Author Archive for Nicholas

Theme competition

Published
by
Nicholas
2 years, 9 months ago
in Culture and Media
. 0 Comments

Cross posted on Troppo.

I am running a surreptitious campaign to introduce the open source ways of the internet to the ABC. Being stacked with salaried people, the ABC is poorly in touch with the resources of the voluntary sector - the sector that produces LP and comments on it day in day out - and the other 27,999,999 blogs out there.

When Michael Duffy was trying to get podcasting for his program Counterpoint, and facing ABC resistance because of the cost of hosting the download bandwidth, this problem was solved on Troppo where someone pointed out that the bandwidth cost could be distributed via bit-torrent.

I was talking to Peter Mares who’s just taken over Terry Lane’s Sunday arvo program, The National Interest. He commented that though he intended a low key change and so had changed very little about the program, the main reason he’d not changed the theme music was copyright complications. I said there must be millions of public domain tracks on the internet and the problem wasn’t their availability but the time it would take to listen to enough to find something worthwhile.

My solution? A competition. Can anyone suggest a track available on the internet with a brief riff that might be suitable as the theme music for The National Interest.

I guess the track needs to be creative commons, though it could still have some restrictions on commercial use. I expect that the ABC would be able to negotiate something pretty low cost with such a source.

Is there no end to the ability to get something out of nothing in this wired world?

Let’s find out. Let the competition begin.

Real Reform

Published
by
Nicholas
2 years, 9 months ago
in Economics and Politics
. 6 Comments

I’ve been looking at a recently published paper by Allen Consulting on tax reform. Tax reform has become the New Thing To Do. The paper was commissioned by the Victorian Government and, given that I don’t know what the brief was, I’m not being critical of the consultants.

The report proposes base broadening – suggesting government choose from a menu of $12 billion worth of base broadening measures – ie removing CGT concessions (nothing so brave as suggesting that we remove CGT concessions on housing that I can see). Allen Consulting then argue that governments need to choose about half of these base broadening options to fund the reduction of the top marginal rate from 47.5% to 40%.

As I’ve indicated in several posts and columns I’m very suss on reducing the top marginal rates. It’s not that I wouldn’t like those of us on the top rate to enjoy a lower rate. It’s that from an efficiency perspective, I just don’t think it’s as high a priority as lower rates further down the income scale where incentives to work are already much worse with high effective marginal tax rates (EMTRs) produced by the combination of tax and benefit withdrawal and this is where the supply responsiveness of labour is higher than it is further up the scale.

Even where we are not targeting high EMTRs from welfare withdrawl as a priority, I think what the government has done since it’s come into office – namely lifting thresholds – makes much more sense than cutting the top rate. But it’s now pretty much accepted that cutting the top rate is a priority.

And various arguments are rolled out about ‘competitiveness’ of the tax system (a very seductive idea which is mostly wrong - but that’s another story pursued a little here). We’re told that we should be cutting tax if not to encourage the wealthy to work harder, then at least to attract highly paid skilled workers to our shores. But that argument doesn’t wash either. If we want to pursue this line of argument then we should be lifting the top threshold as far as we can afford rather than cutting the top rate. I make that assertion on the grounds that we’ll get larger tax cuts to more people in our target zone (high income earners) by lifting thresholds than by cutting rates.

If we want to lift it to $200,000, $250,000 or further well and good. Indeed, with the money we save lowering the top rate we could lower the second top rate a little – and so ‘incentivise’ more of those skilled people that are supposedly at the heart of ‘real reform’. But lowering the rate and creating a windfall for the very rich is mostly revenue down the drain for little GDP return (maybe you’ll get a few fewer sports exiles, but why shouldn’t they keep heading off to the Cayman Islands anyway.)

Anyway, as I was reading the Allens report I came upon this statement. “[W]ith more savings, more fundamental reform could be achievedâ€?. That’s when it struck me that there’s something funny going on in this debate. Continue reading ‘Real Reform’

Crikey Subscriptions - out they go at C-R-A-Z-Y prices

Published
by
Nicholas
2 years, 9 months ago
in Media and Notices
. 2 Comments

That’s right. These prices are just C-R-A-Z-Y.

Following initiatives here, at Troppo and Catallaxy, we look certain to get at least ten subscriptions, cutting the subscription price by 50% to $50. I’ll try to get this sorted out in the middle of next week. So here’s your L-A-S-T C-H-A-N-C-E.

At C-R-A-Z-Y prices like this, this offer can’t last.

If you’ve not signed up, please do so below and email me on nicholas AT gruen DOT com DOT au.

Keynes

Published
by
Nicholas
2 years, 9 months ago
in Economics and Sociology
. 26 Comments

Cross-posted at Club Troppo.

An e-mail from Mark Bahnisch reminded me a few days ago that this week is the seventieth anniversary of the publication of Keynes’ General Theory of Employment Interest and Money. Keynes is a magnetic character perhaps as much to read about as to know personally. That’s because his life reads like a kind of intellectual’s fantasy in which the author showed himself uninterested in the convention that the fantasy was believable. Apart from constant activity over myriad areas of human endeavour – of which more in a moment from Brad DeLong – Keynes intervened perhaps decisively in momentous world events in the twentieth century, not once, not twice but three times between 1919 and 1946. It’s hard to think of a parallel in the life of any other intellectual.

In writing Economic Consequences of the Peace he established the narrative by which the rise of Nazism was read by the liberal intelligentsia both at the time and subsequently. In writing The General Theory he revolutionised economics as he’d boasted to his friend George Bernard Shaw he would. And then in World War Two he directed the British war economy and led the negotiations which gave us the Bretton Woods financial architecture, which survived in tact for twenty five years giving us the long boom and which created the IMF and the WTO (then the GATT) which are still with us.

Continue reading ‘Keynes’

Your specially priced LP subscription to Crikey!

Published
by
Nicholas
2 years, 9 months ago
in Media and Notices
. 20 Comments

Crikey is a wonderful Australian institution - not least because it nominated Troppo Armadillo as their blog of 2005 and LP as one of their favourites!

A sucker for good quality, independent media and flattery like that to boot I was just filling out the on line form inviting me to subscribe when I read that there are bulk discounts.

  • 3-5 annual subscriptions: $70 each – save 30%
  • 6-9 annual subscriptions: $60 each – save 40%
  • 10-20 annual subscriptions: $50 each – save 50%
  • 20-49 annual subscriptions: $40 each – save 60%
  • 50+ annual subscriptions: $35 each – save 65%

    • So if we can get 2 or 5 or 9 more people to sign up with me, we can save some money! Please record your request below, and email me on nicholas AT gruen DOT com DOT au if you’re interested. The base price is $100 per year.

    Gender division of labour in the home - the column

    Published
    by
    Nicholas
    2 years, 10 months ago
    in Sociology
    . 12 Comments

    Crossposted on Troppo.

    Well, subject to the usual caveats - I take all responsibility for errors of fact, judgement, taste and ideology - I still thank you all for helping me out on this column which has now been published.

    Whether you think it’s any good or not, this was the most successful exercise in ‘open-sourcing’ a column I’ve had. It began with some musings a week or so ago cross posted to LP.

    Reactions helped me sort out my ideas. I was struck by the strong (and reductionist) dichotomy between nature and nurture. Often this was invoked by feminists for the purposes of sending it up. “Don’t tell me women are genetically programmed for housework.” I agree that that’s a long bow to draw. Still I’d used the word ‘temperament’ in the previous post.

    The ground is so contested and adversarial that it’s easy to be misunderstood – in fact it’s almost impossible not to be misunderstood.

    You’ll notice that in the piece though I mention neuro-psychology which suggests that boys and girls’ cognitive development are quite different, I don’t really go into the content of it. I tried that and then thought I was getting trapped into ‘Women are more nurturing’ kind of statements. I am pretty suspicious of that kind of stuff, though I expect that’s the kind of thing many will think I’m arguing.

    So if you have a look at what I’ve said there are several things I’ve tried to do.

    1. Not specify the differences between the sexes specifically – except to say that women often choose some things willingly – as do men.
    2. Say that, given that there are strong differences it isn’t surprising that complementary roles emerge (though we shouldn’t get too sure that they’re all that perfectly complementary), and – thought it’s not stated in the column they might change from time to time and even reverse.
    3. Specify my three stages approach differentiation – which is

    a) Biological makeup influencing orientations
    b) Personal developmental choices doing a lot of the solidifying, amplifying and interpreting of how those orientations will develop
    c) All this taking place in a cultural context.

    The word ‘model’ is quite misleading here with all its mechanistic and deterministic implications. The word ‘discourses’ is a tad fashionable for me, but it’s probably the best word I can think of off the top of my head. The three things (discourses a, b, c) outlined above are powerfully interacting influences. That means that I don’t really think that women are more suited to do the housework biologically, or that under different cultural circumstances it mightn’t be entirely OK for it to be ‘men’s work’.

    When I try to think about it in the way I’ve set out (and written up less definitively in the column) the important question to me is “Given the biologico-personal-cultural histories of the players, to what extent are the gender roles oppressive (which is bad) and to what extent are they good because they deepen life experiences of value?”

    The idea that women can raise children and that doing this is valued in their culture can be oppressive, but for many it deepens their experience of something that (I feel) is as valuable thing as we can do. Given this view I also want men to be involved, and – accordingly – for their role to be reinforced in the culture.

    But I have no hangups whatever about there being ‘equality’ in gender roles. Though equality of workload is a practical and political matter between the couple (which is both understandable and not a bad thing) that seems to me to be something between the couple. Gender roles should certainly be flexible (unoppressive) enough not to be a major obstacle to equality of effort if that’s what someone wants to negotiate in a couple.

    So while gender roles should not impose inequality where that is felt as an oppression, I don’t think gender roles should be principally about equality. They should be about the things that men and women do – they should help them do them and value and deepen (and in so doing assist) their achievements.

    I guess I reckon gender roles are like clothes. They’re supposed to permit differentiation which enriches us – without commanding it or preventing those couples who wish to dress in Mao suits (figuratively or literally) from doing so. But of course that’s a tall order and there are necessary tradeoffs in this fallen world of ours.

    Anyway, the column’s below the fold. Continue reading ‘Gender division of labour in the home - the column’

    The division of household labour by gender

    Published
    by
    Nicholas
    2 years, 10 months ago
    in Sociology
    . 27 Comments

    Cross posted at Troppo.

    A little post to get the year off to an uncontroversial start!

    I mentioned a book I’ve read - “Children of the Lucky Country� below. Here is a quote from it relating to the division of labour at home between the genders (p. 83).

    In the past, the way society arranged for the care of children was to ensure that women had little choice but to take on almost the whole of this work. They could not be financially independent, so they had to rely on their husbands for their income. In return, their husbands expected them to take full responsibility for the domestic work and caring for the children (whether or not they actually liked this role). Now women can earn their own incomes, and a majority choose to do so. Who, then takes care of the children? At present the assumption is that this responsibility still rests largely with women.

    There’s a particular barrow being pushed here. Note how the expectations (and I guess the collusive power) of men shape the first world. No doubt there’s some truth to that. But there’s some truth to lots of presentations of complex phenomena. Undoubtedly some women actively resisted the institutions in the way the past was organised. No doubt many resented requirements for women to give up many respectable professional jobs once they married. But plenty of women wouldn’t have resented the rules – and would have accepted the way things were set up. So why put the point in such a loaded way? Especially when it’s not necessary to point of the book which is a heartfelt plea for children’s interests to be more fully represented in our social thinking and our institutions. (a cause with which I could not agree more by the way – hence my reading the book).

    Most women and men agree today that the kinds of rules that came under attack in the 1960s and 70s and which have been swept away are unacceptable. So it seems to be adding gratuitous (gender political) baggage to one’s cause to set out ‘the past’ as rigged by one side.

    Now read the description of the state of the world today. I assume what everyone reports, namely that women do substantially more work around the house – even when they do as much work as their male partners. Why is that? The authors say its ‘an assumption’ that the responsibility still largely rests with women. I read (between the lines and perhaps conditioned by the earlier content of the para) that these assumptions are being made by men. (It seems odd that they’d be made by women, because it seems to be a – pretty understandable – bugbear of women that men don’t do more of that work.) So the problem is being driven by men’s ‘assumptions’.

    I wonder what readers think of an alternative cause for the same phenomenon. Continue reading ‘The division of household labour by gender’

    Howard, Keating, Hawke and labour market reform

    Published
    by
    Nicholas
    2 years, 12 months ago
    in Culture and Industrial Relations
    . 17 Comments

    By popular request! (Well Mark’s request actually) Cross posted at Troppo.

    One of the posts that I’ve had in the back of my mind since I started at Troppo is a ranking of the PMs of my (adult) lifetime.

    Readers of this column will not be surprised to learn that I think that Hawkie was the only really good PM in my lifetime.

    In any event as I say in this week’s column, when it comes to political style the more I think of John Howard, the more I think of Paul Keating. Keating ventured into culture war, but did so in a self indulgent and arrogant way which means that he not only lost the war he started, but set the stage for what turns out to be a huge reaction against his own preferences.

    I reckon if you want to fail, go into religion, not politics.

    In any event, the column is probably a bit unfair to Keating in one sense, and that is that he did manage to pump out some quite good policy during his time in government. But he was very much a stop-start pollie. One big statement after another. And Keating’s lack of a sense of process actually set the stage for a lot of the outrages that Howard has subsequently perpetrated.

    His ads for his labour market programs, with Bill Hunter clambering around slag heaps talking about how great it was to be an Aussie (that’s from memory and I may need correcting on it), were the template for any number of Howard (and ALP State) Government propaganda campaigns.

    I recall being incredulous when John Dawkins told me of some plan to start a hare running to distract attention from some disaster. It seemed to me crazy and likely to create the Whitlamesque impression of ‘one disaster after another’. I suppose the idea was not completely unknown to the Hawke Government, but it was rare. I don’t remember it. Again, that kind of emphasis on improvised media management seemed to be born in the Keating years. Continue reading ‘Howard, Keating, Hawke and labour market reform’

    IR reform - the column - and a graph you need to see if you want to think about IR regulation

    Published
    by
    Nicholas
    3 years, 1 month ago
    in Industrial Relations and Politics
    . 65 Comments

    Cross posted at Troppo

    Here’s this week’s column in the Courier Mail. And here’s the devastating graph which shows how poorly correlated with poverty low wages and minimum wages are. There is almost no relation between these jobs and household income.

    Distribution of different relationships to the labour market by household income decile

    So, at considerable cost and while it generates unemployment, the thicket of IR regulation we have doesn’t look like it does much for equality. As the chart shows, what’s really associated with inequality is unemployment and absence from the labour market.

    Anyway, the column is over the fold. Continue reading ‘IR reform - the column - and a graph you need to see if you want to think about IR regulation’

    David McKnight to speak in Melbourne

    Published
    by
    Nicholas
    3 years, 1 month ago
    in Miscellaneous and Politics
    . 6 Comments

    Cross-posted at Troppo.

    There’s been a bit of interest in the blogosphere regarding David McKnight’s book ‘Beyond Left and Right: New Politics and the Culture Wars’. Rafe has some links here.

    I’m going to try to go along, because from what I’ve seen and heard on LNL, McKnight’s effort is a worthwhile attempt at a worthwhile project, though I’m instinctively wary of self consciously ‘left’ or ‘right’ attempts at the project. If you can’t at least attempt to forget that stuff, and your own self positioning, and just try to think things through on their merits, I think you’re weighing yourself down. And since it’s a difficult task, you can do with as much weight off your back as you can manage.

    Maybe I’ll see you there. If you want to see what I look like, so you can come and say ‘hi’, I’m here. Details below the fold. Continue reading ‘David McKnight to speak in Melbourne’

    Blog get together on Oct 9th in Sydney

    Published
    by
    Nicholas
    3 years, 1 month ago
    in Miscellaneous
    . 23 Comments

    I’ll be in Sydney on Sunday night Oct 9th and thought it would be good to meet up with anyone who wants to. Rafe has posted the details on both Troppo and Catallaxy.

    The market for work satisfaction

    Published
    by
    Nicholas
    3 years, 2 months ago
    in Sociology
    . 11 Comments

    In an earlier comment today, Mark asked me to post a link to a column I did last year. When I duly posted up the link, it had broken. So I’ll post the column from the SMH below.

    Enriching market for work satisfaction will aid productivity
    September 29, 2004, SMH.

    Next to our health and relationships with close family and friends, nothing matters more to us than the quality of our working life. Now ask yourself this. Last time you considered a job offer, how much did you really know about it? Did you know how happy others in the organisation were with their own jobs, how ‘family friendly’ it was — even how safe it was compared with other firms?

    It’s odd isn’t it? If you want to know if you’ll like a movie or a book or even a washing machine, there’s no shortage of independent information, particularly in these days of the net. But if you had to choose between working for — say — McDonalds and Burger King, or KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers, you’d be hard pressed finding much information on their performance in generating rewarding, satisfying jobs outside of their own promotional material, let alone independent ‘reviews’ of such important issues.

    We can do much better. We don’t need to hire an army of government careers advisors or workplace inspectors. After all, we’re only trying to make an established and competitive market better informed. We could start by using important information that’s already available. Good workplace safety usually goes with good management, high productivity and satisfied workers. So we should publish individual workplaces’ workers’ compensation premiums, benchmarked against industry and economy wide averages. They provide a ready proxy for workplace safety. We could do so on a central website and we could require firms to give their employees and prospective employees this information.

    We can do much better still. Continue reading ‘The market for work satisfaction’

    Cricket - will we lose?

    Published
    by
    Nicholas
    3 years, 2 months ago
    in Miscellaneous
    . 23 Comments

    I like sport, but I don’t think you’ll get many sport posts out of me.

    But in my opinion we’re being uniquely ourselves in the way we’re losing the ashes. Good on the Poms for playing so well, particularly their bowlers. And it’s been amazing to watch Warnie. Warnie’s never looked better. And since my son goes to school at the same school as his nippers, I am pleased to announce that his wife Simone Warne looks like a weight has been lifted from her too. So, in the words of Wilde, looks like a divorce made in heaven.

    In any event it’s been amazing how unadventurous we’ve been in plugging the gaps left by the poor performances of all our batsmen. Continue reading ‘Cricket - will we lose?’

    Oscar, Ned: what were you thinking?

    Published
    by
    Nicholas
    3 years, 2 months ago
    in Culture and Miscellaneous
    . 4 Comments

    Part of my deal with Mark to cross post what we each think of as our best posts of the last month or so.

    The contrasts between Oscar Wilde and Ned Kelly are obvious. But reading Neil McKenna’s (relatively) new biography of Oscar the parallels hit me forcefully. What follows is a subjective reflection on those similarities. I won’t try too hard to justify what I’m saying, but rather just try to say it as well as I can. But here is a word of justification.

    I feel sympathy for both Oscar and Ned, and without it there would be little point in writing this. But this does not mean that I approve of their actions. Like anyone, Oscar had unattractive flaws. When released from gaol one lament he expressed was the way in which he had used people much less privileged than himself.

    Kelly was a professional criminal. It might have been quite difficult for the crown to have achieved a guilty verdict for murder in a fair trial, but his criminality led to the killing of three policemen. (The argument in court was that, as the troopers were seeking to kill rather than capture him Kelly’s actions were self defence). Nevertheless, after resisting it, Kelly acquiesced in Joe Byrne’s proposal to murder Aaron Sherritt. Joe (wrongly as it turns out) thought that Aaron had turned police informer. Be that as it may, Kelly was not -as America’s most famous outlaws turn out to be, a psychopath - as for instance Jesse James and Billy the Kid were.

    Continue reading ‘Oscar, Ned: what were you thinking?’

    Is Peter Costello all that’s left?

    Published
    by
    Nicholas
    3 years, 2 months ago
    in Politics
    . 11 Comments

    I recently suggested to Mark that we nominate our best posts of the last month or so and swap them. Mark liked the idea. I also sent him a draft of my next column for the Courier Mail. Mark asked to post it on LP so, being an easy candidate for flattery, I agreed with unseemly haste.

    One thing led to another and so here I am - with my own login and all as a guest or irregular blogger. Who knows? We’ll see. For anyone who’s interested, I wrote out my own (centrist) ideas about politics in an early post of mine on Troppo.

    Anyway this column from Wednesday’s Courier Mail expresses my dismay at the latest turn of events by which every galah in the pet shop is now talking about the need to lower top marginal tax rates — that is tax cuts for those earning more than 125,000 squid (as Ali G would say).

    As I argue in the column this is of some seriousness for the ALP because so many of those arms of government for which the labour movement had high hopes either make life worse for most working people (eg. tariffs) or are ambiguous in their effects helping ‘insiders’ and hurting ‘outsiders’ and even creating some outsiders (as I argue is the case with most IR regulation — including the basic wage).

    I think most people who thought about it much would probably always have imagined that tax and transfers are the most powerful policy means of addressing economic inequality. But with other means looking both politically and economically shaky, it’s no time to be giving up the citadel.

    As I argue, strongly redistributive tax and transfer systems were at the heart of how we managed to engineer the ‘Australian miracle’ of 15 years of strong steady economic growth (still counting) whilst tax and transfer policy undoes most of the growing inequality that the market began to generate starting in the early 1980s — or perhaps the mid to late 1970s.

    Now it seems that Peter Costello is one of the few people who is prepared to counsel caution in jumping on the lower rates bandwagon. So we’re at a pretty pass. Of course when the Coalition gets around to cutting the top marginal rate (its hard to see how they can resist it now) the ALP will look seriously silly objecting to it. Anyway, as I do every week, I’ve posted my column up at Troppo.

    Note by Mark: For a previous discussion on the tax debate at LP, see Naomi’s recent post. And also, please make Nicholas welcome as a new LP blogger.