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John Quiggin 
The economics of gambling seems to be ignored at this time of year. I worked with a Maths master who did long term research on gambling on horse races. According to his research for every $1 than was outlaid on horses the long run return was no higher than 0.96 cents. The LRROI (Long Run Return on Investment) may then be negative. Given that the euphoria around placing a bet on the Melbourne Cup seems misplaced. In economic analysis terms it can be portrayed as an irrational behaviour.
My personal experiences go back to stories about my great-granduncle who was a bookmaker in North Queensland. Inheriting the family fortune at a young age he had lost it all before he reached middle age. Not a very popular person with my mother and her siblings. So maybe I am in some way biased.
“The 13 are members of the 20-personeconomic forecasting panel assembled by The Conversation at the start of this year.
All but one have been surprised by the extent of the economic slowdown.
The 13 represent ten universities in five states.
Among them are macroeconomists, economic modellers, former Treasury, IMF, OECD and Reserve Bank officials and a former government minister.”
https://abc.net.au/news/2019-11-04/economists-back-rba-philip-lowe-not-treasurer-josh-frydenberg/11667836
16,000 -quantum level detail about YOU… more likely your younger family members. Experts here a question.
What number of individual data points have you ever seen or used from treasury or government in general or ecological or other domains? Me – about 2,500.
“systems’ inaccessibility. They’re “largely invisible to the public,” The New York Times wrote in 2012. “Most people have no inkling they even exist,” The Wall Street Journal said in 2018. Most recently, in April, The Journal’s Christopher Mims looked at a company called Sift, whose proprietary scoring system tracks 16,000 factors for companies like”…
I wonder JQ, as you can find out easily I think, how many factors used in the Murray Darling Basin Plan please?
I like cash and anonimity even more now. And want a bills of rights and to own my own data.
How about you?
I bet that this data could also be used to asses a persons usefulness in becoming one of the 200,000 people needed to topple the 20,000 that bear a disproportionate responsibilty for having screwed things up. Ok of course it will take more than 200,000 to sustainably maintain a course of action. But on the other hand since the amount of time left before humanity can no longer control its own destiny might be very close, toppling those 20,000 might be the last productive thing that humanity can do anyways.
Why has there never been a military coup in the USA up to this time? That is clear. It is because there is no American Embassy in Washington D.C.
Bug now that all of this data has been collected so efficiently so that it no longer takes a government to process it, and make use of it, a NGO led by far sighted executive could possibly come up with a plan to make the right introductions to bring the correctly talented and motivated people together who have the capabilty to actually make a positive and glowing change if they can coordinate their activities.
“Why has there never been a military coup in the USA up to this time?”
What do you call two nasty civil wars then?
“Why has there never been a military coup in the USA up to this time?” There has been a string of coups and attempted coups. The most obvious one is where they blew Jacks head open on TV. But when Nelson Rockefeller became VP the President was shot at a couple of times. When George Bush senior was made VP the President was almost killed. The US is such a vital country these guys are always trying to stage coups, rig elections and so forth.
Ok you torched me. Now that you have had your fun try to torch someone else who really deserves it.
“Does Economics Ignore Women and Gender? Out of twenty-nine papers covering women on corporate boards, only one was published in an economics journal.
… “survey. According to the report:
“…when asked about satisfaction with the overall climate within the field of economics, men were twice as likely as women to agree or strongly agree with the statement “I am satisfied with the overall climate within the field of economics” (40% of men vs. 20% of women).”
“The 20 percent “approval rating” by women is shocking, but the 40 percent “approval rating” by men is also no ringing endorsement of the field.”
https://evonomics.com/economics-gender-women-adams/
I just saw the phrase Curt. And bear in mind most people think of these incidents as all about lone crazies. They will say I’m out of line here. I think of very few of these guys as lone crazies. The actor who shot Lincoln. I think he got away, another body was substituted for him. The fellow who killed McKinley may have been a lone crazy. The fellow who tried to kill Andrew Jackson; that one is a little hard to tell. The ending of the Nixon Presidency can be viewed as a coup. Certainly by me. Most of the main actors, including Deep Throat, coming from one tribe. So I wasn’t taking a shot at anyone. We don’t know about every last one of these incidents for an absolute certainty. I’m just pointing this out that the record can be looked at more than one way.
I don’t like it that people cannot wait a year to throw Trump out of office. He’s done a few good things from a regulation-simplification point of view. And hammering political correctness and the horrible media. But he really deserved to not be re-elected when he shot missiles at Syria, to the cheers of the mainstream media. But be that as it may, democracy should be about waiting for the election to throw someone out. The American history of taking that point of view is kind of patchy.
G.B.
Yes the record can be looked at in more than one way. Not only that the record is often incomplete or has been altered. That makes it very hard to seperate truth from fiction. But there is a pattern that has developed over a long enough period of time to know that the “official version of the day” carries no credability what so ever.
People who work as detectives for police departments or work internal affairs for police departments should be able to figure out that our western societies do not work as advertised. That should make them angry. But in the past when such people got angry more often than not they drifted towards political movements that valued previous ways of doing things. It is as if they can not see that current problems are always rooted in the past. For some reason people who are employed in the police forces often come to believe that things were OK at such and such a point and then things went wrong from there. For example here in the US many people hold the view that things were fine up until the early 60s and then welfare reforms destroyed the family structure of poor people especially poor black people. Such an outlook see the past prior to 1964 through rose water glasses.
Unfortunately for us these are the type of people that needed to be the point of the spear in a revolution to finally make America (or Australia or Austria or Argentina, or planet earth) great. They became instead people who gave aid and comfort to the billy club swingers (regular police) who prevented harm to those who deserved it. The good that police do by capturing some one like Ted Bundy does not make up for the harm that they do protecting a system that kills multitudes by the hour.
But in their defence the police can not be the point of the spear that destroys an unjust system unless that spear is launched. And that spear can only be launched by the sychronized commands of LEGITIMATE (AS OPPOSSED TO LAWFUL) military authorities. But in the mean time real proffessional police should be preparing for their legitmate work (as oppossed to their lawful employment).
(In our world lawful rhymes with awful.)
It is being reported on The Converstation that 11,000 scientists are warning that the climate crisis COULD reach a point of no return, That is a really really stupid way to frame the situation. Why would the editors at The Conversation choose to frame the climate situation that way when it would be much much more truthful to say that the climate crisis is GUARANTEED to reach a point of no return, if it hasn´t alreadee.
Now perhaps GB would say that these 11,000 climate scientists are just parroting the “official version of the day” just like 11,000 economists parrot foolish economic paradimes, so this warning reported by the Converstation should be given no credibility what so ever.
GB is clearly right, maybe for the wrong reason though. There is clearly a conspiracy going on concerning climate change. The conspiracy was to create a camp diametrically opposite of the radical alarmists such as myself to make it appear that the those leaders who tout their completly inadequate policies to avoid damaging sea level rises and loss of biodiversity such as increasing the the number of KWs of elecricity generated by solar and wind are seen as reasonable leaders. These manipulative pirates of chaos know that huge numbers of peopel think that if you place yourself in the middle of two extreme camps that you are more likely to have the “correct” position become extreme positions are wrong by default. What these lazy thinkers do not realize is that their perception of what an extreme position is is entirely manipulated. Positioning ones self in the middle of two extremes is not even a good strategy for determining the best politcal policy anyways.
Yes humanity needs clean energy. But clean energy is by far an insufficient condition to save us.
So much more needs to be done. But the problem is that people are not going to want to do what needs to be done because they would have to make painful sacrifices. People who are capable of bing real assholes are needed to bring these changes about because of the normal human tendency to kill the messenger that brings bad news.
Now perhaps some creative artistic assholes might be able to come up with some ways to sugar coat some of the bitter pills that humanity is going to need to swallow. But that can not be counted on.
Now the job of being on of those assholes is clearly not a job that people are going to line up to fill.
Finding job applicants for the unpaid job with terrible working conditions and no safety standards to torch some manipulative international pirates is a piece of cake compared to finding job applicants who are willing to force humanty to live pretty much along the lines of the way that people live in Cuba with strict birth control to boot.
Such people may disagree whether MMT, Parecon, or Cuban style Marxism, or my potential variation of Cuban style socialism, is the path towards FAIRLY reproducing Cuban society but they will not be able to disagree that the industrialized world in particular, including China will have to implement degrowth, in economic terms. That does not neccissarily mean that we will have to eat less Guava, or Mango, or Dates. Some aspects of life could get better. That is the sugar coating that I am talking about.
OOps above I wrote become instead of because in descibing the lazy thinkers who think that they just need to position them selves between to extremes to be able to think that they are holding a correct position.
I just had an idea while I was cleaning some mirrors. If cloud cover reduces tempratures during the daytime by preventing some types of sunlight from reaching the earth and help keep things warmer during the night by traping heat would it not reduce the energy costs of large glass office buildings if they had to maintain dirty windows?
Hmmm, money would be saved for sure by not paying workers to clean the windows as often. Would there be even additional savings by having lower AC costs?
Could the real reason that I wrote this comment be to imply that I do look in to a mirror from time to time?
Jonn Lilyea would like to add, Yes and the only one that you hypnotize with your gaze is yourself. He really would say that himself if he could.
The Labor Party’s election post mortem makes for sobering reading. The problems with its strategy and campaign were so many and so seious it’s a wonder Labor got as close as it did. Strangely, despite in retrospect these problems sticking out like the proverbial, nobody was pointing them out before the event. On the contrary, the unpopularity of Bill Shorten, now seen as a critical factor, was then dismissed as irrelevant because preferred Prime Minister polls don’t predict anything. The Labor Party’s tax and spend agenda was lauded before the election as bold and brave, now it is seen as confusing and overly detailed, leaving no more room for an overarching narrative that the politically disengaged (that is, most people) could latch onto.
The review shows the size of the challenge facing Anthony Albanese. There have been many federal Labor leaders in the 119 years since Federation, but only four have won elections from opposition. Australians are very reluctant to elect Labor to federal government. The Hawke-Keating years were an aberration.
And there’s a very good article in this month’s Monthly on Queensland and the election. The damage done by Bob Brown and his travelling mistrel show was catastrophic. Even Queenslanders supportive of the substantive issues were angry and resentful about the southerners riding into town telling them what to do. Jesus wept, what a wrecker that man has proven to be.
Since the ALP was founded, the number of different people who have led the party stands at twenty-one (which is not many, in my opinion). Of those, five (which one did you miss?) have won elections from Opposition: Andy Fisher (who did it twice), Jimmy Scullin, Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke, and Kevin Rudd.
For the sake of comparison, since the Liberal Party was founded, the number of different people who have led the party stands at fourteen. Of those, three have won elections from Opposition: Bob Menzies, John Howard, and Tony Abbott.
Five out of twenty-one; three out of fourteen; not a massive difference.
From this link, it seems obvious that there are big $$$ to be made out of fossil fuels.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/12/top-three-asset-managers-fossil-fuel-investments
Perhaps that is the reason that some funds seem to do better than the average?
However, central bankers are also dabbling in fossil fuels and there is a call for them to just stop.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50350535?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
J-D
I forgot Fisher though the first time he became PM it wasn’t by winning an election.
And you are being pedantic by excluding Malcolm Fraser. Yes, I know, Kerr, etc, but he won the 1975 election as a de facto opposition leader campaigning against at the Whitlam Government.
My substantive point remains intact. Shorten, Latham, Beazley, (x2), Crean, Hayden … the graveyard of failed Labor opposition leaders covers a lot of territory.
This week the Fair Work Ombudsman and CFMMEU lost cases in the Federal Court in which they claimed workers for a labour hire company should be considered “employees” rather rather than “independent contractors”, as argued by the labour hire company. ***www.judgments.fedcourt.gov.au/judgments/Judgments/fca/single/2019/2019fca1807
**www.judgments.fedcourt.gov.au/judgments/Judgments/fca/single/2019/2019fca1806
This is important because so-called independent contractors aren’t covered by the wages and conditions safety-net provided by the Fair Work Act and are therefore open to exploitation. In my view the federal government should amend the Fair Work Act to make sure gig economy and labour hire workers are no longer subject to inferior wages and conditions.
Smith9
If you don’t count Fisher because the first time he became PM wasn’t by winning an election, then you shouldn’t count Menzies either, because the first time he became PM wasn’t by winning an election.
If you do count Fraser, then that gives you four out of twenty-one compared to three out of fourteen: still not a huge difference. I’m not disputing your point that there are lots of ALP leaders who never did it, that’s obviously true, my point is that there were also lots of Liberal leaders who never did it. The majority of all Australian Prime Ministers of whatever party did not first become Prime Minister by winning an election from Opposition. Cook, Scullin, Lyons, Whitlam, Fraser (if you count him, which you do), Hawke, Howard, Rudd, and Abbott did; Barton, Deakin, Watson, Reid, Fisher, Hughes, Bruce, Menzies, Fadden, Curtin, Chifley, Holt, Gorton, McMahon, Keating, Gillard, Turnbull, and Morrison did not (and nor did Page, Forde, or McEwen, but for this sort of exercise I wouldn’t count them); and then there are also all the Opposition Leaders who never became Prime Minister (Tudor, Charlton, John Latham, Evatt, Calwell, Snedden, Hayden, Peacock, Hewson, Downer, Beazley, Crean, Mark Latham, Nelson, and Shorten). The pattern isn’t just an ALP pattern, it’s an Australian Federal politics pattern. Actually, it shouldn’t be surprising that there are lots of Opposition leaders who never became Prime Minister: that’s exactly what should be expected.
“From this link, it seems obvious that there are big $$$ to be made out of fossil fuels.“
Proof of insufficient royalties. Too much economic rent still on the table.