Author: John Quiggin

Presentations in Adelaide

John Quiggin52 Comments

Despite strenuous efforts, it’s hard to avoid air travel in my line of work, and I’ve been doing more than usual lately. One strategy I use to reduce travel is to bundle multiple commitments into a single trip and I’ve done this reasonably effectively with my latest visit to Adelaide. I presented a paper at the Australian Conference of Economists, a public lecture for the Don Dunstan Foundation and an assessment of the economic outlook for the ACE Business Symposium as well as taking part in several meetings. (A couple of presentations are linked).

My presentations were mostly concerned with the financial crisis and its implications, but I also had meetings on water allocation in the Murray Darling Basin and on Internet access to public information and cultural assets such as image libraries. ???? ??????? 50 ???

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Oh noes! Teh Internets makez u gulible

John Quiggin48 Comments

Another “Internets makes you stupid story” from the Brisbane Courier-Mail (irony detector overload alert !!).

The original source is something called the Levitt Institute and the Courier-Mail story is a pretty fair summary of the Levitt Institute report, which is here (PDF). I’ll leave the deconstruction as an exercise for readers, with a bonus mark for the question “Which basic concept of classical hypothesis testing is ignored in this study of ‘ability to detect erroneous information'”

Update xxx ????? sex ????? ?? ??????? Sucked in! It turns out the whole thing is in fact a hoax by Andrew Denton’s new show.. Sad to say, with the irony detector already blown, it’s hard to tell the difference between genuine and fake stupid. ??????? ?????????

Text and writing

John Quiggin29 Comments

Tigtog at LP points to a study showing that involvement with Facebook, MSN and so on has increased the textual skills of young people, including not just “good writing” but the ability to adapt style to an imagined readership that varies in different context. I was banging on about this last millennium.

Tigtog finishes with a really last-millennium question? “Does anybody here still do lots of handwriting?”.

For those who don’t recall, “handwriting” was a method of producing text, popular in the second millennium, in which, rather than using a keyboard or pointer to produce letters, you used an ink-dispenser to draw each letter in succession. There was a version of this called “cursive” or “script” in which, rather than drawing the letters separately, they were all run together. This was much faster to produce, but, as I recall, almost impossible to read unless done by a real expert. I can still do a very inexpert version of the letter-by-letter method, which was called “printing” (nothing to do with real printing, but the result, done well, looked a bit like printed text).

Uncertainty and climate change

John Quiggin35 Comments

I was at a conference on uncertainty and climate change in Berkeley last week, and gave the wrap-up panel discussion with Geoffrey Heal. We’d discussed a wide range of uncertainties and ambiguities, from future emissions scenarios to model uncertainty to perception and communication issues, and we were asked to comment on how, with so much uncertainty, economists can make useful recommendations.
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More bookblogging

John Quiggin156 Comments

I’m starting now on what will I think be the hardest and most controversial chapter of my book – the argument that the search for a macroeconomic theory founded on (roughly) neoclassical micro, which has been the main direction of macro research for 40 years or so, was a wrong turning, forcing us to retrace our steps and look for another route. As always, comments and criticisms accepted with gratitude.

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Access Economics and CEDA on carbon taxes

John Quiggin35 Comments

I’ve seen a number of reports of statements by CEDA supporting a carbon tax as an alternative to emissions trading. This seemed surprising, since the two are basically equivalent. Given that the ETS is almost in place, suggesting such a variation seemed rather pointless.

But I’ve now received an email from CEDA which appears to explain everything. The real distinction is not between a tax and a trading scheme but between a tax levied at the point where carbon is used and one where final products are consumed. Since Australia exports a lot of embodied carbon, the tax on final consumption would raise a lot less revenue, and cause a much smaller economic shock.

In fact, modelling by Access Economics (PDF) suggests that the loss of income under a consumption-based carbon tax would be about half that from a production-based tax or ETS

So what’s the catch ?

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The macro wars

John Quiggin202 Comments

Paul Krugman’s piece on “Why did economists get it so wrong” has attracted a vitriolic response from John Cochrane, reproduced here. Krugman’s piece was strongly worded, but the reply ups the ante, and I expect further escalation. Economics conferences in the next few years are going to be interesting events.

Given that, as Krugman himself notes, disagreements between economists were notably mild until the crisis erupted, what is going on here?

I’m visiting Berkely at present and just had a chat with Brad DeLong. These are some of the thoughts I had about the great macroeconomics wars as a result.

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