Politics is a difficult game

I rarely mention Bill Shorten, but after last night's reply to the Budget, it's time that I did.

First, as a politician, I feel neutral about him.   He did come out strong when he was first making a name for himself, but it was later clear he was undergoing some terrible stress from being caught up in the Rudd/Gillard wars (as well as from a not insubstantial amount of turbulence in his personal life.)  

Some people find his delivery now too often "mannered", and I can see where they are coming from; but bloody hell, we had a three word sloganeering, unprincipled, windvane of an Opposition leader who got the top job, which I find more offensive than some flat "zingers".

As for his performance this year - he's caught in the perennial problem of how much firm policy an Opposition can announce ahead of an election without risking it being semi-adopted (or flaws exploited) by the government of the day.

I thought the speech last night was praiseworthy for having some actual content (unlike Abbott's speeches in reply), but man, it is such a dangerous game for Labor to be talking about any form of new spending without being 100% clear about its funding.

As for the aim of lowering small business tax rate to 25% - despite my ridiculing of Laffer, and the race to the bottom in tax rates that small government types refuse to acknowledge - I don't actually dispute that there may be room for corporate tax to reduce given the international comparisons.  It is a bit weird for Labor to be sounding like Laffer endorsers, although I see that Shorten wasn't talking about the overall tax rate for companies.  And listening to Bowen on the radio this morning, he did say Labor acknowledges that "it is not easy" to get to that rate, and hence the need for bipartisanship, and I guess that sounds like they are at least not being simplistic about all tax cuts paying for themselves. 

In a general sense, though, unlike the "say anything" and frankly anti-science approach of this government, I find it hard to credit that people don't think that Labor at least sounds like a party that genuinely thinks about the role government policy can take in moving the economy into new directions, with their emphasis on education and investment in technology.   The Abbott government thinks the future lies in roads and new dams in Northern Australia, and the future will look after itself.   (It's like the Ord River project never happened.)

On the other hand, one thing that concerns me about Labor is there reflexive objection to any increase to the GST.  If you ask me, a modest increase to 12.5% would not kill consumers but immediately raise substantial amounts:

Based on 2014-15 data, each 1 per cent extra on the GST would raise about $5.4 billion (increasing to $6.4 billion in 2017-18), meaning a hike in the GST rate from the current 10 per cent to, say, 15 per cent would add more than $25 billion per year to government revenue, escalating to more than $30 billion per annum within three years - if nothing else changed.

I really wish Labor would reconsider their position on this, but as I say, politics is a difficult game.

At least the major parties are both realists as far as being prepared to look at revenue measures (Hockey and his attempt at recovering more tax from transnationals, for example;  although his hit on the already exploited class of young international workers who live on gruel and $5 a day while picking fruit - I think I barely exaggerate - seems a very odd priority.)   Labor is on a sensible line in its desire to gain some revenue from the wealthy with millions of dollars in superannuation.   I suppose that's a vaguely optimistic note to end on.

Quite a bit of confidence in it this time around

El Nińo 2015: Largest ever?

Here's a good article summarising the confidence forecasters now have that 2015 will have a strong El Nino.  And the consequences include possible heavy rain for Southern California, which would be good for dried up reservoirs, but may not end longer term drought:

 For those hoping for an end to the drought, multi-year rainfall deficits in California are now so huge that even a very wet year likely wouldn’t erase them. What’s more, heavy El Niño rainstorms frequently come to California via tropical atmospheric river events,
also known as the Pineapple Express. While those rains can help fill dwindling reservoirs, they’re often too warm to produce significant snowpack in the mountains—which is crucial for agricultural needs during the following summer.

So remember that for later in the year when Andrew Bolt claims that climatologists were wrong about the California drought.

I wonder if the heavy rain that it usually brings to parts of South America can reach over to the other side of the continent too, to help drought ravaged Sao Paulo?  (Speaking of which,  I see that an area close to that city has a terrible crime problem.  I kind of assumed it was a safer place than that.  And this article is an interesting take on the drought:
São Paulo water crisis shows the failure of public-private partnerships.

For the "tax land" fans out there

The land tax: What happened to towns like Fairhope, Alabama, that tried Georgism.

A somewhat interesting look at what happened in a few places in America that tried a radically different idea for raising tax.

The future for Andrew Bolt

Yay for Daley

A 'dull and routine' budget that relies on group denial

That John Daley really has a knack for clear writing and explanation on the economy.  (OK, there's another Grattan Institute co-author on this as well.  Sorry Danielle.)

This article confirms what virtually everyone - except this chronically dissembling "say anything" government - knows:  this budget forecasts a return to surplus on a timetable that would be a fluke if it's achieved.

It also shows a government that has incredible inconsistency.  What a great summary Daley and Wood give here:

As well as asking people to accept these rosy assumptions, the budget
also requires impressive mental gymnastics to reconcile this year’s
budget with last year’s rhetoric.

Last year the government said everyone should contribute to the task
of budget repair through a range of unpopular budget measures. One year
later and many of those measures have either been abandoned (GP
co-payments, pension indexation and six-month waiting periods for
Newstart allowance) or are unlikely to pass the Senate (changes to
Family Tax Benefits and higher education reforms). Some groups –
particularly small business – are simply winners.

Last year Tony Abbott was the “infrastructure Prime Minister”. In
this year’s budget, Commonwealth spending on transport infrastructure
falls from 0.5% of GDP in 2015-16 to 0.3% in 2018-19. The largest
addition to infrastructure spending is for the Northern Australia
Infrastructure Facility, which will only cost .02% of GDP per year, and
even that relies on the government finding commercial partners yet to be
identified.

Last year, a “gold standard” paid parental scheme was a “signature
policy”. This year, parental leave payments are in effect being cut for
those who already receive them from their employer.

Last year, we were told that government was too large and spending
was too high. This budget proposes four years in which Commonwealth
spending will be a greater proportion of GDP than all but the two years
of financial crisis under the Rudd-Gillard governments.

Last year we were told this government would fix the budget through
spending reductions, not higher taxes. This year, budget repair is
supposed to result primarily from the tax take increasing by 1.7% of GDP
in four years.

But the greatest cognitive dissonance comes from the government’s fundamental approach to budget repair. While doing nothing was not an option in the face of the “debt and deficit disaster” a year ago, the government has done precisely that. This budget recognises that 2014-15 will be much worse than forecast in last year’s budget. It is probably sensible to slow the pace of budgetary repair in the face of a weakening economy. However, if the recovery forecast for 2016-2018 is as strong as the budget forecasts, then there needs to be substantially more budget repair in these later years. Australia cannot afford otherwise.

  

Just for the record...

...I find it hard to understand the appeal of the Mad Max films.   Post apocalyptic grubby, ugly, violent worlds leave me completely cold, and wishing that all concerned would just have a good bath.  (It's not just desert based films that have this problem - I was recently watching part of Waterworld and wondering how many people didn't like it because of the Costner's unwashed looks - even though he had plenty of ocean to swim in.)

It looks like the revival of the Max series is getting very strong reviews, and I have read that it has much more stunt work that is obviously real than found in many CGI infested films these days.   I suppose that's a good thing, given my complaints along those lines over the years, but I still have no interest in the peculiar genre it inhabits.   And if it is a good movie, it sure isn't reflected in the trailers, which looked completely un-engaging.  

The "say anything" government

This budget has all the features typical of Tony Abbott - opportunistic, unprincipled, a genuine unreliable windvane prepared to say whatever he thinks will go down well with the audience in front of him at the time.

As I understand it, the serious cuts to health from last budget are unaddressed, and I haven't heard anything about the fate of university funding.  The government is hoping that other stupid ideas that sprang from nowhere last budget are quickly forgotten (making young unemployed starve for 6 months being one of the most prominent ones.)

As many people are saying (even those on opposite sides of economics commentary - such as Judith Sloan and Ian Verrender), the budget is in many respects like a Swan one - forecasting return to surplus on assumptions that everyone thinks are brave, very brave.  In Hockey's case, they are not just the guesstimates on increasing national growth and international stability, but also that he can get measures through the Senate.  And bracket creep is to do so much of the lifting, while the retired rich on superannuation are being promised they won't lose their tax free income.  Yeah, that's fair...

As with any government, it's virtually impossible for them to not come up with some decent measure, so the tightening of pension assets tests is hard to criticise.   

But the overriding thing is the way this government changes rhetoric and policies with wild inconsistency.   (And then has the gall to pretend it hasn't really changed much.)  

Contrarian for a living

I've been looking around at some Lomborg stuff, given the continued complaints by the Australian that the University of WA decided it didn't really want to host a contrarian after all.

Media Watch noted that Lomborg very recently came out complaining about international subsidies for fossil fuels - a very Green Party position it would seem.  Yet his views about the poorest of the poor needing to burn coal to lift them out of poverty have been on high rotation for the last couple of years too.  [Oddly, a short video shows him talking about the - very real - problem of bad health caused by indoor fires for cooking:  yet his segue from that is not the simplest one (make sure they have cheap ovens that use chimneys - I saw something about this on TV or the net  recently) but the big one about them needing fossil fuels.]

And I don't think he has ever changed his position that climate change needs a lot of research money put into clean energy.  (Although I think he is now leaning to promoting carbon capture after burning fossil fuel  - which has been proving to be as impractical as skeptics always thought it would.)   Somehow, I can't quite see how this is a natural match to his "the poor need coal" line - or at least, does he mean they need more expensive and innovative coal power stations in Africa than even the American's can get to be cost effective?

As Desmog blog notes, Lomborg has been personally doing OK out of his "consensus" pet projects, and there is no doubt he is favoured by the rich, libertarian leaning Right regardless of things he sometimes says that are Green tinged.

Which leads me back to a comment made by someone in Media Watch, which I think likely summarises him accurately:

Bjorn Borg's talent is game theory. He will play the two sides of the narrative to create confusion. Once you understand his end game, you are trapped neither by your own narrative of climate change being a left right issue, nor by Lomborg's manipulation of the narrative. He is a double dog whistler that sets both sides barking at each other
This is what is important:

1. He is selling to Abbott and co. the promise of confusion around climate policy through the emphasis on other areas.

2. He is selling the opposite to the media so that he can present a misinterpretation of his stance and extend the attention he receives.
3. Everything he has contributed and continues to contribute is of a lower quality than the research and academic standards that are on offer. The government can find better people to ask better questions and get better answers with less money. But it chooses confusion.

Once you understand Game theory, his trickery becomes transparent, and even slightly hamfisted application of it to create the simple goal of confusion and inaction.

Keep directors away from fiddling

I am pretty sure that I only ever saw Blade Runner at the cinema on its original release and never got around to watching it again on VHS or DVD - until last night.

I was aware that the Director's Cut was controversial - friends told me years ago they didn't like it as much as the original, but it seems it is all you can get easily get now.  (That or the "Final Cut", which I gather keeps all the deficiencies of the Directors Cut, but at slightly greater length.)

And boy, are the Director's Cut skeptics right, or what?

The film is not that easily followed without the voice over that Scott complained was forced on him.  And while it's hard to recognise exactly which scenes are new, it drags in a way I certainly do not recall the cinema version did.  I started nodding off, and my son complained he didn't really get the plot.  (I think he could sort of follow the overriding plot - but the film seems not to adequately explain itself at the smaller scale - from one scene to the next.) 

More broadly, it's hard to remember a film which a Director's Cut has improved, isn't it?  Even Spielberg can't be trusted when it comes to this - I prefer the cinema version of Close Encounters to the Special Edition. 

The lesson is that studio enforced changes are sometimes right - and directors need to leave close enough alone.  Especially Ridley Scott...

Oh dear, they didn't get their fair haired boy

Gee, did Rupert send out a message or something that every columnist who has ever written for him has to complain how anti-intellectual it is for an Australian University not to go with providing an outlet for the lukewarmist's favourite fair haired boy, Bjorn Lomborg?

We've got Ergas and Wilson having a whinge today.  Funny thing about Wilson, but his spectacularly self congratulating on line bio has long stated that he's:

Currently completing a Graduate Diploma of Energy and the Environment (Climate Science and Global Warming) at Perth’s Murdoch University.

which I always thought was kind of odd coming from someone willing to get paid by Australia's pre-eminent "think tank" devoted to convincing people that climate change either isn't real, isn't caused by humans if it is real, might be real but won't harm us - in fact it's probably a good thing, and if it is real and is dangerous, well it's too late to do anything about it, or if it isn't too late the only way to deal with it is to go for growth so you have plenty of money to aircondition every house on the planet (oh, and growth means reducing taxes.)   At the IPA, every single road leads to lowering taxes and reducing regulation.      

Looking at some opinion pieces that Wilson wrote while there, I think it's a fair guess that he follows closely the Lomborg lukerwarmer line - he doesn't talk much directly about the science, but devotes a hell of lot of effort to rubbishing any attempt to deal with climate as a political issue.

And that's why, of course, the government is happy to sponsor Lomborg.   They know their climate policy setting is not going to work in the long run; they need to build up a supply of excuses which the likes of Lomborg and Wilson have made their speciality to churn out.

Anyhow, on Lomborg generally, Graham Readfearn wrote a good article a couple of weeks ago, and I'll link to that now.

John Quiggin's take on the whole Copenhagen Consensus project back in 2005 was worth reading too.

Update:   Noticed on twitter:

Confounding humans

Richard Thaler's piece in the New York Times talking about the rise of behavioural economics (he has a book out on the topic that gets an interesting review in the same paper) was a pretty good read.  But I also liked this comment at the side:

Clarification: (1) Economists have never believed that their assumptions about "rationalism" and "money-seeking" described real people--only that their models derived from such assumptions could predict behavior (at least in many specified situations) with a helpful (utilitarian) degree of accuracy. By focusing on the "unreality" of the model assumptions, critics miss the salient point of emphases: how well do economic models predict? When and under what circumstances? Or perhaps, more significantly, should people think of economists as forecasters (foremost, i.e., as portrayed in the media)?

(2) Behavioral economics does not represent a relatively new field of study--it's only new to the math modelers. Cato the Elder wrote on the subject 2500 years ago. The book from the 1960s, "Bears, Bulls, and Dr. Freud still sits on my book shelve. And, McClellan (1958) "The Achieving Society", explained economic growth and prosperity of nations far better than the economic growth models (then or since) created by Nobel-awarded, growth theorist economists whose work was published during that era. David McClelland was a Harvard social psychologist.

Comic book endings

The Atlantic has an article up talking about Age of Ultron and the "sagas" that the superhero comics have tactically developed to try to keep interest.  (This aspect of the Avengers movies is clearly now wearing thin with critics.)

Anyhow, following the article came this comment, which seems to summarise the problem well:

Meh, this is why I ultimately gave up on comic books. I was a huge comics fan in the late 80's/early 90's - mostly Marvel, but also DC and other imprints. I remember the huge crossover Mutant Massacre storyline in 1986 and the fallout thereof, creating new storylines for the X-Men and New Mutants, creating new teams like Excalibur. But I remember several storylines being drawn on an on, and eventually dropped. I still want to know what happened to the Morlocks! I believe this is a structural problem that comics have - the ability for storylines to get bogged down and reboot is also the frustration of never resolving any long running plots. Aristotle stated that every story needs a beginning, middle, and end. Comics are rife with beginnings (origin stories) and middles, but very poor on ends. This is their entire business model, and it's what ultimately pushed me away from comics.   

A bit of gruesome history for the weekend

Execution by Cannon - Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Can't say I had heard of the practice before...

In the schoolyard

James Mollison photographs playgrounds around the world in his book, Playground.

The photos are actually of schoolyards during recess around the world, and it makes for some startling images.

Well may you mock Maurice Newman...

....but this isn't the first conspiracy he's been exposed to:

(OK, maybe his face blends in too well for this to work.)

This is what a libertarian fantasy looks like

Alternative 2015-16 budget - On Line Opinion - 6/5/2015

David Leyonhjelm's "alternative budget" first appeared in AFR,  but it's since appeared at Catallaxy (to near universal acclaim, last I looked - a clear warning sign it's a crock, if ever there was one) and now it's got a run on Online Opinion.   (Only two comments too - I'm not sure whether that's from the unpopularity of the author or the site.)

I was going to post about it earlier, but really, as no one takes it seriously, I didn't get around to it.

Suffice to say the extensive list of matters on which he thinks its a good idea to cut immediately - foreign aid, research, all capital spending except for defence - shows he's a shallow, nutty ideologue who should stick to brushing cats and patting guns.  

Pigs in history

Good food: Nose-to-tail eating | The Economist

From this review of a book about pigs in history:

The curly-tailed animals have proven extraordinarily useful to human development and have been present from the earliest permanent dwellings to modern metropolises. The porcine ability to turn waste of almost any description into protein—thanks to “a simple gut and multipurpose
teeth”, which means it can eat almost anything—ensured that in the ancient Near East, Anglo-Saxon England and the Americas it was theperfect beast to sustain rapidly growing and colonising populations.

Yet the pig’s indiscriminate appetite has also been its worst enemy. Not for nothing is there a Chinese character, qing, that designates both “pigsty” and “outhouse”, and the idea of consuming a beast fed on communal waste has appalled societies from the ancient Egyptians to the Jews and 19th-century New Yorkers. Pigs have also been beset by snobbery, given that pork has regularly provided calories to the poorest members of society. After the Black Death carried off a third of Europe, demand for meat plummeted and so did prices. Peasants
started eating pork; uppity nobles chewed on birds and beef instead.

Mr Essig’s main point is that the better people treat pigs, the more they like them. Romans lavished love and attention on their pigs, allowing them to wander in the woods, eating nuts and grains. In return, they enjoyed delicious meat. Post-war America industrialised pig production, inventing indoor cages and “a litany of horrors” for their sows, and found the meat was mushy and tasteless. As a consequence, pork consumption has been static for 30 years.

Amateur philosophy and the superhuman

The moral imperative to research editing embryos: The need to modify Nature and Science | Practical Ethics

I see via Jason Soon that there is a bit of a push back against the backlash in Nature and Science about the Chinese who conducted gene editing experiments on (non viable) human embryos.  The article above is one of them.

Now I understand, to a degree, their complaint that the Chinese research was not on viable embryos, so there was no risk of harm in that particular experiment.  And if anything, its results serve as a warning that such editing is not reliable enough to try on viable human embyros, so in that sense it could be welcomed as showing that the dangers from trying to do such work are real.

However, it is pretty clear that the defenders go further - they actually want to see human genome edited for improvement, seeing it as our science fiction-y, transhumanist destiny.   The rest of us are sticks in the mud (probably Christians) standing in the way of progress.   All very Nietzschean. 

But you really have to wonder about the dubious way the guys who wrote the article linked above deal with the question of responsibility in this paragraph:

Imagine that I am a scientist. I have a promising candidate treatment
that could save the lives of 30 million people per year. I decide not to
continue the research. I am responsible for the deaths of those 30
million people if my research would have led to a cure.

This is just a silly attempted extension of the concept of  "responsibility" if you ask me, and reeks of amateur, late night bar room philosophy.   How could they have left that line in and not expect it to detract from their credibility?

The desire to improve humans developmentally is not per se wrong - ensuring adequate nutrition and vitamins for mothers to prevent avoidable problems is a good thing.  But the obvious solution to eliminating the worst genetic disorders is by either not having babies at all once it is discovered you are carrying a dangerous gene, or at least screening embryos for the defect.  Neither carries the risk of inadvertent harm caused by what is likely to be the inevitable imprecision of seeking to repair individual genes, and it's not as if humanity doesn't have enough healthy gene lines to keep the species going.

As for the desire to improve the germ line - you're a philosophical amateur if you can't acknowledge the ethical question it raises as to which human qualities deserve enhancement or removal.  

All was revealed

I woke up this morning from an odd but not unpleasant dream, which initially featured zombie like re-animated dead people (they could talk but not move much) who basically appeared puzzled as to why they were alive again.  To one of them talking about death, I made a comment along the lines that matter may eventually disappear, but information is never lost.  He scoffed at the suggestion, saying that he couldn't see how that made sense, as you needed matter to encode information.

Dream-me then had some exciting insight into information leaking into another universe, and the idea that other universe information watchers became the people who decided what was moral or not in this universe.  I ran off somewhere in a dream Brisbane to write it all down, but someone rudely suggested it might just be a good plot for Dr Who.

I have the feeling seafood somehow got involved too.

Anyway, I woke up to think for a while if there is any theory floating around that does involve information never being lost.  (I keep remembering a line from Spielberg's AI when I think about this.)

I then watched David Leyonhjelm (or his missus) brushing a cat.

More American right wing paranoia

Paranoia Strikes Derp - NYTimes.com

Paul Krugman brings to my attention some current Right wing nuttiness in America, that the dim Ted Cruz is prepared to entertain, at least to the extent of asking the Pentagon about it.  (I bet they're impressed with the idea of him as a possible boss.)