The discussion of my repost on the silliness of generational tropes produced a surprising amount of agreement on the main point, then a lot of disagreement on the question of technological progress. So, I thought I’d continue reprising my greatest hits with this review of Kurzweil’s singularity post, which I put up in draft from at Crooked Timber and my own blog, producing lots of interesting discussion. Again, seven years old, but I don’t see the need to change much – YMMV
Australians installed more domestic rooftop solar PV in 2011 than in any other country in the world. Despite sharp cuts in subsidies, that seems likely to continue, and raises the question of how this will effect patterns of electricity demand and in particular the capacity of the electricity system to meet peak demand. I just ran across an interesting infographic prepared by a consulting group called Exigency management which puts the question into sharper focus . Under current conditions, demand peaks around noon, remains high through the afternoon, then has another peak in the early evening, as people come home and turn on airconditioning or heating. Widespread takeup of home solar PV will increase supply at the noon peak and even more in the afternoon, but drop off as evening approaches. The result, in the absence of any other changes, will be a system with a demand trough in mid-afternoon followed by a much sharper evening peak.
(More graphics here)
What can be done about this? The first point to observe is that the demand projection is under current pricing rules. Any sensible system, faced with a demand pattern like this would set peak prices to cover the actual demand peak, not the one that prevailed under a 20th century coal-based system. But, price incentives alone aren’t satisfactory in the absence of some way of storing energy. There’s been lots of discussion of more-or-less exotic solutions, but there’s a much simpler answer.
Those are the marvellous names for the old common law offences/torts involved in persuading others to engage in a lawsuit for your own benefit (feel free to state more precisely, IANAL). They’ve mostly been abolished now, which is probably a good thing in terms of alllowing class actions and similar, and they’ve never applied (AFAIK) in international law.
Nevertheless, a reminder of the reason such laws existed has come with the announcement of a WTO complaint by Ukraine against Australia’s plain packaging laws for cigarettes.
One of the long-running disputes in the theory of education is whether students are actually acquiring knowledge and skills that will be useful to them and society, both in earning an income and in life generally (among economists this has the unlovely name of human capital theory) or whether the primary purpose is to sort out the most able young people and direct them into the best jobs (screening). I’m a strong advocate of the human capital view, but there have always been some troubling counterexamples, such as the supposed preference of the British Civil Service for employing people with a classical (Latin and Greek) education. While doing some work in the general field, I came across the fact that this actually ceased to be true nearly 100 years ago. I couldn’t use this in the piece I was working on, so I decided to post it here.
There are instances where the ‘screening’ model appears appropriate. At one time, for example, aspirants to enter the British Civil Service were well advised to take a degree in classics from Oxford or Cambridge, since this course was seen as a test of general intellect. This was a long time ago, however. From the 1920s onwards, the most preferred general education for aspiring civil servants has been the PPE (politics, philosophy and economics) degree, particularly that offered at Oxford. No fewer than six members of the current UK Cabinet, along with many senior civil servants and journalists, hold Oxford PPEs. The shift from classics to PPE is a clear indication that the actual content of education is more significant than the screening effect.
There are some big problems with such a political monoculture. But that’s a topic for another post.
In the light of the latest news of large-scale fraud in the for-profit vocational education sector, I thought I would repost this from CT (in turn a repost of an article in Campus Review, that’s no longer on the website).
I also found a response by Andrew Norton
I’ve let my Monthly subscription lapse (will resubscribe as soon as I get a moment), so I can’t read the latest piece by Robert Manne, only the summary by John van Tiggelen, but the basic argument is simple, and widely shared. Climate change policy in the US has gone nowhere thanks to the intransigent opposition of the Republicans. I have a couple of comments
First, the policy situation isn’t nearly as bad as might be supposed, given the failure of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, and the absence of any real push from the Administration. The fact is, that, in the current US situation, achieving coherent outcomes from legislation is just about impossible. Increasingly, the Obama Administration relies on executive and regulatory actions. In the case of climate change, the important ones are fuel economy standards for cars (CAFE), and EPA regulation of CO2 emissions and other pollution from power stations. Obama has pushed through rules requiring a near doubling of fuel efficiency by 2025. The EPA regulations effectively make new coal-fired power stations uneconomic and require the shutdown of many old stations previously exempted from the Clean Air Act. Reliance on executive action has all sorts of problems, and regulation is an inefficient way of reducing emissions. Still, if Obama is re-elected, the US can expect to see continued reductions in emissions over the rest of the decade. It’s important to observe that, even with the current limited policies, US emissions have already peaked and begun to decline. If Obama wins, the EPA and CAFE regulations will be locked in, and there’s the potential to go further, particularly in the context of an agreement with China.
Second, while its unfortunate that climate change has been entangled in the general craziness of the modern Republican party, this process hasn’t been costless for the Repubs. Given the state of the economy, they ought to be looking forward to a whitewash in November. Instead, Romney is expected to lose, and any Repub Congressional majority will be narrow and fragile. That’s not specifically because of climate change, but a result of the entire political approach taken by the Repubs for the last 20 years, of which delusional claims about climate science are just one example. Whereas until the 1990s, there was a steady drift of disillusioned leftists/liberals (both intellectuals and ordinary voters) to the right, the process is now going in reverse.
While working on a piece about a possible bailout for the Spanish government, I discovered a couple of things that were news to me
* The Economics Minister in the (pro-austerity) Spanish government is a former executive of Lehman Brothers
* Axel Weber, formerly the ultra-hawkish head of the Bundesbank went straight from that job to the chairmanship of UBS, of which the NYT recently wrote “The bank’s recidivism seems rivaled only by its ability to escape prosecution”
Comment seems superfluous to me, but I hope readers will prove me wrong on this.
That was the somewhat grandiose theme of the Australian Conference of Economists held in Melbourne last week. I was invited to give a keynote presentation and got this as the default topic. It seemed like a challenge and I gave it a go – here’s my presentation (4.8Mb PDF). For those who would just like to cut to the chase, my penultimate slide gives the main story
CRISIS, COMPLACENCY,AND RELEVANCE
* The global economic crisis should have produced a crisis in economic theory
* Instead, business as usual
* A path to inevitable irrelevance
I’m using the Dropbox public folder for this. I’d be interested to hear from readers if there are any problems, and also if it went smoothly.
I haven’t been active in the debate between Crooked Timber members and various others (Bleeding Heart Libertarians, Matt Yglesias, Tyler Cowen) so far. Broadly speaking the claim on the BHL side has been that if only some minimal conditions (existence of a universal basic income, for example) were met, all employment contracts could be assumed mutually beneficial and there would be no need for governments to regulate their terms, for example to prevent sexual exploitation.
Most at CT have been dismissive of these claims, but I’d like to explore the question a bit further. Is the objection that the necessary conditions aren’t likely to be met in practice, or that the employment relationship is inherently unbalanced, simply by virtue of the fact that one party gets to boss the other around.
Suppose that the following conditions were met
* Full employment, so that the cost to a worker of finding a new job is no greater than the cost to an employer of hiring a replacement
* A minimum wage adequate to allow a decent living standard without requiring acceptance of degrading working conditions
* A universal basic income sufficient to ensure that, even without working no-one need be poor
* A default employment contract, incorporating prohibitions on sexual harassment, rights to regular breaks and so on, unless these are explicitly contracted out
Would we then feel that legislative restrictions on employment contracts were needed, and, if so, which and why? Or, is the question badly posed in some way
Salon today reprints an article from Alternet by Jill Richardson, defending local food against an attack by Pierre Desroches and Hiroku Shimizu, who are associated with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and whose work is based, she says, on neoliberal economics. Richardson runs with a fairly standard critique of neoclassical economics, starting with the standard joke about the chemist, physicist and economist stranded on a desert island.
What’s interesting about this debate is that in intellectual terms both parties are on the opposite side to the the one they imagine.
John Quiggin 