Reader Jane Harris addresses the vexed question “How many umpires?”, first in econospeak and then in verse. The occasion is an AFL proposal to allow goal and boundary umps to award free kicks.
Comments welcome (rhyming couplets please)
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The interest rate bears …
… of whom I am one, are starting to growl again.
The cenral tenet of interest rate bearishness is that if interest rates are low enough to generate negative savings, as is the case in the US and Australia, they are too low to be sustained. The counterargument, put most forcefully by Ben Bernanke is that someone must be willing to lend at these low interest rates, and this lending must reflect a “global savings glut”. Bears respond that the supposed glut does not reflect savings by households or business, but is really a liquidity glut created by expansionary monetary policy around the world, which must eventually come to an end, or be dissipated in inflation.
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Anyone but Beazley, yet again
With the news that Kim Beazley now has the support of 18 per cent of Australian voters, relative to the solid, but still unimpressive, alternative of John Howard, hasn’t the time come to bring his sorry political career to an end?
After a ministerial career distinguished only by longevity, and a series of failures as Opposition leader, the one thing Beazley had going for him was his reputation as a good bloke. Whether or not this reputation was deserved in the past, Beazley has trashed it by his support for the vindictive purges organised by the Victorian Right against independents and Latham supporters. Typically for Beazley, having done the wrong thing, he couldn’t even deliver the goods, as Simon Crean managed to convince enough of the voters stacked in by Conroy that they should think for themselves.
My first preferences for a replacement are, not surprisingly, Kevin Rudd or Julia Gillard. But I’d settle for anyone (except Conroy, I guess) who could muster a majority of the Caucus.
Replug
A bit late I’ll remind people that the first of the “BrisScience” lectures is on tonight. The lectures will involve a number of excellent scientists giving lectures on their topics of interest for the general public. The website is here. All of the lectures are free, there is one talk a month, and they will all be held in the Judith Wright Center of Contemporary Arts in the Valley.
The first lecture is by John Mattick on “junk” DNA, which IIRC has been the subject of a very dubious intellectual property claim by an Australian entrepreneur. But the talk won’t be about IP, which should make it more interesting for about 99 per cent of the potential audience. John argues that the extra DNA is the opposite of junk: it may be ultimately responsible for the development of all life more complex than bacteria.
Monday message board
It’s time, once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual, civilised discussion and absolutely no coarse language, please.
Milosevic is dead. Hooray?
Like John Howard, I won’t be shedding any tears over Slobodan Milosevic, whose death, apparently from natural causes, has been announced.
An obvious question raised by his death is whether (and how) his trial on a variety of war crimes charges could have been accelerated. The fact that he will never be properly convicted is certainly unfortunate. Even if it would have had no short run impact on opinion among Serbian nationalists, it would have helped to set the historical record straight. Milosevic’s death increases the urgency of capturing his main instruments, Mladic and Karadzic, whose connection to the crimes of the Bosnian war is more immediate, and whose trial could drive home the evil of Milosevic’s policies.
Still, the long trial in The Hague is better than the alternative on offer in Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein, whose wars cost millions of lives, is being tried, and may be executed, for a comparatively minor crime, but one which is politically convenient for the purposes of victors’ justice.
Saving the Macquarie Marshes
I’ve been arguing for some time that we won’t have a coherent water policy until governments accept the need to buy water back for the environment. Here’s a good example
Something you’re not likely to see too often
A favorable citation of my arguments at Tech Central Station. Normally, I’d be pretty concerned about this, but it’s from Tim Worstall, the sole exception, AFAIK, to the otherwise uniform hackishness of that site[1].
Tim quotes my discussion of the Baumol effect to argue that the fact that the US spends so much more on health care than other countries is not necessarily a bad thing. At the aggregate level he’s right. We should expect the share of income spent on services like health and education to rise as income increases, driven by productivity growth in the goods-producing sector. In the case of medicine, the regular discovery of new and costly treatments adds to the problem (there’s an argument that this technological innovation is an endogenous result of the way health care is financed but I’ll leave that for another day).
Worstall is also right to imply that systems of public provision have, at least in some cases, led to pressure to hold expenditure below the socially optimal level. This was most obviously true of the National Health Service in Britain, though expenditure and service provision have increased greatly since the election of the Blair government, and are set to rise further. The same pressures are evident here in Australia.
That said, when you look at the US system in detail, it’s clearly not a matter of paying more to get more. While the health care available to the top 20 per cent of Americans (those with unrestricted Blue Cross style insurance) is probably the best in the world, the average American (insured by an HMO or a fee-for-service insurer with restrictions) doesn’t get any better care than in other developed countries and the uninsured are much worse off.
The real problems are the financing system (Worstall gets off a neat crack at the expense of JK Galbraith here, but the real problems go back to the 1930s, as discussed by Robert Moss in When All Else Fails) and the very high salaries of US doctors compared to those in other countries, reflecting both higher inequality in the US and the huge cost of becoming a doctor through the US higher education system.
One result is that, despite relying primarily on private, employer-provided insurance, the US government actually spends more, relative to GDP, on health than most others.
Finally, there’s the balance between medical care and public health, broadly defined. It’s well known that the US has a lower life expectancy than other countries that spend much less on medical care. This isn’t however, primarily due to inadequate access to lifesaving treatments (the poor miss out on lots of routine health and dental care, but they can usually get emergency treatment). Rather, it’s the result of unhealthy living conditions broadly defined to include guns, car crashes, the consequences of obesity and so on. These things aren’t easily fixed, but there’s more resistance to doing anything about them in the US than in most other places.
fn1. Why he keeps writing for them, I don’t know. Tim would do much better as the opposition writer in residence at a left or liberal site, a slot that is very hard to fill in my experience. He makes good points, is willing to admit that he’s wrong on occasion, and is gracious when he catches someone else in error, as he has done with me. Still, that’s his business.
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.
Factions, yet again
One of the points coming up in discussion of the ALP faction issue is the claim that while factions are destructive in the Federal Party they have worked well at a state level. I think this is the reverse of the truth. The faction system worked reasonably well at the Federal level throughout the Hawke-Keating years. At the state level, the system has been poisonous and destructive ever since it took its current form around the time of the Split in the mid-50s.
Full-scale factionalism has been most dominant in Queensland, NSW and Victoria. In Queensland, the AWU and Old Guard factions kept Peter Beatty and the reformers out for years, promoting instead a succession of hacks and no-hopers, most notably Keith Wright, later convicted of sex offences against young girls.
The NSW Right has been similarly dismal, failing miserably to beat the corrupt Robin Askin and losing horribly whenever it put up one of its own favored sons as a leader or contender for any position of substance (Pat Hills, Barrie Unsworth, Michael Lee and almost certainly Morris Iemma as well). Labor in NSW has only succeeded when outsiders like Wran and Carr (a member of the Right, but not a Sussex St hack) have managed to get the top job.
Victorian factions have been a source of grief and disaster for fifty years, and obviously nothing has changed. From Santamaria & Kennelly[1] to Hartley to Conroy, whatever the ideology, the style hasn’t changed.
Labor’s performance at the state level is, and always has been, inversely proportional to the strength of the factions.
fn1. I always remember my father describing how, as a returned serviceman, he joined the ALP (along with my uncle) in the hope of doing something for the good of the working class, and how Pat Kennelly (the “Kingmaker”) led them to quit in disgust.
