Now that I’m back in sunny Queensland I need a sunshield for the windscreen of my car. So I dragged out the one I bought when I lived in the US ten years ago. On the back, along with the patent numbers etc, it bears the warning DO NOT DRIVE WITH SHIELD IN PLACE

I wonder, did someone actually do this and sue them, or do consumer products companies have staff paid to think of really dumb ways their customers could injure themselves.

Bruce Wolpe has an interesting comparison of Australian and American responses to terrorist attacks, noting that Australia is a place where the pursuit of happiness is taken seriously. I mentioned a while ago that Australia could do with our own version of the First Amendment. If we ever become a republic, it would be nice if we could manage a founding document that could bear comparison with the Declaration of Independence.

Monday messages have been very successful, but people tend to stop commenting once the post falls halfway down the page. So I’ve decided to go bi-weekly with this feature. You can post your thoughts on any topic in the comments thread for this post (civilised discussion and no coarse language).

My suggested starter – what can I do to improve this blog? Suggestions that I should get someone else to write it will not be entertained.

I’m making painstaking progress with transferring my website to UQ. Here’s the promised review of Lessig.

An interesting sidelight is that my ANU website had absolute addresses (that is, the complete URL) whereas the orthodoxy says you should have relative addresses to make transfers easy. The positive result is that having copied my homepage to the UQ site, all the links to files at ANU still work. I’m not sure if this refutes the standard argument for relative addresses, but it certainly tips the balance a bit.

A great piece from the unsilenceable Salman Rushdie. Just above it on the NYT Op-Ed page, Thomas Friedman’s piece on similar lines isn’t bad, but looks tired by comparison.

As the comments thread for a recent post made clear, the most notable single representative of the Keating era elite consensus (free-market economic reform and aggressive social progressivism) has been Paul Kelly’s Australian. Today’s editorial plaintively asserts that “Howard must revive that reform feeling”. It starts out with a standard bold generality “A secure economic future for Australia demands bold policy initiatives and a new wave of structural reforms that will help create wealth in which all Australians can share. ” But all that’s proposed is the dead duck of Telstra privatisation (a ‘bold’ proposal that’s been floating around for 15 years or so) and tax-welfare reform along the lines of the Five Economists’ plan that the government rejected three or four years ago.

For good or ill, the free-market reform agenda is essentially played out. The big action in the future will be in health and education, areas where there is no serious proposal for a fully market-oriented solution and where a range of partial market-oriented reforms have repeatedly failed to deliver the goods.

And while I think Howard’s success in changing the terms of debate on social issues has been greatly overstated, it’s clear that top-down elitism of the kind exemplified by Keating is, and will remain, on the nose with the Australian public with respect to both social and economic issues.

Janet Albrechtsen attacks as un-American those Australians who would like to work European hours like the 35 per week that was until recently, within 10 per cent of the Australian full-time norm. Her boilerplate about European sclerosis and poor employment growth sounds as if it has been recycled from 1999, when the dynamic US economy was creating jobs at a steady clip and we were promised a never-ending boom.

But there is something new in this sentence “It [the union movement] champions a collectively dumb group-think vision that reflects an unease over the natural layering that emerges from disparities in talent.” The repetitive abuse of ‘collectively dumb group-think vision’ alerts us that something special is on the way, and we are not disappointed. Growing inequality has now become ‘natural layering’. Good one, Janet!

By the way, this is my first post from my new office at the University of Queensland. Normal service should be restored soon.

In the long comments thread below, Ken Parish makes the point that the observed rate of global warming over the past few decades has been about 0.2 degrees C per decade, and that the IPCC and others (including some Ken has cited with approval) suggest that about half of this is due to human activity, mainly the emission of greenhouse gases. The rest reflects factors such as the cyclical fluctuations that led to warming in the first part of the 20th century and cooling in mid-century. (There are both higher and lower estimates of the share due to global warming, but half seems reasonable, especially when we compare the recent rapid warming to the more gradual warming and cooling observed in the past).

The simplest way to interpret these numbers is to suppose that there are no lags, sinks or feedbacks, so that current emissions feed directly and immediately into increases in global concentrations of greenhouse gases and then, also directly, into higher temperatures. On this basis, a continuation of the late 20th century rate of emissions would imply a temperature increase of 1 degree C, which seems unlikely to cause major disasters.

But of course, under business as usual, emissions will not remain stable. If no mitigation policies are adopted, it seems likely that emissions will at least double over the next 50 years suggesting warming of at least 2 degrees C.

Now lets think about lags, sinks and feedbacks. To the extent that lags and sinks are important, and that sinks are gradually filled, the final impact of CO2 emissions will be greater than the initial impact. Thus, if emissions stabilise at a high level, temperatures will keep rising. This again supports a higher estimate of damage. It’s hard to estimate, but I’d suggest that this supports a baseline business as usual estimate of around 2.5 degrees C.

Feedbacks can go in either direction. The IPCC argues that positive feedbacks will dominate, critics such as Richard Lindzen disagree. I find the arguments too complex to resolve, so lets call it an even-money bet that feedbacks will either enhance GW by 50 per cent or reduce it by 50 per cent. On this basis, it’s about equally likely that the impact will be 1.25 degrees C (not too bad) or 3.75 degrees C, enough to wipe out a wide range of vulnerable ecosystems. (This is spurious precision, but the range of possible outcomes is what matters)

The basic question is whether to start preparing for the bad scenario now (Kyoto) or to wait for more information. If we start preparing and it turns out that things are not as bad as we thought, we incur a cost (about 0.5 per cent of world income on most estimates) for no benefit. On the other hand, if the news is bad, we will be well placed to take the action needed to prevent a disastrous rate of warming.

If we kill Kyoto (negotiated over nearly the whole of the 1990s), wait ten years and then start negotiating an alternative when we get bad news, we will have lost 15-20 years at least, and possibly more. The cost of achieving any given level of atmospheric concentrations will be greatly higher, and the amount of unavoidable damage much greater.

I’ve posted my review of Lawrence Lessig’s new book The Future of Ideas at UQ. It was originally published in the Financial Review which, paradoxically enough given the subject matter, is subscription-only. A short take:

The great paradox of the information age was apparently first summarised in 1984, by Stewart Brand, now with the Sante Fe Institute:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

For many years, enthusiasts for the Internet focused only on one side of this dichotomy. ‘Information wants to be free’ became first a slogan, then a cliché. In the late 1990s, as the idealism of the Internet pioneers was succeeded by the financial madness of the Internet bubble, the paradox intensified. Billions of dollars were sunk into dotcoms based on the belief that vast fortunes could be made out of giving away free information or, in other words, that you could have your Internet cake and eat it too.
On the sidelines of the Internet boom, though, were large and powerful groups who had never believed in free information. The music and motion picture industry had a long history of resisting every new technology or social development that might challenge their absolute control over their product.

To read a lot more on this topic,be sure to visit Kim Weatherall’s blog. She’s finished lectures for the year and is posting lots of interesting stuff.

Update I haven’t managed to get links to files working for the new UQ site. I’ll try and link this ASAP.

Update 2 Ken Parish has a long post on this which I missed in the chaos of my move. He makes the point that it’s a mistake to regard file-sharing services like Napster and Kazaa as heroes of freedom – they’re commercial enterprises which often use dubious money-making methods like spyware.
On the other hand, I think Ken gives too much credence to the concept of intellectual property. The idea that intellectual property is like property in land misses the valid component of the claim that ‘information wants to be free’, namely that information is ‘nonrival’ inuse. If I use your land as a football field, you can’t use it for growing wheat. On the other hand, if I use your idea for a better way of growing wheat, you’re still free to use it and, if I improve on your idea you can copy it. By imposing restrictions on this free use of ideas patents and copyrights are a barrier to innovation and efficiency. On the other hand, by rewarding innovation these devices encourage more innovation (information wants to be expensive because it is valuable and costly to produce). There is a balance that needs to be struck here, and it is not helped by the spurious metaphor of ‘intellectual property’.

PP McGuinness worries about the prospect of rule by an elite band of career bureaucrats along the lines of the French ‘ENArques”, graduates of the Ecole Nationale d”Administration. Given the steady politicisation of the upper ranks of the public service which began with some relatively innocuous moves by the Whitlam government, this is the least of the dangers facing Australia. In fact, we are approaching the point where we need a clear division between ‘career’ and ‘political appointees’, and a convention that the latter go out with the administration that appointed them, as in the US.