New: A couple of books on the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economics in memory of Alfred Nobel (more familiarly the Nobel prize in Economics). My review, posted over the page, drew on discussions here – thanks, everyone.
Old: Northanger Abbey I’d forgotten how much fun this was.
Read More »
Undercover economist Tim Harford comments in Slate. Unusually for a US publication, Queensland gets a mention.
Tim Dunlop has just announced that he will be running a blog for News Limited, on their news.com.au site. The title is Blogocracy, and it’s going to start on Monday.
Tim’s blog, Road to Surfdom, will continue, which is good since it’s always been my favorite among Australian blogs. I was reading the Crikey report on this, and it made an observation that had also occurred to me.
At the very least, the News Limited move suggests that a a back door into journalism is ajar. Don’t want to do a communications course followed by a cadetship to break into journalism? Consider starting up a blog – if you can make it good enough to get noticed.
Tim isn’t the first to follow this route. Back in the Cambrian era of Australian blogging (2003), Gareth Parker was one of the pioneers. He got a job with the West Australian, but giving up blogging was part of the deal, if I recall correctly. Admittedly, Gareth was a journalism student, so it wasn’t just the blog that got him the job, but it didn’t do any harm.
Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.
Andrew Bolt is still touting the Oregon Petition. Is he too lazy to spend the five minutes’ with Wikipedia and Google that would tell him this was a fraudulent exercise put together by professional shills, and that its main claims about satellite data have long since been abandoned even by hardcore denialists, or does he just not care?
Mark asks whether The Price is Right ?
Nanni classes the AP6 as Missing in Action
I’m still working on the details of our Carbon Neutrality Policy
Brisbane blogger Joanne Jacobs is campaigning for daylight saving in SE Queensland. Last year, Mark Bahnisch came out against, arguing that, in Brisbane’s summer weather it’s better to finish work after sunset. I thought this might be a good time to review the issue, which we discussed at length last year
I’m generally in favour as I tend to wake up with the sun. Because Brisbane is so far east (we’re not far from Byron Bay), sunrise in summer is very early – it’s light before 5am. In some ways, that’s good (it’s a great time to get work done), but not if you want to stay up past about 9pm. It starts getting dark pretty early, around 6:30.
I suspect that daylight saving here does little more than restore the time in Brisbane to what it would be under “God’s time”, without time zones or other fiddles.
The problem is, of course, that the state is big in both directions. The tropics have very little seasonal variation in the length of the day, which makes daylight saving in summer nonsensical while the west has the opposite problem to Brisbane. As various commentators noted, the idea that resistance to daylight saving in these regions is based on ignorant provincialism is itself ignorant and provincial, reflecting an assumption that the conditions of the temperate-zone eastern seaboard hold universally.
But if we have to have one time zone for the whole state , we should pick it to suit the majority. My guess is that a majority of people in SEQ would prefer daylight saving, and this would outweigh the majority against in other regions. But there are certainly sizeable minorities in both areas, so it’s hard to predict for sure.
Last time around, I dismissed as ludicrous the idea of an internal time zone border, but as commentators pointed out, NSW has one, with Broken Hill on Adelaide time. On reflection, I think the idea has a bit of appeal on general subsidiarity grounds.
Starting with the current situation, Queensland has to choose whether to go along with the southern states and get the benefits of consistency along with the benefits and costs of daylight savings. Clearly the benefits are larger in SEQ, so if we go that way, it would be reasonable to offer the same choice to the north and west. Those regions would then have the same choice between a more convenient time system, with the costs of inconsistency with the South-East, or a less convenient but consistent system.
Of course, anyone who really doesn’t like daylight saving could leave their watch unchanged, stick to their old schedules as far as possible, and just bear in mind that everyone else is using a different time. The reverse is true in the present situation if you really like daylight saving – you can just get up early.
I’ve gone back to one of the old layouts. So far, I’ve picked up a strong preference for a serif font, which I share, and mixed feelings on the rest of the design, including the mugshot. So please comment away, and I’ll consider a redesign when I’ve digested it all.
One of the issues that’s been debated at length here is the choice of exchange rates to use in converting different currencies for projections of future economic growth and energy demand. The scenarios developed by the IPCC have used market exchange rates (MER) Ian Castles has argued, in very strong terms, that it’s crucial to use exchange rates adjusted so as to exhibit Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). In my submission, I made a couple of points. First, that there is no uniquely satisfactory method of obtaining PPP exchange rates. Second, and more importantly, the choice doesn’t make much difference to projections of energy use or CO2 emissions, as long as the same values are used consistently. A method like MER, which tends to overstate income differences between poor and rich countries relative to PPP will yield a lower income elasticity of demand for energy. And since MER data have been, until recently more readily available for more countries, there are some practical arguments in favour of using them.
That said, there are a couple of reasons to favour a move to PPP-based scenarios. First, since these are now becoming the norm, continued use of MER numbers is likely to cause confusion. Second, while the crucial numbers regarding emissions aren’t much affected (and any error may be either up or down) other variables, particularly those used in calculations of economic welfare, might be significantly affected.
In this context, it’s unfortunate that the debate has been seized upon by denialists as a basis for attacking the whole IPCC process. The energy that’s gone into pointless disputes could have better been used in a constructive attempt to improve things.
Where does the Stern report come out on all this? Pretty much right in my view. Key quote
efforts are under way to improve the provision of PPP data. The International Comparison Programme (ICP), launched by the World Bank when Nicholas Stern was Chief Economist, is the world’s largest statistical initiative, involving 107 countries and collaboration with the OECD, Eurostat and National Statistical Offices. It produces internationally comparable price levels, economic aggregates in real terms, and Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) estimates that inform users about the relative sizes of markets, the size and structure of economies, and the relative purchasing power of currencies.
In the IPCC SRES scenarios that use MER conversions, it is not clear that the use of MERs biases upwards the projected rates of emissions growth, as the SRES calibration of the past relationship between emissions per head and GDP per head also used GDPs converted at MERs as the metric for economic activity (Holtsmark and Alfsen (2003)). Hence the scenarios are based on a lower estimate of the elasticity of emissions growth per head with respect to (the incorrectly measured) GDP growth per head. As Nakicenovic et al (2003) have argued, the use of MERs in many of the IPCC SRES scenarios is unlikely to have distorted the emissions trajectories much.
I should point out that the World Bank ICP is a successor to the earlier ICP work of Heston and Summers who initiated the idea of systematic PPP comparisons and produced the well-known Penn World Tables. Still, as the quote makes clear, Stern can speak with authority on this topic.
The Stern review report is big, and I haven’t had time to digest more than a little bit so far. One point to make is that the apocalyptic numbers that have dominated early reporting represent the worst-case outcomes for 2100 under business-as-usual policies. But even looking at the less dramatic cases, the same basic messages emerge.
More on all these points soon.
John Quiggin 