Pascoe on the low hurdles Hockey is setting himself

In Joe Hockey sets himself the lowest of hurdles to save the world Michael Pascoe observes that "Joe Hockey frames the rules for the local politico-economic game to suit himself with hurdles so low that they're part of the grass".

Hockey has set a goal of an economic growth rate of 3%, something that we were likely to achieve anyway:

That's the benefit of setting the rules: announce a target that you're on track to achieve, achieve it and then announce yourself to be the winner and an economic hero.

Pascoe goes on to write:

Australia does face various challenges, as all economies do. There are improvements that need making, unnecessary spending that can be trimmed, entitlements that should be reduced (mainly at the upper end) and a more efficient and equitable taxation system to be pursued, starting with ending the blatant rorting. In various speeches, sound treasury secretaries and RBA officials have made the case for reform being necessary to protect and enhance our standard of living.

Unfortunately though, attempts by either side of politics to launch rational reforms are immediately reduced to political games. On the available evidence, it increasingly looks like May's budget preparation, with all its huffing and puffing, is more about politics than economics. Dressing it up further in a supposed cloak of G20 global commitments borders on moving it into farce.

A couple of articles on class in Australia

The Conversation is running a series on class in Australia.

In Bogans and hipsters: we’re talking the living language of class Christopher Scanlon argues that the user of labels like bogan and hipster proves that Australia is not a classless society. I especially liked the ending:

Once again, I kicked off the tutorial by asking if they thought class existed in modern Australia. They looked at me as if the answer were obvious: of course it did.

I asked one student why he was so certain. He replied simply:

    I live in Frankston and work at Woolworths.

In Denial to celebration: political responses to class in Australia Geoffrey Robinson looks at the reasons why conservatives supported economic egalitarianism in the middle part of the 20th century and now oppose it.

Yet more evidence wind farms are not harmful

Lenore Taylor in No reliable evidence wind farms harm health, peak research body says writes that a recent National Health and Medical Research Council draft report has found there was "no reliable or consistent evidence that windfarms directly cause adverse health effects in humans".

Hardly a surprise. However, the Government intends to hold more inquires. No doubt they'll eventually be able to create one that gives the answer the want. They just need an inquiry head who's ideologically sound and fact adverse.

Bluntshovels calls austerity for what it is

In Austerity is bullshit El Gibbs writes that austerity isn't about reducing debt, it's "about a bunch of rich, mostly blokes, cutting the heart out of the social safety net".

Increase in heat wave days in Australia

Alexander White has tweeted that:

The number of heatwave days averaged across Australia has gone from 2.6 in 1951-60 to 5.8 in 2001-10.

His tweet included the graph below:

I think I can see a trend.

There is no crisis in the sustainability of the Disability Support Pension

Matt Cowgill writes in DSP reform: a solution in search of a problem that, contrary to the impression given by the minister and elements of the press, we've seen a decline in the proportion of people on the Disability Support Pension.

There is no crisis of sustainability in our disability support system.

Three interesting opeds on the issue of asylum seekers

In Building Australia Drag0nista, aka Paula Matthewson, argues that Australia should abandon it's current draconian policy to asylum seekers and instead open the door. She argues the $2 billion saved could then be used to fund the infrastructure our growing cities need.

In The logic of PNG policy is sanctioned horror Waleed Aly says we shouldn't be outraged at the death on an Iranian asylum seeker on Manus Island this week because tragedy was an inevitable outcome of Australia's current policy.

In Critiquing the open borders policy Mark Fletcher argues an open border policy is unfair on those who are unable to buy passage to country like Australia and must instead languish in a refugee camp for 17 years.

What do I think? I don't know, this is a complex area. Each of the above put forward valid arguments. Our current policy shames us though.

Banking scams

In The Vampire Squid Strikes Again: The Mega Banks' Most Devious Scam Yet Matt Taibbi looks at the move of big banks into the manipulation of commodities and markets.

Using the scientific method to help the poor

Jessica Benko, in The Hyper-Efficient, Highly Scientific Scheme to Help the World’s Poor, reports on the move by economists to implement randomised trials in efforts to help the poor.

Heatwaves in Australia exceeding predictions

Oliver Milman, in Heatwave frequency 'surpasses levels previously predicted for 2030', highlights the increasing frequency of heatwaves in Australia.

More inequality, more guards

In One Nation Under Guard Samuel Bowles and Arjun Jayadev highlight the correlation between inequality and the number of guards employed.

The conversion of a climate change sceptic

Mark Colvin interviewed Professor Snow Barlow, previously a bit of a climate change sceptic, about what changed his mind. Basically he thinks the climate change models have improved to a lever that he now trusts. He's also accepting the evidence of what's happening around him. Barlow also talks about how heatwaves will become more common:

SNOW BARLOW: Particularly heatwaves.

We know that when you look at the way you calculate temperatures, as you move it up a degree - and the climate in Australia has actually moved up by 0.85 of a degree centigrade in the last 50 years - you move the distribution of temperature. That means that you get more events, very hot days. In other words: heatwaves. And not only individual days that are over 35, or in some areas 40, but sequence of days.

So instead of having an isolated day, you may have three or you may have five. And individual occurrences of that is what we call weather, of course. But when you put them all together and you see what the model is projecting, they paint a very convincing picture.

I found this bit interesting:

SNOW BARLOW: For example, the industry that I've worked the most in which relates to climate change is the wine industry, the growing of grapes. And we have shown quite convincingly and published these papers in Nature, showing that vintages in Australia have moved forward - in other words earlier - by something like a day a year over the last 25 years.

And so there are some places in Australia where vintages now are somewhere between 20 and 30 days earlier.

A darker Artic is accelerating Global Waming

In Arctic getting darker, Earth warmer AP reports that melting ice "absorbing more heat than expected":

That extra absorbed energy is so big that it measures about one-quarter of the entire heat-trapping effect of carbon dioxide, said the study's lead author, Ian Eisenman, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California.

Mandatory sentencing

In Mandatory Minimum Sentencing Provisions Under Federal Law Erik Luna documents some of the issues with mandatory minimum sentencing.

The world's richest 85 people have as much wealth as the bottom half of the world's population

Oxfam has released a report on inequality titled Working for the few: Political capture and economic inequality. In the report they point out the following:

• Almost half of the world’s wealth is now owned by just one percent of the population.

• The wealth of the one percent richest people in the world amounts to $110 trillion.That’s 65 times the total wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population.

• The bottom half of the world’s population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world.

• Seven out of ten people live in countries where economic inequality has increased in the last 30 years.

• The richest one percent increased their share of income in 24 out of 26 countries for which we have data between 1980 and 2012.

• In the US, the wealthiest one percent captured 95 percent of post-financial crisis growth since 2009, while the bottom 90 percent became poorer.

They also have the following graph:

Australia's housing unaffordability caused by restrictive land use policies

In Unrealised fringe benefits in the housing market Leith van Onselen looks at the 10th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey which again "ranks Australia as having one of the most expensive housing markets out of the countries surveyed".

At the national level, Hong Kong has by far the most unaffordable housing, with a median multiple of 14.9. Australia and New Zealand are tied for second most unaffordable market out of the nations surveyed (both 5.5), followed by Singapore (5.1), United Kingdom (4.9), Japan (4.0), Canada (3.9), United States (3.4), and Ireland (2.8).

All of Australia's 39 markets captured in the survey are ranked as either "Seriously Unaffordable" (14) or "Severely Unaffordable" (25). Australia currently has no housing markets ranked as "Affordable" or "Moderately Unaffordable". The result represents a slight improvement on last year's survey, where 30 markets were ranked as "Severely Unaffordable".

Looking at the major metropolitan areas only - i.e., those with more than 1 million inhabitants - Australia ranks as third most expensive after Hong Kong and New Zealand (Auckland).

Overall, Australia has moved down the league tables, registering 5 out of the 20 most expensive housing markets identified in the Survey, versus eight in last year's survey.

So why are Australian house prices so expensive. The report puts it down to high land prices, which in turn is due to Australia's restrictive land use policies. It's no surprise that locations with more liberal land use regimes have lower prices:

By contrast, affordable housing markets, like Texas and Georgia in the United States, utilise open market-based land use structures whereby plentiful new housing supply is able to be built quickly and cheaply on the urban fringe, thereby preventing rapid house price escalation.

The report claims that less restrictive land use policies also have other benefits:

In addition to lower costly housing costs relative to incomes, lower population densities in liberal markets are associated with less intense traffic congestion and shorter average work trip journey times.

Leith van Onselen concludes with:

So under an open market-based model (provided there are not also substantial physical barriers to housing supply), increased demand, such as from reduced lending standards and easier availability of credit, quickly leads to the building of additional low priced housing on the urban fringe, which helps keep house prices in check and reduces the likelihood of speculative housing bubbles developing. Further, highly leveraged speculators are less likely to be encouraged into open land markets, since there is little prospect of achieving strong capital gains. Investing in open land markets is, instead, more about rental yield.

I will add that restrictive urban planning structures should not be viewed as a one-way bet for house prices, with unresponsive land supply also more likely to result in higher levels of house price volatility and boom/bust price cycles - a fact also acknowledged by Demographia. Why? Because strict land-use policies (planning) steepens the supply curve, which makes house prices more sensitive to changes in demand, increasing the likelihood of the housing market experiencing boom/bust price cycles as demand rises/falls.

Why global warming is causing cold weather

In Why the Arctic Is Drunk Right Now Chris Mooney explains how the warming of the Arctic is impacting on the jet stream. This in turn is bringing spells of extreme hot and cold weather to parts of the northern hemisphere.

In other words, we're experiencing record-breaking cold temperatures because a wavy and elongated jet stream has allowed frigid Arctic air to travel much farther south than usual.

The article has an embedded  flash video by Jennifer Francis explaining the issue. The article also has a link to A Rough Guide to the Jet Stream: what it is, how it works and how it is responding to enhanced Arctic warming by James Mason.

Maybe Japan's ageing population isn't such a problem after all

Fred Pearce writes that Japan's ageing population could actually be good news.

America's inefficient health care system

In The Myth of Health Care's Free Market David Cay Johnston looks at the US health care system and makes some interesting points.

• The health care system in the US has all the hallmarks of an inefficient market.
• It's the most expensive in the developed world.
• Medicare, the US Government run single payer system for the elderly is much cheaper and more efficient than the system for those under 65. To quote the article: "If everyone in the U.S. was on Medicare, the savings would move the federal budget from deficit to surplus."
• The US spends 17.6% of its economy on health care compared to 11.5% in Canada, France and Germany.
• 48 million Americans had no health insurance in 2012. Another 30 million were only covered for part of the year.

Vaccinate your kids for their sake

Amy Parker in Growing Up Unvaccinated discusses all the childhood illnesses she suffered through because she was not vaccinated by her parents. She makes some great points:

Anecdotal evidence is nothing to base decisions on. But when facts and evidence-based science aren’t good enough to sway someone’s opinion, then this is where I come from. After all, anecdotes are the anti-vaccine supporter’s way. Well, this is my personal experience. And my personal experience prompts me to vaccinate my children and myself. I got the flu vaccine recently, and I am getting the whooping cough booster to protect my unborn baby. My natural immunity from having whooping cough at age 5 will not protect him once he’s born.

I understand, to a point, where the anti-vaccine parents are coming from. Back in the 90s when I was a concerned, 19-year-old mother, frightened by the world I was bringing my child into, I was studying homeopathy, herbalism and aromatherapy; I believed in angels, witchcraft, clairvoyants, crop circles, aliens at Nazca, giant ginger mariners spreading their knowledge to the Aztecs, the Incas and the Egyptians and that I was somehow personally blessed by the Holy Spirit with healing abilities. I was having my aura read at a hefty price and filtering the fluoride out of my water. I was choosing to have past life regressions instead of taking anti-depressants. I was taking my daily advice from tarot cards. I grew all my own veg and made my own herbal remedies. I was so freaking crunchy that I literally crumbled. It was only when I took control of those paranoid thoughts and fears about the world around me and became an objective critical thinker that I got well. It was when I stopped taking sugar pills for everything and started seeing medical professionals that I began to thrive physically and mentally.

If you think your child’s immune system is strong enough to fight off vaccine-preventable diseases, then it’s strong enough to fight off the tiny amounts of dead or weakened pathogens present in any of the vaccines.