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.
I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.
John Quiggin 
Alan Kohler calls the abject failure of our Australian Federal leaders to see what’s coming and start acting like they intend to do something about it. We face a very challenging and likely dire future.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-24/democracy-climate-change-ai-robotics-war/105085846
The same can be said about Qld’s state leaders who are obsessed with holding the Olympics and intent (it seems at this 11th hour) on massively overspending on it. It seems highly likely to me that this Olympics will be a financial, economic and health disaster for Queensland. We are in no position to run it as we face runaway climate and weather crises and runaway crises in housing, homelessness, inflation, poverty, health, infectious diseases and crime. Holding the Olympics will be our Potemkin village moment.
There is also a fire ants crisis after Cyclone Alfred.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2025-03-24/queensland-government-fire-ant-treatment-funding-boost/105088212
As with every other crisis we have here in Qld, the funding to deal with it is totally inadequate. If we weren’t wasting $5 billion on the Olympics, we could deal with these things. There is not a lack of funding and resources, there is just an egregious misallocation of funding and resources.
There’s a lot of ruin in a collapse. That’s what people will find. My theory of us learning from salutary demonstrations by nature – natural disasters – seems to be a non-starter at this point in time. The near complete death of the Barrier reef, the burning of the Pacific Palisades in the US etc. and the increasing natural disaster toll around the world are still not nearly enough to convince people to change their ways.
Theoretically there should be a limit where the mass of humans cannot tolerate, or will not tolerate, further insecurity, impoverishment, privation, sickness, starvation and death of a given proportion of their own population. At this limit, some kind of revolution in human affairs must occur, one would think, if the people concerned still have group or state cohesion and agency, as the ability to act. Where is this limit, approximately? I wonder if research has been done?
At what stage will Australians act against further impoverishment, privation, sickness, and premature death of the population as a whole? Starvation is not yet conceivable for Australians, though this is already happening or conceivable for larger and larger proportions of the global population. The rest of the list is already in train. So where are the limits?
I wonder for, example, if homelessness has to hit 10% of the population, using homelessness as a proxy for extreme impoverishment and insecurity. The examples of Syria, Uganda and Mexico, considered very crudely, might show the value lies somewhere from 1,000 to 2,000 per 10,000 population: that is to say between 10% and 20%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_homeless_population
Syria has had a revolution recently. Mexico has not yet had a recent revolution. A first rough guess must be that between 10% and 20% become homeless before a revolution occurs. Whether a more functional state would tolerate a rise to even 10% is an open question. However, how properly functional would a state be essentially if it was even tolerating a rise above a few percent? With that level being tolerated, it would already seem that state and economic non-functionality (for housing, health and security of the population) was already becoming an established fact.
At some point, the relative non-functionality of the state and economy, for providing broad population security, would already be a serious concern at low whole number homelessness percentages. Faced by escalating natural and man-made disasters and gross mismanagement and misallocation of resources (to things like Olympic games for example) in a time of escalating crisis, the chances of the ruling oligarchy-corporatocracy self-correcting would seem low and the chances of a revolutionary change of any type in national affairs would also seem low below the proxy measure of 20% homelessness. For Australia, that would be well over 5 million people.
There, that is my prediction for Australia. And after that it will get worse. We are clearly not going to act in time. Right now we are about to waste $8 billion and rising (latest estimate) on the absurd, pointless and future-destroying Olympic games.
Possibly worthwhile Icelandic initiative : GDP-B
Via Paul Krugman, an interesting attempt by Erik Brynjolfsson et al at Stanford to correct GDP for free digital goods. Project web page https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/gdp-b/, technical pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31670/w31670.pdf.
They started from the commonsense observation that free digital services, usually financed by advertising, take up a remarkable amount of everybody’s free time, and presumably have a monetary value to them although unpaid.
Quick summary – I admit I don’t fully understand it::
1. Select 10 free services: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, TikTok, Google Search, Google Maps, YouTube, and Amazon Shopping, plus the notional good “meeting friends in person”. Select 13 countries at different income levels and generate large samples from commercial Facebook data.
2. Ask a large first group of Facebook users (N = 23,752) to select their most and least preferred options from randomly generated sublists. Aggregate these to get an overall cardinal scale of best to worst. (The most valued service overall is Google Search, ahead of “meeting friends”.)
4. For a second group of Facebook users (N = 39,717), “respondents were asked: “Would you be willing to stop using Facebook for one month in exchange for X?”, where X was chosen randomly from a set of nine monetary values ranging from $5 to $100. We clarified to the respondents that they could be randomly selected [N not stated] for their choices to be fulfilled, and if so, they would actually be eligible to receive the offer amount if they deactivated their Facebook account for a month.”
5. From the second question, construct a consumer surplus curve for Facebook users in each country. Generalise it to the other digital services using the results of the first question.
The final estimate of the currently disregarded consumer surplus for the 10 services was was $246 billion a year for Facebook alone. It is $2.52 trillion for all 10 digital services in the 13 countries or 5.95% of GDP. The ratio to GDP is markedly higher in poorer countries.
Top marks for ingenuity and certainly food for thought. Convincing? Not so sure. I have several questions. You may have more.
1. It’s an estimate of consumer surplus of the consumption in question. GDP is not. If you and I both buy a new car for $25,000, and you would have been prepared to pay $28,000 and me $30,000, the sales go into GDP as $50,000 not $58,000. It’s impracticable to estimate consumer surplus for all GDP. Google search tells us that “the total number of products on Amazon’s US site, including those from third-party sellers, is in excess of 353 million.” Add in other retailers and intermediate goods not normally sold to households, and the total number of distinct goods must be over half a billion. The Stanford estimate of digital value is thus not a possible numerical addition to GDP, but a conceptually distinct orthogonal correction, as with measures of inequality, life expectancy, and destruction of environmental capital.
2. The selection of digital services is very incomplete. The authors do not conceal their bias towards the Meta empire, on which their survey relied logistically. It doesn’t fit my digital life, for one. My list does not include Twitter (now X), Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok, Instead I rely on email, Wikipedia, the Guardian newspaper, and a handful of blogs on Substack and elsewhere. The last three pester me for voluntary contributions, and like many others I respond to some – a possible source of data to be mined for research. The Stanford group also omit pornography, obviously a major if disreputable source of entertainment and apparently quite innovative technically. Plugging the gaps would presumably lead to an even higher estimate of uncounted value.
3. You wouldn’t notice it from the paper, but digital media have very large and very controversial negative social externalities. They are often seen as enablers of hatred, misogyny and division, threats to democracy, destroyers of community, and a disembodied plague of mental ill-health among adolescents. This may or may not be entirely fair, but it’s what people are talking about just now. Pointing out the benefits does not get the industry off the hook for its abuses.
Equating things in money gives spurious results.
“Free” digital services financed by advertising are ipso facto not free.
The authors follow the Trumpian rule with respect to negative externalities:
“If you don’t measure it, it doesn’t exist: at least not in your theory and propaganda.”
It is strongly arguable that the best chess site in the world is Lichess and the best chess engine in the world is Lichess Stockfish (latest version). Lichess is free including free of advertising. The engine is open source. The site and engine are created by volunteers. Strange is it not? Or perhaps it is not strange. The best stuff is created by people working for free, out of agápē and enthusiasm, and not for that most base of all things, money.
The opposite is true also. The worst things, including all the negative externalities, are created by people working for money for themselves, for private pecuniary and property interests.
Some religious wisdom does get some things right: “The love of money is the root of all evil.” That is an out of context quote which does make the statement absolute. The original (in KJV if that can be termed “original”) is more contextual and relative. In my view, the absolute formulation becomes ever more nearly the complete case as operations supporting the love of money (as private income producing property) become ever more systematised and systemic in the megamachine of capitalisation.
Fooldo – “Smeagolfulli, you promised not to build an Olympic stadium in Victoria Park.”
Smeagolfulli – “I lied.”
Opportunity cost. Every stadium built is a hospital you can’t build. Every elite sports venue is a cancer treatment centre or a respiratory clinic you can’t build. Every sports turnstile line creates another elective surgery waiting line or an emergency department queue or a line of ramped ambulances.
Opportunity cost is not about money (that pallid proxy). It’s about real stuff. If you use real resources for real item A you cannot have real item B. We in Queensland are grievously short of hospital beds, ED capacity and clinics. We are also grievously short of adequate social housing, of medical staff, of social workers, of social programs and even of adequate police and adequate correction facilities. (You would think law and order types would cover that last couple… but no, not even them.)
In that case, why are we building for the Olympics or even having the Olympics? It is a waste of the resources that $8 billion can buy. Where will we even find the construction workers needed for these builds? Well, they will have to be taken from other jobs. Opportunity cost. They can’t build hospitals while they are building stadiums. So forget about any new hospitals for the next seven years. Actually, it is likely to put our critical infrastructure needs behind by another decade, when they are already clearly a decade behind. A twenty year lag in critical medical infrastructure alone. No state can allow that and remain first world. So second world mess and then third world mess, here we come.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-27/brisbane-olympics-construction-workers-needed-thousands/105096808
“Master Builders Queensland is confident the deadlines for the Games venues will be met, but not without challenges.”
If you read the fine print you will notice this means other more needful things getting delayed for years, like the cancer clinic.
https://www.9news.com.au/videos/national/key-1-1-billion-hospital-project-hit-by-delays/cm8pn8aol00080hoc5xk4q3cr
“Construction of the $1.1 billion Queensland Cancer Centre at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital will be delayed by at least three years.” 9News – Added 2 days ago.
All these things are connected by opportunity cost.
It is practically impossible these days for the Queensland householder to get a tradesman or to not get price gouged if they do manage to get one. I speak from personal experience. I am trying to maintain and upgrade my house in the sense of proofing and hardening it and its surrounds for near future climate challenges.
Try to get a house painter now. You will get price gouged as I did. Try to get builders, almost impossible, Try to get roofers, already impossible. Try to get tree loppers to deal with unsafe, leaning, hanging or dead trees and branches on your property. Unbelievable delays and very high prices when you can get them. The window is closing on householders ever being able to maintain and repair their houses from now on. It is already very difficult. Soon it will be impossible. Pray you never lose your roof. You will never get it replaced in the Queensland that is coming very soon.
Note, I didn’t lose my roof but I know now I simply have to hope I never lose it in a severe storm or cyclone. Because, as it is for all the people who are waiting now, roofers are well nigh unobtainable.
https://queenslandpropertyexperts.com.au/queenslands-tradie-shortage/
That was the situation in 2023. It is far worse in 2025. It will far worse again once Olympic construction sucks up ever more building and construction workers. One effect which will not be written about or studied, I predict, will be the deterioration in our housing stock created by ballooning costs and the impossibility of getting tradies on any reasonable time frame or maybe ever. We are in deep trouble but hardly anyone can see it.
Ah, I feel the same – I never wanted the Olympics here either. And of course, iirc, we were told there would be no public funding spent on it.
As for the internet, I wonder. Are the negative social effects mostly just due to the isolation itself? Because I wonder if people are finding what they want to find on it – that is, when I look for plant advice, say on gardenweb, I can find great advice for free. (Yes, I do have to sort it out, but there are some real expert hobbyists there. And it saves me money in terms of fewer houseplants killed.)
Whereas, a grumpier person might go there to find other grumps. (And I do a lot of that myself.) But the internet didn’t make them grumpy. So, I’m not sure we should always blame the medium. Though, I do see people say that there is more isolation. I don’t know what a statistician would say about that though. Maybe I’ll do a search.