This is your chance to make comments on any topic of your choosing, to be written and read at the leisurely pace of the weekend. I welcome pieces a little longer than the usual comments, but not full-length essays. If you want to draw attention to something longer, try an extract or summary with a link. As usual, civilised discussion and no coarse language.
17 thoughts on “Weekend reflections”
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John Quiggin 
One suggestion.
A discussion about the newly developing discourse of conservatism in Australia, and its construction of liberalism as the enemy that must be defeated in a cultural war.
Some material can be found over at Gary Sauer-Thompson’s philosophy.com In that post American material is introduced to understand Australian conservatism and its hostility to social liberalism.
I think I read it on here that the GBP was once the world’s reserve currency and now the USD is.
So I’ll take the opportunity to ask (rather than post a discussion) how did the change come about?
.. and my wish is that someone take the time to write a primer entitled:
“Why Iraq has nothing to do with Oil for Left-Wing Dummies”
I am sorely in need of such an exposition. I can’t figure it out for myself and am unable to “move on” in the meanwhile.
Wbb
Wasn’t this Haddock post a good start? You must have read it at the time, since there’s a comment from you. Or did you want a specifically right wing version?
This relates to the thread on teaching literacy, if a little tangentially.
As a linguist, I am always frustrated by comments about how such and such a person or group of people cannot write grammatically, (or cannot spell correctly). In linguistics, ‘grammatical’ is a technical term meaning something like “in accord with the inferred rule system underlying the production and intuitions of speakers of a language variety”. Grammaticality is relative to the system, and where the systems of two varieties diverge, then grammaticality judgments will also diverge. Take as an example the ongoing debate about the status of Afro-American Vernacular English. For linguists, this is a non-issue: AAVE is a language variety with its own system which is different to the system of Standard English. The utterances of its speakers are fully grammatical qua that system. Similarly, informal varieties of English have systems which are different from the system of Standard English to greater or lesser degrees – for a typical example of how linguists talk about these matters, look at this recent post on the LanguageLog site (http://itre.cis.penn.edu/~my/languagelog/archives/001635.htm).
The standard variety of the language has a certain status, but this is conferred by social factors, not by any intrinsic superiority of that variety. Using the standard variety carries no implication of superior cognitive powers! The conventional nature of this status is clear if we recall how recently eminent practitioners could still use varied spelling, varied punctuation, and word forms (e.g. ain’t) that are now stigmatised.
I definitely believe that children should be given the opportunity to learn how to deploy these conventions (the standard variety of English), as access to many benefits in our society is dependent on that skill. But I also believe that we should be more honest about what is going on in this process. Children have good levels of metalinguistic awareness and learn quickly that different varieties are appropriate in different settings. My 6YO has no trouble with the idea that some words are better not used in front of her grandparents! I think that the challenge is to convince children that using Standard English is a skill which they need and that they can benefit from it.
It’s not altogether clear what is frustrating you Michael. Linguists have an empirical, descriptive concept of grammar, whereby a number of different grammars coexist in the same language. The concept of correctness is not relevant to this description. But in everyday usage, grammar refers to a particular set of grammatical conventions againts which particular utterenaces are judged. So we have two different but related uses of the word grammar, and no reason to be confused.
Maybe you’re frustrated that some people, unlike you, believe the received grammar to be intrinsically superior. But I doubt that many sensible people really believe that. It probably arises from the fact that a lack of educational opportunities leads to both poor communication skills and incorrect grammar, so these characteristics coexist in the same individuals and tend to be conflated. By poor communication skills I don’t mean in everyday contexts, but in technical and professional contexts where abstract ideas need to be manipulated.
Or perhaps you are frustrated that we continue to enforce the received grammar and judge our neighbour by his command of it. On that score I guess you are probably right, but at least you can take comfort in the fact that Australians are less snobbish than the British, especially as far as spoken English is concerned.
But the well educated will always insist on their correct grammar even if they can’t come up with an ironclad justification for it. You are right to suggest we should question this.
Are you immune, as a matter of interest? What if your six-year old says, ‘I done my home work, Dad. Me and Achmed are going to play’. Aren’t you going to correct him?
Do people know anything about the possible practice of healthcare and pharmaceutical firms patenting treatments (as opposed to drugs)? This was mentioned on a CT thread which I now can’t find. Is this something happening now, something that people fear may happen, or just a non-starter? If either of the former, it strikes me that the time may have come to start up a website where people can a)publicise new forms of patient care and b)do so under a Creative Commons-style license, thus forestalling the patent-hunters.
Vee,
Have a look at the Wikipedia article at the following address:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system
Good to see Gary’s challenge for a serious debate about the uses and abuses of liberalism, with some attention to the broader cultural agenda.
This will call for some reading and re-reading of the works of Popper and Hayek, and others less known such as Jacques Barzun, Rene Wellek, Ian D Suttie and Bill Hutt.
Sorry. Simon, I mean.
Bork, Bork, Bork.
It always gets me, the irony of those who go on about the evils of an unelected, activist judiciary, and ignore the greater evils perpetrated by corporate power – now increasingly unaccountable and a long long way from the free competition supposedly dear to classical liberalism. Welcome to your bunk at Wackenhut, Hayek.
The Queensland Nationals are trying to get the Liberals to agree to form a new merged party. It is interesting that Lawrence Springborg, the Nationals leader, envisages this as a “big C” Conservative party rather than a “small l” Liberal Party or even something in between.
One of the reasons State Labor has done so well in Queensland is that the Nationals are becoming increasingly irrelevant in SE Queensland as once rural electorates become increasingly urbanised. The obvious solution would be to let the Liberals contest these seats, but this would give the Liberals a growing electoral base and marginalise the Nationals. So you can see where the Nationals are coming from with this proposal and why the State Liberals are unlikely to agree to it.
The other problem with the Springborg proposal is that, apart from its Conservative label, there is no vision as to what the new party might stand for (other than getting rid of Beattie). Given tha Nationals have the numbers it is more likely to have policies identical to the Nationals (eg. “rural socialism”) and this is likely to alienate part of the urban vote.
Perhaps its time for thr Nationals to realise that it is not the Liberals and Labor, but demographics, that are against them.
I have been reading a series of articles by Henry Lui, in Asian Times. They are very disturbing, is it true that American inflation is much higher than reported, because of “hedonic”, adjustments, to the figures? And does the rest of his arguments make economic sense? Or is it all just a nightmare he had?.
On hedonics, it’s certainly true that the US is more aggressive in making hedonic adjustments than other countries, though they may well be right in doing so. In this post, I observe
Looking at more recent evidence, I tend to think the bias is larger, perhaps as much as a full percentage point.
Have you got a paper on the hedonic adjustment being as much as 1 percentage points? That is a huge difference. It would drop the labour productivity growth in the USA to almost half that of France Germany and Australia.
And how would it carry through to multifactor productivity measures. The Economist (4 Nov 2004) points out that multifactor productivity measures adjust for some of the differences especially the IT factor. But some of the hedonic adjustment would still be there in the multifactor productivity measure. And if remaining hedonic adjustment of the order you are saying was taken out of this measure, the USA would have very low multi-factor productivity growth of 0.5% per year or so. Is that believable? My argument is all back-of-the-envelope stuff, but I’m just trying to say that if there is a 1.0% overestimate for USA productivity growth, it needs a strong body of evidence to argue it.
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3352969
As The Economist points out, the same factors that inflate the output measure also inflate the measure of capital input, so that, broadly speaking, MFP estimates are unaffected by biases in hedonic estimation.
Looking at the data in the Economist, a 1 percentage point adjustment to labour productivity would leave the US about equal to Germany for 1996-2003, behind France and UK but ahead of Italy and Netherlands.
In view of the very weak performance of the US manufacturing sector in international competition, I don’t see any of this as implausible.
Vee — the pound was the reserve currencies in the 1800s and the dollar replaced it in the 1920s-30s.
The death of the pound as the reserve currency was a product of several developments. Most were tied to the costs of WW I and WW II on the British position as a major economy and supplier of capital to the world. But more specifically it was also tied to Churchill’s decicision in the 1920s to go back to the old gold standard at the old exchange rate. That was a major mistake that caused the British to enter the great depression in the 1920s, well ahead of the rest of the world.
Technically, the pound was the center of the financial world in the 1800s because of their commitment to sell gold at a fixed exchange rate. They broke that for WW I and were never again the center of the financial system. The key became the US committment to buy gold that lasted until the US started floating under Nixon.
My comments are very superficial and I’m sure someone can refer youto a good book on the subject are correct my biased opinions.