Author: John Quiggin

HECS and flexibility

John Quiggin12 Comments

I didn’t get around to posting on the recent higher education reforms at the time, but they seem to be working out pretty much as I expected. In particular, the outcome of HECS flexibility is that (nearly) all universities are raising charges across the board by the full 25 per cent allowed under the policy. The explanation is simple. The top universities want the money and all the others need it too desperately to forgo it. Given that there is a lot of unfilled demand, and that the changes to repayment rules have lowered the effective cost to students (particularly those who don’t expect to earn lots of money after uni), there’s no economic reason not to increase charges.

The exceptions to the general pattern are essentially ideological and fall into two classes. First, some universities that oppose the whole idea have refused to increase charges, effectively betting on a change of government before the new charges apply. This group particularly includes those who see themselves as serving relatively low-income communities. If the government is re-elected, though, I expect most of them will raise charges over the next few years and mostly by the full 25 per cent.

Second, some universities that support the changes have made token exceptions, for example by selecting a few ‘socially desirable’ courses and offering free or low-cost entry to those courses. As regards these exceptions, three points are worth noting
1. In every case I’ve seen, the number of places affected is small or negligible
2. The discounts have nothing to do with any notion of responsiveness to student demand
3. This is just a rebranding of the existing practice of offering scholarships to appeal to currently dominant ideology

Looking at the substantive merits of the policy, I’d regard it as a second-best option. The match between HECS contributions and net social cost was pretty good before the increases, so an increase in the government contribution would have been a preferable policy. But since that wasn’t going to happen on an adequate scale, there was no real alternative to higher charges.

Condorcet rules?

John Quiggin1 Comment

The comments thread on the Crooked Timber edition of my last post led me to this site (hat-tip: novalis), advocating Condorcet voting and presenting a critique of the instant runoff/single transferable vote , the core of which is

IRV has serious problems. It allows a sufficiently small minority of voters to safely register “protest” votes for minor-party candidates–but only as long as their candidate is sure to lose. As soon as their candidate threatens to actually win, they risk hurting their own cause by ranking their favorite first, just as they do under our current plurality system. IRV is therefore unlikely to be any more successful than plurality at solving the classic “lesser of two evils” problem.

It’s straightforward to show, however, that this problem can only arise if your preferred candidate would be the loser in a Condorcet system. Hence, voting strategically yields the preferred Condorcet outcome.
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Does Australia exist?

John Quiggin5 Comments

Eric Maskin and Partha Dasgupta are smart guys, and it’s hard to believe they are totally ignorant of what happens in the Southern Hemisphere. So how can they justify writing a piece promoting a system of “rank-order voting” as superior to the existing American (plurality) and French (top-two runoff) systems, without mentioning that Australia has had this system (in a range of variants) for many decades[1].

A minor side point is that, in addition to having the world’s most complicated voting systems, Australia also has compulsory voting[2]. Typically more than 95 per cent of votes are formal, that is, list all candidates in order of preference, with no missing numbers or repetitions. In Dennis Mueller’s generally excellent book on Public Choice, he discusses the single transferable vote and suggests that, while attractive in theory, it’s too complicated to work in practice. Either Australians are a lot smarter than everybody else, or public choice theorists aren’t as smart as they think they are.

fn1. To be precise, Maskin and Dasgupta advocate the Borda weighted vote, whereas Australia has the single transferable vote (called preferential voting in Australia), but nothing in their argument distingushes the two.

fn2. More precisely, compulsory registration and attendance at the polling station – there’s nothing to stop you casting a blank ballot.

What I've been reading

John Quiggin18 Comments

Valdis Krebs presents this map of purchasing habits for political books, using the techniques of cluster analysis. leftright Krebs’ main point is that the books divide readers into two sharply separate clusters, color-coded on the assumption that one group of readers are Democrats and the other are Republicans. The diagram also coincides with the standard left-right coding.

I have a couple of observations on this. The first is the trivial one that this color-coding is the exact opposite of the one that would naturally be used in Australia or the UK (back in my days as a folksinger, one of my more successful pieces (this is a highly relative term( was about a Labour leader who “went in [to office] Red and came out Blue”. Without wanting to load too much on to arbitrary signifiers, this does seem to me to support my view that there’s a bigger gulf between liberals and the radical left in the US than elsewhere. Even if the mainstream left party in other countries does not adopt the red banner of Marxism there’s sufficient continuity along the political spectrum to make it’s adoption by the right unlikely.

The second thing that’s striking is that, on the left-right orientation, I come out as a moderate. I’ve read nearly all the blue books that are within one or two links of the red zone, and none of those on the far left of the diagram. On the right, I’ve read only Letters to a Young Conservative .

Looking again at the titles of the books I’ve read, while there’s a vaguely leftish slant to them, one could scarcely call either Clash of Civilisations or Elusive Quest for Growth supportive of the left. The striking thing is that these are mostly the serious books, while those on either side are mostly lightweight polemics (I’m inferring this from the reviews I’ve read of some of them and the titles of the others). But it would appear from the cluster analysis that those who read leftwing partisan diatribes also tend to read serious books (and vice versa) while those who read rightwing partisan diatribes don’t read anything else.

In terms of the debate that’s been going on for some time about the relative intellectual capacity of the left and the right, the cluster analysis seems to imply that the left is doing a lot more to enhance its intellectual capacity than is the right.

(Hat tip to Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution)

Self-defeating interest groups

John Quiggin7 Comments

This piece by Michael Shmith is mainly about smoking. But one passage resonated with me

Growing up in a smoking household was a rite of passage similar to the dreaded ceremony of school milk. Just as I remain convinced a generation of baby boomers are repulsed by milk because of the warm quarter-pints we were forced to consume at morning recess, I believe childhood exposure to secondary smoking often served as a subliminal early warning system

I think, though I don’t know, that compulsory school milk was the product of lobbying by the dairy industry. If so, there can have been few more counterproductive pieces of interest group politics. Like Shmith, and for the same reason, I never touch the stuff.

Beautiful one night, …

John Quiggin2 Comments

This has been just about the perfect Brisbane Saturday night for me. The temperature is a balmy 20 or so, with the gentlest of breezes. We caught the CityCat downriver to Southbank and cheered the Bullets to a one-point win over minor premiers the Sydney Kings, the winning margin coming from a three-point shot on the final buzzer by Ben Walker. The game made no difference to finals placings, but that doesn’t worry me at all. Then back upriver and home. It doesn’t get much better.

Blood libel

John Quiggin23 Comments

The notion that Jews are collectively responsible for the death of Christ may seem too silly for words, but it is obviously still taken seriously enough to require refutation, not surprisingly in view of the immense human suffering it has caused. My question is, has anyone ever suggested that Italians are collectively responsible?

To answer the obvious quibble, the term “Roman” referred, at the time in question, to any (free) inhabitant of Italy (Roman citizenship was extended to the whole of Italy in 89BC), and Pontius Pilate himself was of Samnite rather than specifically Roman origin.

I know from experience that irony is too dangerous for use in blogs. So, at the risk of boring 95 per cent of readers, let me be absolutely clear on my own position. I don’t think anyone now living can properly be blamed or praised for the actions of putative ancestors 2000 years ago. I also don’t believe we have, or are ever likely to obtain, sufficient evidence to attribute responsibility for the death of Jesus to any person or group.