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.
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John Quiggin 
Do we in Australia and here in Queensland have a crime problem and especially a youth crime problem? Commercial main stream media and the Liberal Parties claim we do. The Labor Parties, state and federal, assert there is no real problem and everything is under control.
What kind of crimes are they talking about? The mainstream focus tends to be on violent crime, home invasion, theft and property damage related to very visible personal assets like houses, house contents and cars. These are serious and emotive issues: emotive because they hit working and middle-class people in the centre of gravity of their personal and family security.
There are crimes and transgressions, by legal or moral definitions respectively, which are less talked about and less pursued by the MSM and political parties. There are business crimes like wage theft or the crime of keeping jobkeeper payments for which the business was and is ultimately ineligible but there has been no enforcement of compliance. Moral offences where businesses and business people have profiteered and still profiteer are less talked about and less actioned or reined in while crimes real or alleged of union bosses are heavily scrutinized with investigations, procecutions and punishments delivered with alacrity. At least, these are my observations and assertions. What is a crime is only what is criminalized, legally speaking. And justice is only done, in the formal sense, if compliance is enforced and lack of compliance punished.
Are the crimes of violence, home invasion, theft and property damage and especially youth crime really on the rise? I am not sure and the reported statistics are reported badly; confusingly and sometimes with intended spin, bias and omissions. I also do not trust government economic, health or crime data after the gutting of the ABS, of government capacity in general, after all the travesties of neoliberal spin and policy and finally our lack of adequate testing and reporting and the lunacy of our response in deliberately spreading COVID-19 infection everywhere. Be that at is it may, as with any crime with genuine victims, our ideal stance should be zero tolerance (of the crimes). At the same time, zero tolerance should not degenerate into unfair targeting, draconian punishments and retribution. In my opinion, the principles of criminological left realism need to be applied.
“Left realism emerged in criminology from critical criminology as a reaction against what was perceived to be the left’s failure to take a practical interest in everyday crime, allowing right realism to monopolize the political agenda on law and order. Left realism argues that crime disproportionately affects working-class people, but that solutions that only increase repression serve to make the crime problem worse. Instead they argue that the root causes of crime lie in relative deprivation, although preventive measures and policing are necessary, but these should be democratically controlled.” – Wikipedia.
There is a great degree of truth that some of the “root causes of crime lie in relative deprivation”. It is also clear that some of the root causes of crime lie in relative and unchecked privilege. This point needs to be made, remembered and acted upon. So I am indeed in favor of a law and order campaign but only on these left realism principles. None of our political parties has the least notion of what is required or else they have not the least inclination to take the actions required.
I could write a lot more but this is not a sandpit. Maybe this post could get a discussion going.
The airline industry in Australia is once more in the news. It’s not just about yet another airline going into administration. Ever since the days of Ansett andTAA (now both gone); the economics of the airline industry at home and abroad has been more reminiscent of welfare economics than economic rationalism. The harshness of empty seats and overwhelming fixed costs, has sent many companies into liquidation. In response the management of airline companies, especially domestic airline companies, started to behave like raptors and robber barons.
This meant that staffing levels were shredded, wage negotiations turned into a master and slave dialogue ( which included wage theft); terminal slots were hoarded and flights overbooked. This resulted in flights been cancelled without notice, planes parked at airports overseas to avoid flying them home empty, even maintenance was sent offshore despite real dangers of poor work standards causing accidents.
Looking on as today’s airlines try to restore profit margins after the lockdowns during the COVID19 pandemic, an impartial observer could wonder where the morality and ethics of the airline industry was headed. In the good times every firm is ready to do the right thing. It costs them nothing and their profits are large. But in the bad times, it becomes every firm for itself. Price gouging, seat hedging and maintenance delays become the new normal.
In light of the bad behaviour of airline companies, governments are stepping forward with new prudential regulations. But they are doing this slowly and in a limited fashion. Not realising that the abandonment of business ethics is now endemic in the airline industry, governments are trying to negotiate for good behaviour. In doing this they allow airline companies to build up strategic reserves. When a more competitive environment is mandated, these airline companies will be able to use those hoarded reserves to undercut competitors.
Governments will always be one step behind businesses behaving badly. After their abject failure to reign in banks and insurance companies, the chances that governments can get airline companies behaving ethically are near zero.
Prudential regulation only works when it is timely and strict. Few governments seem capable of such legislation.
The strangeness of the Nobel Prize in Economics *
Labour MP Torsten Bell, in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/24/economists-like-competition-but-not-when-it-comes-to-their-own-field-of-research
“US and Chinese academics […] gathered data on the top researchers (those receiving the most prestigious awards, such as Nobel prizes) across different scientific fields, spanning engineering, natural and social sciences. In almost every discipline, from chemistry to medicine, the story is one of diffusion – top talent is becoming more widely spread across universities over time, not least as emerging economies develop research ecosystems. The one exception is economics. Economics Nobel winners are far more concentrated in just a few universities, and half of those with top awards are from just 3.3% of universities. Harvard, Chicago and MIT dominate, as does the US generally.”
The paper is here: https://conference.nber.org/conf_papers/f204525.pdf Amusingly, the lead coauthor, Richard B. Freeman, “holds the Herbert Ascherman Chair in Economics at Harvard University.” It looks at 170 awards in total, including very prestigious ones like the Fields medal in mathematics. The story is encapsulated in a striking graph in Figure 1, page 5.
Anecdata supporting this can be found in the careers of two very influential recent outliers, Daniel Kahneman and Mohammed Yunus. Kahneman hopped around, and did spend one year at Harvard, but his main institutional affiliations were with psychology departments at Jerusalem, Stanford, Berkeley and Princeton. Yunus – currently Chief Adviser of the interim government of Bangladesh – was a professor at not-so-famous Chittagong, and his prize was the peace one, not economics. In an alternate history in which the economics prize had not been restricted to he old boys’ club, there would have been more, and more interesting, awardees like them.
The Nobel Foundation’s 2023 report states that assets at year’s end were SEK 6,041 m , with a ten-year return of 10%, or 600m SEK a year. Expenditure on the prize operation was 126 m SEK all in. The Nobel Foundation has about four times as much money as it needs. There are many foundations like this, including Ivy League universities, mindlessly accumulating capital like mediaeval monasteries.
*PS
* To avoid wasting time on trivia, let us stipulate that the prize that everybody calls the “Nobel Prize in Economics” is formally the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”. The selecting body is the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, as with Physics and Chemistry. The award is presented by the King of Sweden at the same ceremony as the others, every 10 December in the same place, the Stockholm Concert Hall, followed by a banquet: except for the Peace Prize, which is awarded in Oslo. The awardees all receive “a gold-plated green gold medal, a diploma, and a monetary award of 11 million SEK”, and are expected to deliver a lecture. If it walks like a duck, etc.
The strangeness of the “Nobel Prize in Economics” perhaps reflects the strangeness of economics. That would be my interpretation. A very broad (too broad) charge would be that physics is objective and economics is subjective. Or in economic jargon perhaps, physics is descriptive and economics is prescriptive. Or to make a too broad an analogy, economics is closer to ideology is closer to religion than is physics. Or finally, we could return to the notion that there is no such thing as economics simpliciter. There is only political economy.
Physics is concerned with real systems (as the target of investigations), economics is concerned with a constellation of real systems and human formal systems. The economy is, as it were , a hybrid of the physis and the nomos, of nature and notions, of the natural world and human ideas.
Valuation in the numeraire in conventional economics is an exercise in the aggregation of incommensurables. Hence it is, strictly speaking at this level, scientifically invalid and unable to deliver the (relative) objectivity of the hard sciences. However, at another level it is perfectly valid to observe that humans empirically do it. That is they invent currencies, aggregate, or at least equate, incommensurables and then trade goods and services which are incommensurable except in the currency of human needs and desires. The evergreen questions which surround these processes are ethical so economics, or rather political economy, belongs fundamentally to moral philosophy.
At a number of important levels, the hard sciences are not practiced objectively either. They too are subject to internecine and career politics, external interference, political/ideological conditioning of objectives, withholding of funding, corcement, co-option and so on. We only have to look at the abandonment and debasement of science as well as the abandonment of vulnerable people and humane values during the entire COVID-19 fiasco, which is still ongoing: an example of the neoliberalisation and corporatisation of science.
Drip, drip, drip
Time for another fix of good news, this time on irrigation: a really clever and simple solar-driven drip irrigation idea from China. https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/08/28/pv-driven-drip-irrigation-system-with-compressed-air-storage/
“The researchers […] utilized a sealed pressure tank with a mixture of air and water. That tank is located in between a pump and the drip tubes. The tank is initially filled with air, and once solar energy is available, the pump pushes water to the tank, effectively compressing the air in it. Once a certain pressure is reached, a valve opens, releasing the stored water in pulses. Once water is released, the air expands again, enabling the repetition of the cycle.”
In addition to working automatically, the pulses cut clogging from sediment in dirty water by 80% – 90%. The same team had earlier published a similar scheme for sprinklers.
In India and Pakistan, over 40% of agricultural land is irrigated, with presumably an even higher share of output. Drip and sprinkler irrigation are two methods among others. Drip is the one that uses water most efficiently, which will become ever more important. The schemes can presumably be made hi-tech with sensors and AI controls, but as described, they are simple lo-tech methods accessible to small farmers, and serviceable by village blacksmiths. Where is the prestigious prize?
Qianwen Zhang and her colleagues are based in Yangling, which may be a backwater today, but lies near the historic roots of Chinese civilisation around the Wei River.
Wow, that is good news!! Thank you!!
Maybe some day someone will invent a sock I can just put on my tailpipe.
I wish somebody would invent the self-cleaning shower. I guess that’s a showerhead outside with an ankle to neck modesty screen of corrugated galvanised iron and a small cement slab. All in full sun for the UV. Get your daily dose vitamin D production at the same time. Short showers to save water and not get sunburn. Watch out for the “joe blakes”.
The world system continues to fail at protecting people from disease and it continues to fail at protecting the planet from global warming. It basically continues to fail at everything of existential importance to humans and all other macro species on earth. The failure of the system is rooted in the placing of the profit motive (and valuation in the numeraire) over and above all other ethics and over and above all other objectively (scientifically) measurable priorities.
The course of the ongoing, unsolved COVID-19 pandemic crisis has demonstrated this comprehensively. The circulation of people (as wage slaves and consuming dupes) and of finance for the purposes of elite profits was prioritised over all other concerns. The course of the climate crisis shows the same thing. Circulation of people and finance for the purposes of elite profits has been continually prioritised over all other concerns (primarily that of retaining a survivable climate).
This behaviour is baked into the cake of neoliberal or late stage capitalism and so far the world system and its people have demonstrated no ability to break out of this system. The problem is systemic, of course, as implied by “baked into the cake”. While our highest value is money and while this method continues – that of equating everything (all incommensurable things) in money *and* then using this as our public policy decision basis, then these crises can never be dealt with.
Stating this does not equate to saying markets, finance and money should be abolished. It does equate to saying that democratic, ethical, humane, environmental and scientific values and goals need to be placed over and above market operations, over and above market fundamentalism. Unfettered markets do not automatically ensure all goals are met. They ensure only that the goals of persons with money, finance and market power are met. This becomes quintessentially a system which only looks into itself and more specifically only looks into the needs and desires of the rich and powerful (existing and nascent). The system does not look into anything else. It does not for example look into the natural world in any objective, scientific way and it does not ask what the natural world requires to continue sustainably for all.
Rebuilding of democratic and expert government capacity (policy capacity and institutional capacity) is essentially what all enlightened economists and political economists are asking for. Then the market could be turned into a servant again, not the master tool that makes the super rich the masters of us all: masters who are destroying society and the environment for short term gain.