Posts tagged…Policy
Precautionary principle, misleading and undemocratic
Fri, Sep 05 2008The "precautionary principle" makes a dishonest claim (I don't say that people who invoke it are dishonest) because it pretends to be one thing—a justification—while being, in fact, a very different thing—an explanation.
I say that precaution justifies, at best, a wager and that wagers should not be the basis of public policy in democracies, certainly not when we are debating a decision that will…
Read more…The Panic of 2007
Wed, Aug 27 2008The sub-prime mortgage crisis sparked a financial market panic caused by lack of information on the current size of the problem. This market-information fault is due, in essence, to the way that the sub-prime mortgage is structured.
Not an easy analysis, but careful, complete, convincing. Hint: you can skip the really obscure stuff on derivative instruments and still find very good value in this…
Foreign direct investment approvals
Tue, Aug 26 2008Below the fold, my Op-Ed in today's Australian Financial Review on the approval of foreign investment proposals.
In summary, I'm advocating a transparent policies and procedures using existing review institutions and laws (the Corporations Act, the Australian Stock Exchange Guidelines on business practices, the transfer pricing regulations of the tax laws) to regulate all companies doing business…
Glimpses of a micro reform program
Sun, Aug 10 2008Paul Keating has a world-beating talent to sting. His descriptions of his successor as Prime Minister, John Howard, as a "dessicated coconut araldited to the seat" while his deputy Costello was "all tip and no iceberg", are exemplars of the jibe. But they're spitballs not barbs. They don't wound because they're often more-than-half boastful: in this case, a reminder that Keating finally crushed…
Monckton’s litany
Fri, Jul 18 2008Christopher, Viscount Monkton of Brenchley, is a good scholar and a fine writer. This clever recital pulls no punches but you may feel like responding 'amen' (at least you might…if you were a 'dissenter')
- Canute couldn’t stop sea level rising. Officials can’t stop it either.
- Even if global temperature has risen, it has risen in a straight line at a natural 0.5 °C/century for 300 years since…
You need a model?
Fri, Jul 04 2008I can't get a response out of the Garnaut Review website—probably overloaded—to download the Review report. But here's an extract from Prof Garnaut's address to the Press Club on a 'curious turn' in AGW 'dissent':
"The dissent took a curious turn in Australia in 2008, with much prominence being given to assertions that a warming trend had ended over the last decade. This is a question that is…
Six out of ten in UK doubt climate change is ‘settled science’
Sun, Jun 22 2008First it was the Irish rejecting an overblown and incomprehensible Lisbon treaty on the consolidation of the EU's political machinery. Now it's the British public who are failing to live up to their leaders' expectations.
"Ipsos MORI polled 1,039 adults and found that six out of 10 agreed that 'many scientific experts still question if humans are contributing to climate change', and that four out…
High food prices accelerate structural change in Europe
Wed, May 28 2008Thirty years on, the Common Agricultural Policy—or, rather, most of the CAP's market intervention but not the payments to farmers—is being dismantled faster than planned due to high food prices that have seen both border barriers and 'intervention' buying dropped.
"The €45bn-a-year common agricultural policy has been blamed for dumping subsidised food on to poor country markets, displacing…
Health entitlements threaten US long-term growth
Wed, May 21 2008The U.S. Congressional Budget Office has provided some important projections of the impacts of current U.S. health entitlement programs on budget balances and growth over the next three to five decades. This is a much greater threat to United States growth and its contribution to global growth than the current crisis in financial markets. There is still time to avoid the crunch by cutting health…
Climate models do not justify even precautionary action
Sun, May 11 2008In an article that is itself a model of its kind, Patrick Frank shows that the documented uncertainties in General Circulation Models (GCMs) are so large that it is impossible they could make falsifiable predictions of the climate, even over the next few years. Illusory precision in the IPCC's trend lines, he points out, does not amount to accuracy and does not support the sort of precautionary…
New Zealand copyright reform
Fri, Apr 11 2008Is it too soon to hope the tide is turning against the abuse of copyright privilege at last? A report of consumer-friendly copyright reform that preserves fair dealing rights, from across the Tasman:
“Unlike the DMCA in the US, the new [New-Zealand] law allows people to bypass DRM if the intended use is legitimate, it explicitly allows format shifting and timeshifting, and it refuses to protect…
Two reasons for caution in climate mitigation
Sun, Mar 23 2008
I can see two reasons for caution about the dramatic action on climate change advocated by the Garnaut Review. First, statistical analysis of temperature trends contradicts claims (from the Review among others) that increases over the last decade are "on track" to meet or exceed IPCC projections. Second, the CO2-linked theories of climate change lack basic plausibility and recent observations…