I just got my new version of iTunes which lets you connect directly to the Apple Music Store and download songs at $US0.99 a pop. Except that I got this message
The iTunes Music Store is not available in your country yet. You will be able to browse music and listen to previews (sic), but you won’t be able to purchase music unless your billing address is in the United States.
This is putting Australians on the same level as (gasp …) Windows users.
Nick Minchin doesn’t seem like a fool to me. So why is he the latest to push the idea of reducing the size of the Senate in the hope of securing majority control? This Fin Report (subscription required) has
Federal Finance Minister Nick Minchin has suggested reducing the size of the Senate to make it easier for the coalition to get controversial pieces of legislation through the upper house.
A smaller Senate, and even more, a return to the winner-takes-all system that prevailed for the first few decades after Federation would guarantee that a major party would control the Senate, but this is a lousy idea for a government to proposed. It’s pretty much an even-money bet that the opposition, and not the government, would be the party controlling the Senate.
Whatever complaints Minchin may have about the current Senate, it’s nothing to the situation that previaled last time we had an Opposition-controlled Senate (between 1972 and 1975). Apart from twice forcing the Whitlam government to elections by blocking or threatening to block supply, the Senate was routinely obstructionist to an extent that makes the frustrations Minchin is experiencing seem like fleabites.
Why then is Minchin pushing the idea? In general, proposals to strengthen the executive come from governments that have been in office too long, and forget they will one day be in Opposition. This proposal actually has more dangers for governments than for oppositions, but I suspect it derives from the same mindset.
I have recently experienced a significant relaxation in my research budget constraint. To translate from economese, I have more money to spend (thanks, Brendan!), and one thing I plan to do is to add to my research library. As can be seen from my website my interests are very diverse and it’s not always easy to keep up. So I thought I’d ask for suggestions. They don’t have to be in economics. In fact recommendations for important books in other fields (particularly other social sciences) would be most welcome. But within economics, if there’s a really good book on endogenous growth theory and related topics, I’d be keen for a recommendation.
Although my budget constraint is not too tight at present, my time constraint is very tight, so reading has to provide consumption benefits as well as contributing to my work. Unless it’s absolutely essential, I’m not going to wade through anything that’s badly written, or printed in hard-to-read type on cheap paper.
One thing I’d particularly like to do is to update and extend my maths library, most of which dates back to my undergraduate days in the 1970s. Areas where I’d particularly like a good recommendation include number theory, differential geometry and algebraic topology. I’d also like suggestions for good books on analysis and general topology(currently I have Rudin Functional Analysis, Royden’s Real Analysis , Conway Functions of One Complex Variable Ash Real Analysis and Probability and Dugundji Topology, so I’m looking for something substantially new and improved). And if there are any hot new areas that have developed since the 1970s that I don’t know about, I’d like to find out.
Finally, of course, I’m always keen to have suggestions for new reading of any kind, even if it has no possible relevance to research. Hopefully readers of this blog will have an idea of what I might like.
This long and impressive rant compares the WMD search to a traditional US initiation rite (link via Jim Henley. In tallying up the costs and benefits of the war, the fact that a program of systematic lies was needed to get it started should an important entry in the cost column.
There’s been lots of news from the Middle East recently, some good and some bad. The good news includes the withdrawal of US troops from Saudi Arabia and the presentation of the long-promised ‘roadmap’ for peace between the Palestinians and Israelis.
The bad news includes yet another incident of US troops firing on civilians. This is a reflection of a lack of capacity for peacekeeping rather than deliberate malice but incompetence in an occupying power that has waged a war of aggression is a crime in itself. Even in the postwar period, direct killings of civilians by the US are occurring at a rate that exceeds most estimates of the killings by Saddam’s dictatorship in the years leading up to the war (1-2000 per year under Saddam, or 20-40 per week as opposed to around 50 per week postwar). And the death rate due to the indirect effects of war (leftover munitions, banditry and looting, the destruction of hospitals, damage to water supply etc) are far worse.
How do we balance these things? If the long-term effect of the war is to bring peace, democracy and prosperity to the Middle East as a whole, then the present suffering will prove justified. But if the end result is an authoritarian government marginally better than Saddam’s and a continuation of the current stalemate in Israel-Palestine, the war will ultimately be judged as a crime in the same general category as other wars of aggression, notably those launched by Saddam himself.
The saying that ‘Success has a thousand parents and failure is an orphan’ is nowhere more true than when rules are broken in the hope that the ends will justify the means.
I’ve been using Barnes & Noble’s online bookstore for a while, but now I’m going to switch to Amazon. The reason is simple and annoying. B&N have changed their search facility to give approximate matches. For example a search for “Quiggin” produces over 1000 matches, the top ones being books by/about Quinn, Quin-Harkin, Queen Noor and so on. “John Quiggin” works better, but I don’t always know the first names of authors whose books I want to buy. In any case, I don’t like being treated like a moron
You might think from typing “Quinzii” that you want Magill and Quinzii’s Theory of Incomplete Markets, but our computer says you probably meant Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, illustrated by Quentin Blake. Well, no, I already have that one, I really did mean Quinzii
I tried voice, writing a complaint the first time I ran into this, but I got no response and the system is still the same. so I’m opting for exit.
By contrast, Amazon gives a listing of exact matches and gives alternatives only if there aren’t any exact matches. This is the kind of treatment I prefer.
One of the big questions in the debate over economic growth is whether it enhances human happiness. One of the sources of information commonly used in this debate is derived from answers to questions of the general form ‘On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you?’. This and similar questions have been asked in many countries and over a period of some decades. The ‘stylised facts’ (this is economists’ jargon for the generally accepted summary that characterised the data) are that at any given time and place, people with high incomes are, on average, happier than those with low incomes, but that there’s not much difference between poor countries and rich ones and no significant trend in happiness levels over time.
This evidence has been used to support two kinds of claims
(i) Growth in economic output has been offset by losses in other, equally important sources of happiness such as clean environments or social cohesion
(ii) People’s happiness is primarily determined by their relative position rather than by absolute levels of consumption
I don’t want to debate the merits of these claims right now, but to point out that data of the kind I’ve described is of no use in assessing them. Starting with the second claim, some sort of relative assessment is forced on respondents by the form of the question. The only sensible way to answer the question is to assign 10 to the happiest people you know or can imagine, and compare yourselves to them (the point at which you would consider yourself better off dead arguably provides a natural zero).
So, if I go from a place where everyone is gloomy and depressed to one where everyone is happy (and adjust so that I no longer think about the gloomy people I used to know) my stated score is likely to decline. This will be true even if I’m actually happier myself – apart from the fact that I’m altruistically happy that other people are happy, I just find that gloomy people get me down. That is, the form of the question makes it look as though people are concerned about their relative position, even if they’re not.
So, if the measure provided is inherently local and relative, it can’t be used for comparisons over time or between groups of people with different reference points.
Jason Soon recently cited a piece by Richard Layard in which he tried to bolster the status of claim (ii) by observing that the results of happiness surveys were consistent with ‘objective’ measures obtained by brain scans. This argument doesn’t work, at least in the absence of time-series measures of brain scans. All it shows is that self-reported assessments of happiness give a local and relative answer consistent with the local and relative answer given by brain scans.
Functional analysis by Rudin. I needed to check something for work but then I saw that Rudin had a proof of the prime number theorem using Riemann’s zeta function. It’s one of the great ironies of mathematics that a simple statement about the integers is most naturally proved by applying abstract analytical techniques to a function of complex numbers, and I decided I had to see how it was done, which entailed working through the theory of Fourier transforms and distributions.
There are ‘elementary’ proofs, most notably by Pal Erdos, that only use ordinary number theory, but elementary does not mean ‘easy’ in this context. I plan to try and work through one of the elementary proofs some time.
This reminds me to mention that my Erdos number is 3 (via Peter Wakker and Peter Fishburn). At a stretch, this blog could be claimed as a collaborative work, in which case all my commentators would obtain an Erdos number of 4 – highly prized in some circles.
*Thanks to my travels, everything is running behind. So I’ve skipped this week’s Word for Wednesday, and put in last weeks Sunday feature instead
I spent much of last week in the Snowy Mountains with my family (the Powerbook came too, of course, so I kept up at least some blogging). It was the first time we’d been back since the devastating fires in January. Large areas are still closed off, and signs of fire are everywhere. Fire is a natural part of the lifecycle of a eucalypt forest, and signs of regeneration were already evident in many of the places we visited. But some of my favorite spots, such as the mountain ash forests around Round Mountain, are probably gone for good. This is the second fire in twenty years and it’s unlikely that new seed has been set. Even if they do come back, it will be decades before they regain anything like their former state.
As is inevitable with such a disaster, fingers have been pointed in all directions, notably at the National Parks and Wildlife Service for not burning off vigorously enough and at global warming for the extreme severity of the drought and hot weather conditions that led to the fire disaster. I’m keeping an open mind on the relationship between drought and global warming. Looking at the way the fire burnt through grassland as well as bush, I’m doubtful that any regime of controlled burning could have mitigated this fire much, unless it was so extreme as to fundamentally change the character of the Park.
Tim Lambert has produced yet more evidence of academic malfeasance by pro-gun economist John Lott. Kevin Drum at Calpundit has more. Since I was convinced long ago that Lott was discredited beyond any hope of redemption, the only point of remaining interest is the collateral damage being incurred by Lott’s allies and defenders.
Obviously, the once-respected American Enterprise Institute, which still employs Lott, is at the top of the list. Having had my own run-in with its current head Karl Zinsmeister, I agree with Brad de Long, whom I cited a while ago saying “Back in the late 1970s, the American Enterprise Institute ranked close to the Brookings Institution as a thinktank you could trust not to deliberately lie to you. Now it has fallen very deeply into the pit indeed”. No doubt some good work is still being done at AEI, but the AEI stamp now detracts from credibility rather than adding to it.
Another casualty is Lott’s Australian co-author, and gun rights advocate, John Whitley, who ended up with his name on an article that Lott himself refused to sign off on when the other party in a dispute pointed out a string of coding errors (Tim Lambert, linked above, has the details).
But the biggest not-so-innocent bystander to be hit by friendly fire is surely the king of the blogworld, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit. Having cut his blogging teeth on the Bellesiles scandal (the discrediting of a widely-acclaimed piece of research seen as favorable to gun control), and having ferociously attacked those on the anti-gun side who failed to dissociate themselves from Bellesiles, Reynolds has consistently given Lott the benefit of the doubt, and has even, in a dispute between Lott and respected economist Steve Levitt, been implicated in Lott’s slimy manoeuvres (again, see Tim Lambert for the complex and gory details). Clearly all that rhetoric about ‘fact-checking your ass’ only applies to those who come up with the wrong conclusions.
Update Jason Soon reports that Steve Levitt has just been awarded the John Bates Clark medal for the best US economist under 40 (Paul Krugman is a previous winner, and it’s often seen as a harbinger of a future Nobel). So I guess he won’t be too worried by anything Lott and Reynolds have to say about him. Tom Spencer has more.
