Author: John Quiggin

Does digital data disappear?

John Quiggin11 Comments

I’ve seen this kind of article many times but is it correct? I’d say that I’ve generated several million words in papers, newspaper articles, blog posts and so on since I got my first Mac in 1984 (a bit over 100kw/yr for 25+ years, for something like 3 million), and also attracted maybe 10 million more in blog comments (over 100k of non-spam comments. Of that, I’ve lost
* a fair bit of material I produced before 1990, when hard disk space was v expensive, and stuff had to be stored in various external disk formats. Sadly that includes my first econ theory book and a book of satirical songs I turned out in the 198s0
* The first year or so of comments on my blog in the now-obsolete Haloscan system.
* The blog has also suffered a lot of linkrot, including internal links to its older incarnations
* A lot of my older text is in formats that can now only be read by extracting a text-only format, and some old stuff (eg pre .qif financial records) is in formats that are no longer readable in any way. But again, that’s mostly a problem with pre-1990 stuff.

Compared to my slightly obsessive desire to preserve every revision of every piece I’ve ever written, those are substantial losses. But compared to my paper records, my digital stuff is almost perfectly complete, not to mention instantly accessible and searchable.

What to do about the ratings agencies

John Quiggin66 Comments

S&P’s decision to downgrade US Treasury bonds from AAA to AA+ has elicited various reactions, some of which I’ll doubtless repeat here. Obviously, S&P has no particular expertise (apparently it couldn’t even get the arithmetic right) and based on its historical and continuing performance, its opinions ought to carry no particular weight with anybody (they say so themselves, when under pressure over obvious cases of misrating, asserting that they are merely offering an opinion).

On the other hand, it’s also pretty obvious (and even more so after the Repubs successful use of the debt ceiling to force Obama to abandon any call for tax increases along with the cuts they both wanted) that the US has some fairly intractable problems in dealing with its (technically quite manageable, but still substantial) public debt. Finally, as I said last time I discussed this, a decision of this kind (including a decision to maintain AAA ratings) is inherently political

There are two reasons why S&P’s choice of rating matters more than, say, my own opinions on the matter
* First, a lot of investors still pay attention to ratings agencies, for whatever reason
* Much more importantly, agency ratings are embedded in global regulations concerning prudent management of investment. If a second major agency were to join S&P in downgrading, large numbers of institutions would be debarred, under existing rules, from investing in Treasury bonds

That’s clearly unsustainable, so what will happen?

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Race day tomorrow!

John Quiggin3 Comments

Tomorrow is the day for the Brisbane Running Festival, and my wonderful readers have donated $3020 to the Queensland Cancer Council. My preparation hasn’t been all it could be, but I’ve had a big boost from the support I’ve received during #quiggingate controversy with News Limited and others. So, I’m going to do my best to meet the original target, which was to do a minute under 2 hours for each $1000 raised, that is, a time of 1:57. I hope to stay with the two hour pace runner for the first half, then, lungs and legs permitting, make my big break. How likely it is that this will actually work, I don’t know, but I’ll report back tomorrow.

Update Haven’t got final results, but failed to break 2 hours. I was a little behind the pace at 18km, but planning a big burst. Instead, I tripped over an uneven bit of footpath (I’m starting to think someone is out to get me this week!) and went face first into the pavement (photos coming). That took away a lot of energy and it was all I could do to jog to the finish line. If the race time was a bit disappointing, the good news is that our collective fundraising effort for the Queensland Cancer Council was the second best overall , with $3020. That’s a marvellous effort, of far more value than a few minutes more or less taken to finish 21.1km.

Core Economics plug

John Quiggin6 Comments

I’ve been very gratified by the number of my fellow economists who’ve come to my defence[1] following the attack on me in the Oz. Among the first was Joshua Gans at Core Economics. I wrote to thank him, but haven’t got around to a public mention. Now that I am around to it, it’s a good opportunity to mention that Core Economics is a great blog, where quite a few of Australia’s leading economists (aka my mates) hang out. Go and read some of the posts.

fn1.* With notably rare exceptions * (I’m (ab)using this blogmeme ironically), any members of the profession who agreed with the hit have kept pretty quiet about it

Weekend reflections

John Quiggin23 Comments

It’s time again for weekend reflections, which makes space for longer than usual comments on any topic. In keeping with my attempts to open up the comments to new contributors , I’d like to redirect discussion, and restatements of previous arguments, as opposed to substantive new contributions, to the sandpit(s). In particular, please post nothing related to nuclear energy. As always, civilised discussion and no coarse language please.

“Not even wrong” is not praise

John Quiggin30 Comments

At one point in Zombie Economics, I tried a Popperian (or maybe Paulian) smackdown, saying that some defenders of EMH used arguments that effectively rendered it unfalsifiable. I thought that was a bad thing, but apparently at least one reviewer disagrees. Following my stoush with Murdoch, a commenter pointed me to this piece by Stephen Williamson of Washington University at St Louis, who has apparently been asked to review the book for the Journal of Economic Literature. Williamson claims that I am badly confused about the EMH, and that

Market efficiency is simply an assumption of rationality. As such it has no implications. If it has no implications, it can’t be wrong.

He follows up with “Like the “efficient markets hypothesis,” DSGE has no implications, and therefore can’t be wrong.””
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Believing Barry O’Farrell could cost you “up to” 100 IQ points

John Quiggin25 Comments

The NSW government has released a a frothing at the mouth press release claiming that a carbon price will devastate the economy. As Mary McCarthy would say, every single word in it is a lie, including “a” and “the”. Top billing has to go to that old favorite of shonky advertisers “up to”, as in a carbon price will ” force up electricity prices for NSW households by up to $498 a year.” The Commonwealth Treasury modelling, which I’ve checked, gives an average cost increase of $3.30 or about $170 a year.

Although the analysis is attributed to NSW Treasury, they apparently weren’t hackish enough for the government, which had to go to Frontier Economics to get the answers they wanted. I’m waiting to see the report, but in the meantime, my reactions to the press statement are over the fold

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