Catallaxy Files

At the end of Sinc’s post on Slippergate he suggested this sort of thing is not uncommon. How true!

You just have to  look around. Try the British scandal on politicians rorting  expense accounts. And the EU (how surprising is that?). And in Tasmania Bob Cheek wrote a book about (among other things) the whole array of rorts for Parliamentarians to enhance their quality of life at the expense of the taxpayers.

That apart, Cheek sends a revealing shaft of daylight through the stuffy, cobwebbed corridors of that squat sandstone pile in Salamanca Place, exposing the backroom plotting, the astonishing rorts, the jealously guarded petty fiefdoms — and the fact that in politics there’s far more cock-up than there is conspiracy.

I never thought I would recommend a book by a politician, especially by a Liberal politician, but this one stands out as a genuine page-turner, revealing how politics is really done down here. It’s worth ten tomes of theory or two tonnes of Hansard; read it and laugh as you learn.

There is no limit to human ingenuity when something can be had for nothing, especially when the practice becomes common enough so that “everyone is doing it”. Will we ever know how many of the billions spent on ATSI programs ended  up in the pockets of the Big Men in the local communities and the white urgers and bureaucrats who made careers in that branch of the Grievance Industry? Try the corruption of the UN and its affliates. The leakage from charitable collections.

Check out the rorts for trade union organizers that are becoming public. Do you think there are no perks attached to local councils? And the waste, duplication, over-regulation and make-work in the public sector, like the health bureaucrats in the states and the Commonwealth who make careers out of writing letter to each other, setting up meetings and working groups that bog down and don’t deliver. You could write a book about it!

According to Tim Blair ”Labor’s remnants need a new parking space before the council tows away their official meeting Tarago.”

For State or Federal members? Just big enough for the State team but surplus to requirements after the next Federal election.

More interesting stuff  in Tim’s post on Labor symbolism.

A disturbing piece on the US  “hospital of cards“.

For some perspective on the magnitude of the healthcare bubble consider that from 1990 to 2007 the cost of all items, as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), rose by 159 percent while housing rose 163 percent and medical care rose a staggering 216 percent. A recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that between 1999 and 2011, health-insurance premiums increased 168 percent while workers’ total earnings increased only 50 percent. Over that same time period, government spending on healthcare increased 240 percent while GDP increased 62 percent.

Does someone have comparable Australian figures at their fingertips?

America’s healthcare system today can best be described as what economics professor Thomas DiLorenzo has termed “fascialist.” According to DiLorenzo, “Fascialism means an economy is part fascist, part socialist.” Fascism is characterized by private enterprise that is comprehensively regulated and regimented by the state, ostensibly “in the public interest” (as arbitrarily defined by the state). According to DiLorenzo,

The problems of the American healthcare system are caused entirely by the fact that the government subjects the system to massive interventions, some of which are fascist in nature, while others are socialist.

Under the current system, consumers play virtually no role in shaping the pattern of resource use and the assignment of resource rewards. The outputs being produced, the methods of production being employed, and the rewards being given to the various owners of productivity are not dictated by healthcare consumers but rather by government and industry lobbyists, or the medical-industrial complex. This mechanism is directly responsible for inflating the healthcare bubble and costs have grown rapidly to reflect whatever the system will bear.

Have a look at the graph in Figure 1 to see that the proportion of “out of pockets” (the cost that is visible to consumers) has declined while all the other (less  visible) costs have escalated. So people who don’t bother with the big picture think that everything is just fine.

This picture is worth a thousand words. But don’t worry, there is another Green pocket to pick to get this wreck up and running! h/t Tim Blair.

Meantime, Mr Baghaei said the Government’s $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation was another fund that companies such as Oceanlinx would go to, to help reach commercialisation.

Should have posted this yesterday, now AB has picked it up.

Popper transformed epistemology and the philosophy of science by four “turns”. Three of there can be seen in his first book of 1934/5 which was translated in 1959 as The Logic of Scientific Discovery. These are (1) the “conjectural turn” to accept that our knowledge is inevitably fallible (conjectural), (2) the “objective turn” to focus on the contents of public or inter-subjective knowlege rather than subjective beliefs which were the traditional focus of theories of knowledge (and still the issue for most philosophers) and (3) critical attention to the social aspects of science and the conventions or “rules of the game” of scientific practice. The fourth turn, to take metaphysics seriously, came during the 1950s.

Here I will address the social aspect of science and the rules of the game because these are particularly relevant to the situation that has developed in climate science. In The Open  Society and its Enemies Chapter 23 Popper explained that the rationality of science, such as it is, does not depend on the rationality of individual scientists. 

Everyone who has an inkling of the history of the natural sciences is aware of the passionate tenacity which characterizes many of its quarrels. No amount of political partiality can influence political theories more strongly than the partiality shown by some natural scientists in favour of their intellectual offspring…

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Some years ago by way of Colin Simkin,  Emeritus Professor of Economics at Sydney, I met the late Warren Hogan, also Professor at Sydney, who spent several years and many millions of dollars on the Hogan Report on Aged Care. I seem to recall that the project went on and on, years past the initial term of the study. Year after year I waited for the Howard administration to pull some kind of aged care rabbit out of  the hat to capitalise on all that effort. Nothing happened that I can remember, apart from an abortive attempt to get home owners to advance funds on loan to the sector to overcome a chronic shortage of capital. That went down like a stone. The nerve of expecting the relatives to forego the property windfall just so their parents could get better care. The responsible minister was just not up to the task of explaining the scheme.

I don’t recall if that came from the Hogan review, he never mentioned it to me in casual conversation. His major concern was the amount of regulation and red tape that prevented entrpreneurs from innovating in the industry. He attributed that to the nursing unions which insisted that everything had to be done by the nursing book.  I wonder if the Productivity Commission has picked up on the issues that concerned Hogan.

BTW Warren Hogan named his eldest son Warren  and he is a senior economist with one of the big banks. He gets to make public comments from time to time and he looks and sounds just like his father.

UPDATE:  The Weekend Australian has a piece by Judith on the over-regulation of the aged are sector, with overlapping rules and regutions from several jurisdictions and regulators, including the rationing of licences for new beds. Where is the Department of Finance and Deregulation when you need it?

It applies with equal aptness to the aged-care industry, where the principles of central planning have been applied for many years…

Connor has done some fact checking on the biography of ms Heiss. The result is not  a pretty sight.

Heiss approvingly quotes David Marr on the Bolt Trial:

Freedom of speech is not at stake here. Judge Mordecai Bromberg is not telling the media what we can say or where we can poke our noses. He’s attacking lousy journalism. He’s saying that if Andrew Bolt of the Herald Sun wants to accuse people of appalling motives, he should start by getting his facts right.

Searches of official records indicate that Ms Heiss has fabricated a great deal of her family history and did not do any serious fact-checking to get the story right.

Conclusion. Obviously, the facts as presented here are completely different from those given in Anita Heiss’s Am I Black Enough For You? At the Bolt Trial she presented a witness statement that claimed her grandmother and sister were part of the “stolen generations”. If there really is, as Heiss says, an Aborigines Protection Board file which says that 5 year old Amy, “along with her four year-old-sister, Florence”, were removed from Nyngan in 1910 she needs to bring it forward to clarify how they were taken away, for what would have been the second time, in 1915 and 1921, from the care of their mother in Brungle.

Anita, please explain.

(HT: Andrew Bolt but no comments allowed on his site.)

Part of the folklore of academia is that the state should fund universities to do fundamental research to advances the frontier of knowlege and then there is a spillover into into technology to deliver wealth and welfare.

Terrence Kealey wrote a book on the economic laws of scientific research which refutes that view. He compared the Baconian view (as above) with the Adam Smith view that technology advances mostly through “on the job” modifications of previous technologies. Scientists and research laboratories can be involved but they might just as well be privately funded as state-funded.

A summary of the book appeared in a series of posts on the Cat a few years ago and this is the consolidated summaries.

A few extracts to give the flavour. 

Chapter 5. The Agricultural Revolution.

The area of innovation shifted to Holland and England. Vital innovations such as crop rotation and systematic improvement of crops and pastures were driven by gentleman farmers such as “Turnip” Townsend and associations such as the Lunar Society which consisted of a mix of scientists, engineers and industrialists.  By 1850 agricultural productivity in Britain was increasing by 0.5% per annum, unprecedented in history. Laissez faire ruled (almost) and there was no state involvement in research or industry policy.

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Mark Latham puts a good question.

In the climate change debate, we are witnessing a puzzling shift in the foundations of public reason – the emergence of what might be thought of as anti-enlightenment. It is no longer sufficient for a large majority of scientists to compile the evidential facts of a matter and expect the public to accept them at face value. Other, more powerful influences are at work.

On a point of detail, I am prepared to bet a dollar that a large majority of scientists do not back climate alarmism. Due to the political influences at work we mostly get to hear about the minority who are active alarmists.

But we still need to explore the influences at work which have radically undermined the credibility of the scientific enterprise.

How about Big Government backing Big Science, the explosion of so-called “higher education”, the rise of the Normal Scientist, the downsides of professionalism and specialization in science, destructive fads and fashions in the philosophy of science and the premature burial of the most important philosopher of science in the 20th century.

Most likely Big Government and the politicization and corruption of everything that it touches is the major issue. Look at the governance and modus operandi of the IPCC as a paradigm case of crazy politics driving science.

To be continued. 

Roger Koppl, a leading Austrian economist, pursues the problem of defective forensic reports in the US justice system. He suggests an alternative to surveillance and regulation of the system, namely to give defendents more access to expert advice.

A front-page article  in yesterday’s Washington Post underlines the importance of establishing a substantive defense right to expertise in the US.

The article says, “Justice Department officials have known for years that flawed forensic work might have led to the convictions of potentially innocent people, but prosecutors failed to notify defendants or their attorneys even in many cases they knew were troubled.” The DoJ begin investigating in the 1990s “after reports that sloppy work by examiners at the FBI lab was producing unreliable forensic evidence in court trials.” As the Post article chronicles, the investigation was very narrowly drawn in spite of evidence that problems were likely more widespread. When problems were identified, the FBI gave notice to the relevant prosecutors, but not to defendants or their legal representatives.

Oversight is a common prescription from those who recognize problems with the system. I have expressed my preference for a different approach, one that chooses checks and balances over hierarchy.