Academic exercises

John Quiggin47 Comments

Sinclair Davidson had a piece in the Fin the other day, attacking the Australian Research Council, which pays my salary (Davidson also gets ARC Grant Money, as he notes). The argument turns, not on specific deficiencies of the ARC but on the general claim that pure research undertaken with government funding has little economic benefit. In the good old days, when confronted with this sort of claim, we research types would wheel out a few trusty examples like cactoblastis and ENIAC, but they’re getting a bit old and tired nowadays.

I remember talking about this a decade or so ago, and somebody said the universities were developing this great new communications system that would revolutionise the economy. What was it called? Interweb? WorldWideNet? Mosaica? Can anyone remember what happened to it? If someone could find any evidence that this idea had an economic impact, it might help to counter Sinclair’s argument.
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The $10 solution

John Quiggin27 Comments

As with most aspects of telecommunications policy, I’ve been singularly unimpressed by the government’s handling of digital TV policy. We seem to be lumbered with an incredibly costly design, to which we will all be forced to switch in 2008 or thereabouts. However, I’ve been contacted by Alex Encel who argues that the government could resolve many of the problems by bulk ordering set-top boxes (he estimates $10 a box), giving them away (I may be reading this into his proposal, but I think that’s what he ends) and shutting down analog broadcasts immediately. The revenue from reselling the spectrum would more than offset the cost of the boxes. I can’t see an obvious flaw in this, though I’m taking the $10 cost estimate on trust. As Alex points out, you can buy a VCR for $99 these days, and it has a whole bunch of moving parts as well as the basic electronics. Anyway, I hope there are some technically minded readers who can comment on this.
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Charitable pledges

John Quiggin11 Comments

Via Chris Bertram at CT, another try from Nicola at a charitable pledge aimed at overcoming the free rider problem inherent in lots of desirable activities. I will give 1% of my gross annual income to charity but only if 100 people will too. Nicola has a blog, as you would expect. Go over and sign up to the pledge!

I’m always interested in ways of using the Internet to promote good collective actions like charitable giving. The tsunami appeal earlier this year was a big success, but the gimmick of tying the amount paid to comments on the blog seems to have got tired, as gimmicks do.

So I’m going to go for something much simpler this time. I’m asking people to donate money to help with the Niger famine (feel free to substitute an alternative cause or organisation if you think it would be more worthwhile). Just send in a comment announcing your donation, or advise me by email, by Sunday and I’ll match it, up to a total of $1000. I’m giving to Medecins sans Frontieres.

Remember this is all tax deductible. So, if you’re on the top marginal tax rate, a donation of $100 actually costs you only $50. With my matching $100, the total amount given will be $200, enough to save many lives. But, if your budget is tighter, and you don’t benefit from tax deductibility, even $10 or $20 can make a difference.

Blogroll changes

John Quiggin12 Comments

I’ve added The Currency Lad to the blogroll. This was long overdue, as CL is easily the best blogger on the conservative side of Australian politics, but for a long time his blog template was unreadable on Safari. I checked a little while ago, and found the template problem now resolved. here’s an interesting first birthday reflection on blogging .

I’ve deleted a few dead or moribund links, among whom I’ll mention Rob Schaap, whose irregular, idiosyncratic and lengthy essays were one of the most interesting features of the early days of Ozplogistan. Feel free to post suggested additions in the comments section. I’m a bit overstretched at the moment, so it may be a while before anything happens.

Converts

John Quiggin130 Comments

I’ve had a few brushes recently with people who’ve shifted, politically, from positions well to my left to positions well to my right. There’s some useful discussion (and some not so useful) of this and related phenomena in this Crooked Timber comments thread following up a post by Chris Bertram about Nick Cohen, a recent exemplar of the left-right shift. I’m taking points from various commenters with whom I agreed, without acknowledging them: read the thread and you can see who has said what.

A couple of things have struck me about this process. One is that, even though the shift from radical left to neoconservativism or neoliberalism is rarely instantaneous, and appears in some ways to be a smooth transition, there doesn’t usually seem to be any intermediate stage at which people in this process hold a position similar to my own (social democratic in domestic policy, internationalist in foreign policy and reluctant to support war except as a last resort). Rather, what seems to happen is that leftist modes of critique are used, increasingly, to defend rightwing policy positions.

An obvious example is the way in which ex-Marxists seize on largely incoherent notions of ‘the new class’ and ‘elites’ (typically defined in cultural terms rather than with any analysis of economic or political power) as a way of attacking their former allies. Eventually, this kind of thing is often abandoned in favour of traditional conservative or free-market rhetoric, but by this time, the shift in political position is usually complete.

The other is that, although people change their opinions, they generally don’t change the confidence with which they express them or their attitudes to those who disagree. If they were thoughtful and sceptical as leftists, they generally remain so. If they regarded all who disagreed with their leftwing shibboleths as fools or knaves, they will take exactly the same view of those who disagree with them when they begin spouting rightwing shibboleths instead.
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Anonymous comment under threat, part 2

John Quiggin13 Comments

I’ve made a Supplementary Submission (over the fold) to the Parliamentary Electoral Matters Committee Inquiry into the Conduct of the 2004 Federal Election and Matters Related Thereto regarding the possibility that bloggers and commenters might fall under Section 328 of the Electoral Act, requiring publication of names and addresses authorising political matter. Comments appreciated
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