Following Howard’s stunning mishandling of the FTA debate, I’ve come to a marginally more optimistic view of the whole issue of FTA and PBS. After reading the various statements on both the review process and the issue of generics, it seems to me that a purely legalistic focus is misleading. I think the letter of the FTA gives a fair bit of room to move, allowing for interpretations more or less favorable to the pharmaceutical lobby on the one hand and the PBS on the other. The government has tried to have it both ways, assuring the Australian public that the FTA clauses relating to PBS are meaningless words inserted to placate the Americans, while promising their (very close) friends in the pharmaceutical lobby that they can expect more favorable treatment, consistent with Wooldridge’s efforts to stack the PBAC and so forth. Passage of the FTA without amendment would have made it easy for the government to deliver to its friends when the elections were out of the way and the electors conveniently on the sidelines. Adding amendments directed at specific possible abuses implies, more generally, that Australia is committed to ensuring that the drug lobby gets nothing more than its minimum legal entitlement under the FTA – a nonbinding review, and observation of patent law.

Of course, if the government gets back in there will be plenty of temptation to renegotiate after the election. But at least now the press is awake to the fact that this is a big story, and that there are headlines to be got from exposing cosy deals, dubious claims and so forth.

Australia is such a small country that, whenever any Australian gets noticed for anything we all tend to feel a glow of vicarious achievement[1]. So I was pleased to see that Germaine Greer was ranked second in a Prospect magazine list of 100 top British intellectuals. Having enjoyed my burst of patriotic pride, I have to ask what they are smoking in the Old Country these days. The Australian view of Germaine Greer[2] is probably best summed up by Geoff Honnor

Greer has metamorphosised into a Barry Humphries creation: the eccentric old bluestocking aunt who loves to blather on in a colourfully opinionated, slightly shocking way about the great issues of the day. These, oddly enough, seem to always come back to the single greatest issue of all – herself.

In fact, Humphries himself would rank ahead of Greer in my rankings of expat Aussie intellectuals. And if you want an expat with bitterly negative views of home, you can’t go past Robert Hughes (since he’s based in the US, he wasn’t eligible for the Prospect poll).

fn1. And we’re not too fussy as to who we count as an Australian. In particular, any Kiwi who’s done so much as pass through the transit lounge at Sydney airport automatically has their achievements added to the Australian total. OTOH, we’re happy to disown Rupert Murdoch.

fn2. I leave aside the shrinking pool of those who are silly enough to be outraged by her provocations

How do articles like this one, with its daringly original reference to War of the Generations keep on getting published? Is there anything here that hasn’t already been said a thousand times by Paul Watson and refuted almost as often on this blog?

A discussion about excessive advertising over at Troppo Armadillo led me to think a bit about the fact that I never watch movies on commercial TV any more, because there are too many ads. Being an economist, I naturally like to assure myself that my conduct is rational, so I did the numbers.

The Media Watch story linked by Ken Parish indicates that TV stations are allowed 15 minutes of ads per hour, which implies that a 2-hour movie can be padded out with around 40 minutes of ads. This seems consistent with my memory of the last time I tried watching such a movie.

For most of the movies shown on commercial TV, I have the alternative option of walking to the video store up the street (10 minutes return) and hiring a video or DVD ($5 max). So, the trade-off is $5 vs 30 minutes. in effect, the TV station is paying me $10 an hour to watch ads. Since I value my time at more than $10 an hour, I choose the rental option.

This seemed convincing to me, but how generally applicable is it? Not everyone lives as close to a video store as I do, but then you can always rent a week’s worth of videos at a time, so the allocation of 10 minutes per movie seems reasonable. As regards the $10 an hour, I have, I think it a perfect arbitrage argument. The average video store pays $10 an hour[1], usually has casual work going, and, in most cases, will let the staff borrow reasonable numbers of videos free of charge.

fn1. I’m ignoring tax here, but if your marginal tax rate is an issue your time is worth more than $10 an hour.

In the most recent London Review of Books, Hugh Pennington has a generally excellent article on measles and erroneous (to put it charitably) research linking the combined MMR vaccine to autism. It’s a pity therefore that, on a peripheral issue, he perpetuates an equally glaring error, saying

‘Most people have an intuitive appreciation that the best vaccine programme, from an individual’s point of view, is one where almost everyone else is vaccinated while they are not, so that they are indirectly protected without incurring any of the risks or inconvenience associated with direct protection.’ If too many people act in this way, the infection becomes commoner in the population as a whole, and returns as a real and significant threat to the unimmunised. This is a modern version of the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ described by Garrett Hardin in his influential 1968 essay: 16th-century English peasants had free grazing on commons; their need to supplement food supplies and income was very great; the resulting overgrazing wrecked the commons for everyone.

As I’ve pointed out previously Hardin’s story was, in historical terms, a load of tripe.

It’s interesting to note that, in repeating Hardin’s story, Pennington adds the spurious specificity of “16th century England”, whereas Hardin’s account was not specific regarding dates and places, and therefore harder to refute. This is characteristic of the way in which factoids are propagated.

Don Arthur and Ken Parish have been discussing values and civility, with links to other bloggers. Both posts are well worth reading. I don’t have anything new to say on this at present, but civility is the kind of thing that’s better shown by example than described in the abstract. With some exceptions, and with occasional lapses by nearly everyone, I think Ozplogistan sets a pretty good example. I rarely agree with, for example, Andrew Norton or John Humphries Humphreys, and frequently disagree with Ken Parish, but we manage to have productive discussions despite this.

Prompted by the recent discussion of blogging on Australia Talks Back (audio here), new reader Ted Kroiter has sent an email asking me to point to his views on drug law reform. . You can also read my thoughts on the same topic. Discussion welcome.

UpdateA striking feature of our drug laws is that there’s a fundamental distinction drawn between those drugs that have been widely used since, say, 1600 (alcohol, tobacco, caffeine) and those that have only been used for 50-100 years (cocaine, heroin, marijuana, amphetamines and so on). Is anyone willing to defend this distinction? As a matter of personal disclosure, I should say that the current rules suit me very well. I am a regular consumer of two of the three main legal drugs, and have no interest in any of the illegal options, (though there are times when a double espresso with added benzedrine might be just the ticket).

My preferred cure for jetlag is to arrive in the morning and spend a fair part of the day outside, resetting your body clock, then have as normal an evening as possible, before going to bed about 10pm. In most respects, my schedule fitted this plan perfectly. Leaving Paris on Monday evening, I got into Brisbane this morning (Wednesday) and the day was suitably sunny. With the State of Origin starting soon, there’ll be no problem about staying up.

The only unusual feature is that my normal Wednesday includes karate training. I can now report that this is a complete, if problematic, cure for jet lag. Whatever term might describe my post-training condition, it is not jet-lagged.

GO MAROONS

From bertramonline, some comment (a couple of weeks old now, but my Internet access has been spotty) on the news that Bjorn Lomborg has resigned as head of the Danish Environmental Assessment Institute and is returning to his academic job. Like me, Bertram is somewhat surprised by the limited media reaction to, and coverage of, Lomborg’s last big effort, the Copenhagen Consensus.

As attentive readers will recall, the conference concluded that fighting AIDS should be the top global priority in helping developing countries and also that climate change mitigation was a waste of money. I agree with the first of these conclusions, and more generally with the need for more spending on health poor countries, and I hope that Lomborg will put some effort into supporting it. I’ll try to keep readers posted on this.

I’m back from my travels and, even after a week in Paris, Brisbane is as beautiful as ever, with blue skies, a mild winter day and the river looking as appealing as always.

My trip to Paris was very enjoyable, and my conference paper went very well. For a mixture of historical and stylistic reasons, my work on the economics of uncertainty is more highly regarded in France than in the United States. This prompted one of my co-authors to observe, rather unkindly I thought, that I could be regarded as the Jerry Lewis of decision theory.

Although I saw many interesting sights in Paris, the most surprising was that of four men in suits riding what appeared to be Segways (as far as I recall, I’ve seen descriptions, but not pictures, of these previously). Whether this was the beginning of a trend, or one of the many demonstrations and manifestations that abound in Paris, I couldn’t say for sure.