Education: more, please

John Quiggin45 Comments

In a post on education at CT, Chris

floats a hypothesis for commenters to shoot down if they want to.

However, since most of the commenters agree with Chris, it looks like I’ll have to provide the other side of the debate. I’m also not linking to any evidence, though I discussed a fair bit of it here

I’m going to argue, contrary to Chris and most of the commenters on his post that there’s no reason to suppose that, in aggregate, the proportion of the population undertaking post-secondary education is too high, and every reason to continue trying to remove obstacles to participation in education for students from poor and working class backgrounds. Further, I don’t think credentialism is an important factor in explaining observed changes in participation in education or the labour market.
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Books and bombs

John Quiggin3 Comments

Tom Stafford points to academic publisher Elsevier’s involvement in the international arms trade. Even the legal aspects of this trade are deplorable, given the excessive readiness of governments and would-be governments to resort to armed force, but the boundary between legal and illegal arms trade is pretty porous. For example, there’s evidence that the arms fairs organised by Elsevier subsidiary Spearhead are venues for the illegal trade in landmines. Tom has a number of suggestions for possible responses.

By Quigger’s beard

John Quiggin85 Comments

Professor Bunyip coins a bon mot at my expense, saying in relation to a dispute between Sharon Beder and Leigh Cartwright over the effects of the Reagan tax cuts on revenue that

some of the itchier creatures in John Quiggin’s beard are the intellectual betters by an order of magnitude.

of one participant. Unfortunately, Prof B is not a professor of economics, and he applies the epithet to the wrong party in the dispute[1].
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Neither fish nor fowl

John Quiggin44 Comments

John Howard’s blistering attack on Telstra management is an example of why I’ve always regarded partial privatisation as the worst of both worlds. Although I’m unimpressed by Trujillo’s performance so far, I have some sympathy with his position as CEO of a company 51 per cent owned by the Australian government. To whom is he supposed to be responsible? The private minority shareholders? The Australian public as majority shareholders? The government? The shareholding ministers? The Liberal Party?
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Back in Brisbane

John Quiggin9 Comments

The trip back home was long and tiring, but I’m glad to be home again, and Brisbane is beautiful as always. There’s a lot to catch up on – Internet news only takes you so far – and I have quite a few posts planned, but jet lag and backlogs will probably slow me down for a while.

An anti-market argument from authority

John Quiggin42 Comments

Miranda Devine’s latest piece on Kyoto (sent to me by Jack Strocchi) adds a couple of new (or newish) talking points to the debate. The first is the claim that New Zealand faces a “cost blowout” of $1 billion as a result of the treaty. As far as I can tell, this is a beat-up. The government had calculated that under existing policies, New Zealand would meet its Kyoto commitments with a bit left over that could be traded on international carbon emission credits markets. Now it looks as if they won’t, which means either changing the policies, buying credits or repudiating the commitments. Its hard to see how the availability of the second option makes NZ any worse off.

What’s more interesting is that Devine attacks not merely the carbon emissions market established under Kyoto, but the whole idea of emissions trading. This is fairly surprising since the whole thrust of environmental policy under the Howard and Keating governments, including the current government’s negotiating position on Kyoto, has been to encourage the used of market-based instruments, of which emissions trading systems are an archetypal example. Although problems can emerge with naive application of this kind of policy, it’s generally the right direction in which to go. The development of tradeable water rights in the Murray-Darling system and elsewhere is a prominent example of both the benefits and some potential pitfalls.
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