As the boom in Australian property prices comes to add hundreds of thousands to the value of any block of land from which the sea is visible, trees that get in the way of those views have been disappearing rapidly. In most places, this has reached the point where further clearing has been tightly restricted by law, but this has merely produced an epidemic of midnight tree-fellings and mysterious poisonings.

I was told today (but haven’t been able to check it) that Noosa Council has adopted what seems likely to be an effective deterrent. In the event of a suspicious tree death, a new tree will be replanted. While it is growing it will be supplemented by an artificial visibility barrier equal in height and width to the old tree. Perhaps the tree-fellers can find a countermeasure, but it’s not obvious how.

And on this kind of thing, as Noosa goes, so goes the nation.

Kieran’s piece on kids being driven to school reminded me of a post I’ve been planning for a while. One of the issues debated at length on my blog is that of speeding and law-enforcement measures such as speed cameras. I’ve argued against speeding and in favor of rigorous law-enforcement. Not surprisingly, and perhaps reflecting the fact that more than 80 per cent of drivers regard themselves as above-average, this has been very controversial. You can read some instalments in the debate here and here or use the search facility for “speeding”. Unfortunately most of the extensive and interesting comments were lost in a database failure.

In the course of this debate I discovered the fact, surprising to me, that, although the rate of road deaths per person in the United States is nearly twice that in Australia and the United Kingdom, much of this difference can be accounted for by the fact that distances travelled in the United States are a lot higher and are rising (there are problems with the numbers and biases in the measure, but I’ll leave that to one side for now). The differences between US and UK are plausible given differences in population density and well-developed public transport in London at least, but the differences between the US and Australia certainly surprised me. Australia is every bit as car-dependent as the US and has much lower population density.

All of this is a prelude to the fact that, in economic terms, time spent travelling is a really big deal. In their book Time for Life, based on the 1985 US Time Use Study, Robinson and Godbey estimate that the average adult American spends 30 hours a week in paid employment and 10 hours a week travelling (they also, controversially, argue that working time has been falling, not rising). It’s pretty clear that distances and times spent travelling have increased since 1985 in the US (in both the US and Australia, driving is by far the dominant mode of travel).

If, as I’ll argue below, most travel should be regarded as being in the same economic category as working and if, as the stats linked above imply, Americans spend about twice as much time travelling as Australians, then reducing travel times to the Australian level would be equivalent to a productivity improvement of between 12 and 15 per cent. As it happens, combined with the relatively small difference in hours of paid work, adjusting for hours of work and travel would just about eliminate the gap between Australian and US GDP per capita (about 20 per cent on standard PPP estimates).
Read More »

Via Lawrence Solum, I found this interesting post from Professor Bainbridge arguing that corporations should not be compelled to pay reparations for past wrongdoing (in this case, complicity in slavery). He says

Punish the wrongdoers, you say? Sorry, but the corporation’s legal personhood is a mere legal fiction. A corporation is not a moral actor. Edward, First Baron Thurlow, put it best: “Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and nobody to be kicked?” The corporation is simply a nexus of contracts between factors of production. As such, there is no moral basis for applying retributive justice to a corporation – there is nothing there to be punished.

So who do we punish when we force the corporation to pay reparations? Since the payment comes out of the corporation’s treasury, it reduces the value of the residual claim on the corporation’s assets and earnings. In other words, the shareholders pay. Not the directors and officers who actually committed the alleged wrongdoing (who in most of these cases are long dead anyway), but modern shareholders who did nothing wrong.

This seems plausible. On the other hand, the obvious implication (one that was clearly implicit in Thurlow’s original point) is that the principle of limited liability is untenable, at least in relation to civil and criminal penalties for corporate wrongdoing. The wrongdoers are, as Bainbridge says, the officers and shareholders at the time the wrong is committed, and they should be held personally liable. The law has moved a bit in this direction in recent years, but Bainbridge’s argument implies that it should go a long way further, restricting the principle of limited liability to the case of voluntarily contracted debts.
Read More »

I enjoyed the series of stories Drunken Banker Week presented by Gummo Trotsky. Start here and work back.

The ‘Gray Lady’ nickname of the NYT implies the kind of conservatism and caution that’s appropriate to a journal of record. But in what is, as far as I know, a newspaper first, today’s NYT brings the astrology column onto the Op-Ed page, providing horoscopes for the Democratic Presidential hopefuls.

I’m bemused by this. If the implied view is that astrology is so patently silly that no-one would take it seriously, isn’t this rather a juvenile trick to play on Erin Sullivan, noted as the author of Saturn in Transit and the forthcoming Astrology and Psychology of Midlife and Aging., who appears to have contributed her column in all seriousness? If the implied view is anything other than that astrology is too silly to be taken seriously, isn’t this rather insulting to every reader of the NYT who has even a high school level of scientific literacy? No doubt there is some ironic postmodern stance that is appropriate here, but I can’t quite locate it.

In today’s SMH, Gerard Henderson repeats all the standard claims about swinging voters, for example

Elections in Australia are invariably decided by people who in most other democracies would not vote, or who, if they choose to back a minor party or independent, would not express a preference for either of the major parties. This is due to the unique federal electoral system, which comprises compulsory and preferential voting – introduced in 1924 and 1918 respectively.

In other words, it is the essentially uncommitted and/or uninterested – living in marginal seats – who decide election outcomes in Australia … Since the end of the Pacific War, the Government has changed hands only five times – 1949 (Menzies), 1972 (Gough Whitlam), 1975 (Fraser), 1983 (Hawke) and 1996 (Howard). The outcome in each case was determined by the change in allegiance of essentially non-political voters, along with a proportion of newly enrolled electors.

There’s a trivial sense in which all of this true, just as the outcome of a cricket match [at least if it isn’t drawn] is always decided by the last ball. And in a constituency-based system with only two parties capable of winning seats, it’s broadly speaking correct that only marginal seats count – however, swings are more variable these days so more seats are marginal.

Apart from that, however, Henderson’s analysis is (to the extent that it was ever valid), totally out of date. The implied picture is one in which most voters, and all who take a serious interest in politics, are committed supporters of one major party or the other, in roughly equal numbers. Hence, the remainder, the ‘swingers’ determine the outcome.

This was always a problematic viewpoint. As Henderson’s own family experience during the Split (he has an interesting piece on this in the latest Sydney Institute newsletter) people can and do make permanent changes in their political allegiance. A conversion of this kind is far more valuable to the gaining party than winning a swinging voter for a single election.

More importantly, the number of “rusted-on” major party voters has declined drastically. Both sides have recorded votes of 35 per cent or below in their worst recent outings, which puts an absolute upper bound of 70 per cent voters committed to one party or the other. But even within this group, there are almost certainly some who changed over time, or voted on a specific issues. For example, Keating lost lots of hardcore Labor voters in the 1996 election, but he undoubtedly gained some “cafe latte” votes with his cultural agenda – many of these will not be so attracted to Latham, while the former hardcore may return.

Henderson is particularly unsatisfactory when it comes to the minor parties. He notes that most Green preferences go to Labor, but there’s a big difference between getting a primary vote and getting 70 per cent of second preferences. To be precise, on these numbers the average Green vote is worth 0.4 first preferences votes to Labor.

More importantly, since minor party preferences are now crucial, what basis does Henderson have for equating minor party voters with “the uncommitted or uninterested”? The decision to vote for a minor party means that the voter has rejected both of the obvious choices, which normally implies some degree of interest in the process. It’s hard to argue that Democrat and Green voters as a group are less interested in politics than major party voters, whatever you might think of the results of their interest. Even One Nation voters, who are on average closer to Henderson’s idea of the apolitical swinger, were expressing a (negative) interest in political ‘business as usual’ when they abandoned their traditional allegiances to vote for Pauline.

Thanks to reader Jim Norton, who points to this letter to the Oz on DDT from parasitologist Dr Alan Lymbery, demolishing the nonsense peddled by Christopher Pearson (it’s on Keneth Miles site). My take on Pearson’s nonsense was here, with links to earlier pieces. I’m pleased to see it matches Lymbery almost point for point.

One fact Lymbery adds, of which I was not aware, is that Rachel Carson, who has been much maligned in the debate on this topic, explicitly noted, in relation to the growth of resistance arising from indiscriminate use of DDT

No responsible person contends that insect-borne disease should be ignored . . . The question that has now urgently presented itself is whether it is wise or responsible to attack the problem by methods that are rapidly making it worse

Lymbery concludes

Malaria is responsible for enormous suffering and death. The facts are readily available in the scientific literature. To blame a reduction in DDT usage for the death of 10-30 million people from malaria is not just simple-minded, it is demonstrably wrong. To blame a mythical, monolithic entity called the environmental lobby for the total reduction in DDT usage is not just paranoid, it is also demonstrably wrong. Your article is not only poor journalism, it is an insult to the people who work for the control of parasitic diseases that afflict developing nations.

The same could be said of the dozens of junk science sites in the blogosphere that have reproduced the same nonsense, usually with no attempt to check original sources.

This piece by William Safire alleges that the CIA was engaged in terrorist activity in Russia in the early 1980s, sabotaging a gas pipeline funded by Britain and Germany, and allegedly leading to its explosion.

Of course, Safire doesn’t use the word terrorism and regards the whole thing as a major victory in the Cold War, but we don’t need to use our imagination to see how the US would regard the same thing done in reverse – blowing up pipelines is one of the main terrorist activities of the Iraqi insurgents.

The sabotage was allegedly done by supplying defective computer chips of a type that were under embargo because of their supposed military use. I get the impression Safire thinks that this makes the deal OK and that it’s different from blowing up the pipeline with dynamite (but I can’t be sure of this).

Finally, I should add that the story sounds phony to me.

For the first time in many weeks, the Monday Message Board is on time and under budget. Please post your thoughts on any topic (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please).

The slow-motion renationalisation of British Rail takes one more step.