Australia should remain in alliance with the bully

Posted on May 27, 2019 by Paul Frijters

There is a widespread consensus in Australian policy circles that Australia should follow the US in almost any foreign adventure, though preferably on the cheap. The shining example of this was John Howard’s decision to publicly support the US in its war in Iraq in 2003, and yet send only a 1,000 special forces or so. Maximum alliance points, minimal actual risks and costs. Well done, John Howard.

Sure, the US and its Murdoch media empire heavily lobby and cajole Australian politicians and public opinion. Yes, joining the Americans makes one a bit of a target. And yes, of course there is a large element of corruption and laziness to the alliance.

Still, we’d be nuts to break up with the Americans. The best arguments come, ironically, from those who criticise the Americans loudly and convincingly.

The biggest reason to be with the Americans is that they are bullies. Yes, you read it correctly: the fact that they misbehave on the international stage is a very important reason to be with the Americans as all those who have opposed them have found out the last 70 years. Look at American decisions the last 5 years around the Golan, Jerusalem, Khassoggi, Venezuela, Iraq, Egypt, Iran, Cuba and Libya. The more we cry ‘injustices’, the more we should want to keep the Americans as friends.

All the ‘left-wing intellectuals’ who write about how many wars the Americans have started and how they have supported dictators and other *ssholes thus provide the strongest reasons for Australia to stay in the US alliance: the Americans get very nasty to those they see as enemies, particularly those who were former friends (think of Panama, Iran, or Venezuela). Why make ourselves the net target?

Sure, supporting the bully comes at a loss to others in the world, but not to us unless the other side really gets more powerful, in which case we can always switch. A new bully would recognise we are just the runt that follows the biggest bully, so it’s up to the new bully to show he is worthy of our allegiance. Till then, we stick with the one we know. That IS smart politics.

Can’t we do a New Zealand and simply be independent, I hear you ask? You see this written a lot, but New Zealand doesn’t have large American bases on its soil. Australia has huge American bases on its soil, which do not merely provide business for prostitutes but also gives the Americans a reason to become very nasty to whomever asks them to leave. Continue reading →

Posted in Cultural Critique, History, Libertarian Musings, Politics - international, Politics - national | 11 Comments

Forecasting and competition policy

Posted on May 26, 2019 by Nicholas Gruen

Top B2B Technology Companies for AI in Sales ForecastingValues are observed in actions and choices, and rather less so in words. Competition policy has been applied with great relish to the labour market – at least at the bottom end. (Subject to our relatively generous basic and award wage arrangements). So restrictive practices of warfies and workers in manufacturing plants have been ended, and where they haven’t compromised worker safety or other valuable things, I expect this is a very good thing.

But back the top end of town, rigid demarcations remain, between doctors and nurses, baristas and solicitors (ok – barristers and solicitors, but you get my meaning). You might think this is because of the raw power of powerful professions in our society. And you’d be right. 1 But the thing is that economists’ and policy makers’ imagination seems to align with the power. The desirability of reforming professional licensing was always in the Chicago School catechism. Continue reading →

  1. To be as generous as possible, let’s say “largely right”. One can concede that restrictive practices in law and medicine do have some consumer protection and integrity functions, though these could be easily dealt with if we were serious about achieving anything here. ↩
Posted in Competitions, Cultural Critique, Economics and public policy, Innovation, Politics - national | 3 Comments

Brian Schmidt: The Mathematics Does Not Lie: Why Polling Got The Australian Election Wrong

Posted on May 20, 2019 by Nicholas Gruen

This is a guest post by Brian Schmidt. Actually it isn’t, I’ve cut and pasted. I hope he doesn’t mind. Important stuff. HT: John Walker

Everyone in my office grew sick last week of my continual complaints about the state of the political polls. Not because of any insights into the results they were predicting, but because they were all saying the same thing with a collective similarity that violates the fundamentals of mathematics.

Since the election was called, there were 16 polls that published two-party preferred results ahead of Saturday’s vote. Every single one of them predicted the LNP winning 48% or 49% of the two-party preferred vote, with Labor winning 51% or 52%.

These polls were central to the public’s perception of this election, with everyone, including the media, ignoring the polls’ underlying uncertainties. These uncertainties typically far out-weighed most of the conclusions drawn from the poll results. Continue reading →

Posted in Democracy, Economics and public policy, Politics - national | 51 Comments

RIP Bob Hawke: a repost from 2008

Posted on May 17, 2019 by Nicholas Gruen

I worked for the early Hawke government in 1983 and 1984 when I worked for Senator John Button. Hawke barely knew me then or later, but in 2003, I attended a dinner at Moonee Valley Racecourse in honour of the 20th anniversary of his election. Anyway, I happened to be at his table and made a point at the end of the dinner of going up to him, shaking his hand and saying “Thanks for being the only really good prime minister of my lifetime,” an assessment which I hold to this day.

Hawke and Keating, both at the time of their 13 years in office and ever since, have enjoyed a relative status surprisingly like Paul McCartney and John Lennon, respectively. Paul, like Hawke, was the babyface, the one more liked by your average Joe but John, like Keating, was the one with intimations of depth and drama. We look down upon those who seem to want us to like them – like Paul and Bob. They can’t be a Cool Kid – like Paul and John. In any event, it’s been becoming clearer that Paul was the greater talent in the Beatles, though they were both giants. And I’d say the same of Hawke versus Keating. Labor supporters are also always a sucker for a martyr, and Keating managed to measure up – along with Whitlam and Gillard.

Such fond thoughts are all very well, but in politics, you sign up to a struggle on behalf of those you claim to represent. You owe them everything you can manage to stitch together to achieve victory. If you want to be a grand failure, better to pick religion. Not politics.

In any event, to mark his passing I’m hoisting an essay I wrote in late 2007 trying to crystallise what seemed to me the lessons from the Hawke and Howard years with an obvious eye to the new Rudd government. What I’ve never told anyone before is that on publication, the new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd rang me and offered to create a post of Australian Strategist Laureate for me if I’d accept it. (I haven’t told anyone this before because I only just made it up.)

Compare and Contrast

I.

Just as Marshall McLuhan argued that, in media, the medium was the message, one can say something similar about style and substance in politics. The style is the substance or at least comes to determine it. The political history of the last generation particularly the contrast between Bob Hawke’s and John Howard’s styles illustrates my point.

Their rhetoric notwithstanding, Hawke’s and Howard’s economic ideologies weren’t far apart. Each sought prosperity through a vigorous market, and each supported substantial income redistribution. But the quality of governance differed considerably in ways that suggest lessons for the future. Continue reading →

Posted in Democracy, Economics and public policy, Political theory, Politics - national | 5 Comments

George RR Martin just reminded us of the horrors of war and our role in them.

Posted on May 15, 2019 by Paul Frijters

Episode 5 of the final season of Game of Thrones showed us a vengeful fallen angle, Daenerys Targaryen, after whom thousands of children in the real world have been named. Even though her enemies had been defeated and surrendered, she nevertheless used her massive weapon, a fire-spewing dragon, to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians. We get to experience this from the point of view of the victims who are incinerated: men, women, and children.

I see this episode as the crowning moment of George Martin’s career. He wrote the books and scenarios on which the tv-series is based. He has shown us and told us about the cruel side of humanity time and time again, but many of us did not take this personally. To worm his way into our minds, he gave us a heroine who overcame sexual abuse and umpteenth set-backs to become a powerful ruler who did many good things.

Daenerys liberated the slaves of an entire region. She helped defeat an army of ice zombies who otherwise would have killed everyone on the continent of Westeros and turned it into a zombie wasteland, thus saving all the generations to come. She hence saved hundreds of millions of lives, losing many of her best friends and allies in the process, risks she knowingly took. Those are good deeds of the highest order. She was and to some extent will remain, on balance, a heroine.

But throughout her on-screen struggles these last 10 years she was ruthless, not blinking an eye when her brother was killed by having molten gold poured over him, crucifying hundreds of ‘slave masters’ as punishment for their actions. The noble side of her character was fanned by adulation of freed slaves and warm relationships with her closest friends, Melisandre and Jorah. Their influence tempered her continuous preparedness to use her children, three fully grown fire-spewing dragons, to lay waste to the bastions of her enemies.

When her closest friends died, two of her dragons were killed, and her role in saving the whole of humanity on Westeros did not bring her the adulation and love she so desired, Daenerys did exactly what she had promised to do and was foretold to do in all previous seasons. She broke the game of power in Westeros and turned its biggest city to ashes. She did it partly out of revenge, partly in order to instill fear and thus loyalty, and partly out of a ruthless bloodlust that ran in her family and in herself.

Letting us, the audience, get so close to Daenerys and all her emotional ups and downs throughout the years, has made many of us feel we have partly done all the good things she did. George RR Martin trapped us in her story by letting us see her develop and gain what we also crave: connection, appreciation, redemption, love, lust, and, above all, power. Many of us excused her excesses and coldness, ignoring all the warnings and prophesies, not because we did not recognise this potential in her or even ourselves, but because she was the symbol of how we want to see ourselves. We were made to trust that she would never give in to seeing everyone as expendable in her drive to rule.

Now George RR Martin has sprung his trap and confronted us with what I think he believes is the truth about humanity: in our desire for power we are prepared to do anything to anyone. All the rationalisations and moralising about who we are and why we do things ultimately will make way for our drive to power when the opportunity for power comes. Power blinds us and, particularly when the drive to it costs us emotionally, it estranges us from others and makes us do things we initially never imagine we would be capable of.

It is this shattering of the image of ourselves that is so unsettling. We are made to realise who was always behind the mirror.

There has been mass disappointment among fans. In their bewilderment at being told that this is not merely how their hero is, but how they themselves all are, they go through the phases of grief: denial, anger, bargaining. Continue reading →

Posted in Cultural Critique, Democracy, Ethics, Films and TV, Geeky Musings, History, Law, Life, Literature, Media, Print media, Religion, Social Policy, Society, Theatre | 25 Comments

Guest Post by Peter Dempster: A novel voting strategy for centrists

Posted on May 14, 2019 by Nicholas Gruen

Peter Dempster asked me to post this follow-up post to an earlier one of his. Nicholas

A novel voting strategy for centrists

Vote 1 for your preferred party but then do something very unusual – Vote 2 for the opposing party, symbolically joining the major parties on your ballot. Make this the trademark vote of the Australian CENTRE, a demand for much less division and much more compromise in Australian politics. 70% of voters agree … political parties should ‘meet in the middle’. (Essential Poll, 18 July 2017)

If we can’t do this, how can they?

Either: Vote 1 for LABOR
& Vote 2 for LIBERAL/NATIONAL		 Or: Vote 1 for LIBERAL/NATIONAL
& Vote 2 for LABOR

If you Vote 1 for a minor party or independent, consider joining the major parties further down your ballot, say, at 2+3 or 3+4.

CENTRE votes will be detected in poll results – polling station by polling station, suburb by suburb. Such that Australia’s CENTRE can stand up and actually be counted, not divisively assigned to one party or another as ‘their’ voters. Only 18% of Australians say they identify with either the left or right wings of politics.

Most importantly, CENTRE votes suggest a readiness to flip, a quiet threat to unseat the most divisive politicians. Continue reading →

Posted in Political theory, Politics - national | 3 Comments

History and economics: it was all there in the beginning …

Posted on May 7, 2019 by Nicholas Gruen

<SelfIndulgenceAlert>Stuart MacIntyre was kind enough to suggest me as a discussant on a paper on financial deregulation in the 1980s in a workshop focusing on Australia and the Bretton Woods conference put on by Melbourne Uni History and Economic History. (Yes I know it’s a little unclear how the 1980s get involved but there you go – this was the unpicking of the institutions Australia built around the Bretton Woods arrangements). In any event, after reading a fair bit of history for the workshop and talking to historians,  economic historians and economists over two evenings I checked out some work I did for my PhD and was quite taken with it. I never know whether I’ll think something I’ve written in the past is good or not when I return to it years later. Anyway, dear reader, I was pleased with my trip down memory lane. I was also surprised at how little the basic tone of what I’d written had changed.

Anyway, I then thought I’d go back to my grad dip thesis, which I recall writing when I’d worked out a lot less. But one thing amazed me. For a long time I’ve been aware of the fact that, though I got some training in economics, the only education I ever got was in history. It was through doing history that I was first brought face to face with that thing that Steve Jobs mentions which is that at some stage in your life you realise that this vast info structure was built by other people just like you – just as fallible as you.

Of course it sounds obvious, but if it’s properly felt or experienced then it can have an impact. In any event I fell in love with the way in which, when it is good, history involves theoretical reflection on the practice of history in the process of practicing it. Any discipline could be like this, but few are. In virtually every discipline you do – whether in the social or the natural sciences – you can do the “philosophy of” course, but they’re usually pretty lame in my experience precisely because they’re an add on. In any event economics is about as bad as it comes in that regard.

Indeed it’s the only one I know of in which ‘theory’ doesn’t mean what it means as I’ve adverted to it above. It means formal models and the equivalent of ‘practice’ is empirical work. Reflection on questions like ‘what criteria determine what a good model is?’, ‘how much of economics is falsifiable in principle and how much is in practice, and what if very little of it is in practice?’. Is the analytical process of working out what the right economic policy is more like the engineering steps needed to get a person to the moon and back or working out how to win a football game (Hint: I think the answer is the latter, but that’s another post?). Well you can go and do a unit of ‘The Philosophy of Economics” but best of luck getting help with those questions.

I reflected a little on this in a speech I gave a couple of years ago. In any event, going back to the preface of my grad dip – written in the late(ish) eighties, it turns out that it was all there – way back then. To do economics using the skills that history had taught me, and that were vanishingly rare in economics. The zen of trying to open one’s mind. Anyway, the preface to my Grad Dip thesis – on my experiences in car industry policy is over the fold.

Oh, one more thing. The preface is my best answer to the pride that economists have in the aggressiveness of their intellectual culture. This is the idea that the stronger the competition – celebrated here – the better because it imposes stronger selection pressure in the market for ideas all the better to select the fittest ideas. I can only say I’ve never experienced that. It’s true that within some formally defined world one person can often by right, the other wrong. But most argument actually requires the skills of listening and searching for common understandings at least as much as it requires contest around disagreement. And that’s even true of a lot of argument about technical matters, which degenerate surprisingly often into some subtle misunderstanding.   Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments