This piece by Justinian looks at more failed self-regulation by the NSW and Queensland Law Societies. As the article points out, one of the most clearly beneficial aspects of microeconomic reform has been the replacement of self-regulating government providers of infrastructure services (Water Boards, Electricity Boards and so on) with external regulators separate from the provision of services. This is quite distinct from the ‘purchaser-provider split’, a much more problematic concept. This change is even more important in cases where the states legal powers to regulate have been handed over to private interest groups.

An interesting piece by Hal Varian, quotes Marx, but only to refute him

Don Arthur is always worth reading, but his posts are so lengthy, erudite and tightly argued that I seem never to find the time to write up an adequate response.
In this piece he develops a theme on which I’ve written quite a bit, coining the term “Dooguite left” for those on the left who are concerned about the social consequences of theory-driven free-market reform, and can therefore be correctly described as “socially conservative” (The usual recipients of this tag, are better referred to as “sexually conservative”, since they focus almost exclusively on issues of sex and reproduction).
I wrote about this last year in the Fin. A short take:
“Despite the frequency with which the name of Edmund Burke has been invoked recently, the intellectual tradition of conservatism finds no place in the Liberal party. The central Burkean idea, that social change should be gradual and organic, rather than rapid, top-down and rationalistic, is anathema to radical free-market reformers.”
As the subsequent Tampa episode showed, it’s a mistake to be too dewy-eyed about community and so on. The same values that promote solidarity within the community can be used to generate unreasoning hostility to outsiders.

Writing on ‘rank-and-file’ versus parliamentary control of polititial parties, Ken Davidson writes:
“Journalists have a reputation for libertarian tendencies. But this trait is undermined in political journalism by their preference for “strong” leadership and “tough” decisions. ”
I have noticed this phenomenon among libertarians more generally – for example, lots of libertarians admired Thatcher’s style (not just her policies) and quite a few liked Pinochet. On the other hand, the Catallaxy collective seems much more in the classical liberal spirit of, say, John Stuart Mill. Is there an ideological divide here, similar to that on the left between social democratics and Leninists, or is it just different strokes for different folks? Over to you, Jason.

Why am I not surprised by this?

Verbal arguments about statistical issues always get messy. So rather than have another round of words with Ken Parish, I thought I’d copy in the data from Christy’s graphs, and run the stats. I started checking for trends. As expected, the upward trend in the surface data (0.02 degrees per year) is stronger than that in the satellite data (0.005). More importantly, the upward trend in the surface data is statistically significant. That is, we can reject, with high confidence (above 99 per cent) the hypothesis that there is no trend. For the satellite data, we cannot reject either
(a) the hypothesis that there is no trend
(b) the hypothesis that the trend is the same as for the surface data
That is, as I said, it’s impossible to draw strong inferences from short runs of inconclusive data.
I was struck by the similarity in movements between the two series, which seemed to contradict some of what Christy said about the lack of linkage, so I also regressed the satellite data against the surface data. The slope coefficient was 0.76, and was statistically significant. The meaning of the slope coefficient is that, on average, if surface temperature goes up 1 degree, satellite temperatures go up by 0.76 degrees. We cannot reject the hypothesis that the coefficient is 1, that is that the two temperature series move together in the way predicted by standard global warming theory.
Just for fun, I tried out my suggestion of dropping the first five years. The slope coefficient was 0.95, close enough to 1 to verify my claim that just by eyeballing the data you can see that the two series move together from 1985 onwards.
Of course, the statistical analysis I’ve presented here is very crude, and there are lots of better things you can do with more data and fancier time-series techniques. But it confirms my view that the NAS panel got the story pretty much right when they concluded that:
(i) surface temperatures are rising strongly
(ii) there is no conflict between the surface and satellite data.
When I get time, I’ll try to post a more formal version of this.

Replying to Jason Soon, Tim Dunlop puts his finger on one of the more embarrassing secrets of economics. Although we use the term ‘efficiency’ all the time, we don’t really have a consistent and rigorous definition of what it means for an economic policy to improve efficiency. A typical welfare economics textbook will define an economic situation as Pareto-efficient if there is no other situation that would constitute a Pareto-improvement, that is, make some people better off and no-one worse off. This doesn’t just require technical efficiency in production. It’s also necessary that there be no unexploited gains from trade (often called allocative efficiency)
So a Pareto-improvement would be an improvement in efficiency. But policies that naturally produce Pareto-improvements are as scarce as hen’s teeth. So when economists talk about improvements in efficiency, they are usually talking about one of the following possibilities (neither of which is generally defined in a rigorous fashion)
(a) If the gainers from the policies felt like it, they could fully compensate the losers while remaining better off themselves
(b) If the government chose it could tax the gainers, still leaving them better off, and use the proceeds to fully compensate the losers
Cases like (a) are common, but, in the absence of an outbreak of altruism among the beneficiaries of efficiency-oriented policies, don’t tell us much about the impact of policy changes on the welfare of society as a whole. If a policy change makes all 20 million Australians (but one) $100 poorer and James Packer $2.1 billion richer, it’s not helpful to know he could pay us back and keep $100 000 for himself if he chose.
Cases like (b) are more relevant, but the required analysis to show that a policy satisfies this condition is generally difficult and rarely done.

Like other users of netcomments, I suddenly found that my comment facility wasn’t working and the netcomments.co.uk site had vanished – you get a redirect to a hosting service. I guess this explains why businesses don’t want to trust their vital operations to Application Service Providers (for those who don’t follow fashion, these were the Next Big Thing in mid-2000). Following the lead of Tim Dunlop, I’ve moved to Haloscan – I hope they are better. Talking of Tim, check out his stoush with the Rittenhouse Review. I thought global warming was a hot topic, but I’ll make sure never to mention the Pope.

US Home Sales Surged in July, prompting statements like this:
“A continued solid gain in prices of existing homes — a proxy for housing wealth– suggests that rising home equity will continue to buffer any weakness in equity wealth and sustain household spending,” said Maury Harris, chief economist at UBS Warburg.”
Exactly, the same argument has been pushed by Alan Greenspan.
In economic terms this simply doesn’t stand up. As the name suggests, households live in houses. The services of the housing stock are consumed by households, and any increase in the value of housing for one household is a loss for others. The only way the household sector as a whole can gain from rising house prices is to sell to immigrants or for non-residential use.
It follows that a consumption boom based on rising home prices is, in the words of the Bible, a house built on sand.
(This argument needs to be qualified by the special features of the US mortgage market, discussed below. Arguably, it’s not households who are in trouble but the institutions who lend to them. But the boom is just as unsound either way).

Ken Parish responds to my post on satellites, making a small but important error in doing so. He attributes the view I quoted to the IPCC then makes the reasonable point that, just because you are one of the 2000 scientists who worked on the report doesn’t mean you endorse everything in it. In fact, the statement I quoted was from the report of a panel assembled by the US National of Academy of Sciences specifically to examine the issue of the apparent discrepancy between satellite and ground data. It had 15 members, one of whom was John Christy. Judging by Christy’s evidence to the US Senate, cited by Ken, Christy would not have written exactly the same report as that of the panel, but he signed his name to it nonetheless, and did not append any dissenting notes as he could have done if he wished. I don’t think it’s “fast and loose” to quote a joint report on a specific topic as evidence of one author’s views on that topic.
To illustrate my point about the fragility of arguments based on short time series take a look at the graph (Fig 1) in Christy’s evidence and drop out the first five years. Even eyeballing it, you can see that the discrepancy between the trends would just about disappear. (As drawn, the level of the satellite data is lower, but that’s a graph artifact).