Last weekend my wife pointed out a channel-billed cuckoo chick being fed by its “adoptive” parents, two crows. Crows are fair-sized birds but the cuckoo was already bigger than either. I’d never seen this before except in books.
Author: John Quiggin
Call for help
John Humphreys is asking for some help for a Khmer friend and colleague whose family is having a rough time.
On a related note, while I was at AARES, I got talking about co-authors and it struck me that mine come from at least a dozen different countries. Going roughly from east to west they include NZ, Australia (obviously), Vietnam, Thailand, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Greece, Italy, France, Netherlands, Spain, England and the US. It’s certainly one of the great things about an academic life that this kind of contact is natural and taken for granted.
What can’t be sustained, won’t be
The US recorded a trade deficit of $725.8 billion or 5.8 per cent of GDP in 2006. That’s roughly equal to Australia’s entire GDP. With short-run interest rates having risen, the income component of the current account deficit is bound to start growing rapidly soon. If the trade deficit doesn’t turn around this will generate an unsustainable explosion in debt and deficits.
Weekend reflections
Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer …
A Bush appointee at NASA, in the news for trying to censor statements about the Big Bang, and silence climate expert James Hansen, has lost his job for falsifying his resume, after being caught out by a science blogger
Great work by the blogosphere, and another data point on the close links between climate change denialism and creationism, and of course, between the Bush Administration and fraud.
AARES
I haven’t posted much lately as I’ve been busy preparing for, and, for the last few days, attending the Annual Conference of the Australian Agricultural & Resource Economics Society, which ends today. This year it’s been held in Sydney, by the beach at Manly. The weather has been great and the beach tempting, but I’ve barely had time to do more than look out the window at it, as the quantity and quality of papers has been great. In particular, there has been a lot of work on salinity (irrigation-related and dryland) which I’ll be going over for some time to come.
The conference has crystallised some of my concerns about policy in this area, which I’ve referred to in the past, and will probably write more about soon. Broadly speaking, I think it’s time for governments to bite the bullet and either scale back entitlements of water for irrigation (in catchments where over-allocation is clear) or else buy them back from irrigators to be used for environmental and urban flows. At present, there is a lot of resistance to doing this, and a big focus on technical solutions.
Cartoons
A couple of people have asked for a post on the great cartoon controversy. It’s a basic principle of a free society people should be able to publish material of this kind without fear of prosecution or physical attack, and anyone who threatens or incites such physical attacks should be prosecuted.
Having said that, my reaction to the displays of bigotry and (largely confected) outrage associated with the whole business are pretty much summed up by Chris Bertram.
Arrivals
Economist and regular commenter here, Harry Clarke, has started his own blog. Quite a few meaty posts already, so visit and comment.
Update Adding to the Ozeconoblogosphere is my co-author[1] Joshua Gans. Go and join his captive audience.
fn1. The Oz economics profession is so small and interconnected that “six degrees of separation” is an overstatement. One way of another, nearly everyone is linked pretty closely to everyone else.
Earthquake appeal final report
Thanks to $20 from Alpaca and an anonymous $100, we passed the $1500 target for the South Asia earthquake appeal. I’ve just sent off my matching donation, so that’s $3000 we’ve raised between us. Here are some examples of the benefits this kind of aid can bring (not earthquake-specific, but they give the general idea).
I’d also like to note reader Jess Moulday who’s going to be volunteering in Muzaffarabad for two months, and points to this link. Well done, Jess!
Thanks once again to everyone who pitched in and gave what they could. For those who couldn’t afford to give this time, I hope the appeal has helped to raise awareness of the problems.
The ultimate generation game book
Andrew Norton points to a newly-released book by one Ryan Heath (aged 25), entitled Please Just F* Off: It’s Our Turn Now. This perfectly sums up the entire genre, and I’m pretty confident we can read Ryan’s entire life history in the title.
At age 8 at recess time, he would have been making this forceful request to his schoolmates at the swings in the playground. As the end of recess approached he would have been still on the swings, smugly ignoring others who had waited their turn more politely. Now, he’s trying to claim the spots occupied by Boomers in the media and elsewhere, ignoring (as Paul Watson notes in comments) the long queue of X-ers waiting for their turn. In 2030, if his ploy has succeeded, he’ll be denouncing slackers, dole bludgers or whatever catchphrase is currently being applied to degenerate youth and opining that ‘the younger generation wants it all handed to them on a plate’.
