Looking after our own backyard

John Quiggin51 Comments

Glenn Milne has a piece in today’s Oz making a clear and convincing argument that Labor’s strategy of focusing our defence efforts on our immediate neighborhood is right, and the government’s expeditionary force strategy is wrong. He endorses all the key arguments of opponents of the Iraq war:

• Iraq: Our involvement has compromised, not improved, Australia’s security. We have no rational exit strategy because there is no political or military solution in sight.

• WMDs: They didn’t exist, undermining the single most important rationale for going to war.

• The terrorist threat: Howard argued that our involvement in Iraq would reduce the threat to Australia. Instead Iraq has become the training ground for the next generation of terrorists, to be deployed at will. …

• And finally the AWB: Stripped of the niceties, we bombed Saddam one day and bankrolled him the next[1]

I can’t recall anything at all like this from Milne in the past (feel free to correct me), which raises the question of whether there’s some sort of hidden agenda. The obvious explanation, given that Milne is normally viewed as a spokesman for Costello, is that this is something to do with the latest leadership rumours, though it’s hard to see exactly what.

A more Machiavellian explanation occurs to me. Howard’s visit to Bush is not going to be as cosy as usual, since Bush undoubtedly wants yet more troops and we are, as Milne points out, already overcommitted. How better to stress this point to Bush than to have it being made (in effect) by Costello, in a way that suggests that Australia could be looking at pulling out of the Coalition of the Willing. On this view, the two are now working together.

Does anyone have any other ideas, or has Milne just seen the light?

Update Tim Dunlop has more

fn1. Actually, the other way around, I think. But the point is right, however hard most supporters of the war here have tried to ignore it.

What I’ve been reading

John Quiggin13 Comments

I’ve been reading a fair bit of science fiction lately, and thinking about doing another preview of the contenders for the Hugos for best novel. Of those I’ve read so far, Accelerando by Charles Stross is definitely the pick. It’s the ultimate Singularity novel (at least assuming it’s a novel). It’s super-evolved lobsters and feral abaci make for something that’s much more readable and, paradoxically, more convincing than Kurzweil’s book on the topic, which I reviewed a while back.

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson is also based on the Singularity, but much more of a traditional hard SF novel in form. The earth is mysteriously sealed off from the rest of the universe by a barrier within which the passage of time is drastically slowed. I enjoyed it, but it doesn’t stand up to comparison with Accelerando.

A Feast for Crows is Volume 4 in the epic fantasy sequence A Ring of Ice and Fire. I started gamely enough, and the opening chapters held my interest, but after 100 pages nothing had happened except conversations between various characters about events that had presumably taken place in Volume 3. I cheered up when I noticed that there was a dramatis personae at the back, but then realised that the list itself ran for many pages and included hundreds of characters I hadn’t yet encountered. The style is engaging, and the series has a lot of fans, but it’s clear that if you want to tackle it, you have to start at the beginning of the series. And, just as any long book has some necessary slow bits where the various threads are gathered, so any multi-volume epic has some slow moving volumes. Nothing wrong with that, but the result is not, in my view, a candidate for a Hugo award – maybe a separate category is needed.

Weekend reflections

John Quiggin18 Comments

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.

Another request for help

John Quiggin6 Comments

Having seen the abilities of the team of crack fact(oid)checkers here, I can’t resist the temptation to ask for more help. I’m planning on writing something on higher education. My starting point is the belief that the squeeze on universities, driven in part by the desire to force them to rely more on full-fee paying domestic students, has resulted in very little growth in domestic undergraduate numbers over the decade since the government was elected. But I’m having trouble getting consistent time-series on this. This report called Selected Higher Education Research Expenditure Statistics: 2000 supports my view for the period up to 2000, but after that, looking at the DEST site, I can only find annual cross-sections that don’t seem to be collected on a consistent basis. Can anyone give me consistent time series on domestic undergraduate numbers, and commencements. Better still is there a breakdown giving the number of HECS places and the number of full-fee places supported by FEE-HELP, on a basis comparable to the statistics up to 2000?

Update I found what I was looking for on the National Union of Students website. It’s over the page and needs some formatting. Money quote:

The number of subsidised places in 2007 will be roughly the same as they were in 1997. In terms of student access to HECS places a decade of Howard Government education reforms has amounted to standing still.

This is consistent with the partial data I already had.
The most recent data on full-fee places I could find was for 2002, when there about 6000 full-fee undergraduate places. Presumably that’s increased, but it seems clear that, as far as expanding access to higher education goes, the last decade has been almost completely wasted while the government chased a range of (mutually inconsistent) ideological hobby horses.
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The system works

John Quiggin22 Comments

A couple of days ago, I pointed out that a claim by Janet Albrechtsen that New Zealand had far fewer public servants than Australia seemed dubious, and called for a factoid check Almost instantly, readers of this blog were able to get the correct figure, showing no significant difference. Thanks particularly to Katz, Tom Davies and Sir Humphrey on this.

Terje Petersen emailed Janet Albrechtsen to ask for a retraction, a course I thought likely to prove fruitless. Yesterday however, she emailed him to advise that the error would be corrected, and Today’s Australian includesn:

Correction

IN her column on Wednesday (�Big government addicts can’t afford tax cuts�, page 24), Janet Albrechtsen compared the size of the public services in Australia and New Zealand using figures put out by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and Statistics New Zealand. The comparison was incorrect because the figures from SNZ did not include some public sector areas that were included in the ABS figures. As a result, the size of the public service in New Zealand is much larger than indicated in the column.

I also got an email from Tom Switzer, opinion editor at the Oz, thanking us for picking up the error. I worked with Tom while he was opinion editor at the Fin, and while our politics couldn’t be more different, he was always very professional.

Albrechtsen and Switzer have done the right thing and should be congratulated for this. And the whole story is a case study in how blogs can be effective in both challenging and improving the mainstream media.

Superannuation: the good, the bad and the cosmetic

John Quiggin31 Comments

Like a lot of people, I suspect, I’ve been putting off the task of working out my situation in relation to superannuation. The rules are so complex, and have been changed so often, that it seems easier to just keep making the automatic payments, pick a reasonable looking investment strategy from the four or five on offer and hope that something comes along to clarify the issues.

In one sense at least, that strategy has paid off. Costello’s Budget speech announced what are claimed to be the most radical reforms ever to superannuation policy. At the very least, they are big changes, and render most previous calculations obsolete, so I’m glad I didn’t make any. Moreover, Costello’s claim to have simplified the tax treatment of super appears to be correct, although we’ll have to wait for the devilish details of cliche to be sure. Given that complexity entails a wide range of social costs, simplification is good in itself.

The bad is that the simplification has been achieved by greatly reducing the tax paid by those with large amounts of super, while doing nothing much for the rest. The likely outcome, I suspect is an increase in import-intensive luxury consumption.

The cosmetic part of the story is the claim that this will encourage people to stay in the workforce longer. Like a lot of other commentators, I doubt this. The income effect (more money makes retirement more affordable) seems likely to outweigh any substitution effect from higher expected net returns.

Becker and Murphy on advertising (crossposted at CT)

John Quiggin8 Comments

During the discussion following the death of JK Galbraith, the issue of advertising came up. In the Affluent Society Galbraith dismissed the idea that advertising is informative, and argued instead that it was used to manufacture demand for goods and services people would otherwise not want. The NYT obit suggested that Gary Becker and George Stigler had disproved this, a proposition that attracted some attention, mainly focusing on the work of Becker and Murphy.

Although Becker and Murphy don’t present it this way, their model actually supports Galbraith in most respects.
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Factoid check

John Quiggin59 Comments

In her Budget column today, Janet Albrechtsen makes the following claim:

NSW has about 380,000 state and local public servants servicing a population of 6.7 million people. And that’s not counting more than 40,000 public servants working in government-owned businesses. With a population of about four million, that should mean that New Zealand should have about 225,000 public servants. Right?

Wrong. According to Statistics New Zealand, our cousins across the Tasman have fewer than 69,000 public servants. That’s one public servant for every 58 New Zealanders, compared with one NSW public servant for every 17.5 NSW residents. The comparison only gets worse when you realise the NZ figure includes almost 12,000 defence force personnel and other public servants who, in Australia, would be working for the federal Government.

I’m too busy to check myself, but this seems highly implausible to me. NZ seems to have much the same mix of public and private schools and hospitals as Australia, and presumably local councils perform much the same range of tasks (maybe with a bit more contracting out). Can anyone do a factoid check here?

Update 2:31 pm An amazing team of unpaid factoid checkers has solved the puzzle almost immediately and the answer is “The number you first thought of”. According to the NZ government,

The public service makes up a small proportion of total state sector employment, as measured by Statistics NZ. In 2004 the Public Service made up only 14 per cent of the 275,000 state sector jobs

suggesting that, after netting out people doing federal government jobs, the NZ and NSW public sectors are almost identical in size, relative to the population. Albrechtsen’s entire piece is based on a difference in statistical classifications. Thanks to everyone who helped dig out the facts.

The obvious question is, if readers of this blog can find this kind of thing out for free, and in a matter of minutes, why is Albrechtsen getting paid for not bothering to make such obvious checks?

A couple of commenters have suggested emailing and asking for a retraction, and anyone who wants to do so is welcome to. My past experience with such things is that any correction is so grudging and qualified as to be worthless, but maybe Albrechtsen will surprise us.