Those who’ve wondered what I (and my colleagues) do in my day job might be interested in the first Annual Report of the Risk and Sustainable Management group (1.5 Mb PDF file)
Water in SE Queensland
I spoke at a Brisbane Institute seminar on water policy in South-East Queensland. My argument, consistent with my views of the mixed economy in general, is that we should try to control quantities in the short run and prices in the long run. Restrictions on low-priority uses such as those in force at present, should be the main tool for short-term demand management, but that these are likely to lose effectivness in the long-term. By contrast, prices and trade in water allocations are unsatisfactory in the short run. My other main point, which I’ve made before, we are going to have to look harder at trade between rural areas and cities.
I’ve uploaded my Powerpoint presentation
here
fn1. It was chaired by fellow-blogger Jennifer Marohasy and, though we’ve clashed a few times in the blogosphere, everything was quite pleasant in person.
The Winter Palace, and after (crossposted at CT)
Now seems as good a time as any to mark the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution of 1905. This upsurge of revolt against Czarism was the occasion of some of the most tragic and inspiring scenes in the revolutionary drama: the “Bloody Sunday” march to the Winter Palace, Trotsky’s leadership of the St. Petersburg Soviet and the Potemkin mutiny. The revolution seemed likely to prove successful when the government agreed to a parliamentary constitution (October 17 in the Julian calendar), but once the threat was over, the autocracy reasserted itself, and the Duma was reduced to a talking shop. Less than 10 years later, the Czarists took Russia into the Great War, leading directly to nearly two million deaths and indirectly to many more.
The lesson drawn by many was that peaceful reform was hopeless: this inevitably pushed the most determined revolutionaries, Lenin and the Bolsheviks to the fore, and for much of the 20th century, they appeared to many to have history on their side. After 100 years, however, it is as clear as any historical fact can be that Bolshevism (or, perhaps more accurately, Leninism) has been a complete and catastrophic failure.
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Monday message board
It’s time, once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual, civilised discussion and no coarse language, please.
Doors opening and closing
Last night I had the great idea of using Blogpulse trend to look at what had happened to the influence of NY Times columnists since the introduction of Times Select. But these days, it’s difficult to have a really original idea (or maybe just easier to verify unoriginality), and it turns out that Kos beat me to this one a couple of days ago. Anyway I’ve done the work, so here are the results for the last six months on
krugman or “frank rich” or “tom friedman” or “bob herbert” or “david brooks”
The month or so since Times Select came in isn’t unprecedentedly low (there was a similar low patch in June), but blog interest in the NYT certainly appears to have fallen off, as you would expect. And at least some of the recent posts are the tail of the discussion about TS itself, visible as a spike in mid-September.
Meanwhile, AOL has abandoned its decade-old attempt to create a walled garden of pay-only content (and therefore gets a much-coveted link from this blog).
Sporting news
A big win for the Bullets in mark Bradtke’s tonight, coming back from 20 points down to beat Townsville by 11. It was a thriller, still wide open with a minute to play.
And SE Qld readers can see a demonstration of Seiyushin karate and much more at the Gold Coast Arts Centre on Sunday (about 12:30)
Rationality repost
Discussion of game theory inevitably brings up the question of whether game theory relies on an assumption of rational behavior, and, if so, whether this is a weakness or a strength. Rather than respond, I thought I’d dig up this old post from my long-abandoned (but still planned-to-be-revived-one-day) Word for Wednesday series.
Shorter JQ: the word ‘rational’ has no meaning that cannot better be conveyed by some alternative term. Avoid it.
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Web 2.1
Those who follow buzzwords will have seen lots of references lately to Web 2.0. This is the new collaborative interweb, symbolised by the transition from (more-or-less static) personal websites to blogging (other examples are Flickr, Wikipedia and so on).
I’ve always wanted to coin a buzzword of my own, so my idea was Web 2.1. Being the .1 version, this would actually work. Links wouldn’t rot, spammers would be automagically repelled, comments wouldn’t vanish into some ethereal sub-realm of the database and so on.
But, of course, I was too slow. A month ago, this would have been an original idea, but Google already shows 65000 hits for “Web 2.1”, and a fair few of the first 100 are playing variants on the same riff. Here’s a link from Ozplogger Trevor Cook
What’s wrong with game theory
The latest Nobel Prize award to Aumann and Schelling has generated a bit of discussion about the value or otherwise of game theory. Generally speaking, economists are enthusiastic about game theory and other social scientists less so. Although I admire the work of Aumann and (even more) Schelling, as economists go, I’m a game-theory sceptic, for a fundamental reason I’ll try to explain.
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test
Just testing
John Quiggin 