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Making the rounds on the web this morning is this report that Al Gore’s house consumers 20 times more electricity than the US average and that it has been increasing since the release of his documentary. Bloggers are reporting this without question and calling it hypocritical (click here for an example).

But I don’t think any of them have seen the movie. Unless they are accusing him of lying, Gore explicitly claimed that he purchased offsets for all his carbon use (most importantly travel). In this case, if he is emitting he is bearing that cost which is more than could be said for the average household. (Although I must say, having looked into this myself, it is really hard to know which offsets can be relied upon but I am sure that just by saying that commenters will tell me!)

[Update: I was right about Gore and offsets]

Regular readers know the disruption poorly implemented policies to stimulate birth rates can cause (click here). But those lessons do not seem to stop governments from continuing on with the practice (Germany was an example earlier this year and for the US it is a continuing issue).

The latest example today comes from Cyrus. There they are considering paying bonuses greater than AU$50,000 for every third child born and thereafter. The concern is that this could be dramatically counterproductive:

Maria Kyriacou says several pregnant women have contacted her to find out when the scheme is likely to start.

Women expecting a third child are considering aborting, and trying again once the payments are active, she said.

“I have had questions from ladies in the earliest stages of pregnancy considering whether they can afford to have a baby [at the present time],” Ms Kyriacou told the BBC News website.

“They could better afford it with a lump sum of thousands of pounds,” the Conservative MP added.

Now it is unclear whether this could happen but what is true is that we know that in managing birth timing there is going to be an issue. Fortunately, it likely only represents a fraction of births so the sort of disruption we saw to maternity hospitals in Australia is less likely to arise. Bottom line: phase the amount in starting from now!

In the sometimes simple is best department, this is a world clock without electronics. Just roll it to the desired time zone. But how will it deal with they daylight saving gap? [From Gizmodo]

Also, apparently we in Australia will be able to have our cake and eat it too with the Wii. Region free should be something we get anyway but a patch will do.

It looks like the forever stamp is coming (click here). Here is my earlier post on that one.

Also, check out Al Gore’s announcement at the academy awards.

Australians appear to be big downloaders of television. I have said this before but this is hardly surprising given the delays Australians face in the airing of new television episodes. An article in The Register (UK) today confirms that along with some interesting other statistics.

According to a survey based on a sample of 119 current or recent free-to-air TV series’, Australian viewers are waiting an average of almost 17 months for the first run series’ first seen overseas. Over the past two years, average Australian broadcast delays for free-to-air television viewers have more than doubled from 7.9 to 16.7 months.

A survey of TV programmes found that while some aired very close to their US air date, many popular programmes were significantly delayed.

Average broadcast delays were shortest for TV series’ on the Seven and Ten Networks, at around nine months. The average delay for TV series’ airing on the Nine Network was 22 months, while TV series’ on ABC and SBS aired on average 23 and 30 months behind the US.

Actually the ABC figure was unfair because they show few US shows and the sample is skewed by The West Wing which they took from Nine. Read more

It is a good Sunday paper headline: rich politician claims an allowance that ultimately stays in his family. So rather than some landlord getting $175 per night, he keeps it (nominally through his wife). Big deal. The allowance would be the same if he got a cheaper or more expensive place. It is just one of those ways of dealing with the expenses of being a politician and having to spend time in Canberra. And in this case he allowance provides an inducement to spend more time in Canberra. As a tax-payer it is the fact that it is money spent, not how that I care about.
What needs to be done is to make these allowances income supplements and avoid the whole deal. Then expenses get be deducted in taxes just the way they would for people who travel for work.

Seen in that light, what the story was really about was whether politicians’ incomes should be means tested. And when it is put that way the idea starts to sound silly. What is more I am far from convinced that we want to get in the habit of politicians competing to simply not draw a salary as a way to be elected. It won’t impact on the really rich of them but on others it opens up the possibility of temptation that our generous post-career pension plans were designed to avoid. So we will end up with politicians that are independently wealthy or find other ways to get money. Not a good outcome.

We have a real interesting environmental issue when it comes to coal. Put simply, Australia has lots of the stuff and if controlling the climate means that no one uses it, well, that is one industry that will be in trouble. So there have been various moves to find a technological solution. How do we find a way to provide a rationale for mining coal without environmental harm? The answer: find a way to ensure that using coal keeps greenhouses gases out of the atmosphere.

The Federal government has made smaller moves along these lines and today Labor proposed to ramp that up should it get into office. The announcement today says that the aim would be to have only clean coal going into our electricity generation by 2020.

But we need to be very clear on something. To be a solution to the global climate situation and our contribution to it, it is not just our use of coal for electricity generation that needs to be fixed but the use of our coal per se. So any technologies developed and the intellectual property protection associated with them would need to be widely disseminated. Now one would not expect news reports to be clear on this type of thing but if the plan is to subsidise private sector development of such technologies, we won’t really be solving anything should those technologies be only available to developing countries at a monopoly price. However, if the IP were associated with coal exports and provide alongside them, that would be another matter.

My co-author, Andrew Leigh, is out of blogging commission this week with a case of the new-borns (Although why that should stop him I don’t know. Off spending his $4000 I suspect). Meanwhile his work with Amy King on beauty and political success continues to get international attention. Tim Harford writes about the Biden-Obama ‘controversy’ and goes on:

Researchers have to be careful when they observe simple correlations between subjective beauty and electoral success. Amy King and Andrew Leigh, who studied Australian elections, wondered whether the findings were driven by ageism or racism: perhaps (mostly white) voters see a black face and believe the face’s owner is both unattractive and unfit to govern. That sounds miserably plausible, but it is not driving the results: restricting analysis only to white politicians, or those in a narrower age band, produces similar estimates of a beauty premium.

So it seems like the research at least is quite attractive.

One of the great mysteries of Australian competition policy is the Federal government’s continued restrictions on competition in international airline markets. While it may have still been contrary to the public interest to protect Qantas prior to its privatisation, at least one could think of a political rationale (keeping the government hands on its monopoly rents). The same rationale might have generated a decade worth of protection. But why does it continue? What has the government got to gain? Read more

Apparently, Xerox have developed an inkless printer that uses erasable and hence, reusable paper. Apparently, the image on the paper disappears in 16 to 24 hours. The might be good in capping meeting length but I must admit that I am skeptical as to its fulfilling the paperless office dream. (Although someone might put newspapers and magazines on it to get a DRM like effect on those like they do for some downloaded movies).

It occurs to me, however, that a good application would be in education. How great to print exam papers on this stuff and not have to worry about dissemination? Then again they would have to be photocopy proof as well, wouldn’t they (unless you timed it really really well or could set the image half-life to a few hours)?

John Quiggin responds to this post on happiness research with some skepticism. That is the research that asks people how happy they are and correlates it with other things.

Suppose you wanted to establish whether children’s height increased with age, but you couldn’t measure height directly.

One way to respond to this problem would be to interview groups of children in different classes at school, and asked them the question Don suggests “On a scale of 1 to 10, how tall are you?”. My guess is that the data would look pretty much like reported data on the relationship between happiness and income.

There is, of course, another option: ask someone else. In the class you could survey children to rate the height of other children and to do it across classes. You just need to ensure that they are all evaluating a sample with sufficient variation on correlates you are interested in.

There is no reason why you couldn’t do the same with evaluations of happiness. Why ask someone how happy they are over asking someone else who knows them how happy they think they are? It is just another subjective evaluation but also with the advantage the each person receives multiple evaluations.

And then when we come to elections politicians can ask: “do you think people you know are happier than they were 4 (< 3 for Australia) years ago?”

Looks like the search for extra-terrestrials has turned in to the search for expropriated technologies . [From ZD Net]

The SETI@home project uses Internet-connected computers operating in a grid to analyze radio telescope data for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence. But as Minnesotan developer James Melin discovered, it can also be used to find… a stolen laptop and a not-so-intelligent terrestrial thief.

After his wife’s laptop (which was running the SETI@home software) was stolen from their home on January 1st, Melin noticed that the computer had checked in three times to the SETI database. So obviously, whoever stole it had simply logged onto the net and hadn’t bothered to disable the service. Melin determined the IP address and sent it to police, who were able to determine the real-world address where the laptop was plugged in. Within days the laptop was recovered, with all data intact.

Classic!

So I was walking to a meeting in the Melbourne CBD and happened across a very unusual shop. It is called Wunderkammer (which stands for Chamber of Wonders). It is an apt name and looks like the kind of shop that would exist in Diagon Alley. There are all sorts of scientific curiosities on sale. It is located on the corner of Londsale and Queen Streets. If you are passing by I can highly recommend taking a look in. Bring the kids. It is quite a museum.

I have a little piece in Crikey today. It is over the fold: Read more

Paul Romer is best known in economics for generating the models at the heart of endogenous growth theory. One of the main insights of that theory is that our rate of knowledge production is related to the ability of economic agents to appropriate private value from that production. (I have written about this model before).

Scott Stern and I have been focused for years on a micro aspect of this — the way start-up firms appropriate value (click here for an example). We demonstrate that there are good reasons why they should do this by selling out to established firms rather than competing with them. For starters, that competition makes it hard to make profit. But also, being an innovator and marketing products are different things. You might be a good innovator but may struggle to market a product as well as established firms. For that reason, we recommended that start-up firms should consider trading in ideas markets rather than competing in product markets.

So when Paul Romer started Aplia (his economic education firm that I was involved a little in initially) I pretty much knew that they would sell out eventually and nominated Thomson as the obvious choice. It took a little longer than I thought but today they announced just that (click here). So Romer has participated in the ideas market just in the way his own model predicts. Thankfully, the same research predicts it is all for the better in terms of product improvements.

So I have just moved from a PC to a Mac for my home computer. Actually, we have Macs in the house already but for the computer I use to work from home, it was a bigger deal. Suffice it to say, thanks to the wonderful Parallels software, the move was very very easy (a day of fiddling tops but in reality much less). Even Office 2007 works seamlessly. Put simply, I now have both a Mac and a PC in the one machine with the one documents folder. Now that is what I call having my cake and eating it too. If nothing changes in the next year or so, my office computer is likely to be a Mac as well.

Yesterday, I received several emails that were ‘news like’ reporting that the Prime Minister had had a heart attack. I suspected and it turned out to be true that the emails masked a virus.

That got me thinking. The impact on this may be that words such as “John Howard” might get put on spam filters. If so, that might be a problem for them. Not that I believe this is anything more than just another spam attack designed to hit the unsuspecting (in fact the reports say it is likely to have originated outside of Australia) but what a nasty and potentially effective way to disrupt communications in an election year.

When I first heard today’s news that incandescent light bulbs would be phased out over the next three years, I looked around the house. There were none to be found. We could identify a desk lamp with one and a few outdoor lights. It seems, therefore, that this won’t impact on us at all. When I looked around work, the same seemed to be true.

This caused me to wonder — based on a ridiculously small sample — whether the savings will really be there? According to the news report, household lighting contributes to around 12 percent of coal-energy greenhouse gas emissions and 25 percent for commercial and public lighting. The new lights seem to 70 percent fewer emissions than the old. Apparently, the total savings on greenhouse gas emissions would eventually (by 2015) be 4m tonnes per year (or about 0.67% of our total emissions).

I searched the web and the Department of the Environment and Water Resources in vain for the study with these calculations. It will be interesting to see them.

OK so I have been going on alot about the water restrictions (click here). Consider it yet another cost of those restrictions that there is an economist scorned.

Anyhow, today I wanted to comment on the observation of many that water restrictions may actually be increasing consumption of water rather than decreasing them. There are two sources for this. The first is the scramble for grey water from showers and elsewhere. If you have tried to fill a bucket in a shower you know that it distracts from the usual shower activity: washing. Absent any need to conserve there, it easy to see how we are consuming more water there even if it isn’t technically ‘wasted.’

The other source of increased consumption is, of course, watering the garden. This might seem strange at first given the increased costs of doing this. Having to use a trigger nozzle and spend hours in the garden is a deterrance and so many have given up but for those watering, they make the most of it. Once you have dragged yourself out of bed at 6am, connected the hose, you might as well give the plants a good soaking. Indeed, more water gets thrown on the garden than through a sprinkler system on for a short period of time because the water flow is not diminished. Read more

This news report today suggests that short-term housing distress is an issue. Read more

My post last week on this subject has been Apliafied (click here).

Sure the front pages of the international press is an achievement for an Australian Prime Minister but nothing compared with getting both a tip of the hat AND a wag of the finger from Stephen Colbert. (The relevant bit is half way through the video).

You might be interested in a climate change forum to be held at Melbourne Business School on Tuesday 27th February. Click here for details.

Tomorrow is the 25th Australasian Economic Theory Workshop; this year held at its traditional home of ANU. By the title you can gather it is their silver anniversary and some of the original participants including Richard Cornes and Frank Milne will be presenting. (The program is here for those interested in attending some sessions). Read more

Ian Larkin is a PhD candidate from the Haas School of Business. He is on the academic job market. Here is his website. Look closely at his ‘experience and awards.’ The last award seems pretty significant! Or it is at least significant because it is listed there.

Apparently, children are impatient and probably not rational according to Eric Bettinger and Robert Slonim in an article published in the Journal of Public Economics (Feb 2007). The abstract is over the fold. The most interesting thing is the lack of a relationship between mathematical ability and discounting. Read more

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