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Monday Message Board

John Quiggin30 Comments

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. If you would like to receive my (hopefully) regular email news, please sign up using the following link


http://eepurl.com/dAv6sX You can also follow me on Twitter @JohnQuiggin, at my Facebook public page   and at my Economics in Two Lessons page

30 thoughts on “Monday Message Board”

  2. Well, we can officially call it folks. We’ve officially reached peak hypocrisy on this day (27/5/2019).

    This just arrived in my email from the Oz:

    ABC gave us groupthink on steroids
    CHRIS MITCHELL
    Was the ABC deliberately biased towards Labor at the election? It certainly did not run a balanced campaign and the nation knows it.

  3. @Paul Norton

    thanks for the link. Fascinating as the Greens’ results are, what caught my eye was the names of the two far-right blocs, Europe of Nations and Freedom Group (ENF) and Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy (EFDD).

    Dare one say it? – it’s the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front redux. You can just imagine the meetings.

    “They’ve bled us white, the bastards. They’ve taken everything we had, and not just from us, from our fathers, and from our fathers’ fathers.”

    “And from our fathers’ fathers’ fathers.”

    “Yeah. All right, Francois. Don’t labour the point. And what have they ever given us in return?! ”

    “Prosperity, human rights and the rule of law.”

    “All right, but apart from prosperity, human rights and the rule of law, what has the EU ever done for us?”

    “Brought peace”.

  4. Troy Prideaux – No. It is just an ill wind whipping up waves of hypocracy and mendacity seemingly over an historical time scale supported by people doing things like;

    1) “This just arrived in my email from the Oz!

    “Back in 1996 the Australian Press Council upheld a complaint against The Courier Mail under editor Chris Mitchell for printing a nutty story that historian Manning Clark was an agent of the Soviet Union who had been awarded the Order of Lenin for his services. The Press Council concluded:

    “The newspaper had too little evidence to assert that Prof Clark was awarded the Order of Lenin – rather there is much evidence to the contrary.

    “That being so, the Press Council finds that The Courier-Mail was not justified in publishing its key assertion and the conclusions which so strongly flowed from it. The newspaper should have taken further steps to check the accuracy of its reports.

    “While the Courier-Mail devoted much space to people challenging its assertions, the Press Council believes it should have retracted the allegations about which Prof Clark’s supporters complained.

    “Mitchell did not retract and became editor of theAustralian in 2003.

    So what do we see in today’s Australian?” …
    … written December 5, 2008!

    https://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/12/05/chris-mitchells-folly

    https://www.crikey.com.au/2017/02/07/abc-critics-miss-the-point-of-a-national-broadcaster/

    https://about.abc.net.au/correcting-the-record/abc-response-to-the-australians-chris-mitchell-13-november-2017/

    https://loonpond.blogspot.com/2017/09/in-which-major-mitchell-and-bouffant.html?m=1

    And you are getting the oz today and noting a peak? These waves have been washing over us forever and the illnewswinds have been making frothy white peak articles since inception.

  5. KT2, Yup this is peak (today!). We all know Mitchell’s fingers and lips have passed plenty of baseless BS over the years – no news to anyone there. This is on a whole new ballpark concerning hypocrisy with literally hundreds (if not thousands) of published headlines & articles to draw from ridiculing any credibility such an argument has from that publisher.

  7. Trolling… yeah… or feeding the subscription base swags of ideological red meat (if that counts as trolling?)

  8. Troy Prideaux, my apologies if I’ve stated the obvious or cast the email from the oz to you as “the problem” – I did and it is imo.

    My imputation was – you are feeding the trolls by subscribing to the oz. Do you?

  9. No I certainly do not subscribe to it. I do get their (the oz) email summaries which i don’t pay for.

  12. Money ( read Palmer for eg) and outright deception. Haven’t we worked this out yet?!

    “A sign, mimicking the purple theme of the Australian Electoral Commission, hung near her family’s local polling booth, delivering a Chinese-language message to voters.

    “Correct way to vote: on the green voting card, put preference 1 next to the Liberal party,” the sign read. “The other boxes can be numbered from smallest to highest.”

    “Que, an organiser with the activist group Anticolonial Asian Alliance, was sickened. The sign, authorised by the Liberal party, was a “condescending”, “cowardly” and “predatory” attempt to trick voters, she said.

    “Most younger Chinese Australians would have been too savvy to fall for it. But Que fears older migrants, and potentially those from Hong Kong and Taiwan, may have been duped into directing their vote.

    “The sign is designed to deceive and manipulate the ‘ethnic vote’,” she told Guardian Australia. “Not to mention it is just another part of the Liberal party’s propaganda tactics, mostly waged on Weibo.”

    “Similar signs were found at booths in Kooyong and Chisholm.

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/may/27/designed-to-deceive-how-do-we-ensure-truth-in-political-advertising

    Echo chambers are not anywhere near as bad as deceptiin at the booth imo. Major problems.

  13. For mainstream economists who are mystified by words.

    Abstract
    This paper builds a dynamic (and NOT general equilibrium!) Keynes/Kalecki/Minsky-style macro simulation in Excel for use in Intermediate Macroeconomics. It is set in time, it is capable of creating a business cycle, it demonstrates the effect of fundamental uncertainty in creating volatile forecast adjustments, it includes debt and the possibility of financial crisis, and it can be used to compare the effects of automatic stabilizers versus a job guarantee. The simulation is simplistic, but I believe it is a very effective means of communicating to students an essential element of our method that may otherwise be difficult to convey.

    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333204113_Post_Keynesian_Modeling_and_Simulation_for_the_Classroom

  15. Thanks for der lead in. One does not need to be a Murray Gell-Mann to know that the not only the world’s leadership but even the leadership of the Green movement never really tried to implement policies that had a chance to prevent a human climax in climate change.
    It seems that the final solution that was opted for by the world’s elite which was that it would not ask anyone to make any sacrifices to prevent such a human climax because the only way that such a policy could have been sold to the public would have been for the world’s leaders to lead by setting policies that would have effected them themselves first.
    What is tragic is that even the Green Leadership went along with this Paradime. This led to such absurdities as, that the production of large privately owned automobiles were never outlawed, that family pets, especially large ones, were never even highly taxed let alone outlawed.
    The OPPORTUNITY COSTS of implementing just these two policies would have been very very painless. But humanity did not even take these two extraordinarily EASY EASY steps towards veering away from catasrophe. No pets, no SUVs, two possessions of the top ricnest 20% of humanity, imagine what the world would have been like without them? Do you see a porographic image?
    Can anyone be blamed for such a grotesque failure of leadership? If so would it be worthwhile to for anyone to take any risks to hold such people accountable?
    There is a vast system in which the people in charge point their fingers at someone else for the problem. The military leaders hide behind the political leaders. The politcal leaders hide behind the voters. The voters point back at the politcal leaders. Then the politcal leaders point to the leading economists, the leading scientists, and the other leading intellectuals in the fields of education, psychology, sociology, history, archelogogy even antropology, of course the legal proffession, and say these great people are the people that we have gotten our ideas from. Yet the institutions that choses who voice among these intellctuals gets amplified and whose voice gets buried share the same beds, at least in a manner of speaking as the leading politicians. While in miliary matters the leading politicians are totally dependent upon the information forwarded to them by the miliary leaders. It should not be to hard to imagine that this power structure allows that military to directly manipulate the politcal power structure and through that power structure indirectly maniplate EVERYTHING. They can even manipulate me. They can even manipulate me with out me know what is happening. Except everyonce in while I figure what they did. My recognition of when I am being played is seldom timely. But once I do figure it out it makes it harder for the same type of manipulation to work a second time.
    BUUUUUTTTTTT hey I am only an army of one. There is no one that I can rely on to cross check information with. Those in a position with more oversight than mine have no excuse for being so easily manipulated. Saffron Saffron Saffron……….Robes, with pallea, and with barberries.

  17. yep, it’s rather difficult to get line on what’s going on—–especially with the swillfake pushed by the mystery of money.

    (i wonder what gibberman will make of that).

    however.
    we are just going to have to face it.

    the “market” has failed.

    southeast Asia doesn’t want any more uneconomic detritus.
    (but but all those jobs sorting mountains of toxic filth at the rubbish tips of Phillipines, et at)
    (not to mention
    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-27/man-dies-at-sydney-waste-facility-after industrial-incident/11153596?WT.ac=localnews_sydney )

    but if the market was as efficient and effective in the delivery of the cornucupia of benefits as the all the advertising and public relations and politicking claims, this stuff would be efficiently and effectively processed into saleable goods.

    wot?

    the market has failed us everywhere.

    finance. (say no more?)
    medicine.(such good returns from uninhibited antibiotic market share.etc)
    agriculture. toxin toxins toxins. ( farmer-what do you mean i’m forbidden to fix my own tractor?
    what do you mean “ownership matters”?)

    on and on and on.

    ownership matters?

    bloody public ownership of essential public services matters more.

    there will always be markets and private(personal as well as corporate)ownership
    but
    like fire, “tha markets” make a good distributor and a horrifyingly lousy policy maker.

  19. May. It seems there is plenty of money if you know where to look.

    “The Wealth Detective Who Finds the Hidden Money of the Super Rich”

    “A decade later, Zucman, 32, is an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley and the world’s foremost expert on where the wealthy hide their money. His doctoral thesis, advised by Piketty, exposed trillions of dollars’ worth of tax evasion by the global rich. For his most influential work, he teamed up with his Berkeley colleague Emmanuel Saez, a fellow Frenchman and Piketty collaborator. Their 2016 paper, “Wealth Inequality in the United States Since 1913,” distilled a century of data to answer one of modern capitalism’s murkiest mysteries: How rich are the rich in the world’s wealthiest nation? The answer—far richer than previously imagined—thrust the pair deep into the American debate over inequality. Their data became the heart of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’s stump speech, recited to the outrage of his supporters during the 2016 Democratic presidential primary.”
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-05-23/the-wealth-detective-who-finds-the-hidden-money-of-the-super-rich

    http://gabriel-zucman.eu/uswealth/

  20. Harry Clark. Do you read the guardian?

    The market has decided. But the idealogues in power are deciding something else.

    “Australia isn’t doing its part for the global climate. Sooner or later we’ll have to pay our share”
    By our host, John Quiggin

    “at least in the absence of a large injection of public money (which may now be on the cards). ”

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/27/australia-isnt-doing-its-part-for-the-global-climate-sooner-or-later-well-have-to-pay-our-share

  21. KT2, if the market has decided then who cares what the ideologues think. The only role for concern then is any commitment to provide subsidies. I do hope that the market has moved beyond new coal projects and obviously would view negatively any subsidies – including foregoing reasonable mineral taxes and bonds that to guarantee environmental cleanup.

    HC

  22. +1 “and obviously would view negatively any subsidies – including foregoing reasonable mineral taxes and bonds that to guarantee environmental cleanup.”
    Thanks HC

  24. ironic that albo is simply repeating what Shorten said. Perhaps no-one heard him.

  25. Imagine a two new decks of cards………….That did not take long now did it?
    Now imagine 104 new names. Christ, that will takes months to narrow the list down that much.
    No point it taking a pool to see whose name should be on the list. As Bill Mitchell just said, and as I said even before that. Polls depend upon igorness. Not only that it has often been pointed out by others that polls also depend on how a question is framed.

  26. Was it an accident that Henry Truman popularized the phrase, the buck stops here?
    He was the man in the office when the National Securtiy State was formally established.
    Would it be unreasonable to see that event as the formal establishment of the system in which everyone can point their fingers at someone else as being the ones responsible for a problem?
    Well the system certianly existed informally before then.
    But imagine this. If it was no accident that Truman made this phrase popular it shows how detailed that operations of the system that I am describing are carried out.

  27. This doesn’t use water… just trades it.

    “Colliers International described the returns being made by water investment companies in 2018 as “eye-watering ” when it released its 2019 agribusiness forecast in April.

    “Duxton Water produced a 40% return for its shareholders, while the Blue Sky water fund produced an annual return of 34.4%, it said.
    …
    “Littleproud said this week that 14% of trades were now done by corporate entities that do not own land and it was prudent for the ACCC to review “the purity of the market.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/may/29/water-investment-companies-score-bumper-year-as-farmers-hit-by-drought

    See videos of precious water investors and boosters:

  28. Open open access… not the coalition – cOAlition S.

    “Part I: The Plan S Principles“With effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo.”

    https://www.coalition-s.org/principles-and-implementation/

  29. No it is not Monday here in Germany. But it is almost Monday in Australia. One could easily say that the comment that I am about to make has no business being placed on a website that is primarily an Australian audiance. It deserves to go to an American audiance. The thing is as an sociologist I deem it non sensical to write to (or talk to) people who are delusional. Ok to write or comment to people who are so far from Cemetary Ridge does not really make any sense either from a practical perspecitve.

    My Brief comments are about the US agression against Iran. First of all I deem the story that has recently come out the Trump oredered an attack against Iran and then cancelled it at the last moment has being a completly contrived story. This story is nothing more that a psychological warfare step, with numerous intended targets.

    But the more important comment here is about what Iran’s strategy should be once it is attacked by the USA and its allies, if it leaders have any sense.
    Up to now all of the blabber has been about Iran shutting down the Straits of Hormuz, or about bombing Israel with long range missles.
    Niether of these tactics will really be anything that the leaders in the USA give a rats ass about.
    They will not really give a rats ass about my proposed tactic either at first. But it is something that will hurt them in the longer term because it will hurt everyone in the longer term and that might cause some of the allies of the USA to walk away from them.
    My proposal which would be much easier for Iran to do than shutting down the Straits of Hormuz. or bombing Israel would be to target Saudi oil fields instead. If the Iranians can set 2 or 3 or perhaps even 4 dozen oil wells on fire it would not only disrupt the world’s economy it would raise the level of CO2 in the atmosphere very quickly. Not only that all of that really black soot spreading over a large area is going to absorb a large amount of sunlight there by trapping heat in our atmosphere.
    This action if it is succssful could be the straw that broke the cammels back as far as climate tipping points go. But if the world is going to stand by and not even break diplomatic relations with the USA over its policies against Iran, and Venezuela too, the faster that this world is destroyed the better as far as I am concerned.

  30. “Not only that all of that really black soot spreading over a large area is going to absorb a large amount of sunlight there by trapping heat in our atmosphere.”

    Other way around, I think, eg., as in our nuclear winter as yet postponed global heating mitigation project.

    However, if attacked by the US out first will come Iran’s trick trusty rusky air defence and carrier busting missiles. You think the yanks will chance that? Recall the quick pull back once those missiles arrived in Syria…

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