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Most people don’t seem to understand* what company tax is intended to do in Australia’s tax imputation system. The idea of imputation is to avoid taxing the same income twice. When a firm earns profits it is taxed on those profits at the company tax rate of 30%. If some of the after-tax profits are distributed as dividends to shareholders then the intention is not to tax this income a second time when it reaches the shareholder. Hence, if the shareholder’s marginal tax rate is 49%, they get a tax credit equal to the tax paid by the company of 30% and hence only pay 19% tax. The income is overall taxed at the taxpayer’s marginal tax rate it is just that the firm is regarded as “pre-paying” the taxpayer’s liability of 30% with the individual making up any excess of their marginal tax rate over 30%. Under John Howard’s sensible and consistent, ruling if the taxpayer’s marginal tax rate was only 20% then they can claim a rebate of 10% since the tax on that amount of dividends was already paid by the company. Continue reading Comments on corporate taxes
I am often asked to give financial advice to friends and colleagues partly on the grounds that I am an economist and partly because, it is supposed, I have a fair bit of experience in investing. My response is that I have no special expertise in making investment choices although I do have strong views on what should be avoided.
Generally, I support a version of the efficient markets hypothesis in financial markets. So, I do not generally believe that activist investors can, on average, outperform the market in the longer-term. Of course, there are thousands of funds out there making stock selections so that, purely by chance, some will make above-average returns short-term and sell themselves as stock-picking superstars. However ex-ante it is impossible to pick which of the investment funds are going to be the winners so that you can’t usefully exploit the benefits of using a superstar.
I agree with Warren Buffett that investment funds that charge high fees are a pure con. They typically take a fixed percentage of your assets – usually around 2% per year but some take even more than that. In addition, if they should be lucky enough to earn above-average returns they will hit you with performance fees of between 15-50% of an “excess” return. Effectively, then, you are paying them with a fixed fee for giving them the chance to gamble with your money and possibly earn themselves more but not to share in any losses that may impact on you. This no-loss proposition is the core reason finance courses are so popular in universities. The courses themselves generally (there are important exceptions) have little or no academic content. Most of the run-of-the-mill courses feed off the fantasy of sitting in front of a computer and raking in millions.
Some people do need financial advice to develop their savings and to manage such things as their retirement. That such people are regularly cheated of their life savings is a testament to this. The best source of advice is commission-free, fee-for-service advisers, examples include the large superannuation funds, that are used for their advice but not as vehicles for investment. If Mr. Bluesky, the smiling accountant, tips you to invest in his best mate’s olive oil plantation (“it can’t lose”) give him a big miss. And try to learn a bit about investment yourself. Burton Malkiel’s “A Random Walk Down Wall Street” is a great start as are older classics such as Benjamin Graham’s, “The Intelligent Investor” which dates from 1949. Both of these books can be purchased for less than $100 and they will give you far more information than any paid investment advisor (or myself) can give.
Like Malkiel, I strongly favor investment in “no” or “low”-load mutual funds (including index funds and ETFs) that are publicly listed on the stock market. Management costs are tiny and accessing your funds is a snack. The key to realizing great wealth is to start investing early in your life, to develop a reasonably diversified portfolio and then exhibiting patience, thereby allowing the effects of compound interest to grow your wealth. The key problem facing investors lies in their naive personal psychologies that are almost always tuned in to the rantings of the “get-rich-quick” school. People who retire without much wealth have asked me what to do to guarantee themselves a high rate of return on their limited wealth. Of course, I cannot advise in this situation other than to offer them commiserations, to advise on the need for careful budgeting and the possibility of getting the Age Pension. Their “needs” do not create the opportunities for above-average returns but their desperation can drive them into the arms of get-rich-quick spivs who will destroy the little wealth they have.
Not everything that Tony Abbott says is nonsense. A fair bit of his verbal output is suspect but his views on immigration make sense. The claims of his critics, in relation to this, do not. Particularly when they are related to unwarranted claims of an anti-multicultural bias.
Abbott wants a substantial cut in the immigration intake from 190,000 to 110,000. The reasons are to limit pressure on house prices and to encourage wage growth. Both of these claims are correct. Immigrants comprise at least half of housing demands in Australia because they comprise more than half of population growth. Moreover, typically immigrants enter Australia with the need for somewhere to live and without any existing dwelling here. Restricting immigration will reduce demand pressures on house prices. Likewise, net additions to the workforce are more than half related to immigration for the same reasons. Unless you believe the cloud-cuckoo view that wages are unrelated to the supply of labour, pouring huge numbers of immigrants into Australia will limit wage growth. The current immigration intake is 190,000 annually which is at close to record levels – almost double the level of the Howard years.
ANU academic Liz Allen is quoted as saying”evidence shows that the optimal rate of immigration is 160,000 to 210,000 per year”. What evidence? I’d like to see it. Having worked in the area of population economics for 30 years I know of no practical way of determining “the” optimal population and that is what is implied here. The issue is not whether these additional people provide tax benefits and “much needed” skills but whether we are better off net having such a high rate of population growth.
Allen claims that people in Melbourne and Sydney want an expanded population. Where is the evidence for that claim too? Massively increased congestion over recent years and with each of these cities destined to be mega-cities by 2050 are an unattractive prospect to many. Allen further claims that infrastructure funding has failed not the immigration program. But this additional infrastructure funding is a consequence of (a cost of) pursuing high rates of population growth. Moreover, it is paid for, in the main, by original residents of these cities not by the newcomers. These infrastructure costs, that are in the order of tens of billions of dollars in Melbourne alone, are driven by the needs of cities exploding at their boundaries. They dominate any claims that Australians derive net benefits from immigration.
Claims that immigrants increase the size of the economy are true but irrelevant piffle. The immigrants want to come here so they can be judged better off – they reveal themselves to be so. The relevant criterion for accepting such high rates of immigration is whether preexisting people derive advantage or not from such immigrations. To see whether this is the case note that immigrants do increase the value of the economy but some of that increase is paid to them as wages as factor returns. The residual – higher profits and other returns to original resource owners must exceed the value of the increased congestion costs that are imposed and the massive infrastructure bills that are being expended by state governments to accommodate a much bigger population. These infrastructure bills relate not only to roads and public transport systems but also to the exploding costs of water provision – there are now hugely expensive desalination plants in every state capital city. In addition part of the reason for rapidly-growing energy costs is population growth. The net return to the preexisting residents of our community is most plausibly negative. These preexisting people lose because the efficiency gains they enjoy from a larger population are dominated by negative environmental externalities and surging infrastructure costs of roads, water and energy.
We are losing as a community by pursuing such mindless, “endless expansion”, population targets. Australian cities that have in the past been ranked as among the world’s most liveable are already becoming much less so. Tony Abbott is right. We should substantially restrict our immigration intake.
A penny dreadful mining exploration company that I have followed in the past (to my regret) has made losses for each of the past 10 years. It has several exploration sites that it owns or co-owns, but none is anything close to a producing mine – indeed at some “promising” sites, only a single drill sample has been analyzed. Several of the sites are in Africa. The firm is capitalized at about $40m but has cash at the bank of only about $500,000. Over the past 6 months, it spent $1.7m on “administrative and corporate costs” (it pays its CEO $700,000 annually) and it spent about $900,000 on “exploration and evaluation” activities. It is scheduled to spend about another million over the next quarter on “exploration and evaluation”.
To me, it isn’t just Bitcoin that raises questions about the rationality of investor expectations. Of course, the firm might strike it rich – I might win Tattslotto too – but a market capitalization of $40m suggests more than a little exuberant optimism. A reasonable question can be raised as to whether it is a going concern – but new issues of stock to credulous investors can keep it ticking over I suppose. It has 700 million shares out there now. A few more hundred million will not make too much difference and once the amount of script gets to a billion or so the board can decide on a 10 for 1 share consolidation and start off the money-mining operation again.
I watched the ten-part series, “The Vietnam War” (TVW), now made available at SBS online. This is a powerful analysis of this almost grotesque tragedy that influenced my own thinking greatly as a young man. It changed me into a person who thought politically. I opposed the American-run war and Australia’s participation in it during my final high school years and most of my years of study at university. I was an active participant in the Vietnam Moratorium movement and faced the real prospect of being drafted to fight in Vietnam. The war changed my politics simply by forcing me to question basic assumptions about supposed democratic governments. I came to reject the naive, adolescent notion that citizens can rely on central governments to behave honestly and decently. They cannot because they do stupid things. Governments tell lies on important issues of life and death and take monumentally foolish decisions that reflect their own selfish interests.
Generally, my view as a youth was that Australia had no business in fighting in this war and that by doing so we were increasing human suffering not improving things. I don’t seek to revise these views at all but one new aspect of the war did become clear to me as a consequence of viewing this excellent documentary: A sound and sensible pragmatic reason for opposing participation in this conflict was that there was no possible way the Americans could “win” this non-conventional civil war. Given the anonymity of the respective sides and the negative spillovers from wrongly persecuting the innocent this was a hopeless military task. Indeed, the difficulties were understood by all three of the US presidents who were concerned with operating most of the war – John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. All were repeatedly advised on the low probability of anything approximating a reasonable outcome from US military efforts. Moreover, this advice came from advisors who were, initially at least, hawkish on the war. Robert McNamara for example argued that even with a massive buildup of US forces in Vietnam, the chances of victory were very low. John F. Kennedy had the same understanding – at least as a young politician. The American people and the unfortunate troops sent to fight in Vietnam were sold lies by their presidents simply because of electoral considerations and the need to avoid being the “first US president to lose a war”. This splendid speech by returned marine, John Kerry, makes it clear that this selfish ethic was in force right up to the final point where Nixon did withdraw US forces. Nixon’s dishonest role in extending this conflict is well-documented in this series. The final rapid US withdrawal and the subsequent collapse of US military equipment support to the South Vietnamese army did seem cowardly given the past actions of the US, but given the sunk costs it probably minimized the consequent very considerable suffering experienced by those who opposed the northern communists. Given past US mistakes there was no simple way to extract itself from this quagmire without imposing huge costs on the South.
The TWV documentary certainly makes it clear that this war was, on both sides, a savage conflict that was immensely costly in terms of loss of life and human suffering. More generally, it is a powerful anti-war film. It also reminded me of the links between this war and the racial divides and of the militarization of security services inside the United States. The killings at Kent State University by US National Guardsmen and the brutality of their attacks on protesters in Chicago’s Democratic Convention in 1968 drove ongoing and, as yet, unresolved social changes that changed America. Cops in the US are still killing innocent black people and cops still patrol US cities like paramilitary forces.
The interviews with Vietnamese war participants and their families were a key part of this documentary. There was both savagery and a great deal of intelligent compassion on the part of the Vietnamese. Both sides of the conflict incurred huge human costs but, in terms of aggregated loss of life and suffering, most of the pain was experienced by the people of Vietnam. Also valuable was the discussion of the moderating role that Ho Chi Minh played in the northern communist movement and, of course, his early impassioned plea to the Americans to help Vietnam secure its independence from the French after WW2. The beginning of the Cold War thwarted that initiative that could otherwise have saved several million lives.
The tragedy of the Vietnam war obviously devastated Vietnam but also changed the west. It changed me.
The series is available on SBS online for the next few weeks. Well worth viewing.
Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” is a sustained attack on the Donald Trump presidency. Trump is revealed as a narcissist bumbler who repeats himself. A buffoon who is out of his depth for the job of being President. The White House staff he has surrounded himself with are a barely competent collection of factions competing for his attention but all of whom are individually aware of the extent of the Trump inadequacies. Organizationally the White House is a shambles partly because of the “crash through” philosophy of Steve Bannon and partly through the competing family versus the rest factions. “Fire and Fury” is a sustained attack on the Donald Trump presidency.
There have been so many scandals and incidents during the Trump Presidency that putting them all together is confronting. It is also oddly repetitious. A major flaw in the book it seems is the failure to appreciate the Trump cunning and the more positive aspects of his personality. Those who read this and who encounter Trump publicly or privately are likely to think that he is not as bad as portrayed here. The unrelenting attack, as several reviewers point out, probably helps Trump.
What did I find interesting in the book? The following claims surprised me:
- The claim that Trump never wanted or expected to win the Presidential election. He wanted to be a runner-up to the evil Hilary and to make a publicity splash. But once he did win he promptly reversed gear and claimed a great victory.
- The key role of a few rich Republican-supporting families (particular that of Rebekah Mercer) in driving a Trump victory. Trump didn’t back himself since he saw his candidacy as inevitably failing.
- The extent to which Trump sees himself as a performer on a stage. It is a continuation of his ethic of putting the name “Trump” on buildings he has built for him. Trump is obsessed by the media.
- The role of Rupert Murdoch as an advisory to Presidents and as a key part of the American political scene. Apparently, he is still on good terms with Trump even though he is claimed to regard him as a “fucking idiot”. Generally, Trump adores financial celebrities such as Murdoch and Carl Icahn.
- The role of the US power elites and particularly of New York’s Jews. For example, on of a billionaire Jewish family, Jared Kusher is a White House employee, is married to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and is a friend of Netanyahu. His primary policy concern in the White House is US Middle East policy. It’s a tight group of financial celebrities. Ivanka, for example, is a close friend of Rupert Murdoch and Murdoch’s previous wife Wendy Deng.
- Steve Bannon is no masterful Machiavellian figure. He is just a small time right-wing flog with a much-exaggerated view of his own intelligence. Bannon is a flash in the pan figure who will soon be forgotten. On the other hand, Bannon did drive much of Trump’s early policy craziness.
- Everything is ultra personal to Trump. Who likes or who criticises him seems to matter more than any policy stance. His immediate family (daughter Ivanka and her husband Jarod Kushner) have a central role and are the possible weak link in the Rusian investigations. None seem to have much political intelligence. The role of Jarod Kushner, raised an orthodox Jew, in driving Trump’s Middle East policies seemed to me astounding.
To Wolff, and of course to Steve Bannon, the Trump presidency seems unlikely to continue. Trump is an ignorant child who seeks approval from those around him but who has neither intellect nor discipline. He is a “fucking idiot”, not only to Rex Tillerson,, but to all those around him. No one is fooled. Nor can some of the considerable talent around him compensate for his stupidity since Trump refuses to be upstaged. I am unsure myself even after reading this book. Trump’s stupidity and lack of suitability for the presidential role seems to be a major asset that keeps 35% of the American people loyal to him. Those who fume at him seem to derive a “guilty pleasure” from listening to and from exposing this fraud.
The arguments by Willem Buiter on the possibility of an exuberance-induced global recession seem reasonable to me. Stock and property markets are exuberant, particularly in the US while bond markets are moving into recession because we all know that interest rates are rising and will continue to rise. There has been a prolonged US expansion since 2009 and Donald Trump’s inappropriately-timed tax cuts will lead to additional exuberance that, given almost full employment in the US, will likely need to be trimmed by even tighter monetary policy than currently envisaged. Tighter future monetary policies are a risk that create the possibility of recession and a stock and property market crash. The poorly timed US fiscal expansion will create a huge US fiscal deficit of 5.5% of GDP that may raise questions about US financial solvency and the possible monetization of the US deficit. There could well be a Trump-induced recession.
All these thoughts are possibilities only but possibilities that need to be accounted for in making current investment decisions. For Australia the fear is one of contagion. A US recession inducing a recession in China and new challenges for our paper-thin energy and commodity price revival.
Christmas is a celebration of what is guessed to be the approximate birth date of Jesus Christ. It is an important occasion in almost all civilized societies for both Christians and Non-Christians alike.
In Australia, the number of people who describe themselves as Christians has fallen from 71% of the population in 1996 to only 52% twenty years later in 2016. I have been a non-believer – although an increasingly much more tolerant one – for my entire adult life so I am gradually acquiring more companions. Christianity, in fact, faces the prospect of being a minority belief – part of the ‘counter-culture’ – in Australian society. But while formal adherence to Christianity may be fading the ideas that underlie it remain, by-in-large, an important positive force in our society. Christmas remains important to many of us – both the secular and the religious.
I lack empathy with multiculturalists and those from other religions who see the widespread respect paid to Christmas as something offensive to atheists and non-Christians. Given my early Christian upbringing, I still feel comfortable celebrating the message of hope, forgiveness, friendship and kindness that Christmas brings to us. I have a long-standing respect for the values that the man Jesus Christ espoused. The birth of a baby indicates the hoped-for possibility of living in a better world. The materialism associated with Christmas does make me reflect. Do we devote to much time to the emotional impact of Christ’s birth and not enough to the thinking and reasoning part of his life as John Carroll claims? Most of us enjoy giving and receiving gifts. One can be too puritanical about such matters. Most of us enjoy some of the incidentals of Christmas – carols being sung, food and wine being imbibed and homes being brightly decorated. At the very least these are a valued part of our cultural traditions.
The idea of hope associated with Christmas and the belief that the world can be a better place because of the birth of a boy is a beautiful parable. I do not believe that to appreciate the beauty of this notion that one, in fact, needs to accept the idea that the young boy is the ‘son of God’ or our ‘saviour’. It is enough to think about our prospects for renewal and for trying to live a life that reflects Christian values of kindness and forgiveness even if not of Christian theology. It is these values that Jesus taught throughout his life that are important to us as well as the symbolism of his birth.
No religion – Christianity included – should ever be seen as having the last word on anything. One of the great advantages of living in Australia is its openness and the freedom of choice it offers with respect to religion. But the wisdom of many religions, freed from their bigotry, can guide us towards living happier, more fulfilled lives. Whether you are thinking about what job you should take, what partner you should live with or how you should deal with the neighbors and with outsiders, the message of Christianity has something to teach us all. God might be irrelevant in all this – we are after all human beings – but the core message of Christians and the hope of Christmas is not.
The North-East Link Project in Melbourne seeks to connect the Western Distributor with the Eastern Freeway. There is much to this project – including a widening of the already-jammed Eastern Freeway – but the biggest feature of this project is its cost. Namely, $16.5b. Some claim the price could go as high as $21b.
This is, by far, the most expensive road transport project in Victorian history. Like most major recent transport infrastructure proposals, there seems to be no cost-benefit analysis that supports the project. If I am wrong please point me in the direction of one.
Arguments for the project include the fact that (i) there is currently heavy congestion due to trucks in local roads around Heidelberg (I live nearby and can verify this), that trucking demands are forecast to grow strongly over future decades (also true) and that the planned 5 km tunnel under the Yarra River will avoid major environmental damages. There have been some qualitative estimates of time savings.
I like the last point but don’t like the huge associated costs being incurred without any overall cost-benefit analysis. It is just hard to get your head around a $16b cost. If I capitalize it at a 4% discount rate over an unending time horizon that is $640m annually forever. The time and inconvenience costs that the project seeks to avoid must be large. Moreover, will the project remain viable for long. The Eastern Freeway and even the link to Eastlink are now already heavily congestion as is the Western Distributor. Even with widening works completed and set to be initiated, there are doubts about whether this project will be an effective one longer-term.
If the project is “essential” then the primary reason for it must be the massive population growth that Melbourne is forecast top experience up to 2050. The immigration-driven population by that time will be something north of 10 million. I think it is important to recognize these costs as an implication of trying to derive benefits from a larger policy-driven population.
This issue is again on the agenda because of the US decision to massively cut corporate taxes from 35 to 20% of corporate profits. It is not the same intellectual case as for the US economy but many of the same issues arise. The growth in the US deficit as a result of these cuts will be large and there are questions about the extent to which investment will increase given the relatively low level of US unemployment. As with the US, there is a case for reducing corporate taxes to induce less effort to transfer price profits out of the country. Australia has already agreed to cut corporate taxes on small companies but should the cuts be extended to all firms including large corporations?
It is important that people take the time to understand what is really at stake here and not just fall into the simplistic and incorrect line that increased profits will only go to increase dividends paid to the rich and salaries paid to corporate bosses. There is much more to it than that. Continue reading The case for enhanced Australian company tax cuts: Modified re-post of an April 2016 post
I agree with parts of the Robert Skidelsky argument supporting restrictions on immigration but not with others. I agree that the value of diversity are overstated (we want some but shared values also of value and we do not want ISIS) and that public sector tax benefits from immigration are like a Ponzi scheme. But I disagree with the Skidelsky analysis of labour market effects.
Skidelsky says that more migrants mean lower wages but that, in time, the benefits to capital owners will encourage more investment thereby offsetting the initial wage decline. Skidelsky argues that the lag between the initial wage and the final investment effects is likely to be excessively long.
This is generally a wrong view of standard immigration arguments. Wages do fall and profits do increase but the standard economic argument is that gains to capital exceed losses to workers. It is a trivial bit of microeconomics to show this. Thus the argument against migration is that while it realises efficiency gains – total incomes rise – it worsens the functional distribution of income. Thus the argument against immigration is a distributional argument.
I have neglected capital flows and the easiest assumption is that there is perfect capital mobility internationally. Then the initial wage fall creates a boost to the marginal product of capital that creates a capital inflow. Theis occurs until wages are driven back to their initial levels. Then wages for the original workers are as before but the economy has a larger capital stock. All gains from the initial migration accrue to the new migrant arrivals.
If capital is imperfectly mobile – the realistic situation – then the outcome is as somewhere between the situation of zero international capital flows and perfect capital mobility so that economic outcomes are, again, on balance, bad for local workers.
The economy gets bigger in this latter case and the new arrivals as well as local capitalists gain advantage but workers in the original pre-immigration economy lose out.
Australia’s population growth rate is rocketing along primarily because of our migration and humanitarian programs. These make up 54% of our total population growth. Our migration program in 2015/16 took in 189,770 people gross and about 20,000 less than that allowing for permanent emigration. The gross figure is within a smidgeon of the highest level ever recorded (190,000 a couple of years back) while the humanitarian program intake was 17,555 entrants which is the highest level of intake for 30 years. The total gross intake was 207,325 people. Useful source documents are here (for migration) and here (for the separate humanitarian program).
Most of our regular immigrants come from India and China while about half of the humanitarian program come from the Middle East (in 2015/16 4358 from Iraq, 461 from Syria, 1714 from Afghanistan, 337 from Iran).
The migration program for 2016/17 and the planned program for 2017/18 is basically a replication of recent trends with an intake of 190,000 being targeted (here). The humanitarian program will increase through to 2018/19 when it will amount to an intake of 18,750 which will create a new record intake over the past 30 years (here). The bulk of this increase will reflect the 2014 commitment by the Australian Government to refugees from Syria and Iraq.
Australia is growing its population using the migration and humanitarian programs at the greatest rate for decades.
Some of the fees charged by local investment advisors, such as local accountants, seem more than hefty. Particularly when investments are in equities. Often there is a fixed fee of around $300 per month or $3600 per year. There is also often a trailing fee of 1% of the value of the portfolio. Thus on a $1m investment with gross earnings of 5% the total annual fees would be $13,600 which, ignoring taxes, would be 25% of the total return. A big slab since it would now take about 20 years for your investment to double if all returns were reinvested whereas it would take only 14 years without the fees.
An alternative might be to charge clients $50 for a copy of Burton Malkiel’s A Random Walk Down Wall Street*, and a once-and-for-all $500 fee for assistance in opening up, for example, an efficient CommSec account**, along with a brief introduction to the Vanguard no-load mutual funds, exchange traded funds or to the low-load mutual funds such as Argo Investments or Milton Corporation. Capitalized over 20 years the transactions cost of doing this would fall from 25% of the investor’s total return to a tiny fraction of 1%. Moreover, this move is consistent with almost all evidence on equity markets that passive investment strategies outperform active management. Should re-tool as a low-cost financial advisor and do this? Probably not although anyone else is free to pursue this approach.
I mention this because, as an economist, I am often asked for financial advice. My response is that I have no investment advice to give beyond reading Burton Malkiel’s book. Generally, I believe in “efficient markets”***. In particular, if you have limited assets when you retire there are no miracle ways of accessing high-income returns. You need to learn to be frugal and budget to live within your means and can claim the aged pension.
*Malkiel is an enlightened believer in “efficient markets”. With a few exceptions, he does not believe in “stock picking” but prefers “no-load” mutual funds. Malkiel is excellent on retirement planning where he favors a major proportion of investments being in REITs and fixed interest securities.
** One which includes direct debit of dividends or their reinvestment in dividend investment schemes.
*** Again following Malkiel I occasionally punt on investments about which “bubble-like” dreams can be built. But this is a risky business and I limit it to 1-3% of my portfolio.
The best deal offered so far in the ongoing conflict with North Korea comes from China. It is: Abandon your nukes and we will offer you protection. This gives the North what it wants, namely, protection from externally-imposed regime change. The North’s nuclear capacities are primarily defensive.Moreover, the policy is credible since China does want a buffer between itself and the “west” (the US allies of South Korea and Japan) and, most importantly, helps prevent huge possible loss of life in the North and South and in Japan. It gives time and incentives for internal reform of the wayward North. It addresses the core concern with North Korea which is their ownership of nuclear weapons and their ability to use and sell these weapons.
Moreover, the Chinese policy is credible since China does want a buffer between itself and the “west” (the US allies of South Korea and Japan) and, most importantly, this policy helps prevent the huge possible loss of life in the North and South and in Japan were there to be an armed conflict. It gives time and incentives for internal reform of the wayward North. It addresses the core concern with North Korea which is their ownership of nuclear weapons and their ability to use and sell these weapons. In time the Pyongyang regime may be bribed or induced to voluntarily surrender power. A pre-emptive strike runs the risk of the regime seeking to go out with a bang rather than a whimper.
Moreover the Chinese policy package is not purely passive – it has ended coal imports from the North (a major source of foreign exchange) and is considering further sanctions.
The US approach is the brinkmanship game of ramping up threats against the bully regime (which is using nukes entirely to protect itself) while leaving the US with the option of a pre-emptive strike. This policy will either not work because the incentives are misaligned or will likely end in a bloodbath. Every nation party seeks eventual regime change in the North but the slow and steady policy path proposed by the Chinese is plausibly less costly than the impulsive militarism of Trump and his generals.
On this foreign policy issue, China is showing leadership whereas the US is moving to antagonize further the obnoxious Great Leader.
One useful issue raised by Tony Abbott, Dick Smith and, with less coherence, by Pauline Hanson, is the size of Australia’s immigration intake. Do we want cities of Melbourne and Sydney to have populations of 8 million by 2050? Do we wish, under a high immigration intake scenario, seek to double our total population by then? I definitely don’t. Our cities are large and congested now and a doubling of their population would make them unpleasant (and ultra-expensive in terms of house prices) places to live in – if not for me then for my children and their children. Moreover, the natural environment of Australia is one of the most remarkable on the planet – I’d like to conserve it as well as provide a home base for people.
Then there seem to me two ways out. Either one of two options: (i) Dramatically cut the immigration intake so that our population tapers off at a few more million than it is now – perhaps at 27 million. The immigration program would be designed to offset the significant emigration that occurs from Australia each year and from the shortfall in natural population growth required to maintain population size. Or (ii) Develop new cities at a sufficiently rapid rate so that net growth in the major population centers is reduced to zero. I prefer option (i) because I cannot see the option (ii) working satisfactorily.
The option of creating new cities would require the creation of 10 new cities (or the augmentation of existing small cities) by 2.5 million people each over the next 30 years of so. It is a big task made difficult by the practical difficulties of socially-engineering where people will live. This is the reason that academic areas such as “regional development” have fallen into such disrepute. Australia has only a handful of large cities now but the imperatives of doubling our population by 2050 would require the creation of 10 new cities the size of Brisbane or Perth. Those who wish to pursue the high migration intake – the Housing Industry Association that represents the construction industry and the various business interest groups must explain clearly how this task will be carried out. Otherwise, they must rationalize the creation of large megacities in all the current capitals.
The standard response on the left to such concerns is to claim that those expressing them are “racists” which is true in the case of a few but overwhelmingly untrue. It is not the composition of the immigration intake that is being questioned here but its aggregate size and the implications of current intakes for how Australians will live in the future. An additional foolish response is the claim that we need more young immigrants to balance the aging of our population. This is Ponzi scheme reasoning – let us take in more now to delay the problem that will be worse in the future because of our current efforts. With a bigger population and a declining birth rate the problems will get increasingly worse not better.
A final argument is that by taking people from the overpopulated parts of the world (China, India, Africa) we relieve population pressures there. That is true but, with reduced population pressures, these short term effects will be plausibly offset by increased births in those immigrant source countries. China has already abandoned its “one child per family” policy and India will soon overtake China as the most populous nation on earth. These countries will become “developed” over the next half century or so and will impose crippling demands on the global environment as a consequence. They should, to the contrary, be forced to face up to their population problems now.
I used to believe that economic manipulations (entry charges, congestion taxes etc) could handle the issue of rapid population growth in Australia’s favor. I no longer do. High house prices as a consequence of immigration-driven population growth as well as high rates of urban disamenities such as congestion and pollution are not being addressed by economic instruments such as taxes and charges. Indeed, I was naive to think they ever could be. The charge towards a high population Australia needs to be stopped. A small bunch of political figures are raising such issues and they deserve to be listened to.
The web and social media, such as FB, comprise an innovation that, in some ways, makes us all worse off. For example, FB undermines the printed media because individuals almost endlessly provide hyperlinks to it, thereby providing an open access alternative to buying the content by, for example, purchasing a newspaper. The result is that the newspapers decline in circulation and suffer economic adversity for reasons linked to a failure in the market for information This, in turn, leads to cost cutting and staff redundancies in newspapers and other media which feed back into lower quality journalism, to lower quality pilfered links in social media and, ultimately, to a more poorly-informed public. News, once published, can be digitized in many ways and. to some extent, this always involves a public good type of market failure – one newspaper can pilfer from another, for example. But this type of theft becomes much more severe when millions of web users have access to this type of pilfering by simply citing a hyperlink.
The only way to get, at least partly, out of this downward spiral is to get rid of the externality here by rigorously defending the property rights of the commercial media to the news they provide. That applies both to individual users of social media and to news gathering organizations that rely primarily on pilfered material for their such matter.
It is technically possible to prevent hyperlinks to published material but much harder to prevent lengthy quotation of pilfered material. Of course, no-one likes to pay for material that they are currently accessing for free but the alternative is an ever-diminishing level of effort in providing news and the end of such things as investigative journalism. This disadvantages us all because we all then operate “in the dark” in settings where a knowledgeable few can set the social agenda.
Kenneth Arrow was, with Paul Samuelson, one of the two greatest economists that the world has known since at least the time of Lord Keynes. I read of his death at age 95 this evening. An astonishing man, he wrote on a myriad of aspects of modern economics and he wrote well and with great insight. A great applied mathematician he was also a skillful craftsman of the English (and French) languages. A profound intellect, he influenced a whole generation of economists.
Simply put: I idolized the guy. Continue reading Kenneth Arrow RIP
Vietnam is the second largest coffee exporter but its coffee has a low international reputation and much of it ends up in instant coffee brews. In fact, there is a substantial coffee culture in Vietnam with (non-alcohol serving) coffee shops operating everywhere (I made the unspeakably bad error of judgment of asking for a beer in one – I got it though the owner had to raid her husband’s supplies!). Vietnamese coffee does take a bit of getting used to – it has a thick somewhat chocolatey taste and is quite strong. But, like the best coffees served in the West, the best Vietnamese coffee is very concentrated and served in specialist coffee shops – one magnificent shop next to my hotel in Hue served far better coffee than in the up-market hotel next to it. I grew to like Vietnamese coffees and will purchase them given half a chance. Certainly worth a trial though they are different.
And the Vietnamese do sell the ethically challenging civet coffee which comes from the bowels of a civet cat who selectively choose the best civet beans and then excrete such. It is, in fact, literally “shit coffee”. Against my better ethical judgment, I bought a packet at Hanoi airport. Good smooth coffee with, if anything, less of the chocolatey taste of the standard Vietnamese coffees but with a fairly intense flavor. These civets “generate” good coffee. The Economist article below provides a more complete review.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2012/01/coffee-vietnam
A major issue with my WordPress blog is its inability to consistently connect with Facebook whereI spend too much time these days. I have refreshment all settings and this post tests whether a connection has been achieved. I used the WP blog for 10 years so I would dearly like to get things working again. Helpful advice appreciated.
Xmas is a celebration of what is guessed to be the approximate birth date of Jesus Christ. It is an important occasion in almost all civilised societies for both Christians and Non-Christians alike.
In Australia the number of people who describe themselves as Christians has fallen from 71% of the population to only 64% in the 10 years to 2006. I have been a non-believer for my entire adult life so I am gradually acquiring more companions. As Kevin Rudd said recently, Christianity faces the prospect of being a minority belief – part of the ‘counter-culture’ – in Australian society. But Christianity remains by-in-large an important positive force in our society and Xmas remain important to many of us – both the secular and the religious.
I lack empathy with multi-culturalists and those from other religions who see the widespread respect paid to Xmas as something offensive to atheists and non-Christians. Given my early Christian upbringing I still feel comfortable celebrating the message of hope, forgiveness, friendship and kindness that Xmas brings to us. I have a long-standing respect for the values that the man Jesus Christ espoused. Most of all, the birth of a baby indicates the hoped-for possibility of living in a better world. The materialism associated with Xmas does make me reflect – but most of us enjoy giving and receiving gifts. One can be too puritanical about such matters. Most of us enjoy some of the incidentals of Christmas – carols being sung, food and wine being imbibed and homes being brightly decorated. At the very least these are a valued part of our cultural traditions.
The idea of hope associated with Xmas and the belief that the world can be a better place because of the birth of a boy is a beautiful parable. I do not believe that to appreciate the beauty of this notion that one, in fact, needs to accept the idea that the young boy is the ‘son of God’ or our ‘saviour’. It is enough to think about our prospects for renewal and for trying to live a life that reflects Christian values of kindness and forgiveness even if not of Christian theology.
No religion – Christianity included – should ever be seen as having the last word on anything. One of the great advantages of living in Australia is its openness and the freedom of choice it offers with respect to religion. But the wisdom of many religions, freed from their bigotry, can guide us towards living happier, more fulfilled lives. Whether you are thinking about what job you should take, what partner you should live with or how you should deal with the neighbours and with outsiders, the message of Christianity has something to teach us all. God might be irrelevant in all this – we are after all human beings – but the core message of Christians and the hope of Xmas is not.
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