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Grammar Obsessive Disorder (G.O.D.) – anyone you know?

Trevor Cook — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 04:03:09 +0000

More, not less, equality needed for economic growth

Trevor Cook — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:00:31 +0000

Now the attention of Australian policy-makers is turning to maximising prosperity, understood as GDP growth, over the next few years.

The Australian’s Michael Stutchbury says this will require ‘tough-love’ policies.

Usually, this is code for giving carrots to the rich and sticks to the poor. Tough for the bottom of society, great for the top,

In economics, inequality rocks. Right?

Well, actually no.

Inequality peaked in the US just before the great depression, and it only returned to those levels just before the GFC (see Palma, Cambridge Journal of Economics).

That’s not news. Keynes pointed out that inequality made the economy more unstable.

In the period before the GFC, growing inequality encouraged people to go into debt to ‘keep up’, contributing to excessive consumer debt and a housing bubble.

This week nobel laureate and NYT columnist Paul Krugman has pointed out that the economy grew faster, and media family incomes much faster, before modern finance, and the whole neoliberal experiment, when incomes were less unequal:

Take the United States, which wasn’t damaged in the war. Take per capita real GDP. Give hostages by taking data from 1950 to 1980, which means including the 1980 recession, but stopping at 2007, so that the current slump isn’t included. Then here’s what you get:

Growth in per capita real GDP from 1950 to 1980: 2.2 percent per year

Growth in per capita real GDP from 1980 to 2007: 2.0 percent per year

Oh, and if we look at real median family income instead, we get:

Growth from 1950 to 1980: 2.3 percent per year

Growth from 1980 to 2007: 0.7 percent per year

Sorry: there’s no measure I can think of by which the U.S. economy has done better since 1980 than it did over an equivalent time span before 1980. It may be something you’ve heard, it may be something you’d like to believe, but it just didn’t happen.

We also know that more equality is better for everyone in society, with the possible exception of the super-rich, because of a recent book that brought together all the evidence, “The Spirit Level: why more equal societies always do better”. A key argument is that:

While it is often assumed that social problems bear little relationship to average incomes, the evidence suggests that income differentials within populations matter a great deal, and this is as true of American states as it is of countries around the world.

In the most unequal countries and states, there is more gender inequality, too, and these places are less generous. A higher proportion of people suffer from mental illness, and more use drugs.

Less egalitarian countries have six times as much obesity. Educational attainment is poorer, with higher dropout rates, shorter periods of paid maternity leave and less early childhood education. Teenage birth rates are higher, and it is young men from disadvantaged neighbourhoods who are most likely to be the victims and perpetrators of violence.

In more unequal countries, children experience more bullying, fights and conflict, and rates of imprisonment are five times higher. Although it is possible that heath and social problems cause bigger income differentials, inequalities are the common denominator.

The same is true for economic growth. If we want growth we have to ensure that the benefits (and the tough-love stuff) are seen to be borne more equally than in recent decades.

Unfortunately, few Australian policy makers and commentators seem willing to recognise the need for more, not less, equality.

Asylum seekers: too tough or too humane

Trevor Cook — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:53:34 +0000

Rudd’s ‘tough but humane’ bob each way rhetoric on asylum seekers was always a crock but hey worth a try and great if you can get away with it. Today’s newspoll shows that he hasn’t got away with it.

Of course, Rudd could hope that this newspoll is an outlier and the damage is not serious.

More likely, he will have to turn the nob on the dial more in the direction of ‘tough’.

I suspect the people switching votes on this issue are the old howard battlers (socially conservative working class types who feel threatened rather than uplifted by migrants from other cultures moving into their neighbourhoods), a group Rudd did so much to court at the last election and to which he is particularly sensitised.

It won’t be pretty.

Rudd decided not to try and show leadership on this issue, and rise above the intuitive racism of many Australian voters, now he will be mired in the bog.

Copenhagen loses appeal for Obama

Trevor Cook — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:37:21 +0000

The much-heralded Copenhagen conference looks like it is about to be dealt a fatal blow, with the Obama administration in ‘lowering expectations’ mode.

Women’s unhappiness and drugs

Trevor Cook — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 18:34:37 +0000

Barbara Ehrenreich:

It’s an old story: If you want to sell something, first find the terrible affliction that it cures. In the 1980s, as silicone implants were taking off, the doctors discovered “micromastia” — the “disease” of small-breastedness. More recently, as big pharma searches furiously for a female Viagra, an amazingly high 43% of women have been found to suffer from “Female Sexual Dysfunction,” or FSD. Now, it’s unhappiness, and the range of potential “cures” is dazzling: Seagrams, Godiva, and Harlequin, take note.

Office work doesn’t need to be boring

Trevor Cook — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:21:26 +0000

Mark Scott should talk to Oliver Stone

Trevor Cook — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:51:57 +0000

Before ABC managing director takes his organisation down the path of the so-called pro-am model (no-one knows what this means but the words sound ‘inclusive’), he should have a chat to film-maker Oliver Stone who told Terra’s Orbita US 2009 conference in New York on Tuesday night:

“I’ve heard the democratic argument [for the internet] and I’m not an elitist, but Winston Churchill did make some kind of sense when he said the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter. Let’s not kid ourselves. A mashup is not a movie. It’s offensive.”

“The internet is a [...] tool. If everybody just wants to jump on the tool and say I, hey I can [...] make a mashup, or I can create my own news show, or show you my gymnastic ability, what is it about? We’ve got 6 billion people showing off. I don’t understand. How do you judge? What is life for? Is there a hierarchy of quality or not? Or is it all the same?”

Let’s not abandon quality for the false god of participation.

My fear is that the pro-am model will become just another way of dumbing-down our media environment further while under-paying (or not paying) the new “content” producers for their efforts.

As for the Winston Churchill’s point, you only need to read the comment streams on many big media sites to see how valid that remains.

In Sydney, adultery is bad but property is really serious

Trevor Cook — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 22:06:07 +0000

This week a couple of big media stories gave us another epiphany on the Sydney psyche.

Della Bosca’s escapades with a comedy script writer got a kind of faux serious treatment, ’shock, adultery right here in Sydney, what next?’.

And then last night, the really serious Sydney stuff, a property dispute that resulted (apparently) in a cold-blodded murder.

In Cremorne, too, on the lower north shore where ladies lunch and ‘financial advisers’ live in harbour front houses and it’s ALL about the property.

After a troubling week like that, it’s time for the music man

Laziness is not the way to the Lodge

Trevor Cook — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 22:05:40 +0000

Malcolm Turnbull has failed on two fronts this week, political donations and the ETS legislation. The idea that the Opposition will oppose the Government’s reforms on political donations because they don’t go far enough is pure poppycock. More serious is the admission that the Opposition will oppose the Government’s ETS legislation but will not put forward any amendments because it does not have sufficient time. This is the sort of nonsense that politicians come up with to hide more serious problems.

Turnbull’s leadership is close to being dead in the water. Turnbull has not:

exerted authority over his side of politics, the primitive rantings of Wilson Tuckey are just the outward manifestation of a deeper problem
offered the Australian public any strong sense of his moral character and political purpose, instead Tony Abbott has staked out this territory with his book which only served to put Turnbull’s deficiencies in this area in greater relief. Having read Annabel Crabbe’s recent Quarterly Essay on Turnbull, I’m still none the wiser about his ambitions beyond a life-long desire to succeed. Crabbe’s essay emphasises that Turnbull has been successful through taking risks (and bullying) but at the moment his leadership is characterised more by policy timidity and laziness. Turnbull’s big gamble was utegate and he lost that through a mixture of tactical impatience and lack of diligence in testing his evidence before he sallied forth and risked all.
and, consequently, he has not been able to put forward a credible political alternative. His efforts lack a credible structure – and that makes them ineffective and makes him appear like flim flam to the electorate.

As the wasted weeks go by, Turnbull is looking more like a Peacock or a Beazley, then a Howard or a Rudd. He is plausible enough but not hungry enough to do the really hard work. Turnbull’s big problem is that once the swingers, who vote on a mix of intuition and emotion, decide you are not the real deal, then you’re always going to fall short.

“Cop you later”

Trevor Cook — Sat, 16 May 2009 02:42:49 +0000

Signing off from last night’s rugby league match, the ABC radio announcer said a cheery ‘cop you later’. After the last week of ‘controversy’ he might what to rethink this salutation.