TANSTAAFL

John Quiggin10 Comments

I managed to prove Milton Friedman[1] right in fine style today. First I gave a talk on the FTA to about 700 high school students, which was supposed to sell them on the idea of studying economics at UQ. In return (and in addition to a small gift from the Queensland Economics Teachers Association) I got an invitation to lunch which I declined so I could lunch with the seminar speaker in my other department, Political Science and International Relations (it was Joe Camilleri, talking on Islam and the West). Arriving early, I ordered straight away to beat the rush, only to discover that, had I waited I would have had my lunch paid for out of some fund or another.

So, if there are any free lunches about, I wasn’t getting them today. Instead, I paid three times (giving the talk, turning up at the seminar and handing over the cash) and only got fed once. Fortunately, I love giving talks and (given a good speaker) like attending seminars.

fn1. Although Friedman and Robert Heinlein usually share the credit for this acronym, Tyler Cowen points out that it should actually go to Alvin Hansen, America’s most prominent early advocate of Keynesianism, and someone whom the average person with a TANSTAAFL bumper sticker might be surprised to find they agreed.

Arbitrage and the video store

John Quiggin21 Comments

A discussion about excessive advertising over at Troppo Armadillo led me to think a bit about the fact that I never watch movies on commercial TV any more, because there are too many ads. Being an economist, I naturally like to assure myself that my conduct is rational, so I did the numbers.

The Media Watch story linked by Ken Parish indicates that TV stations are allowed 15 minutes of ads per hour, which implies that a 2-hour movie can be padded out with around 40 minutes of ads. This seems consistent with my memory of the last time I tried watching such a movie.

For most of the movies shown on commercial TV, I have the alternative option of walking to the video store up the street (10 minutes return) and hiring a video or DVD ($5 max). So, the trade-off is $5 vs 30 minutes. in effect, the TV station is paying me $10 an hour to watch ads. Since I value my time at more than $10 an hour, I choose the rental option.

This seemed convincing to me, but how generally applicable is it? Not everyone lives as close to a video store as I do, but then you can always rent a week’s worth of videos at a time, so the allocation of 10 minutes per movie seems reasonable. As regards the $10 an hour, I have, I think it a perfect arbitrage argument. The average video store pays $10 an hour[1], usually has casual work going, and, in most cases, will let the staff borrow reasonable numbers of videos free of charge.

fn1. I’m ignoring tax here, but if your marginal tax rate is an issue your time is worth more than $10 an hour.

Some links on the Middle East

John Quiggin4 Comments

Just a few links with useful info and argument on various aspects of the situation in the Middle East and the surrounding region (very broadly and loosely defined)

* An excellent piece by Stephen Kinzer on Turkey’s democratic Islamist government, and the prospects for admission to the EU

* Juan Cole points out that the case against Iran is every bit as problematic as the case against Iraq.

* Also via Juan Cole, two views on the Wall being built by the Sharon government

* A powerful piece by Nicholas Kristof on Rwanda and Darfur

The virus of error

John Quiggin4 Comments

In the most recent London Review of Books, Hugh Pennington has a generally excellent article on measles and erroneous (to put it charitably) research linking the combined MMR vaccine to autism. It’s a pity therefore that, on a peripheral issue, he perpetuates an equally glaring error, saying

‘Most people have an intuitive appreciation that the best vaccine programme, from an individual’s point of view, is one where almost everyone else is vaccinated while they are not, so that they are indirectly protected without incurring any of the risks or inconvenience associated with direct protection.’ If too many people act in this way, the infection becomes commoner in the population as a whole, and returns as a real and significant threat to the unimmunised. This is a modern version of the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ described by Garrett Hardin in his influential 1968 essay: 16th-century English peasants had free grazing on commons; their need to supplement food supplies and income was very great; the resulting overgrazing wrecked the commons for everyone.

As I’ve pointed out previously Hardin’s story was, in historical terms, a load of tripe.

It’s interesting to note that, in repeating Hardin’s story, Pennington adds the spurious specificity of “16th century England”, whereas Hardin’s account was not specific regarding dates and places, and therefore harder to refute. This is characteristic of the way in which factoids are propagated.

Respect

John Quiggin15 Comments

Don Arthur and Ken Parish have been discussing values and civility, with links to other bloggers. Both posts are well worth reading. I don’t have anything new to say on this at present, but civility is the kind of thing that’s better shown by example than described in the abstract. With some exceptions, and with occasional lapses by nearly everyone, I think Ozplogistan sets a pretty good example. I rarely agree with, for example, Andrew Norton or John Humphries Humphreys, and frequently disagree with Ken Parish, but we manage to have productive discussions despite this.

Rational manias

John Quiggin51 Comments

There’s a cottage industry within economics involving the production of historical arguments giving rational[1] explanations of seemingly irrational historical episodes, of which the most famous is probably the Dutch tulip boom/mania. This Slate article refers to the most recent example, a complex argument regarding changes in contract rules which seems plausible, but directly contradicts other explanations I’ve seen.

Once opened, questions like this are rarely closed. Still, articles of this kind seem a lot less interesting in 2004 than they did in, say, 1994. In 1994, the efficient markets hypothesis (the belief that asset markets invariably produce the best possible estimate of asset value based on all available information) was an open question, and the standard account of the Dutch tulip mania was evidence against it. In 2004, the falsity of the efficient markets hypothesis is clear to anyone open to being convinced by empirical evidence.
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DeLong on interest rates

John Quiggin3 Comments

There’s an interesting piece by Brad DeLong in Saturday’s Australian Financial Review, which I can’t find anywhere online.He lists four reasons why interest rates can be expected to rise in the future. The first two are just two facets of the same thing – the embrace of deficit finance by the US Republicans in both Congress and the executive branch. The third is closely related: the failure of Western European governments to address the coming fiscal crisis associated with retirement income policies. All of these are currently being offset by the willingness of the Chinese and Indian central banks to buy US and Euro bonds in an effort to maintain competitive exchange rates. But this can’t last forever.

The fourth factor is “the inability of Western European governments top enact sufficiently bold liberalising reforms to create the possibility of full employment, together with the failure of Western European monetary policy to be sufficiently stimulative to create the reality of full employment”. I have some doubts about this. Leaving aside any questions about the efficacy of “liberalising reforms”, it’s far from clear that the adoption of stimulatory monetary policy in the short run is conducive to low nominal interest rates in the long run. I would have thought that just as stimulatory deficits in a recession need to be offset by larger surpluses during booms, an active monetary policy implies a larger variance in interest rates over the cycle.

More significantly, it seems to me that, on a crucial point Brad has the argument backwards. He says “Believers in low interest rates … point to rapid technological progress, which has boosted output.” In general, technological progress ought to create new investment opportunities at high rates of return, while the associated increase in asset values should raise current consumption. This should raise the real rate of interest, not lower it. In fact, this is precisely the argument Brad makes in relation to India and China.

On checking, I was surprised to find out that the ratio of nonresidential gross investment to US GDP is near an all-time low, at 10.0 per cent (you can get the data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis . Taking account of the increasing share of computers and software, which have high depreciation rates, it seems likely that the net investment share is lower than ever. Maybe this can be explained if all the technological progress takes the form of capital-saving reductions in the cost of computing and telecommunications. This would reduce demand for capital (but ought to increase demand for labor, something that has evidently not taken place).

Monday Message Board

John Quiggin24 Comments

It’s Monday again, and time for the Monday Message Board. This is a chance for everyone to give their comments on any topic. Also, if you have longer pieces you’d like to draw to the attention of readers, feel free to post a link. I’ve been a bit slack about policing the “no coarse language” rule in the last couple of weeks, but please adhere to it and stick to civilised discussion.

PPPs – the magic pudding lives

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There’s quite a good piece on Public-Private Partnerships by Graeme Hodge in today’s Age. Fair and balanced, but providing some justified scepticism. Meanwhile the news page of the same paper has a perfect example of the magic pudding mentality that still underlies most advocacy of PPP arrangements.

Brian Caldwell, the outgoing dean of education at Melbourne University, has called on the Bracks Government to follow the lead of the Blair Government in Britain, which is rebuilding schools in partnership with the private sector…Professor Caldwell said that while the Government was moving “quite impressively” to improve the quality of buildings, the cost in many schools was enormous.He called on the Government to adopt the policy of the Blair Government, which is rebuilding schools in urban areas. It often involved the private sector building schools and leasing them back to the Government, which paid them off over 25 years.

Caldwell doesn’t mention cost savings or risk transfer or any of the other reasons why PPPs might be worthwhile, he just seems to think that this is a way of getting money for nothing.

Caldwell on to say that the British PPP program is “coupled with redesigning the educational programs of the schools.” But there is, in general, no link between PPP construction and educational programs, which are typically still public in these cases. Conversely, there are plenty of examples of partial or complete privatisation of education in systems where the public maintains ownership of the school buildings (as with PPP construction, the record of such ventures is mixed at best).

Another enterprising university disaster

John Quiggin10 Comments

A few years ago, Monash University was being described as the first global university‘ on the strength of its multiple campuses in Australia, Malaysia, the UK and South Africa. Along with Alan Gilbert of Melbourne, then VC David Robinson[1] was one of the leading promoters of the idea of the ‘enterprising university’. In practice this meant using the public endowment of the university to establish private, for-profit offshoots, an agenda that is still being pushed vigorously by Tim Dodd and the AFR Higher Education Section. Robinson aimed for a campus on every continent, while Gilbert pushed the idea that the Internet could be used to bring academic handloom weavers into the factory age, an idea embodied in U21 Global.

Now Monash’s African operation is described as a money pit. Exactly the same could be said of U21Global[1], a $US50 million enterprise which has so far produced nothing more than a very ordinary online MBA to add to the hundreds already on the market.

The question of why, outside narrowly vocational training, for-profit educational ventures are almost invariably unsuccessful is a complex and difficult one. But the facts speak for themselves. From an Australian perspective,an equally important question is why university managers (mostly former academics with no obvious qualifications for a business career) entrusted with large sums of public money have been allowed to dissipate it in money-losing speculative investments.

fn1. Robinson got sacked a couple of years ago over a plagiarism scandal. As I pointed out in a very early post, this was hypocritical behavior on the part of a University council that backed his anti-academic agenda. “University managers have done their best to suppress the assumptions of free exchange of information in which notions like ‘plagiarism’ make sense. In the brave new world of ‘intellectual property’, you nail down what you can of your own ideas and appropriate anything from the common pool that hasn’t already been grabbed. The former vice-chancellor of Monash seemed entirely suited to the new world, and it was hypocritical to sack him.”

fn2. As with Monash, the term “global” is an aspiration rather than a reality. In practice, U21Global does not even try to compete outside the Asian market, and it seems that it is increasingly focusing on Singapore, its physical location.