Is aid worthwhile ?

John Quiggin20 Comments
.!.

When we were discussing, not long ago, whether foreign aid could be useful in countries with corrupt and incompetent governments, I wasn’t imagining stories like this (see also this).

As a comparison, here’s a report from December 31, 2004 of aid finally reaching a city in Aceh, close to the epicentre of the earthquake/tsunami that struck on Boxing Day, 5 days previously. That’s in the middle of a war zone in a Third World country, with few roads, and thousands of kilometres from the countries giving most of the aid.

One further comparison. Ten days after the New Orleans disaster, the US has received offers of aid totalling $US1 billion. The total amount given by the US government in response to the tsunami was $950 million.

Carnabetian

John Quiggin14 Comments

One of the great things about the internets is that you can instantly find song lyrics, even if you only recall one line of the song. In the case of The Kinks, Dedicated follower of fashion there was only one word I couldn’t make out despite hearing the song many times. The crucial line turns out to be

Everywhere the carnabetian army marches on,
Each one an dedicated follower of fashion.

It’s obvious when it’s written out that carnabetian is a reference to Carnaby Street, the fashion centre of Swinging London in the 1960s, but I don’t think I would ever have worked it out by ear.

An offer you can’t refuse

John Quiggin5 Comments

ANZ is offering to match donations to charity made by its Internet banking customers. There’s a choice of eight charities, so their should be something for people of all tastes and ideological views.

And, particularly if you’re a top-bracket taxpayer, it’s an offer too good to miss as the end of the tax year approaches. Give, say, $200 to your preferred charity. ANZ’s matching money will bring it up to $400. Then Mr Costello will refund you $100 (well, $96.80 or thereabouts), so you get $400 worth of warm inner glow for the price of a couple of tickets to the footy.

Banks being banks, I was naturally suspicious. But I tried it out and the documentation came back indicating that everything had gone as promised. I guess you have to sign up as an ANZ customer to take advantage of this. But it’s no big hassle and loyalty to one bank is a thing of the past – there’s no need to scrap your existing arrangements if you don’t want to.

Intel inside

John Quiggin23 Comments

Today’s big news, for me at least, is that Apple will be moving to use Intel chips in Macs, in place of the PowerPC chip that’s been used for the last ten years or so. This isn’t good news for Mac users, since the required transitions are always messy and painful. The reason for the shift is that IBM, which produces the PowerPC, has been unwilling or unable to produce a low-heat version of the G5 chip for use in Powerbooks. The shift marks the end of the PowerPC strategy, which began as an alliance between Apple, IBM and Motorola and seemed at first likely to produce a serious alternative to Intel’s dominance of the CPU market.

The good news for Mac users is that, thanks to the massive success of the iPod and the flow-on effects to Mac sales, Apple is in a stronger position to make this move than at any time in years. In addition, the Mac OS itself is easily portable. Still, I expect some of my favorite obscure applications will struggle to make the change.

Another item in the positive column is that this ought to make it easier to run Windows on the occasions I need it (I currently use the Virtual PC emulator which is impressive, considering, but still problematic), and may also reduce the difficulty of porting Windows software to Mac.

General Glut and Australia’s CAD

John Quiggin26 Comments

General Glut turns his attention to Australia’s current account deficit, a topic that’s also being debated in a number of threads over at Stephen Kirchner’s blog. There’s a lot to cover here, so I’ll list the main points I’m going to cover up front

* Martin Wolf makes a point I’ve also been going on about for some time, that the Anglosphere dominates the consuming and borrowing side of the global trade balance
* Although Australia and the US have similar CAD/GDP ratios, the underlying stats are very different
* The claim that Australia’s CAD is being used to finance non-dwelling investment doesn’t stack up well when you look at actual expenditures, rather than volumes derived from dubious price adjustments
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Interest rates unchanged

John Quiggin24 Comments
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In macroeconomic terms, the RBA decision to keep interest rates unchanged looks like a good call. With the levels of indebtedness we have in Australia, the risk of overkill, as seen in 1990, are greater than the risk of delaying for a while to see what happens. Although the evidence is patchy, the claims that economic activity has peaked look quite plausible. On most reasonable estimates, interest rates are still below their ‘neutral’ level and it looks as if they can’t go significantly above this level without producing substantial damage

In microeconomic terms, the decision looks far less appealing. Interest rates represent the price of current consumption in terms of future consumption. If they are permanently held below their equilibrium (roughly the same as neutral) level, the result must be too much consumption and too little saving and Australia has seen this in spades, with negative rates of household savings for some years. Not surprisingly, this has been accompanied by a boom in asset prices, particularly for residential land. This in turn has been associated with a shift in investment towards housing which, since it produces non-tradable services, is not helpful in addressing a huge current account deficit.

When one set of considerations strongly suggests holding interest rates steady and another suggests they need to rise significantly, the obvious conclusion is that we are trying to do too much with one instrument.

Monday message board

John Quiggin94 Comments

As usual on Monday, you are invited to post your thoughts on any topic. Civilised discussion and no coarse language, please. As we approach the winter solstice (for Southern hemisphere readers), I’d be interested in seasonal reflections.

Karimov and Saddam

John Quiggin49 Comments

Pro-war left site Harry’s Place links to a rather equivocal piece by Christopher Hitchens on the Bush Administration’s backing for the Uzbekistan dictator Karimov, and picks out the following quote, among others

The United States did not invent or impose the Karimov government: It “merely” accepted its offer of strategic and tactical help in the matter of Afghanistan.

This sounded familiar, and I thought it would be interesting to see what happened if “Karimov” was replaced by “Saddam” in a Google search.

No exact matches, but “US did not create Saddam” pulls up a bunch of links from sites like Martin Kramer and billhobbs.com defending or downplaying the Reagan Administration policy of support for Saddam during the 1980s, when his foreign wars and internal oppression killed vast numbers of people. “Did not install Saddam” gives more, and no doubt other variants can be found.

Even now, I doubt that Hitchens would accept “the US did not invent or impose Saddam” as a justification for the aid and warm embraces (literal and metaphorical) given to Saddam in the 1980s. But, given his current trajectory, I think it’s only a matter of time.

I am disappointed though, that Harry’s Place, which has generally taken a principled line of opposition to all dictatorship,s should give a favorable link to this weaselly piece, which is more concerned with scoring points against Hitchens’ former allies than in advocating any particular response to Karimov.

PS: Mark Bahnisch is a little kinder, calling Hitchens “confused”.
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Oil economics

John Quiggin28 Comments

So I was reading the less interesting bits of the paper and looked at a report on the price of oil which, as is pretty much routine, contained the suggestion that a shortage of refinery capacity was contributing to the high price of crude. Turning my brain on for a moment, it struck me that economics 101 suggests the exact opposite. Refineries and crude oil are complements in production, so a shortage of refinery capacity should lower the price of crude, while increasing the price of refined products such as petrol and distillate (easy thought experiment to show this: if there were no refineries at all, crude oil would be worthless).

A quick Google shows that I’m not the first person to notice this point, but the erroneous claim keeps on getting repeated.

How does an error like this get started. The obvious reason is that if the price of oil is driven by demand fluctuations (as at present) high prices for oil will be correlated with perceived shortages of refinery capacity. It will be easy to find specific instances to support an apparent causation going the other way. For a refinery working at maximum capacity, a breakdown will cause a supply interruption and will be very obvious. The same breakdown, occurring at a slack time, might be dealt with by rearranging operations and rescheduling maintenance and never reported to customers.

What I’m reading

John Quiggin13 Comments

I just reread “The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia” (Ursula K. Le Guin), which I enjoyed as much as ever. There are a bunch of other books I should be reading, most of them weighty tomes on network theory, real options and so on, but Mark Bahnisch has kindly pointed me to a nearly endless source of distraction, China Miéville’s list of Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read. Le Guin is on the list, of course, along with many of my favorites (though many of the books recommended are new to me) and classics like Bellamy’s Looking Backwards and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein