Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived
A subtle change has been made to the comments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the problem about comments not appearing on permalinked posts, readers?
Update: seemingly not
Update: Oh yeah!
Friday, October 29, 2010
The subaltern speaks
Hands up if you were remotely surprised that this sort of thing goes on. If you didn't chuckle, stop reading this blog.
this item posted by the management 10/29/2010 02:09:00 AM
Thursday Music Link, a day late
... but what if we held an Eisteddfod and everybody came?
Yma o hyd. See if you can triangulate between this one with the Welsh lyrics and this one with subtitles and work out the subtle differences.
Note the two main grievances of Welsh Nationalism - the flooding of the almost completely unpopulated Capel Celyn valley to make a reservoir (displacing over three dozen people to a council estate two miles away and killing as many as none), and the Investiture of the Prince of Wales (which was disapproved of largely on aesthetic grounds). Also, the fact that we weren't given a subsidised television channel for our minority language until 1984. The Irish we ain't.
this item posted by the management 10/29/2010 12:03:00 AM
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
On not being obliged to vote Democrat, parts four and five
Hmm, reminds me I need to get this tidied up and put it on CT to get the outraged attention of some Americans. Two short and related points, because I'm in a hurry.
4: Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander
Empirically, as a matter of observable fact, the Democratic Party does not require very much in the way of party discipline. Things like "voting against key manifesto commitments of a very popular Democratic President" do not cost you your committee chairmanship. "Voting Republican and encouraging others to do so" (Lieberman) is not inconsistent with being allowed to caucus with the Senate Democrats and kee your seniority in doing so. And this isn't a matter of political pragmatism; plenty of Congressional Democrats voted against the reform of derivatives regulation, an issue with basically no cultural or populist relevance at all. It's simply a matter of the governing philosophy of the Democratic Party - that anything goes on the right. Party discipline and outrage is reserved for anyone who deviates to the left.
But the simple matter that the Democrats would like to say that you can have a sauce for geese that isn't a sauce for ganders, doesn't make it so. If sitting Democrat Congressmen are allowed to campaign actively against Democratic party policy, then anything goes.
5. Ineffectuality is a political issue
And this follows on from the preceding. Because the Democratic Party has no party discipline, it is extremely ineffective in getting anything done. It's a coalition of incumbent politicians and their hired consultants, united by their commitment to keeping their own extremely lucrative jobs. Which is why it's unsurprising that non-core, peripheral activities like politics aren't done very well.
But why pour any time and effort at all into an organisation that isn't fit for purpose? Nobody is suggesting that there is any real likelihood in these midterm elections that the Democrats will be pushed below a 40-Senate-seat blocking minority, so they have basically exactly as much power to achieve stasis (which is their goal) whether you vote for them or not. And "fewer, but better" is a principle that applies here, as the marginal Congressmen are for the most part the least politically useful; under Bush, the Congressional Democrats were a comparatively highly effective organisation in blocking things like Social Security reform.
So the strategy of lifting a finger and enabling this shower to keep going seems to me to be dominated by an alternative strategy of letting it dwindle to a blocking minority, and then concentrating your effort on influencing that minority's blocking. Again with the bait and switch - the sales proposition of the Democrats is that they can't achieve anything much at all in the way of useful legislation, because of the archaic and obstructionist rules of Congress, but that if the Republicans get in, they will immediately be able to force through the most radical and hostile agenda conceivable. Seriously - Congressional Democrats couldn't get their own way on the end-user exemption for swaps clearing; why on earth would one think that Republicans can ban abortion?
this item posted by the management 10/27/2010 08:54:00 AM
Money talks and bullshit drinks
Another one for this "occasional series", I think. Questions raised include:
Q1. Is South Dakota a place very similar to London, particularly when the context is drink driving?
Q2. How does this idea, which is rather intensive in the use of the time of probation officers and courts, interact with other decisions recently taken about funding?
Q3. Has a pilot scheme been costed?
Q4. What will the cost per test be, given that we are told that offenders would "pay for the tests themselves", and does this really mean that "it would not cost taxpayers a penny" (ie, are offenders to pay the fully loaded costs of the entire scheme, including enforcement, administration, etc)?
Q5. Would it not have been a better idea to save the press release for when the scheme was actually launched, rather than when the decision was taken to ask the government for permission to carry out a pilot?
A1, A2, A3, A4, A5: Money talks and bullshit walks.Labels: difllic, mtbwotw
this item posted by the management 10/27/2010 08:23:00 AM
Friday, October 22, 2010
You had me at "live in fear"
Via Yglesias, some yank journo writes, in respect of some other yank journo who is apparently being tin-tacked for saying something stupid on telly:
The question here is whether we want to create an atmosphere where commentators need to live in fear that even contemporaneous comments will be scrutinized by the strictest standards of tolerance, and a one-strike-and-you’re-out policy is generally applied toward their employment.
Do we want to live in a world in which television commentators have to think carefully about every single thing they say? Well, that's probably unrealistically utopian and I suspect I would settle for "think a bit, once in a while, about the stream of stuff that's coming out of their mouths". But let's aim for the stars here shall we? My central concept is that perhaps if they were constantly scared of termination by the PC police, they might get into the habit of scrutinisng their every utterance for signs of ideological deviation, and while they were scrutinising, they might once in a while realise that the thing they were going to say was illogical, unpleasant or simply boring. I think we should give it a try, it's not as if it could make the general standard of televised political commentary any worse, could it?
Alex suggested this as a joke for a system for assessing American teachers, but I think it might actually work for pundits - let's just capriciously sack 10% of them, more or less at random every year and see if anyone phones in to say that they miss them.
Addendum: Normally I am not a fan of calling for other people, generically or individually, to lose their jobs - these are after all human beings we are talking about, and even where their politics are repulsive, they often have families and children who can be considered blameless. (I've occasionally remonstrated with Brad DeLong on this score, because I do think it's really quite unattractive to constantly make jokes about the at-will employment of other people while benefiting from tenure yourself).
But in the case of professional TV pundits I'm going to make an exception, because after all, it's not as if they adopt the live-and-let-live philosophy with respect to bloggers, is it? As it happens I don't live with my parents and I do have a wife and a reasonably normal family and social life. But even if these things weren't true, I'd still be a person and deserve a little bit better than the kind of patronising crap handed out by the Andrew Marrs of this world. So game on - if he's going to call me an angry ugly virgin, then I think I am morally in the clear pointing out that he's a great big waste of licence-payers' money and about a thousandth of a per cent as much of a useful or insightful commentator as he thinks he is.
this item posted by the management 10/22/2010 12:43:00 AM
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Thursday Music Link
We're all in this together. I know it's true, I heard the Chancellor say it yesterday. I suspect that some people might have preferred it if we'd all been in this together when things were going well and paying big bonuses, but that didn't happen. But now, we're all in this together.
In general, the phrase "we're all in this together" is a pretty flawless indicator of bad news that's about to get worse. If the person saying it wasn't expecting a shit shower, they wouldn't be looking around for someone else to be in it together with them.
Come Together
(related, via the song that I was actually looking for, did you know that the American version of Screamadelica had a version of "Come Together" that a) doesn't include the Jesse Jackson speech and b) is quite extraordinarily sappy?)
this item posted by the management 10/21/2010 02:52:00 AM
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Thursday Music Link
Hmmm, quite a lot more left wing politics this week than I've been used to. I hope this isn't leading in the direction of joining a political party.
Solidarity Forever. Leonard Cohen, seemingly featuring some Welsh primary school teachers.
this item posted by the management 10/14/2010 02:46:00 AM
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
If I were economic advisor to the Shadow Chancellor ...
... something which I suspect is unlikely to happen, I would be thinking about how one might make an advantage out of his lack of formal economic education, while at the same time conveying a gut-level understanding to my new man of the basis of Keynesian economics. I think I would reason like this:
1. It is a common criticism levelled at politicians of the modern stripe that they have "never had to make a payroll" - ie, that they have no real understanding of how the economy works, because they have never been in a situation of managing a business through tough times.
2. This is also true of Alan Johnson MP, as it is of the Chanceller, George Osborne[1]. However, unlike George Osborne, Alan Johnson has experienced something that's quite like managing a business which needs to make its payroll in a recession, which is called "being poor".
3. When Alan Johnson found himself married with two children at the age of 18, with an income inadequate to his expenses, he did not put his family on an "austerity" programme. Instead, he got a job in the post office, attracted to it by the possibility of well-paid overtime.
4. In general, as anyone who has actually found their household in a situation of having too much debt knows, it's really not usually all that possible to get yourself out of a hole by reducing your expenditure. In general, when you've got an actually serious debt problem, the interest bill is already larger than your discretionary expenses, and so "economising", while it will slow down the rate at which the problem gets worse, will not make it get better.
5. Households which successfully get out of debt, in general, do it by increasing their household income - either by having a non-working partner take on a job, or by doing overtime, or by changing career to something better paid. That's what Alan Johnson did, when he was on his uppers.
Unlike the rather sickening lectures Margaret Thatcher used to give about housewives and their clever domestic scrimping and saving, this is an analogy between the finances of a single household and those of a country which actually works. When you have a debt/GDP ratio which is too high, this is nearly always because the GDP is too low and needs to be increased, not because the debt has got too high and needs to be decreased. If you have a debt/GDP problem that can't be made better by investment and growth, then it's likely that you have a debt/GDP problem that can't be made better at all - ie, you need to default, a situation which the UK is not even nearly in.
A few months in, I'd start showing my man a few straightforward back of the envelope calculations, and maybe even chucking a few debt dynamics finger exercises into his speeches, because I have a canny idea that the man in number 11 is not necessarily in command of his numbers and might be shown up if put in a position of having to do sums in his head (I am guessing that former postmen who have worked with the Byzantine schedule of overtime rates might be quite good at this, plus I seem to remember that Johnson as Work & Pensions Minister did a pretty good number on David Willetts over "the pension crisis", which was a similar combat of neoliberal platitudes versus arithmetic). But the key priority would be to a) get the central intuition lodged into his backbone, and b) set up a sensible and comprehensible counter-narrative to all this dreadful New Austerian nonsense about "money in the kitty" and so on.
If any Labour politicians read this blog, take it, it's yours.
[1] Yes, he was christened "Gideon". But he decided he didn't like the name "Gideon" and changed his name to "George", twenty five years ago. So
this item posted by the management 10/13/2010 10:51:00 AM
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
You don't have to pay the "property price premium" every year to keep living there
It's not that I dislike Cameron, Clegg or even the Miliband boys (and, yes, I know they did not go to private school, but they are still children from one of the best comprehensives whose parents payed a property price premium to live in the catchment area)., says Nick Cohen.
Even if Haverstock School was "one of the best comprehensives" (it's not; it's about average for North London), it needs to be remembered that the Miliband brothers went there in the 70s, not today. Ralph Miliband bought his house in Primrose Hill in 1965. Primrose Hill has always been a quite nice area, due to the Hill, but it wasn't particularly expensive in 1965, which is why a Marxist academic was able to buy a house there.
Since then, obviously the value of that terraced house on Edis Street has gone through the roof, but this is clearly irrelevant to the social and economic standing of the Miliband family in the 1970s.
Quite why so many people feel the need to say that Labour politicians (other than Tony Blair) are upper-middle class, public schoolboys or otherwise children of privilege when they aren't is beyond me.
I mention, merely in passing, that Nick Cohen went to a selective school (Altrincham Grammar). But of course it isn't privilege if you earn it by passing an exam at the age of 11. It isn't even that uncommon to find people who believe that because they passed one exam at some point in the past, that they can ever after attribute all of the massive advantages and legs-up they've enjoyed to their own ability and efforts. Perhaps this is why so many people still put their universities in their potted biographies, ten or twenty years after it could possibly have been relevant.
this item posted by the management 10/12/2010 10:43:00 AM
Equality
More from Gove ...
In every school year there are 600,000 children.
The very poorest are those eligible for free school meals - 80,000 in every year.
And out of those 80,000 how many do you think make it to the best universities?
Just 45.
I checked, and by "the best universities", Gove means Oxford and Cambridge (he had a spat about this factoid with Ed Balls earlier this year). Oxford and Cambridge have an annual undergraduate intake of about 3000 students each (ie, 1% of each school year if we accept the 600k figure), so if children eligible for free school meals were represented in proportion, there would be 800 of them there.
But, take the Aaronovitch Rule: reverse the figure. If Gove's dream were achieved, what happens to the 79,200 children eligible for free school meals who still don't get into Oxbridge? I don't know, but I suspect that the answer might involve the phrase "fuck 'em". This is, of course, the same thinking that names the "Grammar School System" after schools that are by definition not representative of the majority.
When I saw the speech, I initially assumed that "the best universities" meant the Russell Group, which would have been surely more meaningful (although even that wouldn't include York or Durham, which I think most people would include in that group). The Russell Group between them take in 75,000 undergraduates every year, so scaling that up would give you 10,000 new undergraduates at RG universities who had been entitled to free school meals. That actually would be a pretty radical and meaningful egalitarian move; I would still personally be asking awkward questions about the remaining 70,000 and still making the point that elite universities aren't a sensible metric, but ten thousand people a year moving from the bottom decile to (first approx) the top quintile would not be hay. Is that Gove's actual target? I suspect we'll never know and also suspect he's never considered it, because for some people it's Oxbridgeford[1] or nowt.
Update: yes, I know, done it before. I think once every five years is about the right frequency for a trip round this particular mulberry bush.
[1] Let's not kid ourselves here.
this item posted by the management 10/12/2010 01:42:00 AM
Money talks and bullshit walks, an occasional series
This week in MTBW, Michael Gove:
I am delighted to announce today that Professor Simon Schama has agreed to advise us on how we can put British history at the heart of a revived national curriculum.
What, precisely, has Professor Simon Schama agreed to do?
I am delighted to announce today that Professor Simon Schama has agreed to advise us on how we can put British history at the heart of a revived national curriculum.
No, sorry, that's not actually very precise at all. It sounds as if Professor Schama has agreed to write a national curriculum or possibly to direct the assembly of source and classroom materials for one. But that would be a very large administrative project, of a scale which would surely be incompatible with his existing teaching, writing and broadcasting commitments if he were to have more than token involvement with producing it. Or perhaps he has agreed to put aside those other commitments to concentrate on this, a self-sacrificing act of public service of the sort that should surely be rewarded with a peerage or knighthood. But it doesn't actually say what level of involvement Prof. Schama has committed to. What is the deliverable, when is the due date for Prof. Schama's contribution and, if I may be so vulgar, what sort of fee arrangement has been agreed?
I am delighted to announce today that Professor Simon Schama has agreed to advise us on how we can put British history at the heart of a revived national curriculum.
"Money talks and bullshit walks".Labels: "occasional series" with only one post in them, mtbwotw, occasional series which now apparently have two posts in them
this item posted by the management 10/12/2010 01:25:00 AM
Monday, October 11, 2010
Decline of local hero in grim Northern Town
Kevin Mitchell is a really good sports writer. We've discussed this before, including in one of my favourite D^2D comments threads ever (attached to this post) - how can it be, that this man had the strength of will, determination and self-belief to become a world boxing champion, but never had what was needed to step away from the totally destructive influence of his own childhood? I suspect that if we knew the answer to that, we'd be a lot further along the way to solving a hell of a lot of difficult problems in economics.
semi-related link
this item posted by the management 10/11/2010 07:10:00 AM
Always with the basements, isn't it?
Andrew Marr, the former political editor of the BBC, and Nick Robinson, the current political editor of the BBC, have some things to say about bloggers. Apparently, unlike proper political journalists, bloggers drink too much, spend too much of their time obsessing over trivia late at night, and have restricted social circles which consist only of people like themselves, working themselves up over minor conflicts while ignoring really important issues. They're also in general facially ugly.
I think it was Georg Lichtenberg who noted that a book is like a mirror; when a monkey looks in, no wise man looks out.
this item posted by the management 10/11/2010 04:09:00 AM
Friday, October 08, 2010
On not being obliged to vote for the Democrats, part three
Right, having established in Part 2 that the expected value of the benefit from voting Democrat is small due to paradox-of-voting issues, and that the non-instrumental arguments for voting can't be convincingly ginned up into an argument for voting for a party you don't support, I think we turn to consideration of the costs. I am not sure that we need to spend too much time on the opportunity cost of the time-and-shoe-leather, except to note that for anyone involved in politics to the left of the Democratic Party, there will always be a single-issue campaign where the time and effort produces greater expected value than a vote for the Democratic candidate in a midterm election, even in a marginal seat. I'm more interested in the strategic cost - not so much the cost of any individual vote, but the aggregate cost of a policy of always voting Democrat, no matter what. This can be defined as the difference between the expected value of the optimal reward/punish strategy, and the expected value of "Dems always"[1].
So we're into Game Theory then - it's been pointed out to me in the pub that I am not in general a big fan of credibility arguments, and this is indeed a credibility argument (one votes against the Dem candidate in the knowledge that doing so might have a very small negative expected value conditional on having gone out to the polling place in the first place, in the expectation of a positive value from the whole strategy). But all rules have exceptions - deterrence and credibility did win us the Cold War after all - and in this case I think an exception needs to be made.
After all, if you're choosing people to play strategic games against, the people most likely to respond in the way predicted by game theory are those who are already trying to play strategic games with you[2]. By introducing the whole median voter/spatial competition argument in the first place, the Democrats have, presumably unwittingly, signalled their susceptibility to being deterred or influenced by credible signalling.
That's the theoretics[3]. How about the empirics?
Well, draw a Boston box. On the X axis along the bottom, write "Have they operated inside the framework of electoral politics described by the Democratic Party?", YES and NO. On the Y axis down the left side, write "Have they in general seen some sort of success for their agenda over the last ten to twenty years?", YES and NO. Now we're going to write down the names of political movements which tend to the Left of the Democratic Party. Every name going into the top-right (mainly worked without Dems, seen positive progress) or bottom-left (mainly worked with Dems, mainly failed) quadrants is a point for me; every name in the top left or bottom right quadrant is a point for people who think that a strategy of always supporting the Democrats is the best way to make progress on left issues.
I'll do mine first:
Top Right: Green Party, anti-war movement, anti-WTO campaign, gay marriage campaigns
Bottom left: Teachers' unions, unions in general, Bono and Bob Geldof, gay military campaign, civil liberties campaigners.
Now you do yours. I will be amazingly generous by spotting you healthcare reform advocates for top-left, but this concession will be swiftly withdrawn if you try to quibble about any of mine.
[1] This is not a straw man. I know someone who makes it a point of political pride to always vote the straight Dem ticket, always donate time and money, and who will even on occasion donate more time and money to the Democratic Party when they shift to the right, to notionally compensate for those other people who might be demoralised. My personal view is that it is hard to understand a sense in which one could really be said that her "actual" political views are other than those of the Democratic Party, but I can't see into people's souls so I'll take her at her word.
[2] Game theory is an excellent way of predicting the behaviour of professional game theorists, which is worth knowing if you are organising, say, a mobile telecom spectrum auction and all the major bidders have hired economists to advise them on bidding strategy.
[3] There is one more remaining theoretical point of interest. My general argument against credibility and deterrence behaviour is the Davies/Folk Theorem - that since any course of action at all can be supported as a signalling equilibrium, "credibility" isn't a very good argument for any particular course of action[4]. Note in this context that the Folk Theorem half of this argument is actually missing an important qualification - you only get the general result of anything goes if your discount rate is not "too high". In plain language, this means that you can only justify credibility and deterrence if you care sufficiently about the future relative to the here and now; otherwise the potential future value of the benefits don't compensate for the up front cost of the signal. This is, in my view, why people trying to make non-supporters of the Democrat party vote for them will always resist any discussion of the long term future, of abstract or general trends, or indeed anything other than the specific horrible thing that will definitely (in the Oasis sense of "definitely maybe") happen right now if the Democrats were to have a 52-48 majority in the Senate rather than a 58-42 majority.
[4] And note, of course, that deciding not to vote Democrat in any given election isn't a "course of action" in this sense; I don't want to argue for a policy of never voting Democrat at all.
this item posted by the management 10/08/2010 04:51:00 AM
Thursday, October 07, 2010
Day of the Triffins
I am mildly surprised that Paul Krugman hasn't used this as a title for a blog post about the US$/yuan exchange rate yet. I donate it as open source to the community.
That is all.Labels: one for the economists, reader deterrence programme
this item posted by the management 10/07/2010 10:16:00 AM
Dickhead of the day
The sad thing is that the Awl is usually a rather good site. I somehow doubt that the people responsible for this will look back on it with pride.
this item posted by the management 10/07/2010 09:39:00 AM
Wednesday, October 06, 2010
Thursday Music Link
Expect a lot more TML tracks to be coming from this new source. I have one of those last.fm accounts too, but it's not really very representative of my music taste; ever since I used it for music for a barbecue this summer, last.fm has got a fixed idea that I am much more of a reggae fan than I actually am.
Mi Revalueshanary Fren
this item posted by the management 10/06/2010 11:37:00 PM
Friday, October 01, 2010
Let me be governed by lazy men
Like the rest of the jamiesphere, I find myself liking Ed Milliband a lot more than I thought I was going to. I like his Terry Fuckwitt grin and strong physical resemblance to the comedian David Schneider. But most of all, now that we've all heard a bit about his home life, I finally feel that here is a politician I can identify with.
Ed Milliband has been living with the same woman for six years; he has one child (and another on the way) and still hasn't got married to her. I know exactly how this is achieved; I lasted ten years and two kids. Basically the answer to the question "how the fuck do you procrastinate marrying the woman you love and the mother of your children, for ten years?" is "one day at a time". One day I plan to write an inspirational self-help book and management tome, entitled Say Yes, Then Do Nothing.
I admit that a) not getting his name on the birth certificate and then b) managing to sack off going down the town hall and sorting it out for one whole year is bloody impressive though - I guess it's talent like that which is why he's Leader of the Opposition and I'm not. But yes, anyway, as one of the country's leading advocates of "inertia" as a political Big Idea, I think I may have found my man.
I very much look forward to hearing in someone's memoirs about the phone call where Obama says "look, when is the British contribution to Operation Iranian Pony coming", and Ed says "OH GOD! Yes, absolutely, sorry, I am totally on top of that one, I'll get it done immediately!", before settling back into his chair for a biscuit and an idle check of David Moyes' Twitter feed.
this item posted by the management 10/01/2010 06:43:00 AM
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