fully realised. But it’s bad for traditional publishers – and for aspiring regulators.
3. They must assess “the impact of this technological change on the business model that has supported the investment by traditional media organisations in quality journalism and the production of news”.  For anyone who pulls the economics of media apart, the answer is pretty obvious: printed newspapers mostly won’t survive. They are losing advertisers and readers to a fundamentally more attractive and efficient Internet. The media analyst Roger Colman calculates that “all metropolitan newspapers in print editions will be unprofitable, definitely, by 2020″. But a surprising number of people don’t want to say this. And if Finkelstein and Ricketson do say it, they will instantly raise the question: “so why are we bothering about extra regulation of print media now?”.
4. They must figure out how investment in quality journalism ”can be supported, and diversity enhanced, in the changed media environment”. This is an interesting question. But as Ian Rogers and I have argued, the answer is less obvious than many people think. The media and those who analyse it are constantly in danger of over-estimating traditional print media journalism’s contribution to the world, and underestimating the benefits of the information availability explosion which the Internet is bringing us.
5. They must look at “ways of substantially strengthening the independence and effectiveness of the Australian Press Council, including in relation to online publications”. The ABC’s Jonathan Holmes has predicted that the inquiry will push from a stronger Press Council with more powers and a much broader remit. And that will bring us back to the inquiry’s fundamental problem: it seems to want a more activist government media body just at the time when technology is making traditional media of all sorts less dominant and undermining the case for media regulation.
6. They will feel pressure to come up with a solution that fits in with the interim report of the Convergence Review, which has decided the inconsistency of Australia media regulations should be addressed by a system of regulating equally all members of a vaguely-defined group called “content services enterprises”. These firms’ content would be subjected to a public-interest test. The firms covered would include television, radio, newspapers and online outlets – which means print and online journalism would face new restrictions. Finkelstein and Ricketson are at least awake to the freedom-of-expression minefield that such a law would sow. As Jonathan Holmes again points out,  the convergence review’s authors seem largely, weirdly, oblivious to the whole issue.

The Independent Media Inquiry could sensibly suggest that a voluntary body provide reputation indicators for online and offline media. That’s the solution recommended by Monash University’s Dr Johan Lidberg. (The Council could also make it easier for small online media organisations to join.)

But if the inquiry recommends the Press Council or a new media super-regulator starts regulating a much wider group of reporters and commenters, and government follows that recommendation, three things will happen. The council  will be quickly overwhelmed, it will be forced to make impossible judgments, and it will eventually become a joke.

[Update: An hour after first posting, I gave in to the impulse to properly honour Lewis Carroll by adding a sixth point, on the Convergence Review.]

In five minutes.

That’s five minutes each – so there’s plenty of time. I get to talk about the economy.

I already know that I won’t be playing the clairvoyant but will suggest that the best questions about the future are what things we can do to make it better. It will look much like today, though we’ll be richer, mining will (presumably) be a lot bigger and other traded sectors commensurately smaller. Anyway, if I were to think about the biggest challenge it’s inequality. It’s hard not to see rewards to the stars getting higher. And trade and technology will continue to undermine the wages of the unskilled.

I thought I might quote the work of Mike Norton who was written up by Dan Ariely in one of those ‘smarties for 2012′ columns as follows;

There’s a significant amount of literature on the theory that, as people become richer, they don’t necessarily become happier. Norton asked instead whether people know how to use money to buy happiness. [Mike] asked: if you give money to people, what do they do with it? The answer was that they spend it on themselves. He then posited: what if we ask people to spend money on other people? His research revealed that those people are actually happier as a consequence. This worked with individuals, and also with groups — when people spent money on people they worked with, the team became more productive. He and I have been working together to try to figure out what level of wealth inequality people in developed countries are willing to tolerate. What we found is that people want to live in societies that are much more equal and much fairer than currently. So why are we willing to tolerate the current level of inequality? We don’t have the answer for this yet.

So I might run that by them. I’ll be interested to hear what they think. When I think of this it rings true. I think there’s a deep dissonance in people’s attitudes to inequaliy – especially in Australia. They don’t like inequality. They really don’t. But it’s not just that they don’t like it in principle, but then reject the measures in practice.  I think there’s an additional step. If you want to tackle inequality effectively explaining what you’ll do will require abstract thought. You’ll explain that you’ll need capital gains taxes, and high taxes on top marginal incomes. And rent taxes – including green taxes. If you had an hour with everyone in the country you might be able to bring them round, at least those who would be made better off by what you have in mind – which is a large majority.

But that’s not how people make up their mind on these things.  They see that a politician is putting up some tax somewhere (even if it won’t do them a skerrick of harm like the mining tax) and they can easily be made to think “There’s that sneaky politician trying to slip their hand into our pockets”. The fact that it’s proposed by Ken Henry who has no axe to grind and is opposed by self-interested billionaires doesn’t seem to change the dynamic.

Anyway, what do you think I should I talk about?

One thing I think about whenever I sit in a tram waiting for cars that shouldn’t be holding up the tram to stop holding up the tram is that trams should have a video cam on them and drivers could have a button that either activates the cam or marks the spot at which it is running and if the car was breaking the road rules it gets a ticket. Improves efficiency and brings in a bit of revenue. What’s there not to like. Anyway, the same idea has been proposed various times in the past but has never managed to be implemented. I don’t know why. But as is so often the case, technology’s capacity to decentralise these decisions is leading the way – with bicycle cams as illustrated above. Handy in court cases.

But it’s not all one way. There’s at least one person who’s heading into the bureaucracy – the great Pia Waugh who has been the great Kate Lundy’s staffer for three years.

A bundle of optimism, positivity, equanimity, creativity and capability.

So public sector, I hope you know how lucky you are.

To adopt Shakespeare, Meryl Streep came to bury Margaret Thatcher, not to praise her. This was attempted — in the film The Iron Lady — by the simple, but telling, device of retailing Thatcher’s story through a series of retrospectives of the retired prime minister, clearly afflicted by dementia.

Howard made some good points in his review, but I had the blue pencil out after the second word. There are only a couple of things I thought were outright errors. Most of the distraction came from Howard’s writing style.

Is it just me?

Which brings me to the point of this post which is to say that my back is killing me. I have a bit of a scoleosis but am told by those in the know that it isn’t a big problem or explanation for my back ache – which, according to a physio I went to – who seems good – is some muscular spasm or muscular ‘memory’.  I often feel like someone is poking a knife just below my shoulder blade. It’s bearable most of the time, but just.

Anyway, the physio said such things were quite common, were not easy to treat as skeletal problems. He suggested exercises were unlikely to help much and prescribed a few days of Neurofen. The idea was to banish the muscle memory – but it achieved nothing.

It occured to me that accupuncture or ‘dry needling’ might be worth considering.  Anyway I’d be interested in any suggestions, including miracle healers, from Troppoholics.

Postscript clarification inserted by the time of the eighth comment: I live in Inner Melbourne (but, since you ask prefer cappuccino and tea to latte, though I would subscribe to the folk dictum “better latte then never”).

Tim O’Reilly proposed the slogan “Government as a platform” for his Government 2.0 activities which he’s heavily scaled back in favour of more lucrative opportunities. But there was always a problem. That problem was that it wasn’t so much that no-one had ever had the idea that government might be an enabling resource – a platform in the lingo of Web 2.0. The real problem is that government has no culture of this. Departments are proprietorial and secretive and that’s a tenacious culture which is prevented from evaporating by lots of expectations and structures.

But there is one part of government that has cultivated the culture of ‘Government as a platform’ since its inception around a century and a half or so ago:  The GLAM sector – that’s galleries, libraries, archives and museums. I couldn’t help noticing when doing the Government 2.0 Taskforce that the GLAM sector were up and at it long before anyone else. The National Library had its newspaper digitisation program and Seb Chan from the Sydney Powerhouse Museum was on our Taskforce and instrumental in getting us to run a mashup competition – and likely instrumental in getting the Powerhouse to become the first museum anywhere in the world to post its historic photos on Flikr and licence them Creative Commons. Seb’s unit built the mashup of baby names in NSW which is fascinating to play with.

I also learned about all the problems the national and state libraries were having getting rights to archive web content that were analogous to their rights as libraries of record to receive a copy of all publications in their jurisdiction from publishers. If they had such rights all they would need would be a robot to go and collect the material and Bob’s your uncle. In fact without this, much of their efforts involve sending people letters to ask their permission to archive their sites. I discussed with various people in libraries of record having such rights which certainly made sense to me.

Anyway, they still don’t have such rights.

Meanwhile . . . they are certainly keen on their rights to printed material as you will observe from this letter I received from the Victorian State Library this week (I might add that The Victorian State Library is a terrific organisation, which I am very fond of, but even terrific organisations do really silly things):

The State Library of Victoria tries to collect a copy of all books, videos, CD’s, CD-ROMs, pamphlets, periodicals, newspapers and any other items published in Victoria for permanent preservation in the Library.

To help us in this endeavour, legislation was passed in 1869 requiring publishers to deposit free of charge with the library a copy of every item published in Victoria. Current legislation is contained in section 49 of the Libraries Act 1988 (see enclosed leaflet).

Recently the following publication came to our notice.

The economic value of Australia’s investment in health and medical research: reinforcing the evidence for exceptional returns. 

We look forward to receiving a copy of this publications (sic), as well as any other publications you might not have previously sent us for legal deposit. Please follow the enclosed legal deposit instructions when forwarding publications.

This is really silly. In fact Lateral Economics is not the publisher of this ‘book’.  Our client was Research Australia which published it on their website (pdf). It’s true they distributed a few copies to the conference where the report was launched. But it’s not a ‘book’ and it wasn’t ‘published’.  And it would be a lot cheaper and a lot safer as far as preservation goes if the State Library downloaded the ‘book’ from the website where it reposes and archived it rather than spending a lot of money sending silly letters to people.

I got a similar letter from The Australian National Library about a number of other Lateral Economics studies all of which are freely downloadable on the internet.

Why libertarians need to talk with the left and how to do it: "Between Left and Right, the reality remains that the Left is still closer to our ideals. They are more likely to agree with our social liberalism and foreign policy even though they are economic interventionists." James Peron, Moorfield Storey Blog.

Men who argue with goats: They love a good argument at Menzies House.

… or with Cory Bernardi: "Throughout history it has been demonstrated that any government that becomes too big eventually is forced to accrue a level of debt that cannot be sustained." Cory Bernardi.

The biggest government in the world? "The Congressional Budget Office report … says that annual deficits will remain in the $1 trillion range for the next several years if Bush-era tax cuts slated to expire in December are extended, as commonly assumed." NBC Politics.

So what about the Nordics? "If heavy taxation has harmful economic effects, why have Denmark and Sweden performed similarly to the United States during a period of several decades in which their taxes were much higher than America’s?" Lane Kenworthy.

In praise of private equity: "The difficult truth that virtually no politician is prepared to acknowledge is that the road to job creation runs through job destruction." Reihan Salam.

The introvert’s lament: Social butterflies are annoying. Overdressed Anarchist.

Op shopping: Justin Campbell finds a copy of Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose in an op shop. "I quickly grabbed hold of the book and guarded it in case someone else wanted to buy it", he writes. "The bewildered shopkeeper seemed surprised at my excitement."

The fate of Mrs Petrov’s lost shoe: Apparently Sir Les Paterson has it.

Prices keep rising, and they’ve risen again this year. Here’s the schedule.

If you want to join the subscription, please email me on ngruen AT gmail.

Then in a few weeks from now I’ll shoot a list of names and email addresses to Crikey and they’ll follow up.

Group Subscriptions
3-5 Members – $125
6-9 Members – $115
10-19 Members – $105
20-49 Members – $95
50+ Members – $85

Post-postscript: Having sent a bcc email to all current group subscribers earlier today, we’re now at 53 subscribers with more dribbling in – so it looks like the lowest fee is assured.

What became of it? Nothing much in a policy sense. But the states did band together in a political exercise to resist John Howard’s soft climate change denialism and it was politically successful, and was a good stroke of policy because it meant that, coming into national government they were about six months ahead of the pace with the Garnaut process.

Otherwise, I don’t think anything much happened, though I’d be happy to be corrected below.

Meanwhile the newly Liberal Governments of NSW and Victoria have announced a reform partnership.  The public material is full of fine sounding intentions, though I expect it’s too early to see what comes out of it. But the fact that they occupy 57 percent of the Australia economy is significant.  Whatever they can agree to harmonise between themselves, and this seems a major focus of the activity, would create quite a strong ‘attractor’ for others to copy. And it does seem that they got the idea of doing something together a little quicker than their ALP counterparts.

Some time ago the PC tried a bit of online engagement, but it had all the usual ‘run by the IT department’ problems and didn’t go anywhere. I discovered with some excitement the unit in the Victorian Bureaucracy which was built in the mould of the PC and which I think is doing a pretty good job was getting into the same game.

Alas VCEConnect is the usual disaster.

VCEC’s original discussion starter on state reform – consists of a single unsigned question asking whether people agree on the three priorities in the draft report.  There’s one comment.

Then there’s a thread on another inquiry into education reform. It asks “In your view, what are the key areas the Victorian Government should focus on? And, more specifically, what actions should the Government take in these areas?” There are two comments.

That’s it. Both posts were put up in November.

If I were asked what I think of VCEConnect I would borrow from Mahatma Ghandi when he was asked what he thought of Western civilisation.

I think it would be a good idea.

The paper argues this.

We may look down on other animals, perceiving that they have a biased and limited understanding of the world, but somehow assume that we don’t have analogous biases or limitations that we cannot somehow overcome. Surely this is merely another example of anthropocentric arrogance. That we have had some notable successes at understanding our world and even a systematic set of approaches that has been shown to be useful is not sufficient evidence to assume a lack of limitations and biases.

This astonishing assumption takes many forms in philosophy and discussions about the scientific method. One such is that somehow simplicity is a guide to truth. That is, that simplicity in a model or theory has advantages other than the obvious pragmatic ones (pragmatic virtues are such as: being able to analyze/solve it; being able to have good analogies with which to think about it; needing less data in order to parameterize it; and being able to compute it).

Another version is that everything somehow must be simple if only we can find the right way of looking at it, or formalizing it. It is true that frameworks such as Newtonian Physics are relatively simple (though I doubt many in Newton’s time would have thought so), and using this, many useful models and reliable predictions can be obtained. . . .

I am not going to spend time arguing the above points here. Rather I will consider the case under the anti-anthropocentric assumption, that much of the world around us is organized in a way that is beyond adequate modeling in a sufficiently simple and general manner for us to cope with. . . . Under this, admittedly pessimistic, view the phenomena that are simple enough for us to understand in a scientific manner are the exception – the exception to be sought and struggled for. Under this view, we should make the greatest use of the strengths we have, and seek to acknowledge and mitigate our limitations. Under this view a “Science of Complexity” makes no more sense than a “Science of Non-Red Things”, since both red objects and simple systems are the exception rather than the rule.

Why is it that we can see political benefits from the hyper-connected world produced by Web 2.0 in undemocratic countries but no big apparent improvements in democratic countries?

One reason I think is that the low hanging fruit of democracy is all conceptually simple – or relatively simple. It may be politically impossible (and the politics of emerging democracy may be very conceptually difficult), but conceptually the building blocks of moving from autocracy to greater liberality and democracy are straightforward. One needs to build the rule of law and strengthen people’s rights to expression and political power.

So if you’re in a highly corrupt autocracy it’s pretty easy to figure out what needs to be done. And the new technologies help you express your need and, with luck, meet it through political action of various kinds.

In the West we’ve got all that. There would be plenty of ways for the new technologies to help us figure out what to do in various situations, but all the simple (liberalising) rules are already well represented in the debate.  Indeed one might argue that the our preoccupation with the ‘free market’ v ‘intervention’ dichotomy is that the former pole is one of the only simple and general principles we know about government, and we’re not so confident of our ability to successfully know what to do when we intervene with policy.

In any event one response to this dilemma is Hayek’s which is to set out some set of rules intended to define an end state – which is implicitly good for all time in politics. Another (more empirical, conservative and less ‘rationalist’ and what a Marxist would call a less ‘idealist’) approach is to accept the existing political settlements and the principles that emerge from them – which will contain their share of the same kinds of principles (like “don’t interfere with people’s liberty without good reason”). But then one would expect that over time one can build institutions (I meant this word in its broadest sense) to finesse the way those principles are applied in different circumstances.

But for that to happen, you need some system of aggregating experience and learning from people with good judgement and knowledge on the scene. That’s difficult enough at the best of times, but a lot more difficult when one’s system of deliberation like ours which is oriented towards entertainment, the expression of grievance and the cultivation of a sense of entitlement from all and sundry. I’m not, by the way suggesting I have any bright ideas as to how one might reconstruct our culture of deliberation. I’m just trying to articulate a problem. I’m grizzling :)

Did you have an absolutely fantastic science teacher? Now’s the time to get them some recognition.

NOMINATION CALL
2012 PRIME MINISTER’S PRIZES FOR SCIENCE

We are seeking nominations for Australia’s national science and science teaching awards, which are offered to Australian citizens or those who hold permanent residence status in Australia.

·        The $300,000 Prime Minster’s Prize for Science

·        The $50,000 Science Minister’s Prize for Life Scientist of the Year

·        The $50,000 Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year

·        The $50,000 Prime Minster’s Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching in Primary Schools

·        The $50,000 Prime Minister’s Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching in Secondary Schools

These prizes are a key element of the Inspiring Australia national initiative to recognise and reward the achievements and successes of Australians in the sciences.

Please share this information with your networks and associates – The Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science relies on nominations from across many sectors of our nation, to reward and recognise the outstanding achievements of our Australian science researchers and science teachers.

Closing Date: 27 April 2012, AEST 5.00 pm

Further queries and contact - www.innovation.gov.au/scienceprizes

Anyway I recently sought to track down the results of Obama’s less than spectacularly successful community brainstorming on open government when he came into office. (The top two suggestions for promoting open government were legalising marijuana. The other big thing was releasing Obama’s birth certificate.) Anyway I emailed an American friend who’d been in the White House at the relevant time – now back in academia – asking for any write up of the program and she told me there was one in a 2009 annual review of operations.  But it’s gone from the website and no-one has been able to find it in a couple of weeks. This is 2009!

For another project I was also looking up the old Power of Information Taskforce in the UK.  Here’s Tom Steinberg’s blog entry announcing its release.

I’m delighted to announce that the review I’ve been working on with Ed Mayo and the Cabinet Office has launched today. You can get the official PDF version here or my friend Sam Smith’s annotatable version that he just threw together.

I clicked on the first link and it went through to here.

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/publications/reports/power_information/power_information.pdf

Which was promising. It said this.

Object moved to here.

Alas, it wasn’t there either and I was diverted to a Cabinet Office Page Not found signal – as you can see for yourself if you want to click on the link.

Meanwhile one of the things that the Power of Information Taskforce and Review did was to publish using commercial blogging platforms. And everything using that remains safe and sound. “Sam Smith’s annotatable version” that Steinberg says Sam “threw together” refers to on his blog is still there, safe and sound. Likewise the Government 2.0 Taskforce published to its own url using Wordpress software, and it’s still there too, it’s cost to government would be the same as the cost of Troppo to those of us who run it – the cost of the domain name registration, which is about $30 a year or something, though the cost to government of maintaining the UK’s Power of Information review, which is a sub-domain of wordpress.com is exactly zero.

So it still eludes me why, with all the resources to hand, governments make it quite so difficult for themselves.

I remember being at a wedding reception talking to someone who was 70 odd.  I asked them whether in their day it was normal for the bride and groom to put the tip of the knife in the cake and then beam at the cameras for two or three minutes – celebrities on their special day. Sure enough, back in the day, the camera was at the service of life life or was most of the time, not vice versa.

Today I’ve noticed a similar, subtle but profound difference in the zeitgeist. Listening to the Australian Open commentary it’s extraordinary how much psychologising goes on. Now filling in all those hours with chat is probably quite difficult, but the current formula (or perhaps it’s just a formula built around Jim Courier’s style) is endless speculation on what the players are thinking/feeling.

“Take us inside Novak’s mind Leyton” says Jim, and sure enough Leyton does his best in the role play. Roger Rasheed is on hand in hushed tones in the stands telling us what it’s like. He’s right there you see. Well so are Jim and Leyton, but he’s so close he has to speak quietly – and of course that means he can get even further inside the players minds. (Quiet – Roger is trying to hear the players thinking.)

And it turns out that whoever is asked to take us inside a player’s mind really can!  They just say what they reckon the player is thinking – though it seems pretty likely they have no more idea than anyone else. Bruce McAvaney is into this schtick like a rat up a drainpipe of course and is endlessly asking Jim “So what would he be thinking as they change ends”. 

Is this a terrible thing? Well no it’s not.  It’s a ‘manner of speaking’. I guess we are all able to insert the implied “my guess is that he’s thinking . . . ” at the beginning of each of Roger Rasheed’s speculations. And culture makes these kinds of shortcuts all the time. “How do you do?” must have begun as a question but today is a routine, polite greeting.

But I would like to say that I don’t like it either.

It is banality masquerading as expertise. And one of the reasons I’m particularly aware of it is that I get asked clairvoyant questions all the time in media interviews. Not just within what might be claimed as my domain of expertise “how will the economy be in a year’s time?” which in my opinion is silly enough. Often radio journalists will ask me to say how the average Australian will react or a politician or God knows what. Just pretty much anything that’s coursing through their brain at the time.

It is the cult of the expert in the box together with the cult of the amazing super athlete. Often it turns out that what goes on in the mind of one of these athletes is related to their being a true champion. Well some of these guys are amazing there’s no doubt, but I’m to have my awe inspired, I need a little variety a little insight, not the same endlessly banal psycho-dreck. There is also something pathetic about the way in which it elevates both the expert and the celebrity (the athlete) above the rest of us who look on adoring, and waiting for guidance.

The whole thing is an exercise in aggrandisement. It’s ill-suited to what is, or used to be our national culture which fancies itself as egalitarian. John Newcome was in this mould.  Corny and folksy, he was nevertheless quite insightful about both tennis technique and the match temperament of the players. He’d often point out why a shot did or didn’t work out – the player didn’t get down to the volley properly, tended to toss the ball too high on their serve or whatever.

Last night Pat Rafter played Roger Rasheed’s role in the stands and didn’t seem to play along with the psycho-babble script.  On one occasion he asked the question from the stand rather than the other way round – asking Hewitt in the box whether it was particularly difficult to serve to Nadal and why – and what he’d do in Federer’s position. They then had a chat about how Nadal was in nappies when Pat was playing which was funny, and then we learned how Hewitt finds it serving to Nadal (he said it wasn’t too bad, particularly where one could serve to his backhand in the deuce court).

It was a lot more interesting than the umpteenth inane speculation about what Nadal was thinking at the time. In the post match interview Jim Courier asked Nadal what he asks all of the players in his post match interview. “What were you thinking when you were down a break in the third? Take us through that.”. Rafa told him he was thinking that he really really wanted to win the point.

Australia Day from afar: "One of the most surprising things for me to experience out of Australia was people saying–even in the American South!–Australia’s really racist, isn’t it?" Queen Emily, Hoyden About Town.

Drunks draped in flags: "the path that took us here is a complex one. Music festivals, drinking binges, the crystallisation of fears and resentments, the navel gazing over Identity, all that is part of the road, as well as politicians." Kim, Larvatus Prodeo.

The view from Menzies House: Tim Andrews celebrates Australia Day with a whinge about lefties and "self-appointed intellectual elites".

Be as Australian as you want to be: "Let us be frank: anti-racist prejudice is the worst kind of prejudice at all. It denies freedom of expression; it denies freedom of conscience; and most heinous of all, it denies courage." Ben Pobjie.

John Passant reports on the tent embassy protest: "Soon about 200 of the demonstrators moved from the Tent Embassy commemoration to the café to tell Abbott what they thought of him …" En Passant.

Steve Kates on the protests: "I must tell you my disgust is unbounded. We tend not to jail such people, but that is in the way of more fool us than anything." Catallaxy.

Missing the story: The press gallery "shine the light almost exclusively on the confected battle between tweedle dee and tweedle dum – the figureheads at the top of decaying political parties that everyone outside the inbred Canberra vortex can see are just shells of organisations pretending to believe in something beyond power itself." Mr Denmore, The Failed Estate.

Michael loves Heather: "She’s a saint. A princess. A fairy queen. A beautiful, kind, intelligent. imaginative, brave young woman with a wicked sense of humour and a shipload of empathy." Michael Stuchbery gets married.

One year on: "How do you grieve for someone who hurt you profoundly, repeatedly, and tore your family apart? Who was also deeply intelligent, cursed with mental illness, incredibly funny, and when he could be, loving?" Imogen, raw/roar.

What’s So Special about America’s 1%? "If we’re all embedded in a fundamentally unjust, exploitative global economic structure, it’s hard to see why the American 1% should be especially salient." Will Wilkinson, The Moral Sciences Club.

Social justice … Tea Party style: "A common trope for conservative policy intellectuals is that they want to ‘means test’ the welfare state – reduce its availability for those with high wealth and income and focus it on those with the least wealth and income. But the Tea Party base wants the opposite – they are opposed to a welfare state for the poor, young people, undocumented workers and other groups they think are undeserving." Mike Konczal, Rortybomb.

Dogs against Romney: Why is everyone talking about Mitt Romney’s dog?

Blog readers survey: Peter Chen is conducting a survey of blog readers. You can find the survey here: Australian Blog Readers Study (via Andrew Norton).

B) What?

A) Invasion Day.

B) Invasion Day?

A) Yeah,  ’cause it’s the day they invaded us Kooris.

B)  Oh, InVASion Day

A) So all those people wearing Australian flags are celebrating Invasion Day. ‘cept the ones that feel sorry for us.

C) We don’t want you to feel sorry for us, ya cunts.

What a load of old sensationalist nonsense. I’m seriously starting to worry about Giz. If I want to search anonymously there is a thing called an anonymous tab. And I don’t log into my Google account outside work because why would I? – My phone is logged in.

That’s how the first commenter responded to this piece in Gizmodo accusing Google of being evil because it – wait for it – shares identity information between functions. That’s right, Gmail can now share information with Google search with Google + and on it goes.

This is supposed to be some attack on our privacy. Well there are very nasty things Google can do to harm my privacy. Those things would be telling other people things it knows about me that it could reasonably expect that I might not want them to tell them.

But it doesn’t do that. It is just using all the data it has to further improve improve the adds and other services it provides me. WTNTLAT? *

My point is, as I said here, privacy law, and privacy activism should be focused wherever practicable on stopping conduct that actually threatens privacy – ie where that information is provided to agents other than the one that has the information in the first place. It always pissses me off when I have to wait to be read some stupid thing which tells me my voice is going to be recorded “for quality purposes”. If it’s for training purposes they can protect my privacy by making sure the recordings don’t get leaked and by destroying them after the couple of weeks it was necessary to hold them to use them for the entirely benign purposes of quality control.

And remember, although Google is probably mostly thinking of optimising advertising here . . .

1. making advertising relevant is a source of considerable value to the world and
2. there are lots of other ways that the data might be able to be used to simply provide improved services to people – such as search, prompting connections with others, or with information of relevance to users, task management and all the other things that I can’t think of.

So broadly speaking, and with the caveat that I’ve not researched all this in great depth, I submit these views to you O Troppodores and Troppodillians.

* “Define: WTNTLAT” doesn’t generate any answers in Google, so we’re on the ground floor here Troppodores. This could be Troppo’s big break – our own little footnote in the English language, our own corner of the universe.

British Leyland devoured billions pounds of taxpayer’s money before it was finally broken up and sold off. According to New York Times journalist Nelson Schwartz the Thatcher government’s bailout "remains the classic example of a futile government intervention."

Mrs Thatcher was unable to resist the car maker’s insatiable demands for cash. According to Schwartz, her government ended up handing over £3.6 billion (£11 billion adjusted for inflation) to keep the factories open. "On any rational commercial judgment, there were no good reasons for continuing to fund British Leyland", she concedes in her autobiography. The company was a high cost, low volume manufacturer in a world where low costs and high volumes were essential for success. So why did she do it? The "political realities had to be faced", she says, "BL had to be supported":

I knew that closure of the volume car business, with all that would mean for the West Midlands and the Oxford area, would not be politically acceptable to the Cabinet of the Party, at least in the short term. It would also be a huge cost to the Exchequer — perhaps not very different to the sort of sums BL was now seeking (p 120).

As political scientist Fiona McGillivray explains, no government could afford to allow British Leyland’s huge plant in Longbridge to close:

Longbridge was on the southern edge of Birmingham, and its surrounding electoral districts were a mix of middle-class semirural housing and council estates. In the 1959, 1964, 1970, 1974, and the 1979 elections these districts held the key to victory. In an area so rich in marginals, no government could risk harming it; whether the government was Labour or Conservative, it bailed out Longbridge.

By the late 1980s however, the Conservative party was less dependent on marginal seats strongly affected by the fortunes of the car industry. It was then safe to break up the company and sell off the parts. When MG Rover finally stopped producing cars in 2005, a report by the Cambridge-MIT Institute’s Centre for Competitiveness and Innovation concluded that the failure was the final act in cycle of decline that took four decades to work through. Even by the 1970s the company was unable to use government cash injections effectively.

According to Steven Kates at Catallaxy, Mrs Thatcher remains "the gold standard of a conviction politician on the right side of history". But even she couldn’t resist subsidising the car industry when the electoral deck was stacked against her.