Race day tomorrow!

John Quiggin3 Comments

Tomorrow is the day for the Brisbane Running Festival, and my wonderful readers have donated $3020 to the Queensland Cancer Council. My preparation hasn’t been all it could be, but I’ve had a big boost from the support I’ve received during #quiggingate controversy with News Limited and others. So, I’m going to do my best to meet the original target, which was to do a minute under 2 hours for each $1000 raised, that is, a time of 1:57. I hope to stay with the two hour pace runner for the first half, then, lungs and legs permitting, make my big break. How likely it is that this will actually work, I don’t know, but I’ll report back tomorrow.

Update Haven’t got final results, but failed to break 2 hours. I was a little behind the pace at 18km, but planning a big burst. Instead, I tripped over an uneven bit of footpath (I’m starting to think someone is out to get me this week!) and went face first into the pavement (photos coming). That took away a lot of energy and it was all I could do to jog to the finish line. If the race time was a bit disappointing, the good news is that our collective fundraising effort for the Queensland Cancer Council was the second best overall , with $3020. That’s a marvellous effort, of far more value than a few minutes more or less taken to finish 21.1km.

Core Economics plug

John Quiggin6 Comments

I’ve been very gratified by the number of my fellow economists who’ve come to my defence[1] following the attack on me in the Oz. Among the first was Joshua Gans at Core Economics. I wrote to thank him, but haven’t got around to a public mention. Now that I am around to it, it’s a good opportunity to mention that Core Economics is a great blog, where quite a few of Australia’s leading economists (aka my mates) hang out. Go and read some of the posts.

fn1.* With notably rare exceptions * (I’m (ab)using this blogmeme ironically), any members of the profession who agreed with the hit have kept pretty quiet about it

Weekend reflections

John Quiggin23 Comments

It’s time again for weekend reflections, which makes space for longer than usual comments on any topic. In keeping with my attempts to open up the comments to new contributors , I’d like to redirect discussion, and restatements of previous arguments, as opposed to substantive new contributions, to the sandpit(s). In particular, please post nothing related to nuclear energy. As always, civilised discussion and no coarse language please.

“Not even wrong” is not praise

John Quiggin30 Comments

At one point in Zombie Economics, I tried a Popperian (or maybe Paulian) smackdown, saying that some defenders of EMH used arguments that effectively rendered it unfalsifiable. I thought that was a bad thing, but apparently at least one reviewer disagrees. Following my stoush with Murdoch, a commenter pointed me to this piece by Stephen Williamson of Washington University at St Louis, who has apparently been asked to review the book for the Journal of Economic Literature. Williamson claims that I am badly confused about the EMH, and that

Market efficiency is simply an assumption of rationality. As such it has no implications. If it has no implications, it can’t be wrong.

He follows up with “Like the “efficient markets hypothesis,” DSGE has no implications, and therefore can’t be wrong.””
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Believing Barry O’Farrell could cost you “up to” 100 IQ points

John Quiggin25 Comments

The NSW government has released a a frothing at the mouth press release claiming that a carbon price will devastate the economy. As Mary McCarthy would say, every single word in it is a lie, including “a” and “the”. Top billing has to go to that old favorite of shonky advertisers “up to”, as in a carbon price will ” force up electricity prices for NSW households by up to $498 a year.” The Commonwealth Treasury modelling, which I’ve checked, gives an average cost increase of $3.30 or about $170 a year.

Although the analysis is attributed to NSW Treasury, they apparently weren’t hackish enough for the government, which had to go to Frontier Economics to get the answers they wanted. I’m waiting to see the report, but in the meantime, my reactions to the press statement are over the fold

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Last chance for sponsors

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The Brisbane Running Festival is on Sunday, and I’ll be attempting the half-marathon. Thanks to the generosity of readers here, we’ve raised $2320 for the Queensland Cancer Council. It would be a great encouragement to me to get the total up to $2500 or even $3000.

As I mentioned a while back, my preparation has been disrupted, so I’m not confident of breaking the two-hour mark as I originally planned – my original funding gimmick was a minute below that mark for every $1000 raised. But I will be trying hard to run the entire race, and do the best I can as regards time.

I’ve tried to thank all the donors individually, but I’ll offer a collective thanks to you all now, in case I missed anybody