Year: 2007

Fistful of Dollars II

John Quiggin56 Comments

Given how far behind the government is starting, it probably makes sense to lead off the campaign with what has to be its biggest promise, tax cuts costing $34 billion over three years. As I recall, the spending promises already announced total about $9 billion a year, so its hard to imagine that there can be much left in reserve.

Although there’s nothing wrong with announcing a program for an entire term of government, it’s unusual in relation to tax cuts, and I can recall (perhaps with error) at least two instances of such cuts being promised and then taken back. One was Paul Keating’s L-A-W tax cuts in 1993, which (as implied) were actually legislated in an attempt to increase their credibility. The other was the “Fistful of Dollars” tax cut of 1977 (so named for the ads which showed precisely that) promised by the Fraser-Lynch team going into the election and then (if my fading memory serves) taken back by Lynch’s newly-appointed replacement. Now what was his name again?
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Last chance to enrol

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After setting everything up to close the rolls the moment an election is called, the government has waited until Wednesday to dissolve Parliament (I suspect because they can run tax-funded ads until then), which means that it’s not too late for anyone who hasn’t enrolled.

Details here

For readers of this blog, a more likely problem is out-of-date details. You can check on this here

Weekend reflections

John Quiggin7 Comments

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.

A million tragedies

John Quiggin25 Comments

Stalin is supposed to have said “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic”. Like much said by that master of lies, it is a half-truth. A million deaths is a statistic, but it’s also a million individual tragedies.

The death of David Pearce, the first Australian soldier to die in Afghanistan is a tragedy for him and his family. So were the deaths of Marany Awanees and Jeniva Jalal, shot by security guards from Unity Resources Group, an Australian-run security company in Baghdad last week. And so have been all of the deaths in Iraq (as many as a million since 2003) and Afghanistan in the wars and violence that have afflicted both countries for decades.

As someone who supported the war in Afghanistan, as a necessary act of self-defence and as an intervention that seemed likely to have positive effects, I have to accept some share of the responsibility for the deaths it has caused, including that of David Pearce. I can make the point in mitigation that, if the Afghanistan war had not been so shamefully mismanaged, most obviously the diversion of most of the required resources to the Iraq venture, it might well have reached a successful conclusion by now.

But even after that mismanagement, I still, reluctantly, support the view that it is better to try and salvage the situation in Afghanistan by committing more resources, rather than pulling out and leaving the Afghans to sort it out themselves. I draw that conclusion because I think there would be even more bloodshed after a withdrawal, and that there’s a reasonable prospect that a democratic government and a largely free society can survive in Afghanistan with our help. And, even after all the mismanagement, i think most Afghans are better off now than they would have been with a continuation of Taliban rule and civil war.

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The dormitive quality of rational choice

John Quiggin8 Comments

This Matt Yglesias post has already made it on to my colleague Andy McLennan’s door. It’s short enough to quote in full

I’m not sure I understand why Greg Mankiw thinks economists “don’t understand tipping.” When I was learning economics, I learned that people are utility-maximers and that whenever you see some behavior that doesn’t seem explicable in purely financial terms that must be because people are deriving utility from the foregone financial advantage. Thus, as any economist could tell you, people tip because of the utility they derive from the tipping in much the way that economists can explain all aspects of human life.

Have I ever mentioned that philosophers tend to think that economics is vacuous? Which isn’t to say that you shouldn’t listen to economists. These days, they tend to know a lot of math, and math is a very useful thing.

Matt omitted the irony alerts, but I tried to spell out the same point here.

Given any data on any observed set of problems involving the selection of one or more choices from a set of alternatives, the observed choices can be represented as the maximisation of an appropriately specified function.

Playing straight man to Matt, that doesn’t mean utility functions are useless – the functional representation lets you do lots of math that is much harder if you try to work directly with preferences. But any competent economist knows that utility isn’t an explanation of observed choices, it’s a way of representing them. The representation is simpler if choices satisfy some minimal consistency requirements, like transitivity (if you prefer A to B and B to C then you should prefer A to C).
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False positives

John Quiggin4 Comments

While the changes have improved the performance of the blog in many respects, one problem is that I’m now relying on Akismet to detect spam, which produces lots of false positives. The first-best solution would be lock every spammer on the planet far away from any Internet-connected device. Since that won’t happen, I’m inviting commenters whose comments disappear into Akismet limbo to email me and I will try to extract them (no promises on this, but I’ll do my best).