Occupational wages in Australia 2002-2012

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I was looking for evidence recently that tradies in Australia have become amongst the highest paid groups, which would means a profound change in relative rewards in that it would mean that smart young men could then rationally choose not to bother with university but simply become a tradesman. Doing so, I came across an interesting set of graphs that tell you about general changes in weekly wages from 2002 and 2012.

The picture for 2012, just brought out by the ABS, is here:

chart1ABS2013

And the equivalent picture for 2002 from which we can deduce some interesting changes is here: Continue reading →

Jokes that get better with age II

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Well this joke probably doesn’t really qualify as one such joke about which I’ve spoken in the past, but anyway I came upon it today and it made me laugh much more than when I first ran into it – though who knows why.

Last American Who Knew What The Fuck He Was Doing Dies Steve Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple Computers and the only American in the country who had any clue what the fuck he was doing, died Wednesday at the age of 56. “We haven’t just lost a great innovator, leader, and businessman, we’ve literally lost the only person in this country who actually had his shit together and knew what the hell was going on,” a statement from President Barack Obama read in part, adding that Jobs will be remembered both for the life-changing products he created and for the fact that he was able to sit down, think clearly, and execute his ideas—attributes he shared with no other U.S. citizen. “This is a dark time for our country, because the reality is none of the 300 million or so Americans who remain can actually get anything done or make things happen. Those days are over.” Obama added that if anyone could fill the void left by Jobs it would probably be himself, but said that at this point he honestly doesn’t have the slightest notion what he’s doing anymore.

Dear Nokia: a plea for simplicity. Guest post by Mike Pepperday

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Telephone

Dear Nokia,

I hear you have fallen on hard times. I have two product suggestions:

1. Make a mobile that is purely a telephone
2. Make a phone in the shape of a pen

The two could well be combined.

1. Pure phone

There are countless millions of older people who would appreciate a mobile phone but they can’t manage the complications. If they were offered a phone, which was just a phone, they might be interested.

You could promote it as “SMS-FREE!” “CAMERA-FREE!” “INTERNET-FREE!” “MENU-FREE!” “Like phones of old: you talk on it!” You would have to invent a generic name. Purephone? Cleanphone? Straightphone?

It would have no alarms, no recording, no FM radio, no messages, no answering service, no “settings,” no adjustments. Continue reading →

Accents

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I love accents. I love pretty much everything about them. I love the way in which they actually convey things – sincerity, guile, sneering, superiority and their opposites and complements – all surreptitiously; all in a way that is at the same time so compelling to our intuition as to be obvious to all, and yet so subtle as to go entirely under the radar of the rational. Why should the Cockney accent sound cheeky to the point of criminality, the word “gov’nor” a study in irony making it anything from a mark of respect to a comprehensive put down? Why should an ocker accent imply the matey slapdash sensibility that it does. It doesn’t seem to me to be any more possible to answer those questions than it is to figure out why Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings is so sad while the first movement of Beethoven’s 6th Symphony is so peaceful and lovely.

But there you have it. Continue reading →

Shock! Horror! I agree with Greg Sheridan

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I don’t often agree with Greg Sheridan, and I certainly don’t agree with the whole of his article on asylum seeker policy in today’s Weekend Australian. But he certainly says a lot that is worth thinking about and makes numerous points similar to things that I’ve been saying  for years in my Troppo posts on this subject.

Of course you have to ignore Sheridan’s tedious trademark Tory rhetoric and gratuitous smears against the Right’s bête noire Julian Burnside. Moreover, you also need to be able to overlook Sheridan’s own studious overlooking of Tony Abbott’s extraordinary post-election volte-face compared with just about everything he said about asylum seekers as Opposition Leader only a few weeks ago. Sheridan’s stablemate  Peter van Onselen highlights that aspect of the emerging Abbott Prime Ministerial style in today’s  Oz.

Nevertheless, Sheridan’s perspective is  quite a bit more perceptive than most of the nonsense currently being written by mainstream media pundits. He especially highlights, albeit perhaps not strongly enough, the extent to which the goodwill and active efforts of Indonesia have always been centrally important to any successful attempt at regulating irregular asylum seeker arrivals. That was the central reason why the Howard government’s “turn back the boats”/Pacific Solution was successful, partly because  Presidents Sukarnoputri and Yudhoyono were particularly anxious to curry favour with the West in the wake of September 11 but partly also because both of them developed positive personal relationships with John Howard despite (or perhaps because of) his handling of issues surrounding East Timor’s independence following the 1999 act of self-determination. Few (including this writer) imagined that Abbott could readily emulate Howard’s success, but early indications are that he may well be in the process of doing so.

As Sheridan points out, the Rudd/Gillard government’s relationship with the Indonesian government has been far from universally positive, most prominently because of its mishandling of the live cattle export issue but also because of its confusing and inconsistent approach to the asylum seeker issue itself. Clearly the Indonesians were uncomfortable about Abbott’s inflammatory domestic “turn back the boats” rhetoric, but the assumption that this made them natural allies of Rudd/Gillard has turned out to be seriously misguided. The Indonesians are almost as unhappy as most Australians about the tens of thousands of asylum seekers flooding into their territory and waiting months or years to jump on a boat to the Lucky Country It clearly hasn’t escaped their attention that the increase in those arrivals is at least in large measure a result of Labor’s mishandling of the issue.

In any event, rather than paraphrasing Sheridan’s article I think I’ll just reproduce it over the fold and hope Rupert doesn’t get too angry:

Continue reading →

Conspicuous Consumption, Conspicuous Health, and Optimal Taxation

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Is there a health-status race in Australia whereby people get joy from being healthier and fitter than others? And what are the general implications for public policy if there is? My PhD student Redzo Mujcic and myself brought out a new working paper recently on how a health status race can be good for the public purse and furthermore reduces the case for taxing work in order to give people an incentive to take more leisure time.

The abstract:

We present a simple model of status-seeking over multiple socioeconomic domains by introducing the concept of conspicuous health as an argument in the utility function, in addition to the well-established conspicuous consumption term. We explore the implications of such a utility function for optimal income taxation, where we show an increase in concerns for conspicuous health to have an opposite effect on the marginal tax rate, compared to an increase in concerns for conspicuous consumption. Using life satisfaction panel data from Australia, along with an improved measure of exogenous reference groups (that accounts for the time-era of respondents), we find evidence of a comparison health effect.

Monday Quickie – Just Like Old Times Already

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Seems Tony Abbott finally headed off to Indonesia today to have some talks. Not about the boats – he wants the focus to be on building a constructive relationship and of course building trade opportunities. Well good luck with that one mate.

For the past three years you’ve spent most Sunday arvos holding boozed up barbies in the back yard with your boof-head mates and the main topic of conversation has been your slack-arsed wog neighbours and how they’ve done nothing about the bloody fence – it’s a f’k’n disgrace – but one day you’re gunna change it. And you’ve paid sod all attention to whether they could hear you or not. Well they could. And they didn’t much like it.

Continue reading →

Design as a counter-narrative: Presentation to a workshop on arts participation

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Here’s a presentation I gave to a conference called – unhelpfully – Art for Art’s Sake.  It was actually about new approaches to participation in the arts, about finding ways of connecting people to the arts – and the arts to people – which go beyond the traditional arrangement of government subsidised Grand Purveyors of Culture getting bums on seats to consume High Art. The day was spent with presentations from five arts practitioners in the morning and then three people from outside the arts in the arvo.  Those three people were me, an economist, a scientist and a non-partisan political campaigner from OurSay.

When the organiser rang me I was rather taken aback that she’d want me to speak, but she mentioned her topic and I said that I’d always thought about what I did as involving careful listening to people and trying to interact with it in terms of one’s preconceptions of what made good policy – always trying to update that as one went along. She liked the sound of this and I said I could describe the construction of the Button Car Plan as an exercise in that method. She liked that idea but I wondered whether it would be quite what the arties were looking for. When I saw some of the earlier presentations from the artists I got pretty excited about what some of them were doing and decided to talk about our work at the Australian Centre for Social Innovation as you will see from the presentation above.

Other materials to help you understand the talk are the slides I spoke to (ppt) (hastily cobbled together from other slide packs I’d constructed previously) and here is the video I showed during the presentation.