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Today saw economists at their best with the release of the Stern report on climate change. Today also saw politicians in this country at their worst with excuses. None more so than Peter Costello who was quoted as saying: Read more

It seems like the UK has silly and outmoded copyright laws in relation to the iPod (click here). Read more

There is a piece in The Age today entitled “Protests mount on wage rise.” It quotes me as part of the protest but I must say that I was not protesting the wage rise — that decision seems to be economically well thought out. What I was concerned about was the overall mix of government policy:

Joshua Gans, economics professor at Melbourne Business School, said if the Federal Government was taking more than 80 per cent of the pay rise from some families, it was essentially outsourcing some of its welfare bill to employers.

“It’s giving workers about the same or a little more, but the costs of it are to come directly from their employers and not from the Government — that’s why I called it ‘a privatisation of social security’,” he said.

As I mentioned yesterday, the real concern is that the government could cut welfare and thereby put the Fair Pay Commission in the position of readjusting pay accordingly — putting the burden on employers. The FPC would be acting appropriately in the circumstances but the process would have the stamp of an overall shift in policy. To do this without explicit debate is not something one can sanction.

So for the last six years we have been saying years like 2006 as “two thousand and six.” Today, I heard a seminar speaker from Singapore say “twenty o six.” Given the experience of the last millennium, surely that is the better way to go. At some point we will surely switch to it. But when? For me, I am going to begin from this day forward.

There is a longstanding notion — that has not been easy to prove — that there is a political business cycle with booms timed to coincide with elections. Today, Bill Shorten raises the question — although not explicitly — is there a political wage cycle in Australia? (Click here for the news report). Read more

Here is a cartogram which adjusts country area for greenhouse gas emissions. It comes from Mark Newman [Hat tip: Eric Rasmusen] whose site also has a link to software to produce these. Check out the Worldmapper project for more of these.

What is funny about this is the power of benchmarking against area? In normal statistics, we normally benchmark against population but have no real picture of this so we have a view of fairness based on square kilometers.

Actually, it is worse than that since the world map is a projection of the surface of a sphere onto a plane and so lots of countries look smaller in area than they actually are. The picture to the right is the appropriate benchmark.

Greg Mankiw tried this and it turns out he is a libertarian. What am I?

That is a small ‘l’ on the liberal. Interestingly, the distance between myself and Mankiw is not large and is all on the economics and not the personal issues. Try the world’s smallest political quiz yourself to see where you lie.

It will be interesting to plot the Oz group of bloggers on this. Where are you John Quiggin?

Today’s Age carries a piece on under-quoting in real estate markets. It does the usual thing of showing some examples of houses that were quoted between $365K and $395K but sold for $448K; 12.5% more. (The supposedly worst example was a house quoted at $680K and selling for $908K.) Now this type of concern raises lots of questions. The first is what is a reasonable tolerance on quoting? After all, we just don’t know how often the quotes are over-statements and what the variance is likely to be. We have all been at house auctions where two bidders have killed each other for a house meaning that it sells at a value 10 or more percent higher than expectations.

The second issue is: so what? If you go to an auction because you think you are going to be able to afford a house and then cannot, what is the big deal? You have bid what you have bid and if the house sells for lots more it meant that there were at least two others who were willing to pay more. Your presence may have given them comfort that some people placed a lower value on the house but it is not a given that this benefits the sellers in some unscrupulous fashion. The best they get is a larger crowd but, in the end, the eventual buyer also knows that that crowd might have been there because of under-quoting. Read more

It seems to me that we should have one of these; a lego branded dishwasher that washes toys. Full story at Gizmodo.

You know those SciFi stories where something is sent out that everyone gets into and it turns out that it was really re-programming them to do something evil such as overthrow the government, support the government or eat excessive quantities of cheese? Well, you are warned. OK so take a look at this site (it is self explanatory). It may well be that type of re-programming occurring but, what the heck, it is really cool and so I am happy to give them victory.

The clocks go forward tomorrow and we lose an hour of sleep. But then again, those 2 year olds who simply refuse to pay attention to the clock and move by the sun will get up later.

But the real effect of all of this is on the clocks. If you don’t get onto this quickly, your VCR will be out by an hour with disasterous consequences. (If you have a Tivo or DVR you will be fine). But as Tim Harford reports today, using time shifting for TV watching may be more important in your habits than relying on broadcast schedules (click here). Read more

My earlier post on the “mysteries of convergence” has been redone and updated as a column in this week’s Business Review Weekly. Article over the fold …

Read more

The Official Google Blog has a post on the increasingly generic uses of the word ‘google.’ (This is something I have commented on before here and here).

Read more

Like many blogs before it, this blog has been persistently hit by comment spam: 1000s per day. Previously approved commenters have been able to post without moderation but the load of spam on the system is proving prohibitive. Today it pretty much collapsed.

What I have done is changed the settings so that only registered users can comment. It is easy to do this and it will hopefully block spammers. So if you do comment on a post please take the time to register.

Could this be the next YouTube? Take a look at outside.in. Read more

A nice little pointer from Marginal Revolution to a set of articles with friendly advice for those fresh to academia. There is one important one on how to be a good referee. One of the main things it emphasises is promptness: get your referee report done in a month.

This is extremely important advice. Now you don’t do timely reports because some editor will be grateful and help you out later on. They will be but the chances that they will be in that position is low. As an editor, I do, however, remember those who provided good referee reports and I can’t rule out that this has an effect when I receive papers from them. Read more

Just a pointer: an excellent article in this week’s New Yorker on microfinance (click here).

In yet another reason why the US free trade agreement is not working, the US has banned Vegemite (click here).

Read more

The Queensland Government is looking into investing in the next generation of broadband (fibre to the home) and spending about half a billion dollars in doing it. Read more

These Lego constructions speak for themselves. Read more at the Scientific American Blog.

My letter in reply to Sinclair Davidson (his letter here) appeared in the October 19, Business Review Weekly. [Thanks to Sinclair for pointing that out!] Here is the reply: Read more

[Cross Posted at GameTheorist] This week saw two discussions of teacher aptitude and educational quality. The first began with a Slate article by Emily Brazelon on whether we need pre-school teachers with college degrees. The second was a new study by Andrew Leigh on whether raising pay will give you smarter teachers. Read more

Here is an interesting news item about a UNC professor’s approach to teaching economics. They literally play a computer game with aliens and everything (including a ton of economics). Well, if Second Life can be a hit …

Our family visited the Royal Australian Mint today. We saw nice demonstrations of how coins were made. However, I also got an insight into another way our Mint makes money. If you wanted you could actually press a button and have a special $1 coin made for you. And the cost of this exercise? $2.50.

This seemed like a very efficient way to make money. A 150 percent return no less. I bet that the Mint makes literally thousands of dollars a year this way. What is more, it is clearly restrictive monetary policy in action outside of the realm of the Reserve Bank. So much for ‘full’ independence. One can only hope that they are compensating for this in money markets.

Person buys Picasso for large sum. Person holds onto Picasso and strikes a deal to sell it for a much larger sum. Before handing it over person punches elbow threw Picasso. Seinfeld episode. Surely not. This is reality. (Click here for an account).

Then someone suggests that the painting will be worth even more in a few decades because it has a good ‘story’ attached. I guess the same could be said for The Scream. Now if this is the case, these things will become pretty hard to insure.

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