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

Meltdown at the Oz: Quiggin edition

John Quiggin69 Comments

The Oz has always been thin-skinned, and my piece in the Fin the week before last attacking the Murdoch press (I’ve reprinted it over the fold) was bound to elicit a reaction. It came in the form of a full-length hit piece, written by Michael Stutchbury and including a fair few quotations to this blog. The headline An economist who is good in theory but on the far left in practice gives the general line. It has a bit of a phoned-in feel, like an exercise in party solidarity rather than a sudden concern with my errors and obviously wasn’t a spontaneous outburst – Stutchbury told me had been directed to write it. That’s part of the price of working for the Empire these days (compare Caroline Overington’s part in the attack in Julie Posetti).

Mostly, the piece doesn’t misrepresent me – it’s quite true that I think Barack Obama is too centrist, and that Julia Gillard doesn’t care about equality. However, as I said to Stutchbury during our phone conversation, it’s a bit precious to complain about various pieces of colorful language on my part in a paper which referred to me as having a “totalitarian mindset”. At least, unlike the anonymous editorialist who penned that description, Stutchbury calls me out by name rather than coyly referring to “an opinion writer in a financial tabloid“.

More significantly, Stutchbury ducks the issue on climate change, saying

On climate change, Murdoch has backed giving the planet the benefit of the doubt. The Australian supports putting a price on carbon over Tony Abbott’s direct action. But the journalistic default should include some scepticism over whether scientists can accurately predict the climate decades ahead.

He must be reading a different paper to the one that has now racked up 60+ entries in Tim Lambert’s Australian War on Science series. And that’s without considering the truly appalling stuff put out by News International outlets like Fox and the Sunday Times.

Update Michael Stutchbury has called me to take issue with my statement that he told me he had been directed to write the piece. That was my recollection of our conversation, but he was very firm in rejecting it, and I’m not going to insist on my version of events, so I’ve struck out that part of the original post.

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Benefits of hindsight

John Quiggin12 Comments

We’ve just had the first report from the inquiry into the floods at the beginning of the year in Brisbane and other parts of Queensland. The main recommendations are pretty close to what I put forward a few days after the Brisbane flood.

That just reflects the fact that it was immediately obvious, in hindsight, what changes needed to made. It would have been more impressive to get it right in advance. In this context, I feel some sympathy for the minister at the time, Stephen Robertson. As far as I can see, he was the only person to suggest lowering dam levels, but his requests for a response went nowhere with the bureaucracy. As a result, he got an adverse mention in the report. But if he had stuck to the rulebook, I doubt that anyone would have noticed.

Don’t look at the rich?

John Quiggin24 Comments

My last post, arguing that the share of US income going to the top 1 per cent of households is now so great that any effective policy must be financed by reducing or more effectively taxing the income of this group produced a range of interesting (and some not so interesting responses). First up, it elicited what appears to be new variants on a couple of standard rightwing talking points. More interesting to me is a response from Matt Yglesias arguing (as I read him) that, even if there is no serious prospect of reversing the shift of income to the top 1 per cent[1], there is still plenty of capacity for progressive political actions based on a broadly neoliberal (US sense) agenda.
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Where the money is

John Quiggin104 Comments

Over at Crooked Timber, there’s been an extensive neoliberalism (mainly, though not exclusively, in the US sense of this term, which is broadly akin to “Third Way” Labor”) and political theory. I’ve been largely on the sidelines. That’s mainly because, observing the US political and economic situation, I have a very clear view on what policies could, in principle, sustain a progressive political movement, but (given my distance from the scene and the absence of anything substantial enough to force its attention on the mass media) no real idea about how such a movement might develop. Here’s a post I put up there, slightly edited to remove some points that led to thread derailment.

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Tragedy in Norway

John Quiggin84 Comments

As usual on such occasions, I haven’t had much to say about the horrific events in Norway. It’s generally better, in such circumstances, to pause for reflection, and certainly some who rushed to judgement have gone badly wrong in doing so, here as on previous occasions. This is not the time for judgement, but that time will come.