Putting his money where his mouth is

John Quiggin1 Comment

The SMH has the news that Malcom Turnbull has managed to interest Wizard Home Loans in the idea of home equity loans. I was a member of the academic panel of the PMs Task Force, organised by Turnbull looking into this idea. Most of the actual work was done by Christopher Joye, a livewire young economist who’s currently with the Menzies Institute.

The home equity proposal has been widely criticised as likely to further inflate the housing bubble. This is only true if financial institutions are willing to buy equity at inflated prices, as opposed to lending to individuals.I commented on all this in my most recent opinion piece in the Fin, which I have now posted on the Website. An excerpt

The home equity proposal put forward by the Taskforce may also be seen as a kind of insurance [against falling house prices]. Instead of paying a cash premium, homebuyers would forgo part of any possible gains in return for sharing the risk of declining prices with an equity partner. Once again the willingness, or otherwise, of banks to enter such deals may be seen as a financial market judgement about the sustainability of current prices.

It now appears that Turnbull is going to put his money where his mouth is on this one.

Also on the website is a piece on road safety from 5 June much of which I roadtested here on the blog before taking it out for a spin in print. Thanks again to everyone who commented.

Update The SMH story has caused a bit of a fuss about whether it is (or would be) appropriate to use the results of publicly-sponsored research in this way. I don’t see a problem myself. In any case, I got the following email from Malcolm Turnbull indicating that the issue may be moot

The SMH story is quite a beat up I am afraid. The position is that Wizard is keen to investigate whether a commercial product can be developed which implements some of the ideas in the MRC paper. I have not offered to finance Wizard products nor, as the story stated, am I negotiating to do so.

Monday Message Board

John Quiggin14 Comments

It’s time for the regular Monday Message Board when you have your chance to have your say on any topic whatsoever (as always, civilised discussion and no coarse language, please).

I’d be interested if any readers wanted to say something about where and why they read this blog.

Philosophical fictions

John Quiggin

Brian Weatherson links to a paper he’s written with the title ‘ imaginative resistance”. It’s about the fact that, whereas it’s easy to imagine fictional events, people and so on, or to imagine real people and things having properties different from those they actually have, it’s very hard to imagine things as morally right if we believe them to be morally wrong.

It seems to me that there’s an ambiguity here and that it’s precisely this ambiguity that is being used in the majority of the fictional examples that are presented as arguments against consequentialism (and, in particular, utilitarianism). The way these examples work is that we are asked to imagine a situation in which a given action has good consequences (when we know that, in reality it has bad consequences). Since this kind of factual shift seems like what we normally do in fiction, it’s assumed [falsely, I claim] that we can do this without damaging our capacity to reason intuitively. But now, it’s pointed out, acceptance of consequentialism would imply that the action is good, when our intuition tells us it’s bad. Hence, consequentialism must be wrong.

All of this is telling us more about the limits of intuitive moral reasoning than about the reasonableness or otherwise of consequentialism.

Plagiarism or hommage?

John Quiggin1 Comment

This Salon review of horror flick 28 Days Later asserts that whereas

. the classic British dystopian sci-fi novels of J.G. Ballard and John Wyndham as influences, and they’re in there, all right …. [but] George A. Romero’s “Living Dead” trilogy, specifically the underrated third entry “Day of the Dead,” is so closely emulated here that parts of “28 Days Later” feel like a shameless rip-off.

In fact, the plot, as described in the review, is a carbon copy of Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (except with zombies instead of carnivorous walking plants). The film version of this was pretty lame as I recall, but the book was excellent.

My question is, can a film be a shameless ripoff of two completely different sources at the same time? I guess it can be if it takes the plot from one and the cinematography from another. I don’t think I’ll bother going to find out, though.

Regularisation

John Quiggin11 Comments

On the cover of today’s Sun-Herald magazine is a story about the Crown Prince of Nepal who slayed his entire family. My immediate reaction was that the subeditor was asleep on the job, but then I thought that perhaps the language had been regularised and I hadn’t noticed. A search on the Fairfax site showed a dozen other instances of slayed, and Google produced 25 000.

I looked for the formerly standard slew and came up with another problem. There were over 700 000 hits, but most of those on the front page used the word as a synonym for large number. Along with raft used in this way, this is something I don’t remember until recently. My guess is that it comes from idiomatic American usage, and has been popularised by journalists looking for short and snappy synonyms. Rather than do any work to check this, I’ll wait for my readers to set me straight (isn’t blogging great!). Just to complicate things further, there’s an engineering use as a verb roughly equivalent to slide around which has gone through the usual processes of adjectivalisation and nominalisation so that it’s now a generic part of speech.

After this, I checked on slain which is unambiguous and, as a past participle, more prone to regularization than the past tense slew. I got 750 000 hits there, suggesting that slayed is still a minority usage.

What I'm reading

John Quiggin7 Comments

Bad Company: The Cult of the CEO by Gideon Haigh. It’s the latest Quarterly Essay and the first to cover an economic policy issue. Until now, the focus has been on the concerns of the cultural Left (environment, foreign policy, Aboriginal issues). QE encourages responses, and I’m going to submit one on managerialism in general. It’s long, so I’ve included it in the extended entry below. Comments from readers would be much appreciated.

I’m also reading Teach yourself Perl in 21 days by Laura Lemay. I’ve made numerous efforts of this kind over the years, with mixed outcomes. My most successful has been with HTML, also using Lemay’s books. I’m hoping that knowledge of Perl will enable me to improve my blog and even perhaps revive the lost comment threads of past incarnations.

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Taxing times

John Quiggin6 Comments

In the Thursday comments thread “Factory” writes,

One thing I didn’t get about the GST was that it was generally seen as a issue that was owned by the right, but similar tax regimes seem to be the norm in Europe.. hmm..

As I explained here, the reason for this, and for the unpopularity of the GST was that

the Australian advocates of a GST/VAT have tied this change to logically unrelated proposals for a change in the tax mix to give more weight to indirect taxation and for the removal of existing exemptions, notably for food. It is rather as if the advocates of metrication had suggested that the metric system was not worth having unless we also made French the national language and introduced the guillotine.

With the exemption of food, and the associated introduction of the Australian Business Number, the GST has improved the effectiveness of the tax system. The associated income tax cuts made the package as a whole regressive, but not nearly as much so as the previous proposals for a GST (Fightback! and Option C)>

Science and magic

John Quiggin10 Comments

Jason Soon links to this piece by Nicholas Thompson making the point the Republicans are losing the support of scientists, essentially because they ignore expert scientific opinion whenever it doesn’t give them the answers they want (Jack Strocchi also alerted me to this). This blog is running a few months ahead of the Zeitgeist on this one. Back in March, I observed

it’s striking that there is now almost no academic discipline whose conclusions can be considered acceptable to orthodox Republicans. The other social sciences (sociology, anthropology, political science) are even more suspect than economics. The natural sciences are all implicated in support for evolution against creationism, and for their conclusions about global warming, CFCs and other environmental threats. Even the physicists have mostly been sceptical about Star Wars and its offspring. And of course the humanities are beyond the pale.

Of course the same is true in Australia, most notably with respect to the global warming ‘sceptics’ (more accurately described as credulous believers in the handful of scientific Pollyannas who tell them wha they want to hear) of the Lavoisier Group. And even creationism is now finding a home among the Quadrant group, though people like McGuinness would no doubt take some sort of Straussian line on this that it’s good for ordinary folk to believe in the literal truth of the Bible, even though sophisticates like Paddy are above such nonsense.

Thought for Thursday

John Quiggin6 Comments

Jason Soon linked to Alan Woods’ review of Shiller’s The New Financial Order a little while ago, so I thought I’d post mine, published a couple of weeks ago in the Fin. I can’t resist bragging that Shiller said it was the best review of the book he had read. It’s much longer than my usual so I’ve put it in the extended entry below.

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