Month: July 2017

Unscrambling the Toll Road Egg

John Quiggin26 Comments

That’s the title of a presentation I’ll be giving to a seminar run by the Institute for Sensible Transport in Sydney. Registrations are open until tomorrow (Tuesday 1 August) for those with a professional interest. For my readers, in general, here’s a link to the presentation. Please advise if the link works, or doesn’t, as it’s a newish feature in Dropbox I haven’t used much

Tertiary education should be universal, non-profit and free

John Quiggin28 Comments

Last week, I spoke at the Australian Conference of Economists in a panel on Higher Education Policy. My talk was covered by John Ross of The Australian Higher Education Section which, unlike much of the Oz, seems still to be more interested in accurate reporting than political pointscoring. I talked to Steve Austin of ABC Radio Brisbane http://www.abc.net.au/radio/brisbane/programs/mornings/mornings/8733698

To sum up my main points

* As a society we should set a goal of providing appropriate tertiary education (that is, post-school through university or TAFE) for all young people. Instead, policy is still heavily influenced by nostalgia for the days when working class kids (actually, just males) could leave school at Year 10 and be apprenticed to a trade, middle class kids could leave school at Year 12 and get a nice safe job in a bank, and universities were the preserve of an elite, either smart enough to jump the hoops to get in or with parents rich enough to pay

* The provision of a universal publicly funded service like this should not be entrusted to for-profit firms, as has been shown by the VET FEE-HELP disaster

* We should abandon the market liberal rhetoric of choice, competition and incentives and instead focus on professionalism and a service ethos.

* Once we get close enough to the goal of universal tertiary education, we might as well finance it through the tax system as we do with schools, and develop some special policies for those who, for one reason or another, miss out. I’ll post more on this sometime.

Most Australians ineligible for Parliament?

John Quiggin76 Comments

A few weeks ago, I commented adversely on challenges by the ALP to the eligibility of government minister David Gillespie to sit in Parliament, on the basis that he owned a block of shops one of which was leased to an Australia Post branch. Since then, we’ve seen the resignations from Parliament of Greens Senators Ludlum and Waters, and from Cabinet of Senator Canavan. Eligiblity of others remains in question. This has led me to change my view. Instead of trying to make the best of this disastrous system, we should do away with it by constitutional amendment. The only way to make this happen is to enforce the existing provisions in their full absurdity.

According to the ABC, 49 per cent of Australians were born overseas or had a parent born overseas. Add to that everyone employed in the public sector “an office of profit under the Crown”, or who does business with the Commonwealth, and it’s conceivable that a majority of Australians are ineligible to run for election to Parliament. And, while Antony Green thinks it unlikely that pensioners are ineligible, the report he quotes says “However, the meaning of the phrase is not absolutely clear and there are divergent views about its effect.” Speaking personally, although I’ve never seriously considered running for election, I’d also never considered the possibility that, as an academic and ARC Fellow, I’d be ineligible. But it appears that I may be.

Of course, there are steps that can be taken to fix this problem for any individal, but we need a systemic solution.

Obviously, the authors of our Constitution never intended any of this. At the time, there was no separate Australian citizenship, so any British subjec was eligible, which would have solved the problems faced by Ludlum and Waters. And the public sector was much smaller, so the other constraints weren’t nearly as problematic. Age pensions hadn’t been introduced, so the provision against pensioners was meant to exclude personal pensions, granted by the monarch direclty

On the other hand, while the framers guarded against the sources of corruption evident to them, they never anticipated the problems we have now. It’s OK for political parties to be in hock to foreign donors, for someone who has renounced his Australian citizenship to control most of our media, and for careerist politicians to start out as hack staffers, give out favors in office, and cash them out afterwards. But if you don’t do the paperwork to cancel potential citizenship in a country you’ve never seen, you’re out on your ear.

At this point, the situation is so bad that “worse is better”. The best outcome would be for another dozen or two members of Parliament, from all parties, to be thrown out. Then we might get the unanimous support we would need to fix the absurdities of Section 44. Of course, that wouldn’t do anything about the real problems, but at least we would be free of this anti-democratic nonsense.

A trolley problem

John Quiggin9 Comments

I’ve generally been dubious about trolley problems and similar thought experiments in ethics. However, it’s just occurred to me that an idea I’ve tried to express in the economistic terms of opportunity cost, without convincing anybody, might be more persuasive as a trolley problem. So, let’s start with the standard problem where the train is about to kill ten people, but can be diverted onto a side track where it will kill only one.

In my version, however, there is a second train, loaded with vital medical supplies, which is about to crash. The loss of the supplies will lead to hundreds of deaths. You can prevent the crash, and save the supplies, by diverting the train to an alternative route (not killing anybody), but you don’t have time to deal with both trains. Do you divert the first train, the second train, or neither?

Hopefully, most respondents will choose the second train.

Now suppose that the first train has been hijacked by an evil gangster and his henchmen, who will be killed if you divert it, but will otherwise get away with the crime. As well as the gangsters, the single innocent person will die, but the ten people the gangster was going to kill will live.

The impending crash of the second train isn’t caused by anybody in particular. The region it serves is poor and no one paid for track maintenance. If the train doesn’t get through, hundreds of sick people will die, as sick poor people always have, and nobody much will notice.

Does that change your decision?

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Can we get to 350 ppm? Yes, we can

John Quiggin27 Comments

In a recent post, I made the optimistic argument that, despite all the obstacles thrown up by rightwing denialism, the world is on track to reduce CO2 emissions to zero by 2050, on a trajectory that would hold atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases below 450 ppm. On current models, that gives us a 67 per cent chance of holding the long term increase in global temperatures below 2 degrees. Warming of 2 degrees would not be cataclysmic for humanity as a whole but it would be a disaster for many people and also for vulnerable ecosystems such as coral reefs. That’s why 350.org wants to reduce concentrations to 350 ppm from current levels above 400 ppm.

Is that even possible?
And, what would it mean for global warming?

In this post, I’ll argue that the answer to the first question is definitely yes. I’m going to start with the assumption (based on this post) that we can reduce emissions from fossil fuels to zero by 2050, and keep concentrations below 450 ppm at that point. What are the options to reduce concentrations over the following fifty years? In the absence of some new technological fix (not implausible, but there’s nothing in sight as of 2017), there are three main possibilities

* Reducing methane emissions and concentrations. Methane emissions arise mainly from agriculture (paddy rice and ruminants), with some possible addition from fracking. It appears feasible, though not trivial, to greatly reduce these sources at fairly low cost. And because methane has a short residence time, a reduction in emissions will lead fairly rapidly to a reduction in concentrations. The conversions are very tricky, but the radiative forcing associated with methane is currently about 0.5 watts, compared to 1.94 for CO2. So, if methane concentrations were reduced by 40 per cent, that would be equivalent to a 10 per cent reduction in CO2, or about 40 ppm.

* Natural absorption. Only around 50 per cent of the CO2 we emit (the so-called atmospheric fraction) ends up as increase in atmospheric concentrations, with the rest being absorbed by oceans. After that initial addition to sink, CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a long time. However, there is still some additional absorption by sinks. Yale Climate Connections suggests that around 50 per cent is absorbed in 50 years, and around 70 per cent in 100 years. So, by 2100, an additional 20 per cent or so of the CO2 emitted around now will have been absorbed by sinks. A rough estimate would be 0.2*(450-280) or 35 ppm, where 450 is the peak concentration and 280 the stable pre-industrial level. Of course,this is far from an ideal solution, since CO2 contributes to acidification of oceans and therefore to coral reef decline.

* Reforestation and other land use changes. Land use change is currently a big net contributor to global warming, but a systematic program of reforestation could turn this around. The potential has been estimated at 85 ppm.

Against these possibilities, there is currently a net cooling effect, equivalent to around 50 ppm, from aerosols associated with air pollution. Hopefully, pollution will be reduced over the coming century, but that makes the task of stabilizing the climate a bit more difficult.

A question I haven’t yet been able to find a good answer on is: how much warming would a trajectory peaking at 450 ppm and declining to 350 ppm ultimately produce? If anyone can point me to a good source, that would be great.

Finally, at least some of the pollutants we’ve emitted over the past century will, on our current understanding, stay there for hundreds or thousands of years, leading to long term problems of sea level rise. But if we can get to 2100 without destroying the planet through climate change or nuclear warfare, I’m sure our great-grandchildren will work out some way of cleaning up what’s left of our mess.

Sense and senselessness in transport policy

John Quiggin31 Comments

I’ve been doing various pieces of work on transport. Here’s a quick update:

* I’ll be speaking at a one-day seminar organised by the Institute for Sensible Transport in Sydney on 8 August. It should be a good event for those with a professional interest in road pricing and related topics.

* For those with a general interest, I have a section over the fold from my book-in-progress, Economics in Two Lessons. Comments and criticism much appreciated.

* While I was a Member of the Climate Change Authority, I put a lot of work into a report the Authority did on vehicle fuel efficiency standards. With the rejection of just about every other policy measure to reduce CO2 emissions in Australia, this was the government’s last chance to do something useful. Naturally, Turnbull and Frydenberg went to water the moment the denialists who dominate the LNP raised an objection. Perhaps, now that the laws of mathematics have been subordinated to Australian law, Turnbull can solve our problems by simply decreeing a change of sign, so that an increase in emissions becomes a decrease.

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