It’s time again for weekend reflections, which makes space for longer than usual comments on any topic. As always, civilised discussion and no coarse language.
Reading Terry McCrann
Terry McCrann has responded to the call for a new inquiry into the financial system with a snark-filled piece which is of sociological, if not intellectual, interest. Let’s jump to his last para.
What next then? Setting up a government-owned home-buying service at the Post Office? Presumably two others among the ‘six-pac’, Nicholas Gruen and John Quiggin, would love that, provided it directed the trusting unsophisticated only into carbon neutral homes.
The most charitable interpretation of McCrann’s reference to carbon-neutral homes is that he is indicating a tribal affiliation. He knows that the typical reader of the Herald-Sun business pages has delusional beliefs about climate change, and is assuring his readers that he shares these beliefs. This alone would be enough reason to dismiss the rest of the column. If McCrann is prepared to dismiss a vast amount of scientific evidence on a topic on which he has no particular expertise, simply because members of his social group don’t like the conclusions, his judgements are worthless. In the absence of any new factual evidence (and, all the facts mentioned in his column are well-known), his arguments have no evidentiary weight. In essence, they amount to the statement “if you’re on my team, you shouldn’t agree with these guys, because they are on the other team”
The disappearing invisible library
My Icerocket self-search (admit it, we all do it), led me to this marvellous project. The Invisible Library is a collection of books that don’t exist, except in the pages of other books. It is physically manifesting at the Tenderpixel Library in London, but will resume invisibility after 12 July.
The connection?
For a new financial system inquiry
A group of economists: (Joshua Gans, Nicholas Gruen, Christoper Joye, Stephen King, Sam Wylie and me) has issued a statement calling from a comprehensive inquiry into the financial system.
It’s over the fold
Blogs and books
Blogs kill books. At least, that’s what I always thought. Between 1988 and 2000, I wrote four1 books and edited a couple of volumes. In 2002, I started blogging, and I haven’t done a book since then.
But, in the mysterious way of things, it turns out that blogs generate books, or at least book contracts. In comments at Crooked Timber not long ago, Miracle Max wrote
The discredited ideas theme really needs a book, and JQ appears to be the ideal person to write it.
I will even contribute the title: “Dead Ideas from New Economists.” No charge.
Brad DeLong picked it up, and a couple of days later I got an email from Seth Ditchik at Princeton University Press suggesting that it really would be a good idea. Now, we have a contract, and we’re going to use Max’s suggested title.
Monday Message Board
Its time once again for Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. As usual, civilised discussion and no coarse language.
Fox in Oz
I know, I know, I shouldn’t read the Oz, and I certainly shouldn’t read Glenn Milne. But, as with the whole emailgate mess, it’s hard to look away from a trainwreck like this. And you do get the occasional gem, such as Milne’s (non-ironic) description of News Limited’s reporting on the Rudd government as “fair and accurate” and “balanced”.
I report, you decide.
More from Mark Bahnisch
Carbon action gathers global pace
That’s the title of my Fin piece on Thursday (over the fold). As happens more or less routinely, it attracted a letter from Des Moore, formerly prominent as a Treasury official, then a rightwing economist, and now a climate science delusionist. Strikingly, and like most advocates of inaction, Moore doesn’t bother to debate the economics, where he would at least have some credibility as a commentator, if not much of a case. Instead, he recycles a bunch of the usual delusionist talking points.
It goes without saying that Moore has no qualifications relevant to climate science (I don’t either, but then I don’t set myself up as being able to refute the experts). What’s even more striking is that he, like so many delusionists, seems to be totally ignorant of basic statistical principles, and even to have forgotten stuff he must have been at least vaguely aware of in his former career as an economist. What else can be said about his repetition of the claim that “global warming stopped in 1998”? Every economist knows that you can’t measure trends properly without taking account of cyclical fluctuations about those trends. The worst thing you can do is take a peak to trough measurement.
As delusionists were very keen to point out at the time, 1998 was an extreme El Nino year, when temperatures rose well above the long-run (increasing) trend. Fortunately, we haven’t had such an extreme since then, and 2008 saw a fairly strong La Nina, which provides Moore and others with their talking point.
But eyeballing the data shows the obvious trend,
and anyone with a simple regression function on their spreadsheet can confirm it.
A thought about gambling
Like a large proportion of the population (but unlike two lucky winners) I’m a little bit poorer after last week’s jackpot lottery. That might put me in the right frame of a mind for a visit to the Commonwealth Treasury next week where, among other things, I plan to talk about how to treat gambling in the context of the Henry Review of Taxation.
State governments are heavily reliant on revenue from gambling, which is a combination of explicit taxes and payments for monopoly privileges. But gambling (particularly casino gambling and racetrack betting) is socially destructive, since the majority of the revenue is derived from problem gamblers. And while restrictions on gambling were justified by these social ill-effects, the current structure of taxation actually makes things worse, by ensuring that gamblers lose faster. Policy must also deal with the fact that, for the great majority of participants (who only account for a minority of expenditure, however) gambling is harmless and pleasurable. That’s particularly true of non-instant lottery gambling.
I’ve been thinking about how to fix this, and I’ve had the idea of subjecting gaming enterprises like casinos to a (net) revenue cap. That is, rather than being restricted to a certain number of machines, tables and so on, they would be limited in the amount they could take from the machines in a given year. This would eliminate incentives to increase the take from gaming, and replace it with incentives to do more business selling food, drinks, entertainment and so on. It would also increase the incentive to comply with measures aimed at restricting the access of problem gamblers, since they would not change the gaming take and would presumably spend less on other goods and services. My worry, not fully worked out, is that gaming enterprises would just reduce service and extract their allowable revenue from the problem gamblers as cheaply as possible.
Any thoughts on this?
Against (micro)economic imperialism (crossposted at CT)
.!.
.!.
Over at Crooked Timber, we’ve had various versions of the case for and against the use of (micro)economic rational actor models in the social sciences lately, so I thought I would weigh in with my version of the case against. It has three main elements
Read More »
John Quiggin 