Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
Month: August 2017
Millennials are people, not clones
The Washington Post has an article on millennial attitudes to Trump, broken down by race/ethnicity. The results won’t surprise anybody who’s been paying even minimal attention. Other things equal, millennials are even more hostile to Trump than Americans in general. Of course, other things aren’t equal; as with the population at large, African-Americans most unfavorable to Trump, and whites are least so, though no group is favorable on balance.
What’s surprising, or at least depressing, is the contrarian framing of this as a counter-intuitive finding, against a starting point assumption that millennials should have uniform views. I can’t blame the author of this piece for taking this as the starting point; it’s taken as axiomatic in the vast output of generationalist cliches against which I’ve been waging a losing battle since the first millennials came of age in the year 2000.
Just to push the point a little bit further, this study only disaggregates millennials by race. If, in addition, you took account of the fact that millennials (on average) have more education, lower income and less attachment to religion than older Americans, you would probably find it impossible to derive statistically significant differences based on birth cohort.
Alternatives to Adani
It’s obvious to anyone who cares to look that the Adani rail-mine-port project is an environmental and economic disaster area, and that claims that it will generate thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in revenue are nonsense. But that’s little comfort to people in the region, facing high unemployment following the end of the mining boom and the general slowdown in the economy. What’s needed is a positive alternative, and a development strategy that’s adapted to the future rather than the post. Adani’s application for a $900 million concessional loan from the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility to finance the rail component of the project raises the obvious question: if this money is available, what more productive ends could it be used for?
Farmers for Climate Action commissioned me to do a report on this, focusing on alternative investments in the agricultural sector. It was release at the weekend, and got some coverage, including in The Guardian. The report is here, along with a summary
Sandpit
A new sandpit for long side discussions, conspiracy theories, idees fixes and so on.
Monday Message Board
Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
My latest regular email ….
… is over the fold. Contact me on johnquiggin1@mac.com if you’d like to be added to the recipient list.
Another appearance (updated)
I’ll be on Sky at 7pm tonight talking to Peter Switzer talking about Zombie Economics and my views on the Australian economy.
Update There’s a link to the talk here