A better way of collecting fines

John Quiggin35 Comments

Although I’ve been involved in economic policy debates for most of the last 40 years, it’s not often that I can point directly to a substantive outcome, in the sense that a policy proposal I’ve generated is implemented, or at least adopted by a major political party. There’s nothing surprising in that. There are lots of people involved in the policy process, and most successful policy proposals reflect the efforts of many people, combined in such a way that it’s hard to tell whether any one person mattered.

But I was happy to see this proposal from the Labor Party to allow state governments to collect criminal fines through the tax and welfare systems (as with HECS debts and child support), rather than jailing defaulters as at present. This was idea I put forward in a paper with Bruce Chapman, Arie Friedman and David Tait, back in 2004 (paywalled, unfortunately).

As is argued in Labor’s press release, there would be obvious improvements and cost savings, as well as the avoidance of unnecessary suffering for people who can’t afford to pay. But for me, the change in collection mechanism is of interest mainly because it makes possible more radical reforms.

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Halfway horse-race commentary

John Quiggin49 Comments

Four weeks in, and with the two parties neck and neck, this ought to be an exciting point in the election campaign. But thanks to Turnbull’s trickiness* of calling a double dissolution requiring eight weeks of campaigning, it’s anything but. Still, it seems like a good time for some horse race commentary, partly repeating what I’ve said before.

* First, taking the horse race analogy seriously, the behavior of betting markets is as if two horses had run neck and neck in a dozen minor races, but one was still the overwhelming favorite for the big done. To spell this out, the polls have been virtually level pegging for many weeks, but the betting markets have barely moved. On past history, the two will converge by election day. If, as I expect, that means the betting odds will move towards the poll, this campaign will count as a major piece of evidence against the idea that markets are good aggregators of knowledge. And, of course, the converse is true

* Second, the likelihood of a deliberative Parliament, with neither major party having a tame majority is increasing all the time. That’s a good thing in the abstract; how good depends on whose votes turn out to be critical

* Third, the one consistent trend has been the precipitous fall in Malcolm Turnbull’s standing across a wide range of measures. Whatever happens on election day (short of a surprise LNP landslide), I don’t expect Turnbull to be PM a year from now.

* To be sure, Julia Gillard’s attempt to hold on to her leadership by calling an election eight months in advance makes Turnbull look moderate. But that was an absurdity doomed to fail, as it did.

Look what they’ve done to my song, Ma

John Quiggin19 Comments

My discussion of intellectual property inevitably raised questions about my argument that property rights are not natural rights, but are socially constructed and, in the modern world, exist only as part of the legal structures created and enforced by states. The “moral rights” of artists over their creative works has been raised as a suggested counterexample. In fact, this example reinforces my original argument. Two cases arise, both of interest:

In the United States, the moral rights of artists were effectively unrecognised by law until accession to the Berne Convention 1989, and remain extremely limited. The result is that, once an artist has sold the rights to her work, she has no control over its subsequent use, unless she can make a case separate from moral rights, for example that use in an advertisement misrepresents the artist as endorsing the product. So, for example, it’s perfectly legal to use London Calling to advertise Jaguars, or to clip Fortunate Son to fit a jingoistic ad for jeans. Moral rights are widely recognised, and may generate social opprobrium for those who violate them (as with other misuses of property rights) but they have no legal standing.

In France and other European countries, artists have inalienable moral rights over their work, to prevent misuse of the work by the initial or later purchasers. This is not a property right, but a constraint on property rights. To the extent that moral rights are recognised after the fact, they constitute a taking from the purchaser of the property right. To the extent that they are recognised when artists sell rights to their work, they (like any restriction on alienation of property) represent a constraint on the property rights of the artist. Melanie Safka recognised this, in an ironic fashion, in her classic Look what they’ve done to my song, Mawhen she wrote

It’ll be all right ma, maybe it’ll be okay
Well, if the people are buying tears
I’ll be rich someday, ma

Coming back to the general issue, property rights and (perceived/socially accepted) natural rights have features that mean they tend to coincide in some ways and conflict in others. Most obviously, they are both associated with the general feeling of rightful possession, so that a system of property rights is more stable when it coincides with natural rights. On the other hand, natural rights are mostly perceived as inalienable and indivisible, while property in its ideal form is infinitely transferable and divisible. Moral rights for artists are a classical example of the clash between inalienability and unfettered property rights but the same clash arises at every point in the production process.

Campbell Newman: the gift that keeps on taking

John Quiggin7 Comments

A little while ago, it was revealed that the Queensland taxpayers were picking up the bill for Campbell Newman’s indefensible defence in a defamation action brought against him and Jarrod Bleijie (aka Boy Wonder) for accusing two Gold Coast lawyers of being bikie criminals, apparently on the sole basis that they were fulfilling the professional obligation of providing some bikies with a defence. The bill amounted to $0.5 million, and was greatly increased because Newman and Bleijie refused to mitigate the damages by apologising.

Now, thanks to the Oz, we learn how we are paying for the new State Executive Building, which Newman and then-Treasurer Tim Nicholls assured us we would get for nothing as part of a complex land deal. In reality, it turns out Newman left us on the hook for a 15-year lease at above market prices. Of course, the Oz being the Oz, this is presented as the fault of the current Labor government, which denounced the deal at the time and has continued to do so.

Trump and Tribalism (crosspost from Crooked Timber)

John Quiggin62 Comments

Watching the rapid consolidation of the Republican Party around the candidacy of Donald Trump, I’ve tried to make sense of this in terms of the “three party system” analysis I presented a few months ago. I saw the Republicans as the “hard neoliberal” party relying on the votes of (white Christian) tribalists and making symbolic gestures in their direction, but largely ignoring them, particularly if their interests came into conflict with those of big business.

What’s become clear since then, I think, is that the Republican Party apparatus (politicians and party officials) is more tribalist than this analysis suggested. Faced with the prospect of electing their hated tribal enemy, Hillary Clinton, as President, the vast majority look like backing Trump (some, but not all of them, holding their nose as they do so).

From a hard neoliberal viewpoint, this makes no sense. Clinton’s Democratic Leadership Council background is that of the stereotypical soft neoliberal. Her candidacy is the best chance of maintaining the long-running alternation in office between the hard and soft variants of neoliberalism. Admittedly, she will be pulled to the left by the general shift exemplified by the Sanders insurgency, but she is unlikely to do anything that would fundamentally undermine capitalism. By contrast, a Trump takeover of the Republican Party would be a disaster for neoliberalism (which does *not* mean it would be good for the left). That would be the inevitable result of a Trump victory. Even a creditable defeat, which would be blamed on the old establishment, could leave the tribalists in control of the organization.

The only groups where the #NeverTrump analysis seems to hold sway are the business donor class and the remnants of the rightwing intelligentsia (hard to believe they were carrying all before them only 20 years ago). The donors obviously have no interest in throwing money at someone like Trump. As for the intelligentsia, even if they were willing to embrace Trump, it’s obvious he has no use for any but the most total hacks, and not even many of those.

The two-party preferred fallacy

John Quiggin17 Comments

Back in the 1970s, when the idea of analyzing voting and poll results in terms of the “two-party preferred vote, it was a major advance. Even though Australia has had preferential voting since (I think) 1921, it was poorly understood, to the point that when a candidate or party with plurality of votes lost on preferences, it was seen as a source of justified grievance (not helped by the fact that both the DLP and the Australian Democrats were splitoffs from a major party that aligned mostly with the other major party).

But that was in the days when Parliaments (or at least Lower Houses) were almost invariably made up solely of members of the major parties. Just as in the 1970s, the facts have changed but concepts haven’t caught up with it. Even though it’s now very common for the government to have a minority of seats, and such governments have worked very well, pundits still treat this outcome as an aberration, a “hung Parliament”. This is reflected in the continued use of the two-party preferred measure, which presumes that the last two candidates in any electorate, after preferences are distributed, will be those of the major parties. So, for example, Green votes for Adam Bandt are allocated between Labor and Liberal parties and used to forecast the election outcome, even though Bandt’s preferences will never be distributed.

There are various ways this could be fixed. The ideal one, in my view, would be to replaced “two-party preferred” with a seat-by-seat allocation of votes to “two most preferred”. That would need big samples to be reliable, but there are a variety of techniques that could be used to mitigate the problem.

The big benefit of this is that we could then see whether or not the poll was predicting an outright majority for one party. Assuming equal luck in marginal seats, a poll giving more than 50 per cent of the “two most preferred” vote to one party would imply a majority of seats for that party.

My reading is that most of the current polling yields a deliberative (or, as our pundits persist in describing it, “hung”) parliament as the central estimate, with enough error to allow either side the chance of majority. Given the likely alignment of independents and Greens a deliberative parliament would probably allow the formation of a Labor minority government. That raises the thorny question of the relationship between Labor and the Greens, which I will deal with in another post if I get time.

Minimum wages and predistribution: Extract from Economics in Two Lessons

John Quiggin44 Comments

A bit out of order, this is another draft extract from my book-in-progress, Economics in Two Lessons. It’s part of the chapter on income distribution, meant to follow the section on unions, and precede the Australia-US data point and the discussion of corporate profits [links to CT, but all published here also]. After this, I plan to conclude the “predistribution” part of the chapter with a discussion of intellectual “property”, then move on to “redistribution” through taxation and public expenditure.

As always, encouragement is welcome, constructive criticism even more so.

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