Comment on the Russian election outcome has been almost universally negative. This is not surprising when you look at the winners – a government party whose only platform is to support Putin and an opposition party deliberately confected by Putin’s cronies to ensure a tame parliament.

You get a rather different perspective if you look at the main losers – the Communists, Zhirinovsky’s bizarrely misnamed Liberal Democrats and two parties owned by kleptocrats – Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces*. All of them are discredited, and there is no prospect of a serious opposition emerging until they are gone.

It’s certainly true that the next Parliament won’t represent any sort of check on Putin and that this isn’t good for democracy, but the situation is not obviously worse, in this respect, than say, Britain under Thatcher. Of course, Putin could use the situation to entrench a dictatorship. It seems more likely though, that he will rig the situation further to his advantage, but not so much so as to be able to resist a popular and coherent opposition when it finally emerges. Again, the parallel with Thatcher is apposite.

* The Union of Right Forces is openly pro-kleptocrat, and is run by the architect of kleptocracy Anatoly Chubais . Yabloko and its leader Gregory Yavlinsky are more appealing but the party is deeply in hock to leading kleptocrat Khodorkovsky, who recently ran afoul of Putin. (spelling/transliteration corrections welcome).

One of the reasons privatisation has pretty much halted in the English-speaking countries is that obvious failures have become more common as governments have moved on to the harder cases. In the UK, the last three big privatisations were the breakup and sale of British Rail under the Tories and the part privatisation of air traffic control and the London Underground by the Blair government (more particularly Chancellor Gordon Brown).

The rail breakup/privatisation is universally recognised as a disaster and is being gradually reversed. Now the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee has reported that the air traffic control privatisation should never have happened. Looking at the troubles of the Underground, it’s a safe bet that similar findings will be made when this deal is reviewed.

One of the Grand Young Men of Australian blogging, Gareth Parker has announced that he is going over to other side with the offer of a cadetship from the West Australian. Well done!

Under the rules that seem to have evolved, it’s OK for columnists (like me) to have blogs, but not for real journalists, so it looks as if Gareth’s blog “My Two Cents” is no more. It was one I enjoyed a lot, and was an important part of my corner of the blogworld, particularly back in the early days (2002, that is).

Another loss is Stewart Kelly who has apparently succumbed to the ailment all bloggers fear most, getting a life.

Meanwhile there are more arrivals than I can keep up with, so I’ll defer introductions until I get time for an update of the blogroll – soon I hope.

Regular reader James Farrell has asked me to launch a competition with an appealing prize. He says

John, can I have your permission to hold a competition?*

I was just recruited to give a ninety-minute talk in Krakow in January on the Australian Economy.

What the hell am I going to say?

The question: what are the five most important and/or interesting things about the Australian economy from a Polish point of view? Keep it very brief: I don’t need you to write the lecture for me.

I should stress that I’m not getting paid for the talk, apart from an airfare from Budapest.

The prize is a bottle of whatever fancy Polish grog someone recommends to me. I’ll send it to you when I get back.

Entries close Friday noon. So as not to disadvantage the earlier respondents, I place no limit on the number of entries per person. But a later entry would need to be sufficiently differentiated from an earlier one by another competitor to beat it.

A ninety-minute talk! Those Poles must really have some Sitzfleisch.

Via NZPundit via Professor Bunyip via Technorati, I’ve tracked down the study by the New Zealand Land Transport Safety Authority (PDF file) which formed the basis of the estimate that higher speed limits in the US cost 1900 lives.

The study looks at states which had a highway limit of 65mph (about 110 km/h) in 1995, at which time this was the maximum allowed under the National Maximum Speed Limit. The NMSL was repealed in December 1995 and a lot of states increased the limit to 70 or 75. Over the next few years, fatality rates rose, on average, in the states that raised their limits and fell in the states that did not. The LTSA uses a statistical model to check that this wasn’t merely a random fluctuation and to correct for the most important possible source of spurious correlation, an increase in vehicle miles travelled. They find that the increase in fatalities was statistically significant – given that their estimates imply a loss of 1900 lives, it was obviously significant in the ordinary usage of the term.

NZPundit admits to a bit of confusion about the paper and in particular, the divergence between statistical estimates and predictions. To clarify this point, the estimates are those based on the actual outcomes observed in the states in question. The predictions are derived from previous studies that estimated the impact of a given increase in average speeds, and are higher than those obtained here. The suggested explanation is that, since lots of people were speeding anyway, an increase in speed limits does not translate to an equal increase in average speeds, though average speeds do increase.

Supermodel Linda Evangelista is reported to have said that “she wouldn’t get out of bed for less than 10,000 pounds”. I have a similar view regarding possible budgetary savings – if it’s less than $10 million, I’ll leave it to the Department of Finance to chase (of course, I’d probably have a different attitude if economists were paid on a commission basis).

Given my attention threshold, I was pretty impressed to read in my morning AFR that “Travelling ex-pollies cost Australia half a billion”. That looked like some money worth grabbing in my next budget review. Sad to say, it was all a subeditor’s error – the actual cost is half a million. Not only that, but the Internet edition fixed it before I could post a link.

The conference on Public-Private Partnerships I attended today gave me lots of food for thought. Perhaps most interesting was the fact that nearly all the speakers noted that the era of privatisation has passed (at least in the English-speaking countries). I’ve been pointing this out for some years now, but I missed the point when it passed from iconoclastic provocation to conventional wisdom.

It’s time, once again, for your chance to comment on any topic that takes your fancy (civilised discussion, and no coarse language, please).

My suggested discussion starter: which political party will be the next to change leaders? (I’m taking the Democrats to have changed already)

Like lots of other people, I’m sure, I’m getting more and more impatient with the stream of articles about the merits or otherwise of different generations. The main focus is on the Boomers born between 1945 and the early 1960s, and their successors, denoted X and Y, with an occasional nod to the generation who fought in WWII. Those born in the ‘Baby Bust’ between 1930 and 1945 are usually not mentioned, but are, in practice, treated as if they were Boomers (for example, it was the Busters who were the first teenagers and who pioneered rock-and-roll.

My impatience is heightened by the fact that I’ve already published what I immodestly regard as the definitive refutation of the ‘generation game’.

My general point is that, most of the time, claims about generations amount to no more than the repetition of unchanging formulas about different age groups ­ the moral degeneration of the young, the rigidity and hypocrisy of the old, and so on. This is true in spades at present.

I also point out that the use of generational arguments is particularly silly in relation to Baby Boomers because economic and social conditions changed radically over the period when the boomers entered adulthood (the only time at which membership of a given age cohort makes a significant difference). Those born before about 1955* had experiences very similar to those of the preceding Baby Bust generation, entering a booming labour market where not much education was needed to get a good job. Those born towards the end of the baby boom had experience much more like that of the succeeding generations X and Y – in some respects worse, since youth unemployment reached its peak in the late 1970s.

Most pundits who play the generation game simply ignore these inconsistencies. To have all the traits that are commonly attributed to Baby Boomers, for example, you would have to be simultaneously over 65 (to have been around at the beginning of teen rebellion) and under 35 (to have been among the last to get a free university education).

* It’s easy enough to check out my birthdate, but I’ll leave it to readers to do so.

If the Australian Democrats weren’t already doomed, the apparently alcohol-fuelled fracas involving Andrew Bartlett is surely the last straw. Rather than rake over the coals of the last few years, I thought it might be worth assessing their contribution.

The biggest single thing the Democrats have done is to give the Senate a constructive role when it seemed, after 1975, that this was impossible. After 1975 Senate without a government majority seemed like a guarantee of chaos with the axe poised to fall the moment the government’s popularity slipped. And a Senate with a government majority would be waste of space (not to mention money).

Although they didn’t always get it right, the Democrats used the balance of power well, both in their initial phase as a centrist party and subsequently when they became, on most issues, a left alternative to Labor. With luck, the Greens will succeed them in the balance of power and will follow this tradition, driving tougher bargains than the Democrats have done, but still being willing to make the system work.

The pity is that they didn’t merge with the Greens ten years ago. A merger would have been good for both sides. I believe it was considered but was derailed by personal rivalries and party bickering.