If a global emissions trading system is to be implemented, there needs to be a method of deterring free riders – countries that choose not to limit their own emissions. The obvious candidate is a border tax on embodied CO2 emissions. This possibility looks a lot closer with the EU considering trying it out for cement. The issue is unlikely to go away, and will no doubt cause huge ructions in WTO and similar bodies if it goes ahead. (via Dan Drezner).
Belated congratulations
As everyone knows by now, the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel went to Edmund Phelps. Phelps award is one of the relatively rare cases where the Economics Nobel has genuinely been awarded for a single big discovery rather than for a research program. By incorporating inflation expectations into the Philips curve, Phelps killed the idea of a stable long-run trade-off between unemployment and inflation, and, in effect, predicted the emergence of inflation in the 1970s. As Phelps himself noted, the implication of the new model that there exists a ‘natural’ or ‘non-accelerating inflation’ rate of unemployment has not fared nearly so well, but the central point that there is nothing to be gained, in the long run, by allowing inflation rates to rise, remains valid.
Congratulations also to the winner of the Peace Prize, Muhammed Yunus who founded the microcredit provider Grameen Bank
Even more belatedly, Australian Terry Tao shared the Fields Medal in mathematics back in August for his contributions to partial differential equations, combinatorics, harmonic analysis and additive number theory.
Monday message board
It’s time, once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual, civilised discussion and absolutely no coarse language, please.
Zeitgeist
I don’t imagine John Howard reads this blog, or even my columns in the Financial Review, but it was striking, after the discussion we had here to see him make an explicit link between climate change and the severity of the current drought. This is big progress even on his position of month ago, where he was still trying to have a bit each way.
It will be interesting to see how denialists in the commentariat and blogosphere, most of whom are also Howard partisans, respond to this.
Also, while I’m praising Howard, the training package he announced recently was a good thing, and seems to mark an abandonment of the silly idea that it’s OK to finish your education at year 10. Not everyone needs a university education, but failing to finish school (or achieve an equivalent outcome) and get some sort of post-school qualification is a recipe for low wages and regular unemployment.
Speaking of …
The Holden blimp flew over my house at the weekend, close enough to see the screen.
Air war in Iraq
Not surprisingly, the publication by the Lancet of new estimates suggesting that over 600 000 people have died (mostly violently) in Iraq, relative to what would have been expected based on death rates in the year before the war, has provoked violent controversy. A lot of the questions raised about the earlier survey, estimating 100 000 excess deaths in the first year or so appear to have been resolved. In particular, the lower bound estimate is now around 400 000, so that unless the survey is rejected completely, there can be no doubt about catastrophic casualties.
One number that is striking, but hasn’t attracted a lot of attention is the estimated death rate from air strikes, 13 per cent of the total or between 50 000 and 80 000 people. Around half the estimated deaths in the last year of the survey, from June 2005 to June 2006. That’s at least 25 000 deaths, or more than 70 per day.
Yet reports of such deaths are very rare. If you relied on media reports you could easily conclude that total deaths from air strikes would only be a few thousand for the entire war. The difference between the numbers of deaths implied by the Lancet study and the reports that shape the “gut perceptions” that the Lancet must have got it wrong are nowhere greater than here. So are the numbers plausible?
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New football thread
Due to the fact that a well-known leftwing political ideology contains the name of a drug for male performance problems, much touted by spammers, my blog software is rejecting all comments on the football post below. Sorry about this – I’m going to raise it with my hosting service. In the meantime, please comment here.
Weekend reflections
Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.
Paying (for) attention
My piece in yesterday’s Fin was on the attention economy, and, in particular, the kerfuffle over Holden’s use of a blimp to advertise at sporting events sponsored by Ford.
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Capitalism, soc1alism and football
There’s nothing remarkably original about the observation that of the world’s football codes, soccer* is the one that is consistently organised on capitalist lines. Most sporting leagues have a whole series of redistributive taxes and regulations, such as drafts and salary caps, designed to keep the competition open. Even if you follow a team that hasn’t won for decades, like South Melbourne/Sydney in AFL before last year, it’s reasonable to hope that your turn will come again.
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