Microsoft’s core business is under attack
Tailgating
The comments thread for the previous post raises the issue of tailgating. I’ve seen surveys in which the two most common annoyances are (1) tailgating and (2) slow drivers. Given that, in my experience, at least 95 per cent of drivers drive within a few k of the speed limit whenever they can, I’d guess that a large proportion of those giving response (2) are the people who annoy those of us giving response (1). Road safety would be greatly enhanced if these people could either be deterred or delicensed.
But there’s no obvious way of enforcing laws against this species of dangerous driving. I can think of various possibilities, but I can also think of technical difficulties with all of them. About the most promising would be a fixed video camera that would record all passing traffic. It ought to be able to infer both speed and distance between cars, and then prosecute tailgaters, but the computational requirements of recording this digitally and processing it automatically would be immense. Still, Moore’s Law is on our side, here.
Rolling the dice
An interesting Four Corners last night. Here’s the transcript. I worked on gambling issues back in the 90s, and put in a submission to the Productivity Commission inquiry in 1999. Having worked in the field, there are a number of things that everybody knows (including the casinos). Among them:
The bulk of the money comes from a small number of heavy gamblers
A problem gambler is a heavy gambler who’s run out of money
There’s nothing casinos will resist more vigorously than an interruption to play
All of this came out in the program.
On the analysis that I did and also that of the Productivity Commission, it’s pretty clear that some forms of gambling cause more social harm than good, if you apply standard consumer theory to moderate gamblers but assume that heavy/problem gamblers are not getting any benefits from gambling. Pokies and racetrack betting are the worst, lotteries are the best.
One last feature, showing that this blog is still in touch with the zeitgeist was the use of the MRD response “They would say that, wouldn’t they”, in an entirely appropriate context.
Littoral cringe
I stayed at the Gold Coast last weeked, at Tugun Beach near Coolangatta. A nice enough spot, with miles of uncrowded beaches and not overdeveloped by Gold Coast standards, though the towers of Surfers Paradise in the distance produced a rather surreal effect. We stayed at a pleasant place called the Golden Riviera, and the neighbouring places had the usual names – Costa del Sol, Malibu etc. I haven’t been to the Riviera or Costa del Sol, but Malibu is not a patch on Coolangatta, and the pictures of European beaches I’ve seen don’t impress.
So the thought struck me – do villas on the Riviera have names like Noosa and Bondi? I doubt it. Still, Australia has at least advanced since the days when beachside locations were named after Brighton and Margate.
Do motives matter ?
There’s been a good deal of debate on this blog about whether it’s appropriate to look at the motives of people who are making particular arguments (for example Lomborg and the environment), or whether you should take them at face value and respond to the arguments directly. Much the same debate has been taking place among US econobloggers, including Brad de Long and Arnold Kling. You can get started with Brad here.
My view is that motives matter. It’s very difficult to conduct a reasoned discussion with someone if you know they will lie, or distort the truth, whenever they get away with it. Hence, it’s important to distinguish between honest disagreement and propaganda and necessary to respond differently to one than to the other.
Update This post from Tim Lambert illustrates the point perfectly. It concerns an article by well-known pro-gun academic John Lott purporting to prove the correctness of some claims made by rightwing windbag Rush Limbaugh about media coverage of black quarterbacks in the NFL. As Lambert says
Even if all the data is correct and his regressions have been correctly calculated his analysis is not in the slightest bit persuasive. The reason is that his behaviour in the coding errors case suggests that he just keeps trying different models and just cherry picks the one that gives the result he wants. Would Lott want to get a result that supports Limbaugh? Well, check out this Mary Rosh posting:
You have got to download this paper. Lott has done an amazing piece here. Fits in perfectly with Rush Limbaughâs program today.
Tim’s site has more on the Lott/Rosh saga and the bizarre parallels with the case of antigun researcher Michael Bellisles. Ted Barlow at Crooked Timber has more on this (warning: Turn irony detectors on full before reading this post). Finally, for more on the problem of cherry-picking, aka “data mining”, read here, here and here. To spell it out, statistical results from someone you can trust to play by the rules are worth discussing, those from someone known to engage in data-mining/cherry-picking are not.
The Fin leans left and gets it right
Although I’ve written for the Fin for nearly ten years, it’s always been in the role of a dissenting voice on the Op-Ed page. Even when, as at present, the regular opinion commentators are fairly evenly balanced between left and right, the editorial column has stuck closely to economic rationalist/neoliberal orthodoxy.
Today’s editorial on unemployment (subscription required) though is positively Quigginesque*, making the points that 6 per cent unemployment is too much and the Job Network is a mess (for my views on the same topic, go here. There’s even a warning against excessive reliance on market ideology, to balance the inevitable call for further liberalisation of labour markets.
Obviously it’s great to see the Fin taking a hard look at an issue like unemployment and coming up with an answer I can agree with in large measure. I also take a less worthy pleasure in thinking how much this will annoy my friends at the Institute of Public Affairs. They’ve always been bitter at the Fin for having me as a columnist, and they’ll be spitting chips if they think that my heresies could start to infect the editorial column.
While we’re on the opinion pages, check out this neat application of prospect theory by Ross Gittins.
*This delightful term was coined, I think, by Henry Ergas
Monday Message Board
It’s time, as usual, for your comments on any topic (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please).
Suggested discussion starter: Which football code, if any, is Australia’s national game?
Bali Anniversary
Another dubious quote
I’m always suspicious when I see a quote attributed to some historical figure that seems too neatly in tune with the preoccupations of today. Take this widely-cited quote, attributed to Marcus Tullius Cicero in 63 BC
The budget should be balanced, the treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt
What’s wrong with this? For a start, the concept of bankruptcy didn’t emerge until the Renaissance and neither did double-entry accounting, without which the concept of ‘balancing the budget’ makes no sense. The Roman Republic did not have anything that really corresponds to “officialdom” – there was no standing bureaucracy and most public offices were held for short terms by aristocratic figures like Cicero himself. And foreign aid was not something the Romans went in for. On the other hand, if you wanted a statement that perfectly encapsulated the views of a large group of Americans in the late 20th century, when this quote seems to have surfaced, you couldn’t do much better than this.
At a minimum, there’s some free translation being used here. But my guess is that the quote is entirely bogus. Does anyone have any info?
Instant update Yet again, Alan from Southerly Buster comes to my rescue. He writes: Everyone reliable seems to agree the Cicero quote is bogus. So is the Petronius quote.
MRD
Over at Troppo Armadillo, Wayne Wood, discussing Beazley’s contribution to a defence conference, says
Well he would say that wouldn’t he ? (wasn’t that first said by someone else that had something to do with Profumo ?)
This immortal line was indeed first uttered by Mandy Rice-Davies, who is now, I discover, a grandmother living in the United States.
I’ve often thought that a great deal of space could be saved if utterly predictable false statements by politicians and others were replaced by the simple notation MRD. For example, when a political leader is asked whether they are concerned about his or her followers plotting a spill, any response other than “Yes, and I plan to get them before they get me!” could just be reported as “MRD”.
John Quiggin 