Month: August 2003

What I'm reading

John Quiggin7 Comments

The Wealth of Man by Peter Jay. Among other claims to fame, Jay was one of the writers of Yes, Minister and this book has both the strengths and weaknesses of the series.** In essence, it’s a public choice view of the world. This is conducive to telling a convincing story, as long as you don’t worry too much about what’s being left out. In Jay’s story, private initiative is the key to progress and governments are at there best when they keep in the background setting the rules, and defending producers against internal and external predators.

To tell the story this way, you have to leave out some pretty important chapters, or, as in Jay’s case, report them and disregard. While reading about the Mesopotamian civilisations based on gigantic irrigation systems and the Roman road system that enabled rapid communication from Scotland to Syria, I was waiting for some sort of discussion of public goods, but this is not a category for Jay.

In fact, it would be quite plausible, though a drastic oversimplification, to tell a story in which the main engine of progress is the appropriate choice of public goods. Military grandeur, monarchical display and religious edifices like pyramids and cathedrals soak up capital, while schools and transport infrastructure generate high returns. In 18th century England, even the allocation to religion was turned to good account with clergymen like Priestley and Stone discovering oxygen and aspirin instead of writing devotional tracts.

I also read and very much enjoyed Isabel Allende’s memoir of Chile My Invented Country.

**A totally erroneous claim. As James Wright Russell points out, it was Antony Jay. What’s annoying here is that I had doubts about my recollection on this, and relied on Google, which produced this link, referring to “co-writers Jonathan Lynn and Peter Jayâs 1980-1982 series Yes Minister, said to be the favourite series of then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. ” What’s really annoying is that I have a DVD of the series, so I could easily have done a more reliable check.

Working more and enjoying it less?

John Quiggin4 Comments

This piece from the Economist covers some of the same points I’ve been making about work intensity (here and here. The summary is that the UK and France have approximately equal GDP per person. French output per hour is 20 per cent higher than British, but this is cancelled out by higher British employment rates and higher average hours per person.

I’ve argued in the past, that improvements in GDP achieved by longer hours and greater work intensity are largely illusory and the Economist largely goes along with this. On the other hand, higher employment rates are generally a positive way to achieve higher output, at least if the alternative is unemployment, rather than, for example, participation in full-time education.

A very similar analysis applies to the US, except that US productivity is about equal to that in France and other European countries, so higher employment rates and longer hours translate into higher GDP per person.

A final point is that the greater inequality in the US and the UK imply that the average (median) person falls further short of average (mean) income than in Europe.

Back in Oz

John Quiggin3 Comments

Hi everybody, I’m back in Oz today and back blogging. Before I settle back in, I’ll give my impressions of Montreal. In economic terms, it was hard to figure out. On the one hand there were lots of fairly derelict-looking buildings and many not-so-derelict ones had “A Louer” (“To Let”) signs. On the other hand, there was new construction going on all over the place. Similarly, while there was a general air of prosperity, particular in the CBD, beggars and homeless people were considerably more evident than in DC. I’m not clear whether this is reflects a dual economy, or the early stages of recovery from a prolonged slump, or just the hazards of the random snapshot approach.

The city is overwhelmingly francophone and has apparently become significantly more so in recent decades owing to the language policies of the Parti Quebecois. However, at least in shops and so on, everyone switched to fluent English as soon as they’d heard a sample of my French.