I’ve come across the following in the neo-liberal talking-point pamphlet Cossie sends us each fortnight: “The median household income range in 2006 was $1000 to $1199 per week. Ten years ago the equivalent median in 2006 dollars was $778 to $906 per week. Real household incomes have increased by around 30 per cent.”

This is apparently based on the 2006 Census data.

Cheers
BBB

Don’t worry about replying if you’re under the pump re: taxes. All I would (rhetorically) ask is: why is this year’s figure special? Did Coles and Woolies magically obtain market power in the past 12 months? What has changed?

It’s a fair point you raise about wages vs income, though. For wages, I am certainly no statistician but I would have thought median is better than average because it is less likely to be skewed by the outlying high wages (which I would assume are at greater variance than the outlying low wages). In any case, I’d be extremely surprised if either average or median household income has gone backwards against CPI since 2003. I’ve had a quick and dirty hunt around (ABS, HILDA, etc.) with no success.

Good luck with the taxman.

Cheers
BBB

If accurate, this completely destroys any argument about the market power of the supermarket ‘duopoly’. It’s a ‘duopoly’ so inept that it can’t even maintain real prices for groceries. That is, the relative position of big supermarket shareholders vs individual consumers with respect to retail prices has gotten better for the consumer since 2003. Will Mark now retract his comment about libertarians “defending the rights of a big business duopoly to collectively screw its individual customers”. My guess is no.

Median wages have generally tracked ahead of CPI too (I think, don’t quote me). So the position for the average worker is even better than it first seems. But then, lower prices for ordinary consumers is mundane fare for LPers. No, it’s much more important to protect elements of petit bourgeoisie from the evils of scale economies. This is why Walmart gets Teh Left all in a huff. Hopelessly out of touch it is. The unfortunate aspect of all of this is that it is so easy for the economic illiterates to convince the average household that they are being screwed - not ’cause the average household is dumb, but because they don’t have the time to research it themselves and understandably have a bias towards that conclusion.

Cheers
BBB

Does the Howard government fund programmes you disagree with? Would you pay for them voluntarily if you were allowed?

Yes and no. But I live with it and don’t complain and moan and bitch unless I’m confident my dissent can make a real difference.

Guess what buddy, you’ve just been coerced!

Name any any large organisation of humans where soft and hard coercion is not a central factor. I am willing to put up with being ‘coerced’ or at least acquiescing to Government decisions I disagree with as a penalty to pay for living in a large stable first world society.

I’ve yet to hear any libo point to any workable example of a functioning society where everyone must be treated as unique individuals with full opertaing space for all their individual desires and ideologies while also enjoying all the benefits and general stabilty we’ve come expect from central governance.

You do realise all the Mad Max films were set in a distopia not an utopia?

I didn’t choose a moniker that was shared by a man who used terror against his own army and his own people to seize power and was only thwarted of megalomaniacal dictatorship by an even more ruthless totalitarian socialist.

So what bit of “Gummo” don’t you understand? The lad’s taking the piss out of Trotsky, and out of the Soviet mythos in general. His own blog is called ‘Tug Boat Potemkin’.

I hope someone buys you a sense for humour for Xmas. Or at least slips some irony sweeties into your stocking.

I don’t expect people to do anything, they will allocate their time and resources as they see best.

The posters on LP all seem to have time and resources to dedicate to politics and political philosophy. Would it be fair to say that libertarians and socialist activists can tend to have similar socioeconomic backgrounds. How many posters on LP are white middle class and male? How many of them are young and passionate about what they believe? How many of them are older and are trying to pass on their wisdom and experience. More polemic. Ho hum.

Exhibit A.

If I read something in Wiki or get a review in Amazon I mistrust, I simply discount it and look for alternative sources

Right, you reckon a single mother teetering on the poverty line or a two income household sinking under raising interest rates and shrinking family time is gonna spend a bunch of time online shopping around for competitive nappy milk and cleaning product prices?

Which reminds me. How come the overwhelming majority of libertarians these days are young first world males or cranky old farts with no current family or business managment responsibilties?

And I liked this.

…try to compete with commercial television by commissioning shows like Sea Change.

Even though I did enjoy Sea Change

Sounds like they did compete successfully for your share of the attention economy.

Actually I shouldn’t bag you too much Brendan as you do strike me as one libo prepared, if not fully equipped, to engage in civilised debate.

And Gummo was wrong to go for a cheap shot on your name. Bad Gummo! I must punish you with a shot of single malt or three at the Blue Diamond soonish.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU4Rf2u1nwg

/irony alert

*goes back to watching the Simpsons Movie trailer

Does the Howard government fund programmes you disagree with? Would you pay for them voluntarily if you were allowed? Guess what buddy, you’ve just been coerced!

No wonder so many people have been making that obvious pun on your surname all your life.

I was wondering how long the lowest common denominator would take to turn up. No room for personal politics on the left, hey?

We see this for instance in areas such as public broadcasting, whereby the ABC rather than providing national interest broadcasting, try to compete with commercial television by commissioning shows like Sea Change. There are plenty of good arguments for a national broadcaster, and even though I would argue against them, the lamest of all is the provision of light entertainment to compete directly with commercial television for audience share. Even though I did enjoy Sea Change, many people whose taxes contributed to the ABC’s budget did not, and thus were paying for my consumption choices. Not a very serious issue as far as progressive policies as concerned, don’t you think? I would have watched Sea Change if it was broadcast on Channel Seven, Nine or Ten, and paid for it through being submitted to ads, and no one would have been forced to pay for something they didn’t want.

Telstra used to have legislated monopoly, now we struggle to deal with the legacy of that monopoly in competition policy for telecommunications. Perhaps providing pricing information isn’t in the same league, but it is an example of how even in deregulated environments, state funded (or ex-funded) programmes can crowd out private competition and thus consumer choice.

Why do you assume that a government program of price monitoring and reporting necessarily entails coercion? Oh that’s right - you’re a libertarian. All governments are necessarily coercive. Of course that’s why us non-libertarians prefer democracy over other forms of government - if governments get too coercive, we can vote them out.

Interesting though, that when it comes to limiting the power of corporations - that is collectives funded by limited liability stock ownership by a group of nominal owners known as the shareholders, run by an entirely different group with interests that may diverge widely from those of the nominal owners known as company management and staffed at the lowest level by a people whose jobs have been carefully designed to ensure that they don’t acquire too many expensive skills - i.e. the workers - coercion of the lower orders to either provide labour or seek opportunities outside the organisation is par for the course.

If you’d been keeping up with the business pages of The Age this year, you’d also know that the co-ercive power of the major retailers over their suppliers has recently been exploited by one or two of their corporate buyers who were demanding kickbacks for supply contracts.

If you think voluntary or privately supplied information sources are less reliable, you have no excuse for using Wikipedia or reading Amazon.com’s recommendations or picking up a Yellow Pages. Remember that Yellow Pages is a for profit information source!

I don’t recall saying that - perhaps you can point out where I did. If you can’t, then you’ve just wasted a lot of time rebutting an argument I didn’t make.

Alternatively, if you really suggest that shops should be forced to submit prices to a central body, then you will be adding to their administrative responsibilities, marginally increasing their fixed costs. Particularly as you’ve already noticed, that Coles do not set the prices centrally, each store prices their goods according to their own markets. So instead of a clerk dedicated to opening a till at peak times, you’ll have a clerk dedicated to making sure the shop has submitted their prices on time.

No - in this age of electronic communication, there’ll be an extra recipient on the e-mail address list, or something similar when the local stores report to head office what their prices are going to be for the next week. Coles may not set their local supermarket prices locally but, unless they’re very badly managed, they’d sure as hell be tracking them from head office.

Just as they centrally track sales of product lines, centrally order those products from suppliers (using their considerable buying power to negotiate the most favourable terms they can from their suppliers) and centrally co-ordinate the supply chain to get the goods into the stores. And it won’t add a thing to the fixed costs - in all likelihood, they’ll just sweat some poor bugger, or several poor buggers, just that little bit harder. If you think they’d actually pay anyone extra, or take on extra staff to deal with the added workload, you’re the one who’s deluding himself sport. Personally, I don’t like the idea of workers being sweated, but I’ve heard libertarians are all for it, because the benefits - in the form of lower prices to those workers in their role as consumers - outweigh the impositions.

And there’s no hope for you mate - I’m nowhere near being the fool my name might suggest to you that I am, but you’re every bit the fool that you think I am. No wonder so many people have been making that obvious pun on your surname all your life.

But why do you assume a Government auspiced and supervised initiative along such lines would involve hundreds of bureaucrats? These days, SES level civil servants get bonuses for cutting costs and staff, not adding them.

I see no reason why, whether it’s the public or private sector, that an annual budget of around $300,000, mainly going towards some people that know how use web 2.0 tools, shouldn’t be able to create a comprehensive grocery prices wiki. (plus another half mill or so up front to promote its existence and invite contributions, a sunk cost that both the private and public sectors would happily entertain, especially if it gets the relevant CEO or Minister a nice photo and several column inches in general and trade media.)

The question then is who takes overall responsibilty for the credibilty of the data it offers.

Interesting here that you cite Wikipedia and Amazon. Are you aware of the regular bitchfights and accusations over shaping and stacking information and reviews on those sites? And if you disagree with their data, who do you hold responsible and how?

Or to put it another way, would you trust the Australian Food and Grocery Council, the Australian Consumers Association or a bunch of pissed off shoppers from a particular locality to run a trulely impartial price comparison wiki?

At least with Governments, you can sack the bastards every few years. And they know it, especially when it comes to what are literally bread and butter issues here.

You don’t think that voluntary behavious is superior to coerced behaviour? If not, you are a bigger fool than your moniker suggests.

For the purposes of illustration, I could suggest that a government programme might involve hundreds of bureaucrats running around checking prices, each of them requiring a salary and benefits. A voluntary scheme could be as simple as people typing in their grocery receipts into an online form, with minimal administration and the added bonus of the data coming from “real shoppers” not drones sent to check the prices of a centrally determined “common basket of goods”.

If you think voluntary or privately supplied information sources are less reliable, you have no excuse for using Wikipedia or reading Amazon.com’s recommendations or picking up a Yellow Pages. Remember that Yellow Pages is a for profit information source!

Alternatively, if you really suggest that shops should be forced to submit prices to a central body, then you will be adding to their administrative responsibilities, marginally increasing their fixed costs. Particularly as you’ve already noticed, that Coles do not set the prices centrally, each store prices their goods according to their own markets. So instead of a clerk dedicated to opening a till at peak times, you’ll have a clerk dedicated to making sure the shop has submitted their prices on time.

Either way, there is a real cost involved, the cost of the bureaucrat or the cost of the coordinator within each store. Is this really more efficient to a voluntary system in which the only costs are the costs of maintaining the server which could be covered by donation or advertising?

There is some hope for you though, at least you don’t trust politicians to administer any programme without politizing it.

WTF? I don’t think you understand what “theology� means.

Substitute “metaphysics” should you wish.