hamish

A Modest Marginal Proposal

2008-06-09T12:16:00.002+10:00

A recent report that concludes that the carbon footprint of food overwhelmingly consists of carbon emitted during the food's production rather than its transport (i.e. 83% from production, 4% of total footprint is preventable by "eating local"). Based on the report's conclusions Tyler Cowen (of Marginal Revolution) suggests:

In other words, when it comes to food the greenest things you can do, if that is your standard, is to eat less meat and have fewer kids.

But this suggestion just made me think of a modest proposal whereby we could solve both problems in one swift swoop...

Government Proposes Petrol Cartel Enforcement Legislation

2008-06-09T10:21:00.002+10:00

I'm still astounded by the Australian Government's proposed Fuel-Watch scheme. Working at its best, Fuel-Watch might provide an extremely marginal decrease in petrol prices but it seems far more likely to me that Fuel-Watch will have the exact opposite effect!

The most difficult part about enforcing a cartel agreement with your competitors is monitoring their behaviour and making sure that they stick to the cartel's agreed-upon price. In Fuel-Watch, the government is providing just such a mechanism, the perfect way for petrol stations to enforce any cartel-like agreements. All that the petrol stations need to do now is agree on a monopoly-level price and rake in the profits while the government works hard to enforce their cartel agreement!

Does anyone have a clue in the Rudd government? (Don't take that as an endorsement of the Liberal Party, the opposition is no better, if not considerably worse...) *sigh*

Privatize Australia Post! Privatize it NOW!

2008-06-09T10:11:00.003+10:00

Open the postal sector up to free competition! Other countries have done it and they didn't collapse into anarchy! Even Sweden, one of the countries that from my brother's account seems to be most likely to collapse into a communist dictatorship, has done it! Australia Post needs to be privatized and the postal sector opened up to competition.

Australia Post's:

Diabolical customer service
Absolutely ridiculous opening hours (have you ever tried to pick up a packet delivered to your house when you work full-time?)
General ignorance about the services they actually offer (try sending something use Print Post Direct International, and you'll see what I mean)
Need I go on?

all argue for change. For instance in Sweden where postal delivery has been opened up to competition, you can pick up packet deliveries from the local 7-11 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!

And don't get me started with remarks like: "What about the people living in rural areas?". I've had quite enough of funding the lifestyle decisions of people who choose to live in rural areas. They can find out just how much their decision is costing the rest of us!

Privatize Australia Post! Privatize it NOW!

Maternity leave tax on women without plans for children a "Human Right"

2008-06-09T10:05:00.000+10:00

What about: "Sex discrimination commissioner advocates lower wages and poorer conditions for women of child-bearing age"? Or perhaps "sex discrimination commissioner wants to make it harder for women of child-bearing age to find work"? That's what I read when I saw this article. The Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Elizabeth Broderick, wants maternity leave recognised as a "Human-Right" and for mothers to initially get 14 weeks of paid maternity leave. She eventually wants the maternity leave increased to 48 weeks.

This paid maternity leave can be funded in two ways, by forcing employers to provide paid maternity leave or through taxation. In the first case, employer financed maternity leave; anyone who understands any economics whatsoever will realise that obligating employers to provide these benefits is a sure way to increase discriminatory hiring and firing practices.

In the second case, getting tax-payers to fund other people's life-style choices is, in my opinion, morally questionable. Even in this latter case, the employer is presumably obligated to keep the job open for the new mother on her return after almost a year of leave. This will still create an, albeit lesser but no less real, incentive for employers to discriminate against women of child-bearing age.

Why not let people plan their own lives and make their own decisions? A free market economy already offers employers far more incentives than the government ever could not to discriminate against different groups in the community. Efforts by the government that have the stated goal of reducing discrimination usually have the perverse consequence that they actually increase levels of discrimination (or at the very best shift that same level of discrimination into other practices).

Rudd demonstrates Hayek-ian knowledge problem

2008-05-31T17:22:00.002+10:00

In searching for some material on Hayek I turned up this speech by Kevin Rudd on the Hayek's philosophy. One of the core claims of the speech is that Hayek argues that (and this is a claim upon which most of Rudd's argument rests):

"Hayek argues that human beings’ altruism is a hangover from their primitive tribal experience, reinforced by religion, and must be purged if we are to optimise our individual liberty through rational self-centred participation in the market."

Anyone passingly familiar with Hayek's work could tell you that this assertion was a patent mis-representation of Hayek's thought. Rudd is either willfully ignorant or willfully misrepresented of Hayek's thought. Rudd's entire argument collapses like a house of cards if we were to consider, for instance, this quotes from Hayek's book, "The Fatal Conceit":

"…we must constantly adjust our lives, our thoughts and our emotions, in order to live simultaneously within different kinds of orders according to different rules. If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed rules of the…small band or troop, or…our families…to the (extended order of cooperation through markets), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it. Yet if we were to always apply the (competitive) rules of the extended order to our more intimate groupings, we would crush them."
(Hayek, 1988, p 18)

Hayek argues that extended orders of cooperation are impossible to maintain if the rules of small scale interactions (like those within the family) are applied to the macro scale. Not, as Rudd represents Hayek's thought as being, that applying the rules of these small scale interactions is always a mistakes.

It is one of Hayek's most famous quotes so it is difficult to maintain that someone who had actually done any research on Hayek and his thought could possibly be ignorant of it. It is incumbent on Rudd to either maintain intellectual honesty and either not give a speech about a topic about which he quite obviously has no understanding or alternatively be honest about Hayek's philosophy and engage it for what it is rather than the straw-man version Rudd presents.

UPDATE: I just noticed The Economist's Free Exchange blog has a post making almost exactly the same point except that it was written some time ago. Nice to know that I'm in good company.

Bogu bags $80m deal!?!

2008-05-30T14:26:00.002+10:00

I guess it just shows how preoccupied with kendo I am at the moment but I saw this article in the sport section and thought, "wow, that's a lot to pay for a bogu bag". Of course, the headline was actually "Bogut bags $80m deal" and about basketball...

Rudd's Breathtaking Ignorance

2008-05-23T11:58:00.002+10:00

Not Kevin but Kevin's cousin, Van Thanh Rudd. According to this article Van Thanh recently had his submission to an exhibition rejected for being too provocative. Commenting on his artwork and its meaning Van Thanh reportedly said:

"commenting on the fact that I believe the global economy is a direct hurdle to a lot of the good peace processes to deal with human rights abuses", including in Tibet. He said he did not discount China's obvious atrocities. "But the overwhelming historical thing is going back to American colonialism in Asia and globally."

I really hope this thinking isn't reflective of Kevin's thoughts. I hope Kevin believes something more like this (but I doubt it):

"The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another."
Milton Friedman

The "global economy" is a force for good lifting people out of conflict and poverty, not miring them in it!

Unions look after unions

2008-05-16T13:29:00.002+10:00

I think this post from Megan McArdle stresses an important point that is often forgotten in discussions about unions and unionization, unions are, first and foremost, out to look after the health of the union rather than the workers. Just like the politicians whose main aim is to implement good policy rather than get re-elected probably won't get re-elected, the unions that don't focus first and foremost on sustaining their own existence will probably cease to exist.

Energy Efficiency - Market Response

2008-05-09T14:29:00.003+10:00

There's an interesting article in this week's Economist about energy efficiency. Most of the most egregious causes of poor energy efficiency are government subsidies and regulations.

The article also talks about how many businesses and consumers seem not to bother to adopt energy saving devices unless there is a very high return on their use. They cite the transaction costs of researching, purchasing and installing these energy saving devices as one of the main causes of this failure . This of course presents a profit opportunity. Companies have sprung up that take care of financing and talling energy saving devices. These companies split the energy savings with their clients.

If only the various Australian water boards learnt that lesson and raised the price of water instead of instituting the ridiculous water restrictions that they use to limit demand.

My bank employs Marvin

2008-05-09T11:45:00.000+10:00

It seems my bank has decided to employ Marvin to write captchas for them:

Hypnosis? There are cheaper ways!

2008-05-09T11:36:00.000+10:00

According to this article, Some businesses in America are apparently starting to use hypnosis on their employees to aid in brainstorming. Under hypnosis "people are less inhibited... and may offer their craziest ideas".
Given that a 6 hour hypnosis brainstorming session costs between $10,000 to $20,000 I don't know why they don't just use more traditional methods. For much less than $10,000 you could get everyone really really drunk. In this state they would be totally uninhibited and perfectly willing to offer their craziest ideas. Of course there may be more of a mess to clean up afterwards.
HT: Management R&D

Window Switching in Ubuntu

2008-04-17T18:33:00.000+10:00

In both Windows and Ubuntu Linux you can switch active windows by pressing control (ctl) and tab. However on Windows if you press ctl-alt after pressing ctl-tab the previously active window will stay in the foreground. I find this very useful so it really bugs me that I haven't found a way to do this in Ubuntu. I've had a look at the keyboard mappings for window switching and there isn't a space for reverting to the previously active window. If anyone knows how to do this please let me know!

Car Names

2008-04-07T09:59:00.000+10:00

Who gets paid to give cars their names? Where do they come up with such ridiculous names?

I mean take "Charade"... I can just see two people talking:

Person 1: What sort of car do you have?
Person 2: Car? It's a "Charade".
Person 1: So you don't have a car? It's a sham?
Person 2: No it's a "Charade".
Person 1: That's what I said.
...

I can see an almost identical conversation with the "Mirage". What kind of stupid name is that? Why do you want a car that's a charade or a mirage?

One of my other favorites is the "Prelude". Prelude to what? I think I'll wait for the real thing thanks.

Deadweight loss of taxation

2008-03-28T16:09:00.000+11:00

Argentina is doing their bit to help economics instructors explain the deadweight loss of taxation. After the Argentinian Government increased export taxes on agricultural exports:

The tax rise would lead to some 2m hectares (5m acres) being left idle next year, reckons Pablo Adreani, an agricultural consultant. Some producers are already cutting back: Alexis de Noailles, who runs Rincón de Chillar, a large farming company, says the new policy caused him to stop work on a new milk factory, costing ten families their jobs.

From the Economist

Hazard perception test

2008-03-27T04:35:00.000+11:00

The NSW government recently introduced a hazard perception test in their increasingly byzantine car licensing requirements. In this test you are shown a series of videos of various driving situations and asked to touch the screen when you would take a particular action (e.g. break or turn right). The test was introduced because research in Victoria showed that people who passed the test were far less likely to have an accident.

The problem is in NSW you're allowed to sit the test as many times as you like and people who fail don't have to undertake any action. I will admit a persons first attempt at the test probably has predictive value in telling you whether they're more likely to have an accident because very cautious people are far more likely to pass the test the first time. Passing the test on the fifth attempt, however, is unlikely to mean that you've suddenly improved as a driver. It's probably far more likely to mean that you've finally learned how to game the test and give the RTA the answers they're looking for.

The problem is they don't take any action to improve the hazard perception of drivers that fail. If they asked the drivers that failed on the first (or second attempt) to do some kind of course that was shown to improve hazard perception and reduce the risk of an accident then the test would be meaningful but they don't. Instead you can sit the test as many times as you like until you work out when they want you to press the screen, not necessarily when you've become a better driver.

Marglin Podcast

2008-03-25T12:31:00.000+11:00

A recent Econtalk Podcast was with Stephen Marglin about his new book, "The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community". As always the podcast was very interesting. I heard about his book a couple of weeks ago and was somewhat skeptical and this podcast didn't change my opinion.

His main point seemed to be that conventional economic analysis undervalues the benefits of "community" where community is some kind of group thats costly to leave. As a critique of main-stream, highly technical economics may have some substance but from what I understood his reasons for not being a Hayek-ian were highly confused. If joining a community is so beneficial then why not leave that up to individuals? Surely communities have--and could, if people wanted it--develop ways of voluntarily making a credible commitment to join the community such that it would be extremely costly for an individual to leave that community. Does he think that there is no way for people to voluntarily credibly commit to joining a community? Alternatively, does Marglin think that people, irrationally, underestimate the benefits of joining a community and, as such, are unwilling to join communities that require them to voluntarily make the initial credible commitment to join? I couldn't work it out.

I could think of a lot of organizations that require a very heavy upfront voluntary commitment to join and the members of the community endure very heavy losses to leave. These communities are mostly religious cults where the leader usually absconds with the community members' money but they do seem to exist.

Smith quote

2008-03-10T14:13:00.000+11:00

I thought this quote from Adam Smith was fantastic:

The property which every man has in his own labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable. The patrimony of a poor man lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands; and to hinder him from employing this strength and dexterity in what manner he thinks proper without injury to his neighbour, is a plain violation of this most sacred property. It is a manifest encroachment upon the just liberty both of the workman, and of those who might be disposed to employ him. As it hinders the one from working at what he thinks proper, so it hinders the aothersa from employing whom they think proper. To judge whether he is fit to be employed, may surely be trusted to the discretion of the employers whose interest it so much concerns. The affected anxiety of the law–giver lest they should employ an improper person, is evidently as impertinent as it is oppressive.
Adam Smith

HT: Tom Palmer

Resumption of intermittent service

2008-03-04T10:26:00.000+11:00

It turns out that this isn't the echo chamber I thought it was. Not only does my brother read this blog it turns out that someone else at his university reads this blog too! Not only that but they noticed the recent laziness induced hiatus! So this post is just to say that the intermittent blog posts will be resumed posthaste.

Could it be the pill?

2007-11-10T13:59:00.000+11:00

Yesterday I posted about recent research showing that women have a preference for men of their own race in speed dating situations. I was puzzling about a possible evolutionary explanation for this result when I remembered that I'd read about research showing that women who are pregnant or taking the pill (because taking the pill works by tricking the body into thinking you're already pregnant) prefer men who smell similar to themselves (see here and here for example). Could it simply be that the female subjects in the experiment were taking the pill and that this was causing them to prefer men that were perceived as being more similar (i.e. of the same race)?

Women are more racist than men?

2007-11-09T17:04:00.000+11:00

At least when it comes to choosing a mate in speed dating, according to the latest research:

reported in a forthcoming article in the Review of Economic Studies. Women of all the races we studied revealed a strong preference for men of their own race: White women were more likely to choose white men; black women preferred black men; East Asian women preferred East Asian men; Hispanic women preferred Hispanic men. But men don't seem to discriminate based on race when it comes to dating. A woman's race had no effect on the men's choices.

Mind you men went for good looking women that they perceived to be less intelligent and have less career ambition than themselves so men don't get off the hood completely.
HT: The Undercover Economist

This explains a lot...

2007-10-30T15:47:00.000+11:00

Bryan Caplan recently named Gollum and Magneto as the two villains he most identified with. It really explains a lot. After having read his book and met him he really is like a cross between Gollum and Magneto, but in a good way.

Voting on implementation effort

2007-09-22T17:07:00.000+10:00

I was recently at the International Conference on Information Systems Design at the National University of Ireland in Galway. One of the more interesting presentations was from Hans Mitlöhner. He suggested that you could use ordinal rankings and voting rules to develop effort estimates for software development projects with comparable accuracy to the more complicated but well known COCOMO method* (here are the slides and the paper). It was an interesting idea but I think it requires a slightly different focus to be an effective estimation technique.

The idea was that you could think of each of the different COCOMO attributes as a voter. Each of these attributes (or voters) ranks the new project relative to the other projects. So for instance you rank all the projects based on the required reliability, then on programmers' capability and so on. These rankings (or votes) are then aggregated based on voting rules: simple majority, maximin, copeland or borda. Based on these rankings you can come up with an accurate estimate for how much effort it will take to develop the software. Using, for instance, simple majority voting and just 5 of the COCOMO attributes (reliability, turn-around time, analyst's capability, programmer's capability, schedule constraints) this method produced estimates of comparable to the full COCOMO method (i.e. 30% accuracy).

It is presumably easier to rank projects rather than to calculate the attributes completely. Coming up with a numeric estimate for some of the COCOMO attributes is a time-consuming and produces precise numbers for things that are somewhat ambiguous in nature. For that reason its plausible that coming up with a simple ranking will in many circumstances be easier and more transparent than using the normal COCOMO method.

In my view, there are two problems with the method:

Most companies won't have enough projects to come up with a representative sample that could be used to apply this method. This estimation method seems to require a reasonable number of cases to be used as reference points that the people in the project are familiar with before it is applicable.
Even if they do have enough projects that the method could be applied effectively, would there be people in the company with enough knowledge about each of those cases that they could ranking each project accurately on each of the attributes.

Where I think this method may, however, be useful is in aiding the estimation of work effort of "cards" in extreme programming. In extreme programming techniques changes are written out on cards which are then assigned an effort estimate. These effort estimates are usually based on the intuition of the software developer. In my current workplace we have a problem that these estimates aren't terribly accurate and that there is a large optimistic bias (we usually estimate too little time for each card rather than too much).

Each week we work through a fairly large number of these cards, maybe twenty or so. The developers, especially the developer that worked on the card, can give a fairly accurate ranking of the card's difficulty across different criteria. This means that, while this effort estimation method may not be useful at the level of whole projects, it may be possible to apply it at the level of individual cards. Especially if there was software support for the ranking process to make it easier to apply the method.

The next question I guess is do we really want better estimates of development effort? Some people say no... but that's a topic for another time.

*COCOMO is a technique for estimating the effort required to implement a particular piece of software and was originally developed by Barry Boehm. For more information see this Wikipedia article.

Peccadilloes of Academic Typograghy: Endnotes vs. Footnotes

2007-09-16T12:34:00.000+10:00

In a continuing series on the peccadilloes of academic typography I present the endnote. Being a curious person endnotes in a book or an article really annoy me. I feel compelled to flip to the end of the article and appease my curiosity. Normally I'm let down because its usually just a simple reference or something obvious. Occasionally, however, there's a really interesting endnote, and this is what keeps me flipping back and forth.

The Oxford Press Edition of Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' is a case in point. Full of mostly useless endnotes, but, the occaisional gem lies lurking there at the back of the book forcing me to continual look and, almost always, be disappointed. Why can't everyone just use footnotes. It saves wear and tear on the book and satisfies my curiosity immediately!

More than food miles

2007-09-12T10:26:00.000+10:00

I was discussing the relative merits of buying local food vs. food that's shipped or flown in with some of the guys at work. My position, which I expressed poorly, was that often the economies of scale or comparative advantage overwhelm the carbon produced by the shipping process meaning that its often better (i.e. more environmentally friendly) to buy food that was grown overseas and flown or shipped in. Fortuitously, I stumbled across this recent NY Times article (via Cafe Hayek) which argues the point far more effectively than I did.

It all depends on how you wield the carbon calculator. Instead of measuring a product's carbon footprint through food miles alone, the Lincoln University scientists expanded their equations to include other energy-consuming aspects of production — what economists call "factor inputs and externalities" — like water use, harvesting techniques, fertilizer outlays, renewable energy applications, means of transportation (and the kind of fuel used), the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed during photosynthesis, disposal of packaging, storage procedures and dozens of other cultivation inputs.

Incorporating these measurements into their assessments, scientists reached surprising conclusions. Most notably, they found that lamb raised on New Zealand's clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed. In other words, it is four times more energy-efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard. Similar figures were found for dairy products and fruit.

Admittedly the research is from NZ scientists comparing NZ products to English products so there is room for bias but the point remains. Its not as simple as tallying up the carbon emitted in transporting the produce from where it was grown to where its being consumed. There are a range of other carbon emissions involved (other than transport) not to mention the fact that local small scale growers are likely to use less efficient and more carbon emission producing means of production. How clear is it that carbon emissions are really so bad anyway?

A stitch in time...

2007-09-11T15:10:00.000+10:00

It took me a long time before I understood the saying "a stitch in time saves nine". I always wondered how a rent in the fabric of space-time could save nine. I guess its just a reflection on my child hood.