Scaling error

John Quiggin4 Comments

This CS Monitor story reports that morale among US troops in Iraq has “hit rock bottom”. I used to use this phrase in relation to the university I worked at during the Kemp-Vanstone era, but then realised it was a mistaken metaphor, since it implies a zero level. In fact, no matter how low morale is, it can always go lower.

In relation to Iraq, the inapplicbility of the metaphor the current situation is clear. The griping reported in the story is nothing compared to, say, Vietnam, where desertion and ‘fragging’ (murder of officers, with the weapon of choice being a fragmentation grenade) were routine events [there was an isolated case of this kind during the Iraq war, but nothing since].

But it’s hard to see any alternative to a long occupation or any way that morale among the occupying forces can go, other than down. For a successful war of liberation, what was needed was multilateral support, ideally including support from Islamic countries willing to supply peacekeeping forces, and an internationally recognised alternative government ready to take over in a relatively short period.

Behind the curve

John Quiggin

Maureen Dowd has never really got back into her groove since the end of the Clinton culture wars, a topic she made her own. This NYT column (reproduced in today’s SMH), criticises the Bush administration as suffering from attention deficit disorder. The same metaphor was circulating in the blog world nearly a year ago, as this post illustrates.

What I'm reading, and more

John Quiggin2 Comments

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, one of the books recommended to me by readers, and, until now, a surprising omission on my part. I’m enjoying it very much. I’m also reading Gensler’s Introduction to Logic (‘You should have done that before you started blogging’, I hear you all say), from which I’m hoping to tighten up my understanding of modal logic.

Today I went to Southbank to see the Bonnard exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery. As a successor to the Impressionists, Bonnard was among the last painters who filled the role created by the 19th century notion of the artist in a fairly unselfconscious fashion, making some innovations in technique without adopting innovation for its own sake. After about 1910, we get the disaster of ‘modern art’, based on the assumption that formal innovations are necessary to artistic greatness and that success in the game of ‘epater le bourgeois’ (shock the middle-classes) is the test of sufficiency.

Finally, this afternoon I took my son and a friend to see ‘The Matrix Reloaded’. Good fun, in a RoadRunner vs Wile E Coyote kind of way, but, as so often, a good argument against sequels.

Reverse migration

John Quiggin1 Comment

Gianna has taken the (as far as I know unique) step of moving from MT back to Blogger. She hasn’t being deliberately contrary, as is evidenced by the fact that she’s joined the trend to an open mike posting, my most successful (well, my only successful) technical innovation in blogging.

A record of failure

John Quiggin2 Comments

As part of my research on higher ed, I checked out statistics on student numbers and other things collected by DEST. A particularly striking figure is that on commencements by non-overseas students. This series rises steadily until 1996 (to about 230 000) then stops.

Here’s the table

1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000
194,746 200,709 206,202 221,531 233,310 232,890 229,420 231,392 231,992 237,960

Commencements are a more sensitive indicator of responses to policy changes than student numbers, and this certainly tells the story of human capital investment under the present government, or at least in the Kemp period covered by the data set.

Over the same period, the number of Full-Time Equivalent academic staff actually declined, continuing a decline in staff-student ratios that began under Labor (the picture is worse than it looks at first glance because overseas student numbers have been rising).

So, we’ve got a smaller proportion of the population going to university, and receiving a lower-quality education. This is the same story as we got from reform of school education in the early 1990s notably under the Kennett and Olsen governments. Whatever short-run improvements in measured productivity have been extracted from micro-economic reform will be more than offset by lower investment in human capital.

Slow blogging

John Quiggin9 Comments

In a post from the dim dark past (June 28, 2003) Chris Sheil wrote

Although Iâm only very new to this medium, it is obvious that the dynamism of blogosphere is incredible. Most blog-hosts seem to feel a need to add at least one fresh post to their site each day to retain their readership. If the issue upon which they post is hot, comments will come a-flying, links will come a-pinging and, before you know it, the debate will become a control freakâs nightmare. In the case of a hot issue, it is simply not possible to have an influence at every point where the matter begins breaking. The difficulty of contributing is then compounded by the press of fresh posts, which usually means comment windows close in a day or three or four, as the posts slip into the archives.

I’ve been frustrated by this, especially as I’m finding that time pressure (aka having a life) is slowing down my responses and my posting more generally. So I’m going to try a new approach, for a while, of which this post is an instance, responding to news stories and other blogs on a scale of weeks rather than hours. Perhaps this will produce more considered responses, perhaps not.

In another attempt to reduce pressure for immediacy, I removed my hit counter when I shifted to MT. On the other hand, I now get email alerts of new comments, so I don’t know how much this has done to reduce the compulsive aspect of blogging.

New books

John Quiggin6 Comments

My first order of books from Amazon, largely selected on the basis of recommendations from readers, has just arrived. A couple arrived a few days earlier, including Economical Writing by Deirdre McCloskey, which I have already read. Very enjoyable, though I can’t bring myself to accept her advice to abandon the “roadmap” para which ends the introduction to all my articles. Her view is that it’s meaningless until you’ve read the article, and useless once you have done so. I agree with this if you only read the article once. But I find this kind of para useful when rereading my own articles and those of others.

Anyway, thanks to all who made suggestions and a reminder that I’m always keen to get recommendations for reading on almost any topic.

Going with the flow

John Quiggin8 Comments

In a piece worthy of Bjorn Lomborg, perennial environmental Pollyanna Alan Moran quotes stats in yesterday’s Fin (subscription required) to prove that everything is roses with the Murray-Darling and that the the sacred property rights of irrigators should not be interfered with. Here’s an extract

Upstream of Morgan in South Australia, salinity levels have been reduced over the past 20 years, and now are at the levels observed in 1938 when salinity was first measured.

Hence, for 1500 kilometres, the river’s agriculture has not adversely affected salinity, which is evident only for the last 200 kms in South Australia.

Similarly, there is no data to support claims that river usage is threatening to eradicate native animals and plants. In fact, the Murray Darling Basin Commission has only recently embarked on a systematic appraisal of the environmental health of the system.

Hence there is little evidence to justify a need for drastically curtailing productive agricultural uses of the river to bolster environmental flows designed, for example, to flush out salt and increase floods of forested areas.

Yet a chorus of voices wants Murray Darling water to be redirected from productive uses to such flows. Simon Crean has endorsed plans to divert 1500 gigalitres, some 20 per cent of the irrigators’ water in the Murray system, to environmental flows.

There are so many distortions here that it’s hard to know where to begin. But the biggest one, and a standard Lomborg tactic, is that Moran tries to argue against environmental policies by pointing to improvements generated by those very policies. As the Murray-Darling Basin Commission points out, significant reductions in salinity have been achieved only since 1990, when a Cap was imposed halting growth in extractions and thereby restricting rights previously exercised or assumed by irrigators (these rights are and were various and complex, and can’t be treated as inalienable private property rights in the simplistic fashion posited by Moran). I’ll be posting more on this in the future as my research gets into higher gear.

Thought for Thursday

John Quiggin3 Comments

My column in today’s AFR (subscription required) is about financing renewed investment in universities. Here’s an extract.

What is needed is a large-scale capital injection. In a budgetary environment still dominated by cash accounting, this is unlikely to be provided out of general revenue. However, there is one big asset associated with the university sector that could be used to finance new investment. The student debt accumulated under HECS amounts to between $5 billion and $10 billion, depending on how it is valued.

This debt is treated as an asset of the commonwealth but it ought to be regarded as a contribution to the university system from graduates. Bonds secured against the HECS debt and serviced by the associated flow of HECS repayments could be used to finance new investment in higher education, repairing the shortfalls of the past decade. To ensure equitable access to funds, universities could be aggregated into funding groups, each representing a mix of university types (old-established sandstones, former institutes of technology, former CAEs, regional universities and so on) with different endowments of assets.

Although borrowing against the HECS debt would provide a flow of investment funds in the medium term, it would not change the fact that, ultimately, public expenditure must be financed by taxation. HECS repayments used to service higher education bonds would not be paid into general revenue as at present.

More than any other activity undertaken by society, education embodies the obligations of each generation to the next. Explicit recognition of student contributions as a basis for future investment in education, rather than a mere user charge for consumption of current services, would contribute to social cohesion as well as yielding a social return as high or higher than any alternative investment available to governments or individuals.

Update Andrew Norton disputes my claim about social cohesion. I don’t see a need to change what I’ve written in response.