Manifestation

John Quiggin8 Comments

I’ve been interviewed by the 7:30 report regarding the resignation of Bob Mansfield, the Telstra chairman. Unless something more newsworthy bumps it, some of the interview should go to air tonight. Those who don’t care about the visual component can read my general views on Telstra here, here and here.

On the proposal that led to Mansfield’s downfall, that Telstra should buy Fairfax, my reaction is “What were they thinking!?” Obviously the majority of the board could see howinappropriate this idea was for a company owned by the Federal government and directly controlled by the shareholding ministers. But even if Telstra were fully privatised, it would be a terrible idea for a major regulated monopoly to own large chunks of the press or, as in the previous proposal to buy Channel 9, TV.

More research on speeding and road deaths

John Quiggin4 Comments

Thanks to reader Christoper Short for alerting me to this NBER Working Paper by Orley Ashenfelter and Michael Greenstone which gives more information on speeding and road deaths. Most of the article concerns statistical pitfalls in estimation, but I’ll focus on the bottom line which is their estimate that the implicit value of the time saved per life lost as a result of relaxation of rural speed limits in the US in the 1980s was in the range $1.2 million to $3.2 million in 1997 values.

This sounds like a lot, but it’s lower than most estimates of the value people place on risks to life (for example, looking at stated willingness to accept risk, wage premiums for risky occupations, or costs of medical procedures that are generally accepted as cost-effective). I discuss this a bit more here and you can find more discussion by searching the site for “speeding”[1].
Read More »

JSTOR

John Quiggin5 Comments

Just a note that anyone interested in the issues of intellectual property and the Internet could usefully look at JSTOR: A history by Roger Schonfeld. JSTOR was the first big attempt to put complete series of academic journals (including back issues) online and free[1]. Despite a lot of missteps, JSTOR survived and prospered while well-funded commercial ventures failed. I’m pleased to say the economics profession played a prominent role, with the American Economic Review, Econometrica and others being among the early participants.

The success of JSTOR is an illustration of the proposition, put forward most clearly by Clay Shirky that the economics of the Internet favour the free provision of content by those seeking fame (taken generally to include anyone who has something to say and wants others to read it) over fee-based content created by those seeking fortune.

fn1. Quite a few commentators over at Crooked Timber have pointed out that JSTOR isn’t free or easily accessible to individuals, though it is non-profit and the charges for library subscriptions are modest – less than a single commercial journal in many cases.

Breaking the circuit

John Quiggin7 Comments

Since the situation in Iraq seems to have stabilised momentarily, this might be a good time to think about measures that could prevent a renewed downward spiral. An essential starting point, and a relatively easy measure, would be to dump both Bremer and Chalabhi. Every major decision Bremer has made has been a disaster, from the dissolution of the Iraqi army to the failed attempt at rigged elections based on “caucuses” to the decision to pick a fight with Sadr. The cumulative result is that the Coalition is stuck with a promise to hand over power on June 30 and no-one remotely credible to hand it to. The other party in all of this is Chalabhi, who is still apparently Bremer’s preferred candidate, despite the fact that he has zero credibility in Iraq or, for that matter, anywhere outside the Pentagon. It might not be feasible to remove him from the Governing Council, but he should be dumped from any administrative position he holds, and particularly from his role in the disastrous de-Baathification campaign.

My suggestion for the next step would be to send Powell to Baghdad to take personal charge of the proposed transition. Although he’s been compromised like everyone else in the Administration, he’s by far the most credible person they have.
Read More »

Does Gerard Henderson own a dictionary ?

John Quiggin13 Comments

In today’s SMH, Gerard Henderson writes

Few now disagree with the proposition that the international community should have acted pre-emptively to stop the Rwandan genocide of Tutsis of a decade ago. Few disagree that it was proper for the US-led NATO forces, without the approval of the United Nations, to intervene pre-emptively against Serbia in support of the Muslim Kosovars.

Both the events Henderson refers to showed the international community in a very poor light, for failing to respond to terrible crimes when they were taking place, but, as far as I know, no-one has ever suggested that the countries in question should have been invaded in advance, to forestall the mere possibility that such things might happen. i can only conclude that Gerard has forgotten the meaning of the word pre-emptive.

In relation to Iraq, there would have been a strong case for doing something about Saddam’s worst crimes against humanity in the 1980s. The only problem with such a proposal is that Donald Rumsfeld might have been caught in the crossfire.

What I did on my holidays

John Quiggin7 Comments

I went to the National Folk Festival in Canberra. This always gets me into the kind of utopian mood where you think that the troubles of the world would be over if only we would all be like brothers and sisters to each other[1]. And lately, it always seems to coincide with particularly bloody events in the real world, making me very reluctant to get out of this mood and back to reality.
Read More »

Monday Message Board (on Tuesday)

John Quiggin9 Comments

I’m slowly getting back on deck after Easter. For starters, here’s the Monday Message Board, a day late, again. Please post your comments on any topic (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). My suggested discussion starter “What I did in the holidays”.

A missing gadget ?

John Quiggin23 Comments

Brothers and sisters I have none, but that man’s father is my father’s son

Most people can solve this familiar puzzle if they think about it for a little while, but only slightly more complex versions have them floundering. Yet the problem described isn’t much more difficult than naming the day after the day after yesterday, which (I think) most people can do instantly. The fact that such a simple problem can be posed as a puzzle is just one piece of evidence that people (at least people in modern/Western societies) have trouble learning about and reasoning about kinship relations.

I’m generally sympathetic to the Cosmides-Tooby idea of the mind as a collection of special-purpose gadgets rather than a general-purpose computer. The work of Kahneman and Tversky on probability judgements (also my own main area of theoretical research) supports this idea. And I’ve occasionally put forward evolutionary arguments to support the view that people are likely to overweight low-probability extreme events.

So, there is a bigger puzzle here for me. Assuming that the set of gadgets with which our minds are now equipped is the product of evolution, shouldn’t we (at least in some phase of our lives) be as good at learning about kinship systems as young children are at learning about languages? After all, it’s hard to imagine that we can be acting to promote the survival of our genes if we don’t know who is carrying them.

It’s often asserted that modern/Western society has a particularly minimal kinship system and that the systems prevailing in other societies are considerably more complex. This certainly seems to be true of the Aboriginal Australian systems I’ve seen described, but I don’t know whether it’s true more generally. Has the kinship instinct atrophied over time, and, if so, what are the implications?