The Economist on Turkey

John Quiggin11 Comments

One thing that’s struck me about the recent wave of triumphalism regarding good news from the Middle East is how rarely Turkey is mentioned[1]. Yet Turkey’s progress towards full-scale Western-style democracy over the last few years has been by far the most hopeful development in the region over this period.

And the Bush Administration has played a positive (if occasionally unsubtle) role here, strongly backing Turkey’s application to join the EU, which is the main motive for reform. Yet this never seems to get a mention, while the fact that the absolute monarchs of Saudi Arabia have decided, like their counterparts in Communist China, to permit municipal elections is presented as if it’s a democratic revolution.

For those interested, The Economist has an excellent survey.

fn1. Except in the context of Thanksgiving.

Overconsumption

John Quiggin34 Comments

There’s already been a bit of blogospheric response to the latest study on wasteful consumption (PDF) by Clive Hamilton and others at the Australia Institute . As Andrew Norton notes in the comments to Jason Soon’s post, the study reflects Clive’s rather ascetic wordview, one not shared by the majority of Australians. And, no doubt, waste is in the eye of the beholder. To take one of Clive’s examples, I must admit to buying books and not reading them, at least some of the time, but I can find excuses for this, whereas I’m scandalised by the idea of throwing out perfectly good clothes because they’re out of fashion.

That said, I think that, unless you are willing to take a completely agnostic view of social trends of all kinds, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the present period is one of generally excessive consumption. There are underlying economic causes of this, including low interest rates, easy credit and an economy that rewards successful speculation more than effort[1]. This in turn produces a demand for cultural celebration of consumption which reinforces the whole process. The wheel must turn and I think Clive is right to give it a bit of a shove.

And, leaving aside the fact that an excessive focus on consumption is bad for us, Tim Costello was spot-on on TV pointing to the moral obscenity of allowing children to starve while we making strenuous efforts to acquire trivial items for ourselves. No-one is perfect here, but, as I’ve said before, we all seemed a lot happier when we were putting a bit of our spare time into the tsunami aid effort. If we could keep this up, the world would be a much better place.

Such things are cyclical: material prosperity was just as eagerly celebrated in the 1950s, and this produced the anti-materialist reaction of the 1960s.

fn1. And even where wealth is produced by effort, it commonly takes the form of a capital gain, on the sale of a business, a renovated home, or whatever.

Timber Tour

John Quiggin5 Comments

While Crooked Timber is out of action, I thought I’d tour the sites of those Timberites who maintain individual blogs in addition to posting on CT. There’s a lot of overlap with CT, and too much to describe everything so I just thought I’d give you a sample:

* Eszter has a Flickr album of Chicagoland. I need to look into this.

* Kieran has a review column, including one of The Money Game by ‘Adam Smith’. I got this as a school prize when it first came out way back when, and was really impressed. It played quite a big part in steering me towards economics.

* Over at John and Belle’s they’re debating the hardy perennial: was Communism as bad as Nazism ? I had a go at this a while back. Also, Belle puts in a bid for the Nobel Peace Prize

* Brian is going to a philosophy conference where the usual questions of existence, meaning and so on will be complicated by a union boycott of the main venue

* Daniel is threatening a Welsh-triumphalist post about the Six Nations when we get back on air, but hasn’t gone so far as to reanimate his blog for the purpose.

For the rest of the team, you’ll just have to wait until our hosting negotiations are concluded.

Investigation

John Quiggin12 Comments

Former blogger James Morrow is setting up a magazine called Investigate. As long-time residents of Ozplogistan will recall, Morrow is fairly firmly on the political right, but he was kind enough to invite me to contribute a dissenting column for the opening issue (and maybe a regular feature). Due to email foulups, the piece I sent him didn’t get through, and it will be thoroughly obsolete by the next issue, so I just thought I’d put it up on the blog for anyone interested – some of it has already appeared in blog post form, but I thought I wrapped it up into a pretty good rant.
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Travels

John Quiggin12 Comments

I’ve been in Melbourne for the last few days, giving seminars at university departments and talking to people at the Productivity Commission and a roundtable the ACCC. The ACCC event had some very interesting discussion of behavioral economics and its implications. When I get time I’ll do a post on it.

Meanwhile, the Internet has given me nothing but problems. I was trying to deal with comment spam and anti-spam overkill on flaky dialup connections, which was no fun at all. GMail was horribly slow and unresponsive. Then when I got home I got the news that Crooked Timber has been shut down by our hosting service for overloading the database.

All back to normal soon I hope.

Education and central planning

John Quiggin48 Comments

The argument about Voluntary Student Unionism is interestingly summed up by a letter in today’s Age, supporting the government. The writer, an employer, asks us to imagine the outrage that would arise if he told his employees that they had to pay $500 in return for a range of the kinds of services typically provided by student unions.
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False positives

John Quiggin2 Comments

Apologies yet again to everyone having trouble posting comments. My anti-spam software is too aggressive, but as soon as I relax it I’m flooded with spam. I’ll have another go at resolving this as soon as I can get some free time. One suggestion that seems to work for some is to use a different email address. If you can’t get through you can email me directly and I’ll post your comment when I get time.

On the internet, nobody knows you’re an LWLB

John Quiggin36 Comments

Not surprisingly, a lot of bloggers are concerned about this report suggesting anyonymous blogging on political topics may be illegal. I had a few thoughts on this.

Closest to home, while I’m not anonymous[1], I welcome comments with or without anonymity. I don’t think there’s a problem here – any comments on this site are “authorised” by me, although I may not agree with them. As I’ve mentioned a few times, I reserve my right to delete or expurgate offensive comments, though there may be a delay for one reason or another.

Second, I don’t think it’s sensible to assume that the Internet is some kind of special free-fire zone where ordinary law does not apply. If a rule is right for print on paper, it’s probably right for text on a screen. If it’s wrong for the Internet, it’s probably wrong as applied to pamphlets.

Third, if a natural reading of the existing law is that it’s illegal to publish your political opinions under a pseudonym, the obvious question is: Why? I can’t see any possible justification for such a rule. It seems reasonable to prohibit dirty tricks like publishing something purporting to represent the views of your opponents, but the general tradition of writing as “Cicero” or “A modest member” is a well-established and honorable one. The idea that special rules are needed during election campaigns is an outdated relic, the kind of thing that used to give us a three-day blackout of electronic media.

Finally, where does Misha Schubert get off putting bloggers and spammers in the same headline? Maybe I should write something saying “state governments are considering uniform defamation laws, which would apply to journalists and spammers”.

fn1. That is, unless you believe the rumours that I’m really Imre Salusinszky posting under a false name and picture.

Negative income taxes

John Quiggin10 Comments

Reader Hans van Leeuwen wrote to ask about the Negative Income Tax which is one of those concepts that always seems to be discussed in favorable terms but never makes it on to the policy agenda. The basic idea, due to (or at least put forward by) Milton Friedman is that the tax system should consist of a flat grant and tax levied at a proportional rate on all incomes. The ‘negative’ part comes from the fact that people on low incomes would get money from the government and would therefore pay negative tax.

I’m sympathetic to the general concept, but I think it’s necessary to take the whole tax-welfare system into account. The implied objective then is to make positive transfers to low-income individuals and families while giving everyone roughly the same effective marginal rate of taxation. From this perspective, as the OECD noted the other week, the big problem is high effective marginal rates of taxation for low-income and middle-income families.

This is a difficult problem because, in general, I would like to make the grant component large for families with children (a view shared by government). It’s difficult to do this, apply a common marginal rate and hold the cost to revenue of the initial grant down to an affordable level.

The national comparisons game

John Quiggin52 Comments

Tim Blair points to this exercise asserting that the EU is twenty years behind the USA. As Tim subtly points out, it’s absurd to suggest that the EU today (home of Nokia and Airbus, and birthplace of Linux and the World Wide Web) is comparable to the US when Atari boxes were the state of the art. Unfortunately, Tim’s irony is lost on his commenters, who assume the report deserves to be taken seriously.

To ram the point home to his slower readers, Tim might do well to point to the fact that, in terms of output per hour, several European countries are ahead of the US. Of course, when hours worked are taken into account, the US regains the lead, but on that criterion, Britain during the Industrial Revolution was ahead of any modern country.

The real point is that productivity differences between modern economies are so small that, by selecting the right criterion, any developed country can be made to look better, or worse, than any other. The report is explicitly described by its promoters as a “wake-up call” designed to scare Europeans into adopting the policies favored by its promoters. Having seen this kind of thing going on since the 80s, when Australians were terrified with the prospect of becoming the “poor white trash of Asia”, I find such reports more soporific than alarming.