This paper uses a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effect of home computers on child and adolescent outcomes.  We collected survey data from households who participated in a unique government program in Romania which allocated vouchers for the purchase of a home computer to low-income children based on a simple ranking of family income.  We show that children in households who received a voucher were substantially more likely to own and use a computer than their counterparts who did not receive a voucher.  Our main results indicate that that home computer use has both positive and negative effects on the development of human capital.  Children who won a voucher had significantly lower school grades in Math, English and Romanian but significantly higher scores in a test of computer skills and in self-reported measures of computer fluency. There is also evidence that winning a voucher increased cognitive ability, as measured by Raven’s Progressive Matrices.  We do not findmuch evidence for an effect on non-cognitive outcomes. Finally, thepresence of parental rules regarding computer use and homework appear to mitigate the effects of computer ownership, suggesting that parental monitoring and supervision may be important mediating factors. http://papers.nber.org/papers/W15814

SPIEGEL: Mr Carlsen, what is your IQ?

Magnus Carlsen: I have no idea. I wouldn’t want to know it anyway. It might turn out to be a nasty surprise.

If you enjoy a bit of chess, Amberchess could be your kind of tourney.  All games are over in about an hour and each day two games are played between super grandmasters – from say the top fifteen in the world.  The first game is blindfold, the second sighted, with both being played in the space of the time allowed by giving each player 25 minutes and (I think) ten seconds per move (It may be 25, I’m not sure – no doubt you can look it up).  Anyway, it beats chessboxing.

Anyway, if you want to check out the Amber tournament, here is the website and the first game starts at 12.30 am Australian Eastern Standard time every day. And here’s a rather interesting and engaging interview with the new World Number One – who has had an amazing tournament so far, losing both games on the first day and then winning both the next two days.  He certainly doesn’t muck around when he comes after your king as you can verify for yourself by looking at his game as black in either round 2 or 3 three of Amberchess.

A leader writer at the Telegraph decided that they knew exactly what Cameron meant — and didn’t approve:

The idea that society is to blame for criminal behaviour is passé. It flies in the face of common sense, empirical evidence, Christian doctrine and modern evolutionary biology.

Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser was also saddled with a catchphrase that his opponents used against him — "life is not meant to be easy". As Tony Stephens writes: "His political opponents seized on the sentence, arguing it revealed the attitude of the privileged and wealthy towards less-fortunate Australians." And unlike Cameron, Fraser did use his catchphrase in a speech.

Other catchphrases have been kinder to those who used them. Like his brothers, Robert Kennedy liked to say : "Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say, why not?" And curiously, Kennedy’s quote has the same source as Fraser’s catchphrase.

One thing all of these catchphrases have in common is that they do not originate with the politicians themselves.

Hug a hoodie

"Hug a hoodie" was imposed on Cameron by the media and his political opponents.

The “Hug a hoodie” speech gives a conservative spin to Tony Blair’s formula: "tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime".

The hoodie has become "a vivid symbol of what has gone wrong with young people in Britain today", said Cameron. While tough sanctions and punishment are important, he said, "The long-term answer to anti-social behaviour is a pro-social society where we really do get to grips with the causes of crime."

According to the Conservative leader, getting to grips with the causes of crime meant showing more love and understanding:

So when you see a child walking down the road, hoodie up, head down, moody, swaggering, dominating the pavement — think what has brought that child to that moment.

If the first thing we have to do is understand what’s gone wrong, the second thing is to realise that putting things right is not just about law enforcement.

It’s about the quality of the work we do with young people.

It’s about relationships.

It’s about trust.

Above all, it’s about emotion and emotional development.

Labour’s Home Office Minister Vernon Coaker thought it all sounded a bit soft . "Cameron’s empty idea seems to be ‘let’s hug a hoodie’, whatever they have done", he said. And the Sun responded by sending reporters into the streets to hug hoodies while photographers snapped their reactions.

Cameron’s speech was written by Danny Kruger. And when Kruger was later punched in the face by "rat-faced boy" in a hooded top, the tabloids were overjoyed. Kruger eventually left his speech writing job to work with Only Connect, the charity he founded with his wife Emma. In a piece for the Spectator he writes:

My main claim to distinction in my old job was drafting the speech in which David said something capable of the construction (though not the words, not the words themselves) that the public should all get out there and hug hoodies.

This speech has gone down in Tory lore as a terrible blunder, but I am still rather proud of it. The nub of it was, that while we should certainly punish people who cross the line into criminality, on this side of the line we need ‘to show a lot more love’.

Kruger’s charity works with prisoners, ex-offenders and young people at risk of crime.

From big ideas to catchy phrases — George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah

Some people say that Alan Jones came up with the "life is not meant to be easy" quote. According to journalist Chris Masters, Jones said the phrase originated with Rousseau. But as Fraser explained later, it is actually part of a quote from George Bernard Shaw’s Back to Methuselah. Not many people are well read enough to know that, said Fraser.

Back to Methuselah is series of five plays written after the end of the First World War. In the fifth play, a character identified as the He-ancient says:

Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage: it can be delightful.

Back to Methuselah revolves around Shaw’s idiosyncratic theory of "creative evolution". In his plays he imagined a world where human beings were able to live for hundreds of years. According to Shaw, this would give them enough time to figure out how to govern society properly. The first play is set in the Garden of Eden where Adam and Even discover death and the serpent tells Eve how to overcome it.

The Kennedy quote comes from the first play where the Serpent says to Eve:

I tell you I am very subtle. When you and Adam talk, I hear you say ‘Why?’ Always ‘Why?’ You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’

It’s always risky to make a point by quoting the villain of Genesis. So in his 1963 speech to the Irish Parliament, John F Kennedy handled the quote gingerly:

George Bernard Shaw, speaking as an Irishman, summed up an approach to life: Other people, he said "see things and . . . say ‘Why?’ . . . But I dream things that never were — and I say: ‘Why not?’"

It is that quality of the Irish — that remarkable combination of hope, confidence and imagination — that is needed more than ever today. The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics, whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were, and ask why not.

With use the quote grew tougher and more elegant. In 1968 John F Kennedy’s brother Bobby said:

George Bernard Shaw once wrote, "Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say, why not?"

The quote became a favourite of Bobby’s. And in a tribute after his death later in 1968, his young brother Edward (Ted) said:

As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him:

"Some men see things as they are and say why.
I dream things that never were and say why not."

The reference to both Shaw and the Serpent had gone, and for many Americans the quote had become Bobby Kennedy’s forever.

Justin Madden – boofhead, retired AFL hero, Labor Minister and perhaps soon to be unwitting definer of the bounds of Westminster democracy

A dispute has arisen in Victoria’s Upper House of Parliament which seems to show some promise of throwing legal light on a dim aspect of Australia’s evolved version of Westminster responsible government, namely whether and to what extent an Upper House can compel a Ministerial officer to give evidence.

Before explaining why the answer to that question remains obscure, although many would imagine it should be clear and long-settled, the context in which the issue arises is explained in an article in The Age yesterday:

An inquiry on the planning process behind the Windsor Hotel redevelopment descended into farce yesterday after Planning Minister Justin Madden tried to appear without being invited.

Sitting in a seat reserved for his former media adviser, Peta Duke, whom the committee had subpoenaed, Mr Madden attempted to answer questions on her behalf.

”Excuse me, chair, I’m the responsible minister and I’m prepared to answer questions today,” he told the inquiry.

But committee chairman Gordon Rich-Phillips wanted to have a closed-door discussion about whether to hear from Mr Madden.

There was some loud disagreement among the committee before Labor MP Matt Viney shouted: ”You want to close this down and have a secret hearing so you can have your … McCarthyist witch-hunt.” Opposition MPs then walked out.

Outside, Mr Madden denied he had provoked the breakdown, saying it was appropriate for him to answer questions on behalf of his staff.

The inquiry, instigated by the upper house Finance and Public Administration Committee, is investigating the Windsor Hotel planning approval process after a media plan written by Ms Duke was accidentally emailed to the ABC.

The plan outlined a strategy to manipulate public opinion to help the government halt the proposed $260 million redevelopment of the Windsor. A development application was lodged last year and is under consideration. Mr Madden has said Ms Duke came up with the plan and that it was wrong, leading him to remove her from his office.

You can readily see why the Opposition is interested in exploring the issue.  Moreover I suspect most thoughtful political observers would think the matter is one of genuine public interest and importance.  Was this just a hare-brained scheme hatched by a renegade ministerial staffer?  Or was there a strategy endorsed by the Planning Minister to subvert the planning process for which he is responsible by orchestrating public opinion?  Obviously the Minister would deny the latter interpretation (although interestingly he hasn’t yet done so, at least judging by his words quoted in The Age article), hence the upper house committee’s enthusiasm to see what the sacked ministerial staffer might have to say.

The Brumby government’s response to this upper house committee is the standard one exemplified by other federal and state governments:

[Madden] defended Ms Duke’s decision not to answer the committee’s subpoena, saying Attorney-General Rob Hulls had directed her to stay away.

Mr Hulls said the subpoena breached parliamentary conventions and called the inquiry a ”tawdry political stunt”. ”As Attorney-General, I am standing up for the conventions of Parliament and for the principles of natural justice,” he said.

Similarly, the Greens members of the committee exemplify a typical Opposition stance:

Greens MP and committee member Greg Barber said Ms Duke may have to be ”dragged” in front of the committee. ”Our legal advice says there is no question Parliament can demand any document, person or thing,” he said.

Similarly opposed stances were taken federally when a similar issue of compellability of ministerial staffers arose during the Senate inquiry into the “children overboard” affair under the Howard government, albeit with the major parties’ respective stances opportunistically reversed:

A spokesman for the Prime Minister, John Howard, says the normal arrangements for Senate select committees will apply.

The Opposition and minor parties are keen to question two staff in the former defence minister Peter Reith’s office, his media adviser and his military adviser.

The Government’s decision also exempts the Prime Minister’s foreign affairs adviser Miles Jordana.

During the election campaign, Mr Jordana was told of doubts over photographs that had been released and was given defence and foreign affairs information on the matter.

The spokesman says it is normal practice not to allow staff of MP’s to appear before Senate inquiries.

Then Opposition spokesperson John Faulkner adopted the position the Libs and Greens are currently pursuing in Victoria:

“The powers of a Senate select committee are very strong in this regard,” [Faulkner] said.

“I do think such a committee I think it’s unarguable that such a Senate select committee does have power to subpoena witnesses.”

However, while Faulkner struck a pugnacious pose, Labor didn’t ultimately press the point during “children overboard”, an outcome Faulkner foreshadowed at the time:

The Federal Opposition says Senate powers to subpoena ministerial staff to answer questions on the child overboard affair will only be used as a last resort.

Committee member and Labor Senator John Faulkner says legal processes will be only be used if other means fail.

Of course, all other means did fail, in that it was never established exactly what Ministers knew or when they knew it, but Labor never proceeded to the “last resort” of forcing Miles Jordana et al to give evidence. At least at federal level, both Labor and the Coalition operate on a Mutually Assured Destruction approach to Senate powers: they each avoid establishing a precedent for forcing ministerial staffers to give evidence lest it later be used against them when they’re in government.

Fortunately their State colleagues have occasionally been less restrained in looking to the long term consequences of inflicting short-term political pain on an opponent.  That’s how Australian constitutional law came to acquire the only two relevant court decisions on the extent of upper house powers.  Egan v Willis (1998 High Court) and Egan v Chadwick (1999 NSW Court of  Appeal) both arose from a Mexican stand-off between the Carr Labor government and an Upper House it didn’t control.

Upper House Minister Michael Egan was required by the Legislative Council to produce government documents but refused, was ejected from Parliament and sued in trespass, claiming that the upper house didn’t have the constitutional power to require him to produce documents (and that therefore ejecting him from Parliament was an actionable trespass). The High Court held that the Legislative Council prima facie did have the power to require a Minister to produce documents, rejecting a Carr government argument that the Westminster doctrine of responsible government required ministerial responsibility/accountability only to the lower house where governments are made and unmade.  The High Court ruled that ministerial accountability was to Parliament as a whole, and that upper houses had always performed a role in requiring production of government documents and the like.

However, the High Court did not determine what might be the legal outcome if a Minister claimed some form of evidentiary privilege from disclosure, most likely Cabinet immunity, or the slightly less exclusionary Crown privilege (now more commonly called public interest immunity), or even legal professional privilege.  Egan attempted to claim all three of these privileges, and it was those claims that were heard and determined by the Court of Appeal in Egan v Chadwick.

I won’t explain the way the Court disposed of Egan’s  claim to legal professional privilege here, because it isn’t relevant to the current situation in Victoria.  Nor is the issue of Cabinet immunity strictly relevant either in the present situation (because the document Ms Duke prepared isn’t a Cabinet document on any view), but you need to understand it to comprehend the broader  legal/constitutional issue.  On Cabinet immunity, the Court drew a distinction between documents that disclosed the actual discussion and proceedings in Cabinet, which were absolutely immune from disclosure, and other “Cabinet documents” like briefing papers prepared to inform Cabinet about matters it needed to decide.  It was held that the latter type of document should, like public interest immunity claims generally, be subjected by the Court to a “weighing” exercise between the public interest in disclosure in the particular situation and the public interest in maintaining the confidentiality of documents prepared to inform Cabinet deliberations.

That sort of weighing exercise would not always lead to a decision in favour of disclosure.  Cabinet briefing papers generally outline a range of possible policy options for consideration.  Most of them typically never receive any but the most cursory consideration by Cabinet and only one is actually adopted.  However, if disclosure is ordered, Oppositions can always be counted on to attempt to whip up a scare campaign in an endeavour to convince gullible voters that the government has a “secret plan” to introduce the rejected measures at some later stage.  Hence the public interest on balance might well militate against disclosure of documents of that sort lest public confusion be needlessly created and effective Cabinet government impeded.

However, the evidence sought in the current Victorian situation is not of that type.  We already know what the document Ms Duke prepared says, because someone accidentally sent it to the ABC.  What we don’t know is whether it outlines a strategy that the Minister himself knew about and endorsed.  It seems unlikely that sort of information would be the subject of a successful claim of public interest immunity.

However, both Egan v Willis and Egan v Chadwick were about whether production of government documents could be compelled by an upper house. They didn’t concern the current situation of whether a ministerial staffer can be compelled to give oral evidence before an upper house committee.  They do, however, contain some general propositions that might help us to make an educated guess.

In Egan v Willis, Gaudron, Gummow and Hayne JJ emphasised the centrality of “accepted precedent” in determining the scope of upper house powers:

… the long practice since 1856 with respect to the production to the Council of State papers, together with the provision in Standing Order 29 for the putting to Ministers of questions relating to public affairs and the convention and parliamentary practice with respect to the representation in the Legislative Council by a Minister in respect of portfolios held by members of the Legislative Assembly, are significant. What is `reasonably necessary’ at any time for the `proper exercise’ of the `functions’ of the Legislative Council is to be understood by reference to what, at the time in question, have come to be conventional practices established and mentioned by the Legislative Council.

Given that Oppositions have not until now attempted to press the point on subpoenaing ministerial staffers and that governments have never conceded that point, it must be regarded as somewhat doubtful whether upper house powers extend that far.¹1. KP: For clarity, it’s clear that upper houses have the power to subpoena witnesses generally, and that probably includes ministerial staffers even though no federal or state government has ever conceded that. What is more doubtful is whether the power extends to compelling a ministerial staffer to answer questions about what advice she gave the Minister and what his response might have been. One can make a plausible argument that compelling such answers is inimical to responsible government, which requires Ministers to be able to receive advice in confidence and deliberate about that advice without a court or the Opposition looking over the Minister’s shoulder. In Egan v Chadwick the Court remarked in that regard: “However, in my opinion, it is not reasonably necessary for the proper exercise of the functions of the Legislative Council to call for documents the production of which would conflict with the doctrine of ministerial responsibility, either in its individual or collective dimension. The power is itself, in significant degree, derived from that doctrine. The existence of an inconsistency or conflict constitutes a qualification on the power itself.” [↩]  Moreover, courts have always tended for good democratic reasons to be very reticent about ruling on parliamentary powers and privileges.

On the other hand, Gaudron, Gummow and Hayne JJ also said:

A system of responsible government traditionally has been considered to encompass “the means by which Parliament brings the Executive to account” so that “the Executive’s primary responsibility in its prosecution of government is owed to Parliament”. The point was made by Mill, writing in 1861, who spoke of the task of the legislature “to watch and control the government: to throw the light of publicity on its acts”. It has been said of the contemporary position in Australia that, whilst “the primary role of Parliament is to pass laws, it also has important functions to question and criticise government on behalf of the people” and that “to secure accountability of government activity is the very essence of responsible government”.  …

One aspect of responsible government is that Ministers may be members of either House of a bicameral legislature and liable to the scrutiny of that chamber in respect of the conduct of the executive branch of government. Another aspect of responsible government, perhaps the best known, is that the ministry must command the support of the lower House of a bicameral legislature upon confidence motions. The circumstance that Ministers are not members of a chamber in which the fate of administration is determined in this way does not have the consequence that the first aspect of responsible government mentioned above does not apply to them. Nor is it a determinative consideration that the political party or parties, from members of which the administration has been formed, “controls” the lower but not the upper chamber. Rather, there may be much to be said for the view that it is such a state of affairs which assists the attainment of the object of responsible government of which Mill spoke in 1861.

Application of this accountability approach might lead to the conclusion that ministerial staffers should be regarded as compellable to give evidence before an upper house inquiry, at least in some circumstances. It is difficult to conceive of a more stark case than the current one in Victoria, where the question is whether or not a Minister is complicit in a political strategy to undermine the proper and regular functioning of his own portfolio responsibilities entrusted to him by Parliament.  Madden will certainly persist in the Sergeant Schultz defence, so that evidence from former Madden staffer Ms Duke might be the only way democratic accountability can ever be achieved.

Afterthought - Like the better known constitutional lacuna flowing from reserve powers and highlighted by the Whitlam dismissal in 1975, the drastic uncertainty surrounding the powers of upper houses (both federally and at state level) illustrates that the truism about Australia’s constitutional system – “if it ain’t broke why fix it? – is dangerously complacent and seriously misconceived.

What would happen if Peta Duke continues to obey the Attorney-General’s direction not to answer the upper house’s subpoena?  Could the upper house send its presiding officer to arrest her and bring her before the Legislative Council?  What if she continued to refuse to answer questions?  Would the Legislative Council resolve to imprison her for contempt?  What would the government-controlled Legislative Assembly then do? Pass a resolution declaring the Legislative Council’s action to be unlawful and send its presiding officer to release her?  What would the Governor then do?  Decide that the government is acting unlawfully and exercise reserve powers to dismiss it?

Existing constitutional law and practice simply don’t provide the answers to any of these questions.  Moreover, the events bear more than a passing similarity to those in Britain in 1839-40 in the series of cases known as Stockdale v Hansard, except that they involved a stand-off between parliament and the courts rather than between the two houses of parliament.  Anyone who thinks that such constitutional crises can’t happen is ignorant of history.  It would be a brave person who would be utterly confident that Tony “Mad Monk” Abbott wouldn’t push the political envelope of Senate powers beyond breaking point if he stays Opposition Leader for long enough to get the chance.

The British system of responsible government works (or has done historically) for two main reasons: (a) the political classes have at least until recent times been sufficiently homogeneous, even since the advent of Labor, that they could always count on the fact that they were ultimately thoroughly decent English chaps who would negotiate a workable compromise when push came to shove; and (b) if they couldn’t then the Monarch would intervene and sort it out for them and they’d live with the result.  Neither of those fail-safe assumptions necessarily apply in Australia’s modern political system. …

One of the promises made by the current government in opposition that they managed to get in place without much difficulty was the Lobbyists Register.  This was to make the whole lobbying process more transparent. Any firms wanting to lobby the parliament would have to register themselves, and their staff and their clients and update it three times a year.

Whatever the benefit of these regulations, they seem to entail alot of red tape, particularly for smaller firms, or those for whom lobbying is only part of their activities. New regulations are meant to be assessed by a Regulatory Impact Statement.

I asked to see it. There wasn’t one.  I asked why.

A long process followed.

There was alot of prodding of the Finance Department who would prod the Office of Prime Minister and Cabinet whom would be elusive until prodded again after prodding from me.

Fully 6months of prodding resulted in this.

Dear Mr Green
Lobbyist register
Thank you for your query seeking information on whether a Regulation Impact Statement
(RIS) was required for the Australian Government Lobbyist Register. I apologise for the
delay in responding to your query.
The Office of Best Practice Regulation considered that the impact on business, including the
compliance burden of the register, was relatively low. Consequently, a RIS was not required
for the decision to introduce the register.
I hope this information assists your research. Should you have any further queries please
contact the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet as they maintain the lobbyist
register.

The 6 months also included numerous attempts to find out who I was working for, what bodies I was affiliated with etc. and I was required to give my home address in order for it to be signed off on.

Now, there are questions here about what’s the point of an RIS. It seems the criteria for determining whether an RIS is required is similar to what an RIS does, only less open. The front page of the AFR promises changes to the register, I wonder if these will require an RIS.

But more interesting is just how long it took to get this answer. It’s hardly sensitive information that could shake governments or undermine the quality of advice by bureaucrats. It’s hardly something that would have taken long to write, or an answer that was hard to find.

Why do government departments have such great inertia against releasing information, even when the sensitivity is so low. Why are they so concerned with just who is asking about a process (RIS) that is meant to be public anyway.

Moreover, why such secrecy about a  regulation designed entirely in the name of transparency?

Both the ALP and the Coalition have folded like cheap garden chairs in the face of organised evil. Shame on both of them.

An auction of old old radios. They’re little bundles of nostalgia these little guys. What about this one!

Or perhaps you’d like it in blue. Blue we can do.

Joel’s, the auctioneer reckons they’ll go for around 1.5K.  Then again this cherry red Emerson AU 190 Cathedral will set you back 8-12K.

From my notes (I did mean inordinately) :

Short Black/Ristretto : $2.20

Long Black/Piccolo Latte : $3.00

Latte/Flat White/Cappuccino : $3.50

Here’s my puzzlement. It’s clearly not marginal cost pricing.  Whilst the extra labour and milk obviously add a slightly greater cost to the flat white compared to long black, these extra costs are also present to a marginally smaller extent in the piccolo latte which is priced the same. And the effort involved in adding already heated effectively free water to a cup for a long black can’t represent an 80 cent cost on top of a short black.

But we don’t expect perfect marginal cost pricing in many places anyway.

But the prices don’t reflect what I’d expect from typical price discrimination either. This location isn’t in a place of heavy foot traffic. Casual walk ins are likely matched in numbers by people that came specifically for this coffee, and this is a boutique roaster after all. In this situation the people who have the least price elasticity, and are thus most prepared to pay higher prices are not the hurried or those who are ignorant of alternatives, but the coffee connoisseurs.  They have less elasticity in their demand for higher quality coffee and are prepared to pay more (or walk out to Wooloomooloo) to get better quality. Casual drinkers will be less fussy head for cheaper options.  A price discriminating firm would attempt to price the beverages the connoisseurs drink at a premium.

But such connoisseurs would lean towards either “purer” forms of coffee unadulterated by other flavours, or uncommon beverages that might mark them as an expert. On this menu these would be the short black, ristretto and piccolo latte. The first is a taste hostile to the casual drinker, the latter two are terms that the casual drinker is unlikely to even understand. Yet these are three of the four cheapest options.

The pricing seems to be based more on expectations of fairness. Greater volume of beverage should command a higher price, even if the cost is the same, even if certain consumers value a greater volume less.  Violating these notions of fairness would inspire hostility amongst customers whom would stay away as a result.

This seems fairly obvious without thinking deeply, but I don’t remember anything about this in Microeconomics. I just wonder if this effect (if it exists) is significant enough to be worth incorporating into analytical tools. It might help explain the difficulty public policy has in creating markets or pricing things, whether Pigou taxes, utility prices or parking.

As far as the politics are concerned, it looks like standard Howard era populism, seizing on the winds of prevailing opinion. As for the financing, the interesting aspect is not that business will pay for it. In fact, it would take it a bit of detailed modelling to work out how the incidence would ultimately fall. Businesses forced to pay the levy would recover part of it from salaries and part from consumers via higher prices, with shareholders paying the balance. The cost will fall fairlly broadly on the community as a whole, just as it would if it were taxpayer funded.

Therefore, what is interesting from an economic point of view is the insurance aspect — that there would be no connection between what firms pay and whether their female employees take maternity leave. The alternative private-sector funded scheme might have been a compulsory scheme in which each employer pays for its particular employees who took leave. That would have created a disincentive for firms to hire potential new mothers, and Abbott’s scheme avoids this.

At the aggregate societal level, it amounts to subsidisation of working mothers, in the form of six months’ free time, by the rest of the population. I had a go at unpicking the welfare implications a couple of years ago (and Paul Frijters before that), and this seems an apt moment to review the issues briefly.

For women who would otherwise have taken time off unpaid, the scheme is a windfall. For those on low incomes it’s a justifiable income redistribution measure, but for those on average incomes and higher, it’s middle class welfare pure and simple. For the rest, however, the scheme amounts to social engineering, so we need to consider how it will change behaviour and whether there is a net social benefit, given the mildly distortionary effects the levy would have.

Three groups of women benefit. The first is those who planned to have a baby anyway but would otherwise have stayed at work. This is good for their mental health, and the babies benefit from some extra crucial bonding time.The social benefit seems straightforward, but it isn’t clear whether leave on full pay would be necessay to meet the objective in the majority of cases. The $150,000 threshold seems excessive at first blush.

Second, there are women who would not otherwise have had a baby. Presumably the nation benefits from the extra children. But the same effect could probably be acheived with a bigger baby bonus that didn’t discriminate in favour of working women, so, if natural population growth is the main motivation for the scheme, it rests on an implicit assumption that working women raise better young citizens than their non-working counterparts.

Third, there are women who were going to have children anyway but would have stayed out of the workforce in the absence of a paid maternity scheme. Arguably it’s good for them and their chidren to have a closer attachment to the workforce, but the likey affect on their labour market participation, and the number of women involved, would be very hard to quantify.

While checking some of my own words on Monday, I discovered that many of my old blog posts had been attributed to Danger Mouse and Admin. A part of my online identity had been sucked down the memory hole.

While it’s easier than ever to check quotes from well known figures like John F Kennedy, Groucho Marx or Winston Churchill, it can be surprisingly difficult to check quotes from bloggers. As John Quiggin notes, some bloggers try to fend off criticism by stealthily correcting their mistakes. And some blogs just disappear.

Online content is more ephemeral than paper and ink. So an interesting question whether a shift away from physical texts to online texts will make checking some sources more difficult.

The trend is away from print. Newspapers like the Christian Science Monitor and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have abandoned print and moved to online only. And while popular novels and coffee table books will continue to sell well in print, low circulation non-fiction may gradually migrate online. The academic libraries of the future may end up with more silicon and less paper.

As more and more old books are scanned into online databases like Google Books and offered for download by retailers like Amazon, their paper and ink counterparts may begin to disappear. And this may mean we’ll be increasingly reliant on a small number of centrally managed electronic sources rather than on a large number of physical texts.

If people are able to get the books they want from their wirelessly connected laptops, book shops and libraries may find older, less popular books are more trouble than they’re worth.

Digital collections will lead to more aggressive ‘weeding’

In 2001 the University of Western Sydney admitted that it had buried 10,000 books in order to avoid the cost of storing them. But this pales in comparison with claims that the San Francisco Public Library dumped over 200,000 books in the late 1990s.

Almost all libraries ‘weed‘ their collections by disposing of books that are obsolete, damaged or rarely used. And the easier and cheaper it is to download old and less often used books from the internet, the more aggressive weeding policies will become.

Eventually, using electronic texts for research may become the norm. After all, it’s far more convenient to check a few key facts from your laptop than it is to trudge across town only to find that the book you want has been stolen or misplaced.

And with demand for physical books declining, libraries will further restrict their collections. Many little used books will be held only in a handful of university and major public libraries like the National Library of Australia. As a result, it will become increasingly difficult to check electronic versions against the original paper ones.

Missing books and altered text

So what if Google ends up with most of the digitised texts? The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Fred von Lohmann worries about Google’s ability to delete texts from its collection. "Once a book is removed," he says, "not only won’t you be able to read it online, you won’t even be able to find it using full-text search".

According to von Lohmann, the biggest risk comes from copyright holders. Under the Google book settlement, they are able to ask Google to remove their books from Google’s electronic database. "Even more troubling", he writes, "is the possibility of selective alterations of the texts of the books themselves".

The last library?

At Language Log Geoff Nunberg worries that Google Books "is almost certainly the Last Library":

There’s no Moore’s Law for capture, and nobody is ever going to scan most of these books again. So whoever is in charge of the collection a hundred years from now — Google? UNESCO? Wal-Mart? — these are the files that scholars are going to be using then. All of which lends a particular urgency to the concerns about whether Google is doing this right.

One of Nunberg’s major complaints is that many of the texts held in Google Books are misdated. Almost everyone who uses Google Books’ advanced search has come across this problem. If the date is important, readers should always check the text itself, rather than relying on Google’s metadata.

First they filtered You Tube …

As von Lohmann points out, electronic texts are far easier to alter than those on paper. As a result, the integrity of electronic collections depends on the policies and priorities of those who manage them. Not every library is an archive designed to collect and preserve texts for the future.

For example, on the practice of weeding, Renate Beilharz of the Schools Catalogue Information Service writes:

Students deserve information that is current and up to date. A key purpose of weeding is to rid the collection of inaccurate, outdated and misleading resources. Students are encouraged to use and rely on information provided in the school resource centre. It is essential to provide information that is correct, non-racist or sexist, and that reflects modern knowledge and values.

If schools move to electronic collections it will become much easier for parents, teachers or concerned citizens to identify material they don’t approve of and insist that librarians block or filter access. A quick electronic search may uncover vast amounts of objectionable material that had been allowed to remain undisturbed on library shelves for decades.

Who can you trust?

In the case of my misattributed posts, it’s the National Library of Australia that offers a safety net. At least some of Club Troppo’s and Catallaxy’s older posts are archived in Pandora.

The move from physical to online text is a bit like the move from gold to paper money. The fundamental issue is trust. In the future, paranoid survivalists will not just have cellars full of axe handles and canned food — they will have books. Lots of books.

Note: Jacques has since restored my name to the Troppo posts.

The latest episode of madness was an attempt to more fully bring across user details from the previous database.

The proximate cause of my woes has been that export/import tools built into Wordpress are, basically, crap. This is not a total surprise coming from the “programmers” behind this pretty-but-buggy system. It probably worked fine on the trivial little click-around tests they ran on their computers. It is functionally broken in real world use due to combination of PHP limitations and pisspoor design.

What it does in the trivial, tiny migration is fantastic. It brings a user, their posts, their categories, their tags and all the comments for their posts across in a single file without a hitch. However it doesn’t work if that file is too big. By themselves, Ken and Nicholas have posted too much for the facility to handle.

So I turned to plan B, which was an arduous and painful. This reveals the root cause of my woes, which is that MySQL is a piece of poop. Congratulations, Wordpress, you’re no longer to worst software in the stack.

Every important item in Wordpress has an identity: every post, every author, every comment etc is marked with an ostensibly unique numerical ID. This ID is provided by MySQL with a facility called AUTO_INCREMENT. It seems like a wonderful facility … right until you need to merge databases.

This is because AUTO_INCREMENT does not actually produce unique identities. It just produces a sequence of integers, starting at one and going up by one for each new record. This works fine in a single database, because the numbers are always going up and won’t collide. But it is useless when you try to combine databases, because MySQL will happily trample any existing records with the same ‘unique’ ID when you try to combine records into a single database.

What MySQL should provide is some sort of proper unique ID type. In other databases you can get unique types called IDENTITY, or sometimes, UUID. The later stands for Universally Unique ID. A UUID or IDENTITY column is guaranteed to be unique not just within the database, but unique to all databases, everywhere, for all time (subject to the limits of 128 bit numbers). If in the first place MySQL had offered some UUID or IDENTITY type, Wordpress records would be uniquely identified across databases. Moving users from one database to another would not have involved hours and hours of tedious and error-prone numerical substitutions that had to run in a precise order. All this mess might have been finished a lot sooner.

The bottom line

The whole point of last night’s attempt to bring user details across was twofold:

1. To bring across email addresses so that users could reset their password if necessary, and
2. To make it unnecessary to reset passwords by restoring the ones from the original database.

Goal (1) was apparently successful. Goal (2) was an utter failure. I did more than fail, I actually broke other login details. How on god’s green earth I did that is a total mystery to me as my SQL commands don’t even refer to other logins. But there it is.

So the upshot for Ozblogistan login-holders is: you may still need to do the ‘reset password’ dance, but at least now it’ll get to your email address.

I’ll keep looking at it, but at this stage I am not hopeful of a better resolution.

As explained on the site:

Antonyms, of course, are pairs of words that have meanings opposite to each other. Autoantonyms, in turn, are single words thatthemselves can mean either one thing or its opposite. This can happen either by convergence –e.g., the English verb ‘to cleave’ comes from two separate but similar Anglo-Saxon verbs, and today can mean either ‘to separate’ or ‘to latch on’– or it can happen through a cleavage, so to speak, within a single lexical item– thus ‘to dust’ means either to remove the dust from something or to cover something, perhaps that very thing, with dust or a dust-like substance. You might think that autoantonyms of the latter sort are rare birds in the dictionary, but in fact they are all over the place, particularly when the opposition between motion and rest is in question. Thus the adjective ‘fast’ means both ’swift with respect to motion’ and ‘bolted down’, i.e., ‘motionless’. A little reflection will also convince you that most prepositions are capable of autoantonymy. This in fact may have happened to you already: when confronted by a well-intentioned fund-raiser in the street, who tells you that she is raising money ‘for breast cancer’, does a little part of you not wish to reply: ‘Sorry, no, I’m against breast cancer’?

The thing with a lot of the autoantonyms in the article is that they typically do not lead to ambiguity or problems in conveying meanings because context and/or the form of the sentence makes it clear what meaning is intended.  To cleave a marriage in two and for one partner to cleave to the other are opposites in meaning using the same word, but in each case we know what is meant.

The autoantonym that’s always bugged me (since we’re already in the bowels of pedantry here perhaps I should say autoantonymic clause!) is the expression “if not”.  When this expression is used it is generally the case that it could mean either what was intended, or its opposite (here again, pedantry leads me to say that the expression ‘opposite’ is being used slightly loosely to mean not ‘the negation of the proposition’ but ‘the assertion of a proposition at direct odds with the stated proposition).Anyway, consider the statement:

He was a good player, if not a virtuoso.

Here the expression ‘if not’ could either intensify ‘a good player’: “He was a good player, so much so that he might even be called a virtuoso”. By contrast it could signify the downplaying of the description as a good player: ”He was a good player, even if you couldn’t say he was a virtuoso”.

I guess with ‘pure autoantonyms’ like that it’s a case of “we report, you decide”.

But even today, books, newspapers and academic papers are full of quotes that are just wrong. Here’s an example from Catherine Lumby’s and Duncan Fine’s book Why TV Is Good for Kids:

Take a guess who said the following about children. They ‘love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and and love chatter in place of exercise’. Worse, they ‘no longer rise when elders enter the room’, ‘they contradict their parents’, ‘tyrannise their teachers’ and spend their time scoffing down treats. It sounds like something you could rely on almost any shock jock to say any day of the week. But actually it’s the Greek philosopher Socrates talking about young people sometime around 399 BC.

A quick check of Respectfully Quoted at Bartleby.com shows that the quote is probably bogus. According to the The Yale Book of Quotations: "Researchers have never found anything like it in the words of Socrates or Plato."

Fred Shapiro, the editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, suggests that the quote originated with US horror fiction writer Guy Endore. But if you search Google Books, you’ll find that the quote pre-dates Endore’s book.

The entry in the The Yale Book of Quotations reads:

“The children now love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize over their teachers.”

Attributed to Socrates in The New York Times, Jan. 24, 1948. This spurious quotation, trying to make the point that adults have always complained about the behavior of youths, became very popular in the 1960s. Researchers have never found anything like it in the words of Socrates or Plato. Dennis Lien has discovered a similar attribution in Guy Endore’s 1933 novel The Werewolf of Paris "The young people no longer obey the old. The laws that ruled their fathers are trampled underfoot. They seek only their own pleasure and have no respect for religion. They dress indecently and their talk is full of impudence." Endore cites “an ancient Egyptian papyrus” as the source (p 717).

The entry for Guy Endore lists the passage from The Werewolf of Paris as:

… the earliest example of "the Socrates quote," which in various wordings attributes to Socrates a denunciation of the corrupt youth of his day. No one has found an authentic classical source for this, and it is undoubtedly a modern invention by Endore or some unknown earlier person (p 246).

Google Books lists a number of sources that may be earlier than this. Endore’s book was published in 1933. According to Google Books, the Journal of Home Economics: Volume 21 contains the quote and this was published in 1929.

This is easy to check. The Mann Library at Cornell University has digitised this volume of the journal and you can find the quote online (in Number 6 page 438).

The quote appears in an editorial which begins by saying "The March issue of Ginn and Company’s What the Colleges Are Doing gives us this twenty-three-hundred-year-old reminder that there is really nothing new under the sun …"

And that’s where the trail runs cold for the online quote sleuth. If What the Colleges Are Doing is available on the internet it’s hard to find. So the next step is to head to the library and flick through paper copies of the journal. I’ll let you know the result if I get around to doing that.

We could do the same with information.  We should presume that more is better than less, that open is better than closed and further that independence in the creation and dissemination of information is better than its creation and disemination by vested interests. Of course such an agenda would be large – as competition policy was.  And it would also be more complex than competition policy.  So while it sounds like the NCP it would be a larger, more diverse undertaking and would probably unfold over a longer period.

Perhaps one might think of Government 2.0 as the first cab off the rank as we move to developing the economic value of information assets in the possession of the government. But there are any number of other fronts. Improving information flows in financial markets.  We should move beyond regulation of mandatory disclosure – as important as that is – and start asking ourselves how we can assist the development of standards against which information is reported, the independence with which it is audited and the accuracy with which reputations are acquired.

The same goes for reputations in markets for important professional services, like medicine.  We’re starting to do it for schools.  And we already have the information to do much more in tertiary education.

Then there are the conflict of interest issues and issues of bias, deliberate or inadvertent. The way we gain information on the performance of drugs is incredibly inefficient because guess who we get to generate the information – the drug companies themselves. But similar problems arise in all softs of places. I was put in mind of these things by these articles on the ways in which forensic science is done in the legal system and ways information flows could be restructured to introduce checks for bias and conflicts of interest.

There’s one other similarity with competition policy.  The NCP was a formalisation of ideas that had been with us forever and which we were becoming more active on long before they became a conscious ‘national policy’.  Ditto National Information Policy.

Well if there were a book to illustrate that old proverb that you can’t judge a book by its cover it’s this one. In fact the cover is not just a cover, it’s a cover up! The book, as you may know if you’ve read it or about it elsewhere is Cowen’s paean to autism.  If that surprises you it certainly surprised me. As I read on I figured it would broaden from his own ‘outing’ of himself as high functioning autistic or perhaps others would call it Aspergers Syndrome – into broader themes.  But it never really does. In fact there is one mention of autism on the cover on the second of the four ’shouts’ on the back cover (and nothing whatever on the front). That’s all the warning you get. I presume this isn’t Cowen’s fault.  I presume the publisher cooked up the cover-up (making Cowen’s point about the stigmatisation of autism).

In one of the back cover ’shouts’ the book promises to “weave Facebook, Zen Buddism, Sherlock Holmes and so much more into a compelling argument”. Well it certainly seemed intriguing so I bought the book.  The ‘compelling argument’ that Cowen weaves is that all these things can be related in some way to autism or Aspergers. The internet generally is encouraging classification of all and sundry – classification being an autistic trait, Sherlock Holmes is autistic – a case which Cowen argues compellingly. Zen Buddhism gets a guernsey in there somehow, though it’s a while since I read that bit.

Anyway, Cowen makes a good case that autism is stigmatised and that that is 1) cruel and unfair to autistics and 2) stupid because high functioning autistics have contributed an unusual amount to human civilisation. I think he makes his point well.  I have a few criticisms for what they’re worth.

• I don’t know if this book had its origins in an article, but this is one of those books that should have just been an article to elaborate and argue the thesis and perhaps some blog posts to expand examples. Unfortunately the panoply of examples didn’t really build a richer picture of his argument and so it palled as a book.
• Cowen’s call is ultimately one for balance between cognitive skills, which is unarguable. And good on him for having the courage of his convictions – and his cognitive style. But, perhaps as one might expect, in arguing the case for greater emphasis on what autistic approaches can bring to the world, he does not report to his readers that some people think that his own discipline is already too autistic. In fact there’s a whole movement started in France at the turn of the century calling for a “post autistic economics“. As Wikipedia observes the movement has “has been criticized for using the medical diagnosis, autism, as a derogatory expression.”  Fair enough too, but the point being made is a serious one. In a book about the appropriate balance between different cognitive orientations, or ‘neurodiversity’ as Cowen pithily calls it, it’s a pity that Cowen couldn’t have discussed this possible weakness in contemporary economics.

Even so, the one thing that concerned me when I’d concluded was that I wasn’t able to directly discuss the idea that one of the panelists – Andrew Podger – seemed to suggest. I’d preface what I’m saying by saying that I’ve met Andrew on a number of occasions, and, like many people in Canberra, I have a very high regard for him. Andrew seemed to think that the idea of public servants blogging was really a bit alarming, perhaps flip. He was concerned that there was no room for public servants to be blogging about what they were briefing ministers about. I would generally agree. But then this really illustrates my argument – articulated briefly on the show – that when we debate this issue we don’t really deliberate on where and how social media like blogging could add value. Rather we focus on the extremes, and on what can go wrong and the default rapidly becomes a silence that is in no way compelled by the public service values we’re trying to defend.

There is much more that public agencies do, and much more that public servants do other than offer confidential and potentially politically contested advice to ministers. What I was at pains to try to point out was that the default right now is silence and that that foregos a lot of exciting opportunities.

I generally agree that there needs to be some government ‘privacy’ if you like around what public servants are advising governments. In a world of confrontation between Opposition and Government, all played out in the context of a media hungry for the only story they really want to write about – conflict – not doing so would compromise the advice. On the one hand it would tie the hands of politicians and make it harder for them to come to their own decision on what to do if it did not accord with their official advice. On the other, and in response, a lot of pressure would be put on public servants to provide the ‘right’ advice – the advice the ministers want to hear.

But there are so many other ways in which blogging and other uses of Web 2.0 could be useful. Especially in a small country, there’s a limited pool of people with real expertise about any number of things – say a technical matter like the management of tropical rainforest. Say provisions of the Tax Act.  Now it is quite possible to imagine discussion about such things that is politically partisan.  And so it should be avoided as contrary to the aspirations of the public service.

But it also possible to imagine professional discussion of such things that is focused on information sharing and professional discussion and that is not politically partisan.

Most obviously one can do this when one is running an inquiry and we did it in the Government 2.0 Taskforce. We avoided political partisanship and we did so easily and I would have thought with minimal risk.  And it was highly successful in involving people, having them feel listened to, in spreading the word of our inquiry and in drawing in experts from around the world.  So I can’t see why those bodies which are charged with conducting independent public inquiries – such as the Australian Law Reform Commission (which is probably our leading policy inquiry body in its attempts to explore online engagement),  the Productivity Commission the ACCC and any number of other bodies that currently are not using blogs to help inform their (independent) deliberations or not doing it much.

Now in fact any large organisation is running inquiries all the time. They’re trying to sort out this or that, considering changing the way they do something, doing policy research into one thing or another. This is quintessential knowledge work. And they are also doing things that it can be beneficial to let people know about.  Sometimes senior public servants will reasonably take the view that saying that one is doing a whole lot of new work on something might be politically contentious in itself. But there are any number of relatively mundane reviews of things where this is not the case.

In some areas one would need to be more constrained – for instance in talking about taxes – and one’s level of circumspection might have to rise when political partisanship was particularly strong around a particular matter – say the efficacy of fiscal policy right now. But there are still plenty of things one could talk about.  One could for instance have technical discussions about the tax statistics and how they could be improved, the thin capitalisation rules, practices in other countries or any number of discussions.

In my deliberations on government bodies, I’m frequently struck by the necessary limitations on our knowledge and how useful a bit of blogging would be – and how rarely it would raise any risks of being perceived as politically partisan. To take one example, a subject that often comes up is ‘how do we measure what we’re doing?’.  Now how would blogging about such a thing jeopardise public service values?  It would simply make it clear that the public service was curious and keen to get in the input of those who might have some really good ideas, expertise or experience.

So there are lots of ways in which public servants could blog. And yes, there are ways they shouldn’t blog.

So the Bunning blockade is over. For days, Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky exploited Senate rules to block a one-month extension of unemployment benefits. In the end, he gave in, although not soon enough to prevent an interruption of payments to around 100,000 workers.

But while the blockade is over, its lessons remain. Some of those lessons involve the spectacular dysfunctionality of the Senate. What I want to focus on right now, however, is the incredible gap that has opened up between the parties. Today, Democrats and Republicans live in different universes, both intellectually and morally.

Take the question of helping the unemployed in the middle of a deep slump. What Democrats believe is what textbook economics says: that when the economy is deeply depressed, extending unemployment benefits not only helps those in need, it also reduces unemployment. That’s because the economy’s problem right now is lack of sufficient demand, and cash-strapped unemployed workers are likely to spend their benefits. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office says that aid to the unemployed is one of the most effective forms of economic stimulus, as measured by jobs created per dollar of outlay.

But that’s not how Republicans see it. Here’s what Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, had to say when defending Mr. Bunning’s position (although not joining his blockade): unemployment relief “doesn’t create new jobs. In fact, if anything, continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.”

In Mr. Kyl’s view, then, what we really need to worry about right now — with more than five unemployed workers for every job opening, and long-term unemployment at its highest level since the Great Depression — is whether we’re reducing the incentive of the unemployed to find jobs. To me, that’s a bizarre point of view — but then, I don’t live in Mr. Kyl’s universe.

And the difference between the two universes isn’t just intellectual, it’s also moral.

Bill Clinton famously told a suffering constituent, “I feel your pain.” But the thing is, he did and does — while many other politicians clearly don’t. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that the parties feel the pain of different people.

During the debate over unemployment benefits, Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat of Oregon, made a plea for action on behalf of those in need. In response, Mr. Bunning blurted out an expletive. That was undignified — but not that different, in substance, from the position of leading Republicans.

Consider, in particular, the position that Mr. Kyl has taken on a proposed bill that would extend unemployment benefits and health insurance subsidies for the jobless for the rest of the year. Republicans will block that bill, said Mr. Kyl, unless they get a “path forward fairly soon” on the estate tax.

Now, the House has already passed a bill that, by exempting the assets of couples up to $7 million, would leave 99.75 percent of estates tax-free. But that doesn’t seem to be enough for Mr. Kyl; he’s willing to hold up desperately needed aid to the unemployed on behalf of the remaining 0.25 percent. That’s a very clear statement of priorities.

So, as I said, the parties now live in different universes, both intellectually and morally. We can ask how that happened; there, too, the parties live in different worlds. Republicans would say that it’s because Democrats have moved sharply left: a Republican National Committee fund-raising plan acquired by Politico suggests motivating donors by promising to “save the country from trending toward socialism.” I’d say that it’s because Republicans have moved hard to the right, furiously rejecting ideas they used to support. Indeed, the Obama health care plan strongly resembles past G.O.P. plans. But again, I don’t live in their universe.

More important, however, what are the implications of this total divergence in views?

The answer, of course, is that bipartisanship is now a foolish dream. How can the parties agree on policy when they have utterly different visions of how the economy works, when one party feels for the unemployed, while the other weeps over affluent victims of the “death tax”?

Which brings us to the central political issue right now: health care reform. If Congress enacts reform in the next few weeks — and the odds are growing that it will — it will do so without any Republican votes. Some people will decry this, insisting that President Obama should have tried harder to gain bipartisan support. But that isn’t going to happen, on health care or anything else, for years to come.

Someday, somehow, we as a nation will once again find ourselves living on the same planet. But for now, we aren’t. And that’s just the way it is.

Remember my famous catchcry, “Victory!”

The one in the post just below Nicholas on G2.0.

Yep. I trusted Wordpress to do the right thing. Silly me.

It thoughtfully dropped everyone’s email when migrating you to the new server. This means that the approach I’ve used previously — “here’s the link to reset your password, it will email you a new one” — doesn’t work.

So, friends and Troppo authors, if you’re having trouble logging in, please email me first so I can restore your email details to the system.

We’re all in favour of openness – at least as Sir Humphrey might say “in principle”, but of course it means different things to different people. The original US Freedom of Information Act was passed in 1966 in the US though it took until 1982 for something similar to find its way into Australian Law.

But placing the act in its historical context illustrates how FOI was seen as a matter of essential civil rights. The Freedom of Information Bill introduced to Parliament last year bore the marks of a new sensibility. Freedom of information it tells us is there not just to defend people’s civil right to information – particularly information about them.

The Act extends the objectives of the old FOI Act. FOI now seeks “to promote Australia’s representative democracy”. And this is offered not simply as an ethical or constitutional value. The additional focus is the utility of people being well informed. The new FIO bill proposes to increase “public participation in Government processes, with a view to promoting better-informed decision-making”

This focus on utility resurfaces when the bill emphasises the Parliament’s intention “to increase recognition that information held by the Government is to be managed for public purposes, and is a national resource.” FOI has become micro-economic reform – it’s as much about making the best possible use of our resources as it is about addressing people’s undoubted civil rights to information about them or which bears on their interests.

And the government has vast resources of useful information. And the internet, particularly Web 2.0 applications which facilitate broadly based collaboration between all and sundry has vastly increased the potential value of that information.

Agencies which have always collected information and produced ‘content’ for public distribution, like the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Geosciences Australia, the National Library of Australia and the Powerhouse Museum to name a few have been going great things to open themselves up and provide access to all comers on the internet. Most have embraced ‘creative commons’ licencing to sweep away some of the cobwebs that can prevent publicly funded information flowing freely through the internet being copied, recopied and ‘repurposed’ as people find new uses for it.

Lots of other information exists, and could be incredibly useful. The FOI Act will often help but if it doesn’t agencies tend to regard the information they generate – say in administering a program as their own property. True some information will have to be withheld for reasons of privacy, confidentiality or security. But often these concerns can be met while publishing the information – for instance in anonymised form.

To take a simple example, to cope with the sheer size of the task, the authorities who sent out the family payments that made up the early part of the government’s fiscal stimulus staggered payment by postcode. Information about which suburbs got their cheques when can be used for econometric estimation of the efficacy of the stimulus. Working out how effectively around $20 billion of your money was spent is no trivial matter. But the first instinct of the relevant agency was to refuse to release the information.

And, as I’ve been advocating for a decade or more, firms’ workers compensation premiums are often the best measure we have of firms’ workplace safety. Shouldn’t we be making it as easy as possible for workers to get hold of that data – perhaps even requiring firms to divulge their own premiums and their relationship to state-wide and industry wide averages to prospective employees?

That would be treating the information currently locked within government agencies “for public purposes, [as] a national resource”. Further, these examples don’t factor in the incredible power of the internet to transmit information and indeed of Web 2.0 to facilitate broad based collaboration between citizens and governments. Established in the UK by non-profit foundation MySociety, Fixmystreet creates the infrastructure to enable people to register maintenance problems in their local area. The site then conveys the information to government and tracks governments’ response to the data.

In an ideal world such facilities would have been built by governments themselves, but Fixmystreet shows how much can be done by citizen action – and how governments can then come to the party. Here the ‘national resource’ is information which, in the first instance is in the possession of the populace rather than the government. But the internet permits that information to flow to government in the best possible way, allowing all to observe how well government is collaborating with the citizens it serves.

Which brings me to the other main way in which openness should be thought of as micro-economic reform rather than just a principle of ethical and constitutional hygiene. It’s a truism that what gets measured gets done and strong information systems generate strong incentives to get things done. Before Fixmystreet there were the usual pressures on government agencies to fix things, but the citizens were the amateurs with poor information except for their own knowledge of their own environs. Now the scales are tipping in their favour in their relationship with the professionals who deliver services.

Finally gentle reader, did you get turned off when I referred to openness as micro-economic reform? A lot of people do. (Whispered aside to the Prime Minister’s economic advisors – people’s eyes glaze over when tell them you want to increase the per capita productivity growth rate by 0.6%. They’ll be much more interest in making things work better – schools, hospitals, workplaces and all those other things like waiting in traffic snarls that make up their lives).

As a general principle, the more government information we can get out into the community – and the more information from the community we can bring back into the mix using the kinds of Web 2.0 tools exemplified by Fixmystreet and the more we can allow people to innovate in the way they display and manipulate that information on the internet smart phones and in the next generation of information platforms that come our way – the better things will work; the more effective our governments will be.

I have two alternative strategies to look at. One involves chopping bits out of Wordpress that prevent the export/import system from working in the way I want them to.

The other involves a few hours of tedious SQL munging.

You may see Troppo go offline on Saturday or Sunday.

There will be transient locking of comments, so please hold off on the conspiracy theories about moderation policies for the duration.

Update 3.25pm WST: I investigated option 1. It’s still not very good. Luckily the SQL munging was made simpler by TextMate’s macro facilities and column selection feature. From hours down to minutes. I am now going to place the site into a gentle lockdown for a few hours to run through the process.

Update 6.50pm WST: Victory! My new most-favourite commandline tool is iconv, which converts text files from one encoding to another. The trick to this migration was that I needed to run it twice on the same file as there were two layers of character-set shenanigans taking place.

I was going to take a breather from the crikey annual group subscription this year, but couldn’t help myself. I’m beleaguered with people asking me if I’m doing it again.  Because it’s not hard to do I’m doing it again.

Please email requests to join in with your name and email address to mwilliscroft AT lateraleconomics DOT com DOT au

And we’ll then send them off to crikey who will then be in touch with you with an automated way for you to pay your (reduced) subscription.

So I’m gonna buy another one.  I’d consider Apple but for the fact that their approach to the ultra-light strained to maximise screen size. I don’t want to maximise screen size because

1. Except when I’m on planes and in hotel rooms I use an external screen.
2. When I’m in a plane, space limitations make a large screen a nightmare in economy class

So I’m back in the market for another ultra-light laptop.  It’s possible that a netbook would be good enough, but it’s my main machine so I don’t mind spending more money than that.  I want reliability, light weight and enough power to multi-task happily though I’m not a serious power user and don’t want it for any more fancy gaming apps than chess! I’d also prefer an external optical drive, but if there’s a drive in it and it’s light, that’s OK.

So any suggestions you have would be gratefully accepted . . .

HT Brad Delong: George Packer: The Top of Our Game:

David Broder had a devastatingly unremarkable assessment of Sarah Palin in the Post the other day. Her speech at the Tea Party convention in Nashville showed off a public figure at the top of her gamea politician who knows who she is and how to sell herself…. Broder wasnt analyzing Palins positions or accusations, or the truth or falsehood of her claims, or even the nature of the emotions that she appeals to. He was reviewing a performance and giving it the thumbs up, using the familiar terminology of political journalism. This has been so characteristic of the coverage of politics for so long that it doesnt seem in the least bit odd…. It would be strange if the Timess coverage of the financial crisis, which has been stellar, focussed entirely on things like Richard Fulds handling of his P.R. problems while Lehman was going down. And it would be strange if the papers coverage of Afghanistan, which has also been stellar, focussed entirely on things like Hamid Karzais use of traditional Pashtun rhetoric in his effort to ride the wave of public anger at the Americans. Imagine Karzais recent inaugural address as covered by a Washington journalist:

Speaking at the presidential palace in Kabul, Mr. Karzai showed himself to be at the top of his game. He skillfully co-opted his Pashtun base while making a powerful appeal to the technocrats who have lately been disappointed in him, and at the same time he reassured the Afghan public that his patience with civilian casualties is wearing thin. A palace insider, who asked for anonymity in order to be able to speak candidly, said, If Karzai can continue to signal the West that he is concerned about corruption without alienating his warlord allies, he will likely be able to defuse the perception of a weak leader and regain his image as a unifying figure who can play the role of both modernizer and nationalist. Still, the palace insider acknowledged, tensions remain within Mr. Karzais own inner circle. At one point during the swearing-in ceremony, observers noted that Mohammad Hanif Atmar, his interior minister, seemed to ignore the greeting of Amrullah Saleh, the intelligence chief. The two have been rumored to be at odds ever since last years controversial election. A palace spokesman, speaking on background, denied that the incident had any significance. The sun was in Hanifs eyesthats it, the spokesman said.

A war or an economic collapse has a reality apart from perceptions, which imposes a pressure on reporters to find it. But for some reason, American political coverage is exempt…. [A]s an exercise in accountability, political journalists should ask themselves from time to time: Would I write this about a war, or a depression? In the same vein, a government official once told me that the best way to cover Washington is as a foreign capitalas Baghdad, or Kabul.

It isnt that freshwater types believe that actual people are perfectly rationalthey just believe that making that assumption enables a more rigorous economics than is possible without it. After all, while there is only one way to be perfectly rational, there are an infinite number of ways to be irrational, and how do you choose? It all begins to look awfully arbitrary.

Hurrah! An non-lazy portrayal!

The article continues to talk about macro, but in relation to micro the problems associated with the assumption of rationality are evidently huge, but critiques have often irritated me because they imply that neoclassicism adopted the concept either through sinister ideological motives or willful stupidity. It probably feels good to imply this, but it doesn’t help us produce something better unless we understand why the flawed tool we want to use was adopted in the first place. We haven’t been using internal combustions engines through willful stupidity, it’s just they were the best/least worst option around for most of the last century. We’ll stop once there’s something better.

Granted there has been a process of discursive collapse where the RET kiddies don’t understand the tools they’re using, but we won’t get anywhere unless we address the reasons behind why their academic fathers (gendered language intended economics is regrettably a sausage fest) created them.

Behavioral Economics does do this by giving systematic shape to the relevant irrationalities, despite constantly being portrayed as disproving the homo economicus straw man. Perhaps agent based modeling can do the same.

I’m just glad there’s been an honest appraisal in the public sphere as to why a weak idea like assumed rationality has been prevalent.