Words fail me

John Quiggin14 Comments

While collecting links for my previous post, I came across this quote from Minister for Financial Services and Regulation, Joe Hockey.

In 1930 the Bank of England sent Sir Otto to Australia to help us work through our financial problems caused by the Great Depression. The result was that Sir Otto Niemeyer had a profound impact on our recovery.

So profound, in fact, that the Depression was still in full swing when World War II broke out nearly a decade later.

It turns out the Hockey was announcing the inauguration of a “Sir Otto Niemeyer” scholarship at the Australian Graduate School of Management, supported by

• The Commonwealth Treasury;
• The Reserve Bank of Australia;
• The Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority;
• The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission
• The Australian Securities and Investments Commission and
• The Australian Bureau of Statistics.

This is an absolute disgrace, and all of these institutions should be ashamed of themselves. I doubt that anyone in Australian history has caused as much economic hardship as Otto Niemeyer.

Moreover, there was no question of error in his actions. Niemeyer knew that, if the British banks he represented were to be receive repayments of their loans (overvalued thanks to deflation) Australian living standards would have to fall, and unemployment would have to rise. He delivered precisely that outcome. He had previously done precisely the same in Britain, having been the leading advocate of the disastrous return to pre-war gold parity in 1925.

What I’m reading

John Quiggin1 Comment

Ice Station by Matthew Reilly. Readers might have picked up by now that my taste in reading is fairly omnivorous, but techno-thrillers are outside my normal range. However, given that the author is Australian, I was struck by the introduction which seemed to promise an evil genius role for a character named Otto Niemeyer, and decided to read on. In fact, he remains peripheral. As compensation, though, you get to encounter (I am not making this up!), mutated sea-elephants. Despite the absence of laser-beams, they are very ill-tempered. If you can overlook this kind of thing, and like the genre, Reilly is actually pretty good.

Manners and political correctness (repost from January)

John Quiggin38 Comments

In my experience there is a close to 100 per cent correlation between the stated belief that society is suffering from a decline in “civility” and a willingness to proclaim that we are all being oppressed by “political correctness”. John Howard neatly illustrates this. A week or two ago, he was denouncing public schools as hotbeds of political correctness, and the excessive concern with offending religious minorities that (allegedly) led to the curtailment of Christmas celebrations. Now he’s calling for more civility.

The common analysis underlying both demands for “political correctness” (this actual phrase was never used, except jocularly as far as I know, until critics seized on it, but terms such as “sensitivity” or “inclusive language” cover much the same ground) and for “civility”, is that offensive words give rise to offensive acts. In both cases, there’s some ambiguity over whether the problem is with the offence to the recipient or with the reinforcement of the hostile/prejudiced attitudes of the speaker, but the central claim is that modes of speech are an appropriate subject of concern and that some form of government action to encourage more socially appropriate modes of speech, ranging from subtle pressure to direct coercion, is desirable. The only difference between the two positions is that they have different lists of inappropriate words.

I don’t have a sharply defined position on any of this, except that I find people who think that being “politically incorrect” is exceptionally brave and witty to be among the most tiresome of bores. I doubt that changes in speech will, of themselves, produce changes in attitudes. The obvious evidence for this is the rate at which euphemisms wear out and become as offensive as the terms they replaced (for example, ‘handicapped’ for ‘crippled’). On the other hand, I think there’s a lot to be said for avoiding offensive words and forms of speech and can see a place for (tightly drafted and cautiously applied) laws prohibiting or penalising various forms of collective defamation.

Spot the arithmetic error

John Quiggin10 Comments

This story in the Oz reports a decline in the return to education, but the argument is undermined by a problem with averages. Here are the crucial bits

THE gap in earnings between university graduates and people without a degree is closing, as the cost of getting a degree escalates.
…
While the proportion of the labour force aged 15 to 64 with a degree had almost doubled since 1993, the salary gap was closing against average earnings, he [Michael Gallagher] said.

The ratio of earnings for bachelor degree graduates to average earnings has fallen for both men and women but is more pronounced for women.

For example, between 1995 and 2001 it fell from 105.4 per cent to 93.9 per cent for women and from 96.8 per cent to 91.9 per cent for men.

Readers should not need a university degree to see the problem with this analysis, but I’ll spell it out over the page

Update Andrew Norton at Catallaxy has already made the same point
Read More »

Worse than the disease ?

John Quiggin6 Comments

My preferred cure for jetlag is to arrive in the morning and spend a fair part of the day outside, resetting your body clock, then have as normal an evening as possible, before going to bed about 10pm. In most respects, my schedule fitted this plan perfectly. Leaving Paris on Monday evening, I got into Brisbane this morning (Wednesday) and the day was suitably sunny. With the State of Origin starting soon, there’ll be no problem about staying up.

The only unusual feature is that my normal Wednesday includes karate training. I can now report that this is a complete, if problematic, cure for jet lag. Whatever term might describe my post-training condition, it is not jet-lagged.

GO MAROONS

Lomborg resigns from EIA

John Quiggin5 Comments

From bertramonline, some comment (a couple of weeks old now, but my Internet access has been spotty) on the news that Bjorn Lomborg has resigned as head of the Danish Environmental Assessment Institute and is returning to his academic job. Like me, Bertram is somewhat surprised by the limited media reaction to, and coverage of, Lomborg’s last big effort, the Copenhagen Consensus.

As attentive readers will recall, the conference concluded that fighting AIDS should be the top global priority in helping developing countries and also that climate change mitigation was a waste of money. I agree with the first of these conclusions, and more generally with the need for more spending on health poor countries, and I hope that Lomborg will put some effort into supporting it. I’ll try to keep readers posted on this.

Back in Brisbane

John Quiggin2 Comments

I’m back from my travels and, even after a week in Paris, Brisbane is as beautiful as ever, with blue skies, a mild winter day and the river looking as appealing as always.

My trip to Paris was very enjoyable, and my conference paper went very well. For a mixture of historical and stylistic reasons, my work on the economics of uncertainty is more highly regarded in France than in the United States. This prompted one of my co-authors to observe, rather unkindly I thought, that I could be regarded as the Jerry Lewis of decision theory.

Although I saw many interesting sights in Paris, the most surprising was that of four men in suits riding what appeared to be Segways (as far as I recall, I’ve seen descriptions, but not pictures, of these previously). Whether this was the beginning of a trend, or one of the many demonstrations and manifestations that abound in Paris, I couldn’t say for sure.

Belated birthday

John Quiggin2 Comments

In the rush of getting ready to travel overseas, I forgot to note it, but this blog was two years old on 21 June. It seems a lot longer ago than that to me. During that time I’ve moved the blog twice, and seen many other bloggers come and go, and in some cases return. There have been some big changes in the time I’ve been paying attention to the blog world, not all of them in line with what I would have expected.

Although the number of blogs has grown over time, there hasn’t been the explosion I expected to result from the capacity (in my experience highly addictive) to publish your thoughts to the world on a daily basis. By the way, this is a good time to invite anyone who thinks they should be on my blogroll to write and tell me[1].

The relationship between blogs and the print media has reached something that looks like equilibrium for the moment. Most journalists know now what blogs are, and most who engage in political and social commentary are aware that their words are going to be dissected by mostly-hostile commentators (I try to accentuate the positive, but even so, most of my links to articles in the mainstream press are critical).

Of course, as bloggers are to pundits, commenters are to bloggers. This blog developed a robust group of commenters early on, and has sustained lively debate ever since (much of it, unfortunately, lost in various database failures).

fn1. I’m generally happy to link to blogs in the listed category, though I reserve the right to make arbitrary judgements, and to put off updating the roll until I get a round tuit.