via We’ve got 5 years to save world says Australia’s chief scientist Professor Penny Sackett | Herald Sun.
We’ve got 5 years (now 1 hour left) to save world says Australia’s chief scientist Professor Penny Sackett, 4th December 2009 | Herald Sun
04 Dec 2014 Leave a comment
Three days to save the world from climate change, if Australia’s chief scientist is to believed?!
01 Dec 2014 Leave a comment
in environmental economics, global warming, politics - Australia Tags: climate alarmism, global warming, green rent seeking
The meddlesome preferences of the Green Left
28 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in liberalism, Marxist economics, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA Tags: Green Left, Leftover Left, meddlesome preferences
It’s not just Ed Miliband. Labour’s on the wrong side of history » The Spectator
21 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, comparative institutional analysis, constitutional political economy, election campaigns, liberalism, macroeconomics, Marxist economics, political change, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, public economics, technological progress Tags: free trade, globalisation, market augmenting governments
Politicians can’t be heroes any more. Instead, they have to operate within the tightly drawn tramlines of the global economy.
This is true for those on the left and the right, but the pressure that this places on countries to adopt a low-tax, light-regulation regime is something with which the right is far more comfortable.
via It’s not just Ed Miliband. Labour’s on the wrong side of history » The Spectator.
Real GDP per New Zealander and Australian aged 15-64, PPP, 1956-2013, $US
18 Nov 2014 1 Comment
in business cycles, economic growth, geography, global financial crisis (GFC), great recession, macroeconomics, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand Tags: lost decades, prosperity and depression
Figure 1: Real GDP per New Zealander and Australian aged 15-64, converted to 2013 price level with updated 2005 EKS purchasing power parities, 1956-2013, $US
Source: Computed from OECD Stat Extract and The Conference Board, Total Database, January 2014, http://www.conference-board.org/economics
Figure 1 shows that New Zealand lost two decades of growth between 1974 and 1992 after level pegging with Australia for the preceding two decades.
New Zealand returned to trend growth between 1992 and 2007. New Zealand did not make up the lost growth of the previous two decades to catch up to Australia.
Figure 2: Real GDP per New Zealander and Australian aged 15-64, converted to 2013 price level with updated 2005 EKS purchasing power parities, 1.9 per cent detrended, base 100 = 1974, 1956-2013, $US
Source: Computed from OECD Stat Extract and The Conference Board, Total Database, January 2014, http://www.conference-board.org/economics
In Figure 2, a flat line equates to a 1.9% GDP annual growth rate; a falling line is a below trend growth rate; a rising line is an above 1.9% growth rate.
Figure 2 shows that there was a 34% drop against trend between 1974 and 1992; a return to trend growth and slightly better between 1992 and 2007; and then a recession to 2010.
Australia had its ups and downs since 1956 but essentially grew at the trend growth rate of 1.85% since 1970. The so-called resources boom in Australia does not show up in Figures 1 or 2.
There was no growth rebound in New Zealand to recover the lost ground, either in the lost decades between 1974 and 1992, or after the Global Financial Crisis. The strong GDP growth in Australia after that Keating recession in 1991 is an example of the country recovering lost ground after a recession – See Figure 2.
A trend growth rate of 1.9% is the 20th century trend growth rate that Edward Prescott currently estimates for the global industrial leader, which is the United States of America.
Why does the Left oppose higher petrol prices?
14 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in election campaigns, energy economics, environmental economics, environmentalism, politics - Australia
George Stigler vindicated: Learning the Wealth of Nations
14 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in constitutional political economy, political change, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, Public Choice Tags: george stigler, Leftover Left, Milton Friedman, neoliberal conspiracies, public choice, Twitter left, Tyler Cowen
Tyler Cowen has drawn attention to a 2011 paper on policy learning in the 1970s and 80s by Francisco J. Buera, Alexander Monge-Narajo, and Giorgio E. Primiceri was published in Econometrica in 2011. Their paper found that:
1. Policymakers have priors about how good the market economy is, and they revise those views — and thus revise policy — as they observe their own growth results and those of their neighbors.
2. A simple learning model predicts about 97% of the policy choices observed in the data. The model accounts for more than 77% of the observed policy switches over a three-year time window.
3. Evolving beliefs — and not just the fixed demographic characteristics of countries — are critical for understanding policy decisions.
4. It was probably the growth collapse of the late 1970s for interventionist countries which led to a greater reliance on markets.
5. Adjustment toward better-performing policies is often quite slow. In part this is because policymakers attribute the superior performance of other countries to heterogeneity rather than policy per se.
This record of politicians learning from failure and success at home and abroad is a vindication of George Stigler’s views of the relative unimportance of economists in influencing public policy.
There was no neoliberal conspiracy that captured the hearts and minds of politicians through mass hypnosis in the 1970s and 1980s as both the Left over Left and the Twitter Left like to suggest
The policies of Friedman had to wait, as George Stigler predicted, for a market to develop among interest groups and the voting public. Once that market developed, Milton Friedman, FA Hayek and others looked like leaders of an opinion.
A few years earlier, Friedman and Hayek were just angry men in the wilderness.
The reason for this sudden change in their public profile and purported influence on the shape the course of public policy in th 1970s and 1980s onwards was political parties were yet to conclude that the existing policy regime had failed irretrievably, and that the successes of neighbours on economic reform might be worth imitating locally.
Once politicians, the voting public and interest groups concluded that new solutions are needed, just as Stigler predicted, the ideas for reform been around for a long time came to the front.
via http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/11/learning-the-wealth-of-nations.html
The Twitter Left is replacing the Left over Left
14 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in comparative institutional analysis, liberalism, Marxist economics, politics, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, technological progress Tags: Leftover Left, Twitter left
On the withering away of the Labour Party
08 Nov 2014 1 Comment
in politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand Tags: Leftover Left, The withering away of the Labour Party, the withering away of the proletariat
John Quiggin made an interesting point the other day that explains why the Australian Labor Party caucus is no longer the cream of the working class:
In 1945, the largest single occupational group in Australia (and an archetypal group of Labor supporters) were railwaymen (there were almost no women in the industry).
By the 1970s, the largest occupational group, also becoming the archetypal group of Labor supporters. were schoolteachers.
Quiggin was not making the point I am making, but his data was instructive.
The traditional labour voter of days gone by was socially conservative, fiscally conservative, strict on educational standards and believed in hard work, self-improvement and being frugal. They agreed with Dalton Trumbo who said:
I never considered the working class anything other than something to get out of.
Bringing Labor together
05 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in politics - Australia Tags: Gough Whitlam
HT: sinclair davidson
The Greens are the heirs of the 19th century Tory squires
01 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in environmentalism, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA Tags: expressive voting, green rent seeking, green voters
The Greens are no more than a reincarnation of the 19th century British Tory Radicals with their aristocratic sensibilities that combined strong support for centralised power with a paternalistic concern for the plight of the poor:
- 19th century Tory radicals opposed the middle classes and the aesthetic ugliness they associated with an industrial economy; and
- Like the 19th century Tory Radicals, today’s green gentry see the untamed middle classes as the true enemy.
Environmentalists have an aristocratic vision of a stratified, terraced society in which the knowing ones would order society for the rest of us.
Environmentalism offered the extraordinary opportunity to combine the qualities of virtue and selfishness
Many left-wingers thought they were expressing an entirely new and progressive philosophy as they mouthed the same prejudices as Trollope’s 19th century Tory squires: attacking any further expansion of industry and commerce as impossibly vulgar, because it was:
View original post 346 more words
Trends in union membership in New Zealand, Australia, the UK and the USA
27 Oct 2014 Leave a comment
in labour economics, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA, unions Tags: Employment Contracts Act, union membership
The Encyclopaedia of New Zealand says that the rate of union membership dropped sharply to under 20% when the Employment Contracts Act was passed in 1991 using the chart below.
Figure 1: Percentage of union members
The OECD union density data, which allows international comparisons back to 1970, tells a different story. OECD data on union membership in New Zealand started in 1970.
Figure 2: Union density,New Zealand, Australia, the UK and USA 1970-2013
Source: OECD Stats Extract
Note: Trade union density corresponds to the ratio of wage and salary earners that are trade union members, divided by the total number of wage and salary earners (OECD Labour Force Statistics).
Figure 2 above shows that union membership has been in a long slow decline in New Zealand since the mid-1970s. This is been pretty much the pattern all round the world.
The much hated Employment Contracts Act 1991, much hated by the Left over Left, doesn’t really show up in the union density figures in figure 2. There is no sudden break in trend obvious in figure 2.
The longer time series in union membership in figure 1 compiled by the Encyclopaedia of New Zealand has long gaps between the data observations. Because of this, the sharp decline in union membership from the late 1970s, which it actually show up in its start-up , is not sufficiently distinguished from subsequent events because of the long gaps between observations reported in the figure 1.
If anything, union membership stopped declining in New Zealand in the late 1990s. Stabilising at about 20% of wage and salary earners.
Union membership continued to decline slowly in Australia, the UK and the USA subsequent to 1998. Union membership stabilised in New Zealand by contrast. Perhaps the Employment Contracts act should be able to claim credit for that?
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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