Catallaxy Files

ALP Workplace Health and Safety Election Platform November 2007

All workers have the right to a safe and healthy workplace. Every family has the right to expect their loved ones will return home safely at the end of the working day.

Julia Gillard April 29, 2008

The health and safety of Australian workers is a key concern of Australian governments at all levels.
All workers have the right to a safe and healthy workplace.

Lindsay Tanner February 10, 2010

I don’t think it’s right to say we should have sat back … dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s because we were in a crisis situation

Insulation hotline 131792 after 10am AEDT Thursday.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dzb8FljvGGI&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
(HT: Climategate)

Something of a mixed message has gotten about over the schools computer program. Rudd went to the last election with two computer promises. The first was for a tax-break that allowed some parents (from memory those who could access Family Tax Benefit Part A) to buy a tax deductable laptop (or make other computer related educational expenditure). The second policy was that every school child in the last three years of high school would have access to their own computer at school. Presumably that would be a desktop.

By most accounts Monday’s Q and A was a disaster for Rudd.

At one point, Rudd almost lost his temper with a girl all of 16 years of age, who shook her head at his answer on school laptops, telling her with a sharp look and tone in his voice: “You’re shaking your head. Can I just say that is a fact, and if you ring up principals from around the country, it’s happening.”

The SMH is quoting a Twitter message.

Kevin Rudd is ripping into the sort of girls who denied him sex in high school.

While that is very funny and I admit to a snigger, it is also very undignified. People are going to remember a comment like that and it suggests something of a PR problem for the government on this score. The Australian fact-check is also interesting (not online, but Andrew Bolt has a copy, and at page 4 of the paper edition).

RHETORIC: “Laptops, which is computers in schools, we said we would have a computer for every young person at secondary school from Year 9 and above by, I seem to recall, 2013 or thereabouts.”
REALITY: The original 2007 election commitment was for the laptops to be rolled out in four years (by 2011).
—————————————-
RHETORIC: “We are on track to doing that. We have about 260,000 computers out there in schools now … can I just say that is a fact.”

REALITY: According to Senate estimates, 154,000 of the one million promised laptops are in operation.

Just not good. I think Rudd was under-prepared and has added to the laptop confusion. Really he only has himself to blame; it was a half-assed policy in the first place that they tried to implement on the cheap and they have been caught out by technology savvy kids.

That might not be such a bad thing. Joshua Gans reckons the iPad will revolutionise e-education.

James Buchanan has a new paper where he makes several points about economists and the GFC. While I agree with the notion that money should be neutral (as neutral as is possible anyway) I don’t agree with bringing back the Glass-Stegall laws or greater anti-trust for banks. Afterall the GFC impacted in the US and EU where very different banking regulation models are at work. But you don’t have to agree with his policy prescriptions to agree with his diagnosis of the problem.

The Keynesian-inspired separation of macroeconomics from microeconomics that took place in midcentury seemed to embody genuine scientific advance. The attention of many economists was shifted to measure the aggregate variables that seemed adequate to describe the macroecomy. The size of the gross product, the number of unemployed, the price level—these variables, and others, seemed intrinsically worth measuring, and especially rates of change over time. The whole corpus of macroeconomic modeling that came to be dominant in the years immediately following World War II seemed to offer new vistas for economists’ productive value to the general welfare.

Unfortunately, economists, generally, failed to understand that aggregate variables that may be measured with tolerable accuracy ex post may not be variables subject to control, directly or even indirectly. The fundamental misconception here lies in the understanding of what ‘the economy’ is. The ‘economic problem’ is not (despite Lionel Robbins) an engineering problem that may be defined simply as the allocation of scarce resources among alternative uses. The economy, in some inclusive definitional sense, is perhaps best described as an order that consists of an interlinked set of exchanges, simple and complex, from which outcomes emerge that may in some respects be meaningfully measured but that cannot be chosen, and thereby controlled, by concentrated decision takers.

The false conceptualization here is, of course, exemplified in the failure, both in theory and in practice, of the grand socialist experiments of the twentieth century. What remains missing, however, is a general recognition by economists themselves that their mind-set, when confronted with challenge, has not escaped from the engineering mentality. There has been little or no spillover from observation of events to the analysis by the putative scientists in the academies. It is not, therefore, surprising that the policy objectives and implementation are basically the same as those advanced by the Keynesians of midcentury.

Economists do not really understand what they are doing as they seem forced to make efforts to control aggregate variables that are not controllable in any direct sense. For example, the rate of employment (or unemployment) cannot readily be shifted by governmental mandate. At best, small and peripheral changes may be made while the emergent aggregate generated by the working of the large and complex economy remains stubbornly immune, or worse, to wrongly conceived reform efforts.

Readers familiar with the critiques of Hayek and Mises would recognise those arguments.

The concern I have over this appointment is not so much Kaiser getting the job, but why on earth does an organisation which is 100 per cent government owned have a government relations manager in the first place, let alone one being paid $450,000?