Progressive Direction

May 20, 2019

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

  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.

  In 2019 it’s hard to get a poll right. No longer is there an easy way to phone a random sample of people at home using the White Pages. Those people who are contacted are less likely to agree to be surveyed than in decades past. This means that getting a random sample that really represents Australia is harder than ever.

  But the one thing that is almost impossible to avoid is what is called sampling error. This uncertainty in a poll is caused by talking to a subset of people, rather than everyone. And no matter what you do, except polling more and more people (which is very expensive), you are stuck with it.

  You can think of the uncertainties in the polls much like what happens when you flip a coin 10 times. You can expect to get the “right” answer of five heads quite frequently, but not every time. It turns out mathematics tells us that you’ll only get five heads 25.2% of the time.

  If you do a similar calculation for the 16 polls conducted during the election, based on the number of people interviewed, the odds of those 16 polls coming in with the same, small spread of answers is greater than 100,000 to 1. In other words, the polls have been manipulated, probably unintentionally, to give the same answers as each other. The mathematics does not lie.

  I say unintentionally because humans are biased towards liking to get the same answer as everyone else. We often make subtle choices, even in quantitative analyses, to get the answer we expect. Commonly called confirmation bias in science, many of the large experiments in physics and astronomy hide the answers of an analysis from researchers until they are completely done to avoid this effect.

  I don’t know why the polls so badly missed the election’s actual result. But whatever led to the five polling companies to illegitimately converge on the same answer, must be a significant contributor. All five need to have a thorough and independent investigation into their methodologies, and all should agree to better reflect uncertainties in their future narratives.

  The last five years have demonstrated to me the fragility of democracy when the electorate is given bad information. Polls will continue to be central to the narrative of any election. But if they begin to emerge as yet another form of unreliable information, they too will be opened up to outright manipulation, and by extrapolation, manipulation of the electorate. This is a downward spiral our democracy can ill afford.

  • Professor Brian Schmidt is a Nobel Laureate in physics and the vice-chancellor of the Australian National University

May 17, 2019

• Club Troppo RIP Bob Hawke: a repost from 2008

  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.

  II.

  Lack of resources and timidity in the face of inevitable scare campaigns ensure that opposition platforms are painfully incomplete blueprints for government. But the style of government influences the subsequent development of that platform for good or ill.

  Three crucial and related elements of political style depend on whether:

  • unity or division is emphasised;
  • there is a cult of the strong leader as opposed to the leader being seen as an orchestrator of wider forces; and
  • the extent to which populist themes dominate political rhetoric

  Hawke provides us with the archetype of one style. Seeing himself as the conductor in an orchestra more than the strong man at the helm, his style was self-consciously inclusive. Of course, he was happy to use populist themes, but much of his political energy was dedicated to persuasion, to arguing a principled case for economic reform.

  By contrast, Howard saw himself as the strong leader, and his instincts were populist and nationalist. As a result, his reign was remarkably free of policy momentum. And that robbed him of political momentum. Remarkably for a politician governing during a long boom, each election saw Howard come from well behind, needing to pull ‘a rabbit from his hat’ to use the expression that became a cliché by the time Howard’s time drew to a close.

  III.

  The centrepiece of Hawke’s economic strategy was tackling both inflation and unemployment simultaneously by reducing real wages and doing so by agreement with the unions rather than with economic contraction. Despite widespread scepticism (such policies had failed elsewhere), things fell into place with great felicity.

  Like all successful prime ministers, Hawke had his luck. But his consensus was the template on which a rich, new style of politics developed. A highly productive relationship grew around the framework of the Accord. The unions delivered lower disputation and wage restraint. Treasury and the central agencies sold the new government a backlog of economic reform that the previous government had baulked at.

  Though not formally part of the structure, business leaders were also involved in the process. These new nodes of ideas and influence existed in a productive and dynamic tension with one another so that within a few years the Treasury, the ACTU, some business peak bodies and the government each under the sway of competent and pragmatic leaders were working very productively together.

  Within just five years of Hawke’s election, the process of microeconomic reform had been articulated in a wide-ranging and mature form and it continued to unfold as governments committed and then implemented new policies over the next decade. And on the back of the revenue from rapid growth, the government bought continuing wage restraint, economic reform and major increases in transfers to poorer households.

  IV.

  By contrast, Howard’s accession to power was much less constructive. Sacking six departmental heads at the outset, his government’s relationship with the bureaucracy was serviceable but not particularly creative or productive. And while its relationship with business was close and sympathetic, business wasn’t a particularly useful partner in developing and implementing a political agenda.

  Where Hawke enjoyed an extended honeymoon lasting beyond his 1984 re-election, Howard was in trouble within his first year. Introducing gun control and slashing expenditure showed political courage, but policy was a series of episodes rather than the unfolding of a growing policy vision.

  Within 12 months of Howard’s taking office, there was increasing alarm at his directionlessness. In this circumstance, Howard took his economic policy vision off the shelf, as it were, promising the GST that Hawke and Fraser had shied away from. Though his subsequent re-election was inevitably regarded as a vindication, it was a difficult election to lose. And Howard lost it on votes, though he held sufficient marginal seats to retain government.

  A leader with greater policy vision wouldn’t normally have needed this grand and near politically suicidal gesture.

  V.

  To use the ungainly terminology of our time, Hawke’s strategy was triangulation, Howard’s was wedge politics.

  Coined by Bill Clinton’s advisor Dick Morris, “triangulation” involves a leader presenting themself as someone above and between partisan politics, finding a creative but commonsensical course between left and right. As Katherine West used to observe, for quite some time, Prime Minister Hawke appeared above the ruckus and between the left and right.

  As the expression suggests, wedge politics focuses on dividing one’s opponents or their constituency. At least where it’s been most devastating, wedge politics has appealed to populist sentiment. It appeals to the idea of a nation or a national culture besieged either from without as in the case of terrorism and asylum seekers, or from within as in the case of the culture wars against effete elites who are seen to court nihilism, relativism and cultural disintegration.

  Now, these sentiments can make a good speech. In the right circumstances, they can win an election. But they are expressive, not deliberative. “We decide who comes here and the circumstances under which they come” is ill-suited to the unfolding of a coherent policy platform.

  Of course, all democratic politicians juggle tensions between popular sentiments and policies that must be more carefully considered. Yet, not surprisingly, political strategising dominates the mind of most professional politicians. And where wedging is at best a distraction from the policy substance of governing, triangulation is a political strategy which is about policy rather than value-laden gestures. It facilitates a constructive integration of political strategy and rhetoric and policy development. Populist wedging frustrates it.

  Further, though a government practising triangulation frequently steals its opponents’ policies, its focus remains itself. To the extent possible in the chancy game of politics, it remains the author of its destiny. By contrast, wedge politics is reactive both to evolving events and to its opponents. Thus, although one can think of some exceptions to this generalisation, while Hawke’s broad strategy was to marginalise his opponents as irrelevant, Howard’s approach was to exploit opposition weaknesses, so much so that his own conduct was often shaped by little more than the desire to draw his opponents into political dilemmas.

  VI.

  If his first year in office left onlookers wondering what he was trying to achieve, Howard’s last year was an apotheosis in which the style of sledging and wedging his opponents had become the substance. What policy direction there ever was had leached away, overtaken by a clearing of the policy decks (numerous policies being hurriedly reversed to neutralise the opposition’s policy advantage) and a symphony of improvised attacks on its opponents.

  Howard improvised one political feint after another. The only time I can remember when I had less knowledge of what alarms and excursions might turn up in the next day’s papers was during the chaos that was the Whitlam Government.

  With the recent AWB scandal leaving the government’s distain for the principles of ministerial responsibility fresh in the mind, the Minister for Environment got tangled up in the government’s attack on Kevin Rudd. With the government in high dudgeon about Rudd meeting persona non grata Brian Burke, the minister turned out to have done the same thing quite appropriately in his ministerial duties.

  At this point, the principles of Westminster Government appeared, like some digitised folkloric creature in a Harry Potter movie with nothing but its uncanny weightlessness to give away its essential unreality. The minister resigned. His prime minister said he’d done nothing morally wrong. Others in his party said that in resigning hed done the right thing. The minister, smiling and magnanimous, was transparent about his party’s motivation, which was to clear the decks for intensified attacks on the Opposition Leader. And so, the once-grave principle of ministerial responsibility reasserted itself one last time under Howard, this time transformed into an ironic simulacrum of its former self — a walk-on walk-off cameo the tactical feint du jour in the news cycle.

  And apparently seeking to expose divisions in the ALP, Howard managed to wedge his own party by embracing nuclear power. He then downplayed the conversion as a grateful opposition drove home its electoral unpopularity.

  The rudderless in pursuit of Rudd.

  VII.

  Workchoices offers a pointed example of our themes.

  Though Hawke never gained control of the Senate, the style and institutions of consensus politics also helped insulate him from this kind of political overreach. The search for consensus often identified politically viable means of making policy progress while addressing the concerns of major interest groups. And once policies had been broadly agreed, the partners to the process then helped sell the sometimes difficult messages that emerged, like the need to rein in expenditure, reduce real wage costs, protection and means test benefits.

  In fact, as right-leaning labour economist Mark Wooden observed, Workchoices itself was far from clean or coherent as labour market liberalisation. In addition to introducing new red tape and arbitrarily restricting what could be negotiated, it maintained minimum wages that were relatively and absolutely amongst the highest in the world. And it was not integrated with other arms of policy, most particularly welfare.

  Workchoices eroded wages and conditions for lower paid workers, though perhaps less dramatically than many feared. But Howard never clearly acknowledged the obvious political problem. He responded to the inevitable scare campaign with an Orwellian mix of advertising and spin seeking to highlight the positives. Even Workchoices Regulatory Impact Statement (RIS) read like a marketing brochure, and was duly rejected as an inadequate appraisal of costs and benefits by the independent red tape watchdog. (As an aside, this was while the Howard government-appointed Banks Committee was coming up with a red-tape busting agenda. In 2007, with a refurbished regulatory gatekeeping infrastructure in place in the wake of the Banks Report, the hastily cobbled together “Fairness Test” also fronted with an inadequate RIS).

  More importantly for the fate of the Howard government, in eliding the policy problem (the costs imposed on some) it ignored the corresponding political problem.

  It needn’t have been that way. Hawke’s approach to engineering lower real wages was straightforwardly negotiated with stakeholders and so addressed these issues as an integral aspect of its design. Wage restraint was sold as equality of sacrifice for the greater good of the economy and community, and other arms of policy were mobilised to compensate workers through the social wage (Medicare) and through a wage tax trade-off.

  Ironically, in 1999 the Business Council proposed something in this mould. It proposed and met with the ACTU to seek support for a wage tax trade-off which would have seen the minimum wage frozen in return for tax credits to compensate low income working families. But the government showed little interest.

  If cost had been the problem or the fact that the compensation package was highly targeted and so created some losers in childless households, this constraint evaporated as the mining boom drove soaring company tax receipts. Remarkably, during the endless embarrassment of riches that followed, the government seemed endlessly caught short, cutting taxes in different ways in four successive years (without trying to buy reform with such measures) and improvising any number of different giveaways invariably multiples of $100 to specific groups. Beneficiaries included pensioners, self-funded retirees, parents. One year apprentices got $800 for their tool kit.

  Had the government acknowledged the losers from Workchoices, explained its rationale and explicitly compensated them for it, history could have been very different.

  VIII.

  Triangulation has been the political style of left-of-centre parties, whilst wedging has characterised the right. Yet, there’s no logical necessity for this. It would be perfectly possible for right-leaning parties to triangulate and so dominate the centre as to render their opponents irrelevant, but both here and in other countries, particularly the United States, they have practised divisive and populist wedge politics.

  In fact, in Australia, we’ve had three right-leaning political leaders who have had powerful policy visions. They’ve not embraced wedge politics. Yet in presenting themselves as strong leaders, each has forsworn the resources the inclusion of triangulation. And each of those leaders — Hewson, Kennett and Greiner — was less politically successful than Howard the wedger, whilst enjoying no worse circumstances.

  We’ve also had a left-leaning political leader Paul Keating mix the economic policy of triangulation with a new, more divisive style focused on his own strong leadership. Like the three Coalition politicians mentioned above, Keating’s style had more than a little of the crazy brave about it and, like them, his period of political supremacy was surprisingly short given his talents.

  IX.

  Prime Minister Rudd’s style is already emerging. Promising a new consensus across our country, he’s already pre-emptively launched a process by which his opposition number is undergoing trial by bipartisanship on Aboriginal affairs. These clues suggest that Rudd wants to be the conductor rather than the heroic leader, the uniter not the divider, the triangulator, not the wedger.

  But Hawke’s success was built not just on his own style, but on what it brought forth most particularly the Accord and the creative tension this established with the bureaucracy as well as institutions such as EPAC. Critics could say – did say – that Hawke’s corporatism was undemocratic; that the right venue for such deal-making was not behind closed doors, but within Parliament under public scrutiny.

  But shouldn’t governments set agendas both inside and outside Parliament? Indeed the Howard government’s failure to do so damaged both the quality of its governance and ultimately its own long-term political saleability. In any event, whatever extra-parliamentary institutions and pressures an accord can produce, Parliament retains its role in forming governments and passing laws.

  Indeed, at a time when the executive so dominates Parliament, when political debate is so rarely permitted to rise above the relentless infotainment values of the media, one can argue that Hawke’s centrist corporatism enriched our deliberative democracy. Although invitations to the table were at the grace and favour of the government, the conversation once there was a genuine search for solutions, something that has become increasingly rare within the stage-managed public theatre of Parliament and party political combat. And once established within the Accord framework, politically difficult policy objectives like wage restraint were then sold to constituencies by the Accord partners.

  But, as its period in power lengthened, the bureaucracy’s proximity to senior politicians ensured that its influence grew at the cost of others. Australia has a first-class bureaucracy and Treasury, the central bank and central agencies typically provide first-class advice. But it’s in the nature of such agencies to promote strong orthodoxies which can blindside them and those they advise. By the end of the ALP’s reign, economic reform had become formulaic and it had become all too easy for the defenders of the formula to mistake those arguing for new developments of those policies as their opponents.

  Instead of letting it slowly atrophy, an alternative course was for the Accord to have deepened, for instance by broadening its agenda and its make-up. Its purposes would have changed as the issues changed; for instance, its role in wages policy would necessarily have been scaled back as enterprise bargaining spread. It would, however, have been an ideal vehicle within which to negotiate a wage-tax-trade-off of the kind discussed above.

  While we debate across the trenches between left and right using weapons crafted from the experience of the US, England and New Zealand, there’s a strange beam in our eye about Ireland. In fighting its way out of the economic despond of 17% unemployment in 1987, Ireland emulated Australia. Like us, Ireland embraced fiscal and wage restraint and it did so with an accord between government, employees and employers. But, as our Accord withered and was duly dispatched upon Howard’s victory in 1996, Ireland’s social partnership grew in stature and now enjoys bipartisan support. Since 1987, Ireland has roughly doubled our own impressive per capita economic growth. It was one of Europe’s poorest countries. It’s now one of its richest.

  The idea that innovation in practical affairs might be central to Australia’s destiny has deep roots in our history. In the late 1930s, Australian economic statistician Colin Clark expressed his own ambitions in response to John Maynard Keynes’ entreaties to Clark to return to England.

  I am reaching the conclusion I want to stay in Australia. People have minds which are not closed to new truths, as the minds of so many Englishmen are: and with all the mistakes Australia has made in the past, I still think she may show the world, in economics . . . .

  By the mid-1990s, we were showing the world, which watched and imitated our best innovations — HECS, the Child Support Agency, Rural Research and Development Corporations, welfare targeting, and the list goes on. But the atrophying of the Accord, and the loss of political confidence engendered by the early ’90s recession (and Keating’s more divisive style?) robbed us of confidence to build imaginatively on that accomplishment.

  Today, after a long detour from which we might surely have hoped for more, the possibility presents itself anew. Though, as usual, we’re sceptical, the government’s exploratory 2020 Summit at least suggests an appetite for the challenge. Hawke’s two summits attracted similar scepticism before their event. But both were the beginning, not the end of a process by which we built the institutions and political culture capable of meeting the challenge.

  Let’s hope we can do so again, and that both political parties come to sustain the effort for decades to come.

May 15, 2019

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

  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.

  The disappointment of the fans shows you how successful George has been in springing his trap (and in the amazing ability of HBO to have kept it a secret so long). The fans latch on to accusations of how the tv-makers have cheated them by rushing the story, not flagging enough that this was coming, betraying the essential character, or something else. The reason for this denial and rationalisation is obvious: they wanted to be allowed to distance themselves from Daenerys and hence not experience what they have just experienced – the momentary realisation that what she did is in all of us. The horror of war is the horror of what we are all prepared to do to others in our lust for power. We suffer when others do this to us and we inflict the suffering when we do it. Just for a moment George RR Martin has truly managed to drive home the message he has told us ever since the first episode some 10 years ago: power blinds all of us and corrupts most of us, except a few fools who get themselves and others killed by their naivete (Ned and John).

  Well done George, you have spent your artistic life well. You have managed to engender a realisation amongst millions, however temporary, that humans in modern societies have not often had and that they quickly forget after their brief glimpses of it.

  Just after World War I was another such moment. We knew that Great War was due to human stupidity. It was recognised as being a stupidity that belonged to all of us, not merely the elites who decided. We knew the leaders were stupid in sleepwalking into that war. We knew the soldiers were stupid for enthusiastically walking to their deaths and empowering their leaders by their obedience. We knew whole populations were stupid for being so full of themselves and so hell-bent in imposing their collective will on other people that they cheered on both leaders and soldiers, giving neither of them a choice but to follow-up on the collective stupidity. Power lust blinded whole populations and lead them to gas, bomb, maim, and shoot each other in unimaginable orgies of destruction. For a brief moment afterwards, surrounded by cripples and widows, we knew. In that moment, we vowed never to forget.

  Yet, we forgot quickly. The truth was replaced by parades of glorious soldiers professing how noble their cause was, organised by elites that wanted the population to keep empowering and obeying them, egged on by populations that wanted to believe in their collective glory and infallibility. The window for truth was short because humans in modern societies are trained to be blind to their own powerlust. That blindness is part and parcel of a society where we are nicer to others within our society than we need to be prepared to be towards enemies outside that society. That duality is solved by having most people believe they would not be violent and ruthless unless it is for a just cause. The lie that we are all fluffy bunnies to some degree ceases to be a lie when it comes to our behaviour inside our group. Yet, we normally do not really look closely at whether the cause is just when we murder the enemies outside. We behave like feral beasts to outsiders, but we try not to know.

  Yet, our power lust remains undiminished. We are not fluffy bunnies. Our desire for power is what makes us cheer on and identify with powerful rulers on screen, no matter what they do. When we see films about him, we forgive Alexander the Great his great cruelty, which included the burning and rape of entire cities, because we imagine ourselves to be him and have that power. We fawn over stories of Henry VIII with his many wives because we revel in the idea that we are also so powerful and adulated, conveniently blotting out the fact that he was a genocidal murderer on whose orders the North of England was pillaged. We cheer on ‘our leaders’ when we look at war films, choosing not to remember things like the bombing of Cambodia or the genocide of the Khoisan. We cheer on butchers because, in the end, the power attracts us more than the butchering repels us. That doesn’t make us evil, it is just who we are. It is the job of artists to remind us. It is the job of those who devise the institutions of society to keep that truth in the front of their minds.

  George Martin for a moment shattered our collective illusions. Thank you to George and to the thousands who helped him spring his trap. You reminded us of who we really are and of the human costs of what the game of power does to us. Lest we forget.

• Daniel Bowen Climate, money and politics

  I don’t often write about climate change, but here are a few thoughts as we go into the Federal election on Saturday.

  But first I need to get these points out of the way:

  • Climate change is real.
  • If you think climate change is a hoax because you think you know more than the 97% of climate scientists who say it’s real, that’s up to you – but I’m not interested in your theories. Don’t bother leaving a comment.
  • Australia’s share of emissions isn’t that big, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have influence, that we shouldn’t set a good example, or that we shouldn’t make an effort with everybody else.

  Okay then.

  So often it seems the politics of climate change in Australia comes down to cold hard cash: the cost, the impact on jobs.

  The Coalition’s rhetoric going into the election, and for literally 20 years now, has been to demand to know how the cost of reducing emissions.

  They never seem to consider the cost of not acting.

  What we thought we needed.
  My @smh @theage cartoon. pic.twitter.com/CDEAanGuat

  — The Cathy Wilcox (@cathywilcox1) May 6, 2019

  No matter how much I might dislike the rhetoric, for some people it resonates, and it seems in Australia, real action on emissions reductions may continue to be resisted for this reason.

  But what I think might (hopefully) get things happening is if it can be shown that actually, cutting emissions can save money.

  Technology is getting cheaper over time, and this is changing the equation.

  Some examples:

  Power

  Everyone knows the importance of affordable reliable power.

  Coal subsidies are huge, particularly the costs of keeping the existing coal power stations going.

  It’s even getting cheaper to build new renewables than to maintain existing coal power stations – let alone build new coal power.

  Recent power reliability problems such as on January 25th were caused by coal failures. Coal is becoming expensive and unreliable.

  No wonder coal is on the way out, with 13 coal power stations shut down in Australia since 2012.

  Meanwhile effective large-scale battery systems have emerged that are
  overcoming store and dispatch issues with renewables, contributing to stabilisation of the grid, which in turn demonstrably cuts power costs.

  This means I’m not convinced anymore that clean means unaffordable and unreliable.

  (People like to talk about baseload power, but what’s really important is dispatchable power – in other words, available when and where it’s needed.)

  Britain recently went a week without coal power. Okay, so it included 46% gas and 21% nuclear, but they still think they can regularly get by without coal and gas by 2025.

  The cost of PV panels is dropping, making both large-scale solar farms and household solar a good investment.

  Given labour is becoming the biggest cost in many industries, it makes sense that over time, the once-off installation and maintenance of renewable energy generation will end up being cheaper that paying people to continually dig stuff out of the ground and burn it.

  In fact the economics of it means that even people who don’t believe in climate change are jumping on this bandwagon.

  Tony Pecora, the now disendorsed Clive Palmer/UAP candidate for Melbourne, who believes that the IMF and the World Bank “are pushing the idea of climate change so strongly … because having a global-based carbon taxation system is one of the most effective ways of centralising financial power” (his actual words) and yet his day job is installing solar panels!

  

  Cars

  Meanwhile the cost of electric vehicles is dropping, with some models set to drop to the same price as their petrol counterparts by next year. That’s high-end vehicles initially, but even for models such as Toyota Camry it’s likely to be between 2022 and 2024.

  The Coalition’s bleating against electric vehicles is utterly ridiculous. They’ve gone in hard against them just because Labor has decided to support them – a reminder that politicians will say almost anything to get themselves elected.

  The key claim that electric vehicles are under-powered is just simply wrong. Here’s a video of a Tesla pulling a Boeing 787.

  With other countries moving on this, vehicle manufacturers are also moving off petrol. Mercedes just announced half of their new vehicles will be electric by 2030, with all switched by 2039.

  Electric vehicles won’t fix traffic problems, but do reduce pollution in cities, and if combined with renewable energy, will help cut overall pollution and emissions.

  Transport choice

  Transport investment has outcomes in emissions.

  Because transport is supply-led, funding more road infrastructure results in higher emissions (especially while the bulk of the car fleet is petrol) whereas providing better public transport (particularly when powered by renewables) gives people options to leave the car at home more often, helping to cut emissions.

  Victorians who consider transport infrastructure important have a stark choice in Saturday’s election. The Coalition says they’ll fund the East West Link. Labor says it’ll fund the Suburban Rail Loop.

  OK, so when it comes to transport infrastructure, Victoria has a simple choice:
  Coalition will fund the #EWLink – getting more cars on the road – the plan voters have already rejected twice
  Labor will fund the #SuburbanRailLoop – getting more people onto trains#auspol #ausvotes pic.twitter.com/DehVEniL38

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) May 11, 2019

  SRL isn’t perfect. Most would agree it isn’t as important as Metro 2. And the whole concept still needs fleshing out. But I’d rather have it than EWL any day.

  Follow the money

  Lots of people want action on climate change, but the way the economics are going, even those who don’t particularly care will soon be choosing to buy electric vehicles and rooftop solar – because it’ll be cheaper.

  And power industry investors will be building renewables, not coal, because it’ll be cheaper. The dinosaurs will be left behind.

  

  So I suspect climate change action will come, with of course plenty of other benefits from cutting pollution.

  But this is not an excuse for our political leaders to do nothing. On the contrary – they should be pushing harder for change, to help us ride the wave, not swim against it.

  It’s not just good for humanity, it can also ensure that Australia doesn’t miss out on opportunities to be at the forefront of a huge technological shift as the world decarbonises.

  More action needed

  So the good news is that money will force progress.

  The bad news it it won’t be enough.

  The science says CO2 needs to get down to a level of 350 parts per million to stabilise the climate. It’s just gone above 415, the highest in human history.

  Recently our planet hit a new all too serious record – 415ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. (If you remember from our name, 350 is the safe level to be at). The human species have NEVER experienced this before.
  
  We have gone from first hitting 400 to 415 in just 6 short years. pic.twitter.com/5An7BHEI9u

  — 350 dot org (@350) May 13, 2019

  Something has to happen, and quickly.

  It’s all very well for us to just follow the money to cleaner energy and reduced emissions, but stopping dangerous climate change should be a higher priority for our political leaders and policymakers.

  Vote well, Australia.

May 14, 2019

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

  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.

  It’s a symbolic vote but symbols are essential. Flags are symbols; hi-vis vests and school uniforms are symbols; hair styles and tattoos; handshakes and signatures; hugs and kisses. Putting the other party last, as instructed by each party’s how-to-vote, is also a symbol. But a symbol of disgust and mistrust, which is not what most of us want to say to each other; only 18% of voters identify with either left-wing or right-wing politics. So, on 18 May, let’s rally ourselves, come together, look around to find we are not alone, realise the strength in our numbers; proclaim the CENTRE from both sides of politics. It’s the start of a long road back to where we need to be.

  It is important to vote CENTRE for the Senate, not just the House of Representatives. There is an exhaustive reporting of Senate preferences, such that the CENTRE vote can be fully documented.

  The Senate ballot paper can be challenging. If you need a cheat sheet in the polling booth, you will find how-to-votes at thecentrevotes.org.  There are always three: one each for those who Vote 1 LABOR, those who Vote 1 LIBERAL/NATIONAL, and those who vote minor party or independent. All can adopt some version of the CENTRE vote, declaring what they have in common, not just how they differ.

  Then what happens?

  The CENTRE’s objective is to establish a political audience and constituency that is neither left wing nor right wing. Such that pollsters take an interest in what CENTRE voters think, rather than assign us to a party – LABOR, LIBERAL, GREEN and so forth. Political journalists do more stories that interest the CENTRE, focusing on the pre-selection, behaviour and abilities of individual politicians in respect of … meeting in the middle. Politicians better understand they must appeal to the CENTRE, most importantly, by creating non-partisan processes and institutions to resolve the many difficult issues that we face. Thus, a rejuvenated, and depoliticised public service, genuine public consultation, anti-corruption commission, evaluator general, independent commissions to deal objectively with tough issues, fewer rollouts of half-baked policies a few weeks or days before elections.

  The CENTRE may need a ‘big stick’ of the kind favoured by Teddy Roosevelt … speak softly and carry a big stick, you will go far … to jointly threaten the careers of divisive politicians on both sides of politics. That requires more political innovation and will take some organising. Importantly, however, the CENTRE will have expressed a need felt on both sides of politics.

May 11, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Wall insulation

  Improving my house’s heating and cooling and energy efficiency is an ongoing project.

  • 2008 Solar hot water
  • 2012 Ceiling fans and roof insulation
  • 2015 External blinds
  • 2017 Air-conditioning (a backwards step for energy efficiency, but a giant leap for comfort on very hot days)

  This week it was wall insulation.

  Obviously this is best fitted when the house is built, but in a house built circa 1930, the only way is to retrofit it.

  They do this by drilling small holes in the walls all the way around the house, then spraying in filler stuff into the wall cavity.

  

  They’ve filled the holes, but they’ll need sanding and painting, which leaves me somewhat regretting I didn’t do this before I got the house painted in 2015. Not to worry, but for now the house looks like it has measles.

  Last year’s winter gas bill (covering 15th June to 15th August) was a whopper, at $489 ($7.87 / 354 MJ of gas per day) – similar to 2016. (In 2017 we were away on holiday for some of winter.)

  I’m hoping that by getting the new insulation in time for winter, the gas bill for winter this year can be reduced quite a bit – hopefully daytime warmth can be better retained into the evening and overnight.

  It might be a while before the investment (not insubstantial) pays off, but already there’s a noticeable difference, which is good.

  Future options around the house include:

  • double-glazing on the windows
  • under-floor insulation
  • PV panels for the roof
  • replacing gas cooking with electric
  • replacing gas central heating with more reverse cycle units
  • and one I learnt about recently which seems like an easy no-brainer: a balloon in the fireplace.

May 07, 2019

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

  <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.  

  This paper would not be the way it is without certain influences.

  My participation in formulating policy for the Australian automotive industry from 1983 till 1985 while working as private secretary to Senator John Button and consultant to the Automotive Industry Authority dictates the basic subject matter. Influences on my method have been less direct.

  A degree of familiarity with some of the central ideas of the ‘theory’ of social inquiry and knowledge acquired as an historian showed me why the rationality with which one pursues inquiry and knowledge – particularly in the social sciences – is inescapably and profoundly problematic. The reason for this is quite simple. Any model and any analytic apparatus actively selects, and by describing, identifies and organises facts and associates them with each other in explicitly stated or metaphorically suggested relationships of various kinds. On this foundation measurement, analysis and interpretation proceed. While this is necessary to acquiring the benefits of analysis and improved understanding, the selection, organisation and description of facts in one way necessarily excludes alternatives.

  Where the limitations of analysis go unrecognised, there arises the risk of what (I think)¹ Veblen called ‘trained incapacity’, which, in this instance will take the form of an analytical training which provides the benefits of analysis at the (possibly heavy) price of blindness to the necessary limitations and inherent selectiveness – and so myopia – of a particular analytic system. In this sense the essay is a plea for methodological toleration and arises from my experiences in learning about the car industry.

  I arrived on the scene a confirmed “Rattigan man”. Indeed it is not stretching the point to say that I was brought up as one! So the industry’s calls for assistance were all explicable to me as expressions of self-interest. Nevertheless, I made it my business to prick up my ears whenever I was surprised by something. Here, just as was the case with historical research, my surprises provided me with an opportunity to reflect on my assumptions. When a senior Toyota executive said to me that his company wanted to know what the government wanted so that Toyota could do it, that surprised me very much. That wasn’t quite how companies were supposed to express their interests. Given the state of the Japanese industry vis a vis our. own, I treated these ideas with respect. Slowly, I began to see things differently. When industry representatives argued for assistance of various kinds I began to see that, sure enough this was an expression of self interest, but that this was not the whole story. it was also a consequence of the practical conditions existing within what economists call ‘imperfectly competitive’ markets.

  I started to see the ‘inside’ of a story in which I had previously been an outsider. The experience was not unlike the opening of interpretive doors in history. Bailyn had a similar sort of experience studying the pamphlets of the American revolution.

  [T]hey are, to an unusual degree, explanatory.… They reveal not merely positions taken; they reveal motive and understanding. …  And I found myself viewing the[m] with surprise, for the ‘interior view’, from the vantage point of the pamphlets was different from what I had expected.²

  I came more and more to see the ‘IAC line’ as a partial perspective on the economics of the industry. Industry’s view was perhaps even more so, frequently involving a simple failure to understand or listen to IAC arguments, or even to try putting itself in the place of a government which, whatever its motives, must seek some consistency and fairness in its decision making. There seemed to be a fairly desperate need to do whatever was possible to put the two views together, or at least to initiate some genuine dialogue between the two worlds. I have attempted that in this paper.</SelfIndulgenceAlert>

  1. You can tell this is before the world wide web! ↩
  2.  Bailyn, B. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Cambridge, Mass, 1967, p. vi. Emphasis in the original ↩

May 04, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Weekend traffic

  A short rant.

  It’s Saturday, and I’m driving in heavy traffic.

  I’m making a trip that’s impractical using any other mode, alongside thousands of others, many also making trips impractical using any other mode.

  It’s not about options along that particular stretch of road. It’s about the whole transport network, supporting people’s trips end to end.

  On an overpass I see a train go by. It’s so crowded people are standing. Weekend frequency on that line: 20 to 30 minutes.

  Half hourly trains even at 11pm don't cut it Minister: standing room only ex Loop at North Melbourne. Fix PT @DanielAndrewsMP pic.twitter.com/g0gI16ePhB

  — MetroTrainsPassenger (@MetroTrainsPax) May 3, 2019

  If a road suffered 20 minute delays, it would be shown on real-time maps as a major delay. On Melbourne’s rail network, that’s the standard wait between trains on Saturday on most lines, and has been for decades. And they’re crowded.

  And 20 minutes is a good frequency on the weekend PT network. Most suburban bus routes are hourly. An hour in the car is a long trip, but it’s the wait just between buses for so many areas.

  

  Decades of road building made suburbs car dependent. Decades of neglect and cutbacks in public transport left no other options. Weekend traffic congestion in our city is a totally expected outcome.

  As I drive, I look at all the cars, my own included, stuck in the traffic, all burning energy. It just makes me angry.

  Giving people viable options is not about billion-dollar infrastructure. Better infrastructure helps (especially in the areas of walking, cycling and tram accessibility), but the biggest change needed (whether money is spent on infrastructure or not) to just get PT running more frequently right through the day, every day.

  All possible with the current assets.

  As it stands, if they ran the road system like they do public transport, two-thirds of freeway and arterial traffic lanes would be shut outside peak hours.

  Waits of 20, 30, 60 minutes are simply not good enough for a city of our size.

  Fixing it in every suburb, not just some, will provide options, and more people off the roads.

  But when will the decision makers do it?

  Update Monday 11am: the Victorian Parliamentary Budget Office has published a cost estimate of a Greens policy: trains and trams boosted to every 10 minutes until 9pm, 7 days-a-week. For trains this came out at around $200m per year (less $50m additional fare revenue). For trams about $50m per year (less $10m additional fare revenue).

  Nobody wants to doubt the PBO, but the train figure in particular is higher than some other estimates – for instance Infrastructure Victoria came up with $150-185m “on the basis of service kilometres alone”, but transport insiders believe it would be far lower.

  Did the PBO simply try to extrapolate out existing per kilometre costs as IV did, ignoring that existing assets would be used, and some staff (for instance on stations) don’t need to be boosted to run more trains? Unfortunately it’s not really clear from the document.

  Update Tuesday 7:30am: The Age: Trains, trams every 10-minutes on every line to cost just $200m a year

May 02, 2019

• Daniel Bowen More information = good

  Wednesday morning’s commute for me was one of those made easier via good quality real-time information.

  My usual train was cancelled. I knew this before I left the house thanks to checking the PTV app.

  The app also told me that other trains were delayed. It was going to be a messy commute. Bleugh.

  Sometimes in morning peak when there is a cancellation, you can backtrack from Bentleigh to Moorabbin and pick up an express train that gets you into the City sooner than if you just waited at Bentleigh. (It’s a trick that probably applies at a few other places on the network, and incurs no fare penalty now that Zone 1+2 costs the same as Zone 1.)

  The app lets you check departures at any station. Checking Moorabbin told me that no, this trickery wasn’t going to help today.

  At Bentleigh station the screens and announcements confirmed the delays.

  

  The next train arrived – heavily delayed, and crowded as expected. Completely packed? No. But with another six stops before the City (not served by other trains) it’s not hard to predict that there were sardine times ahead.

  Crucially – the screens on the platform confirmed what the announcements were saying: another train was 4 minutes behind it.

  Some of us on the platform used this information to decide to wait and catch the following train, which was near-empty as it had just started its trip. Scored a seat! Much better than being in a crush-loaded train a few minutes earlier.

  This kind of real-time information can make a big difference to your trip. So why isn’t it provided more widely?

  

  The good news is: there’s progress. The design seen last year at some stations is now appearing at more locations – recently at Parkdale, Moorabbin, Balaclava, Malvern, some of the platforms at Caulfield, and no doubt others.

  The app is helpful too of course – for trams and buses as well. And apart from the official PTV app, a few others have real-time departure information fed from the same API.

  But even if you’re not inclined to check an app, hopefully the improved screens are coming to your station soon!

  Good information can’t fix delays or undo cancellations, but it can help passengers make the most of a bad situation.

April 29, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Old photos from April 2009

  Another in my series of old ten year old photos.

  This turned out to be a bit of a bumper crop – a few months before I’d got the Nokia N95 phone, my first with a decent camera, so perhaps no surprise the number of photos was increasing.

  Melbourne’s first wind-powered tram had launched in 2008. Note the “Gone With The Wind” reference, and the pre-platform “safety zone” Elizabeth Street (at Bourke Street) tram stop.

  

  Bentleigh – directional signage for bus drivers. This one for rail replacement buses inbound into the City.

  

  A trip down to Geelong one Saturday…

  

  …to visit the special Myki Shop in Ryrie Street, so I could try it for the first time.

  

  I got to try out a Myki card, which you can read about here. I also came home with these amusing Myki wristbands, I guess to get The Kids on-side with the concept. Note the “scan on, scan off” messaging which later became “touch on, touch off” when they realised just how slow the first generation readers are.

  

  Spotted in Footscray: a special bus stop for Regional Fast Rail project rail replacement coaches. RFR had finished about five years earlier.

  

  An excursion to the in-laws farm. Like many farm practices, burning off a field was a bit of an eye-opener for this city boy.

  

  Federation Square. Note the pre-renovation mustard colour of Flinders Street Station.

  

  Flinders Street from another angle, showing the red Tourist Shuttle (not a shuttle) bus that was funded by the inner-city parking levy. When the bus was free, it could be quite crowded, but was virtually unused once they introduced a $5 fare.

  

  The Parkiteer cage at Brighton Beach Station was getting plenty of use, as was the fence outside. Prior to 2015, a lot of people from further out would use zone boundary stations like Brighton Beach to avoid paying a Zone 1+2 fare which was about 55% higher than just Zone 1.

  

  The old Bentleigh station in the autumn fog.

  

  Also at Bentleigh station, where walkway crowding was becoming an issue, authorities made an effort to discourage bike parking.

  

  Connex introduced its trial layout Comeng train, with a mini-launch for stakeholders one lunchtime. It had fewer seats; similar to later changes made across the fleet by Metro in 2015-16.

  

  

  I got Connex’s Lanie Harris to introduce the new layout.

  The students are revolting! I don’t recall how big this protest was.

  

  One of the contenders for the prize of most confusing bus route was the 627. It has since been split into two separate routes, and is much easier to understand. This was one of few recommendations of the 2010 bus reviews that actually got implemented.

  

  Finally, this moron in Bourke Street.

  

• Club Troppo Six tough institutional challenges this century

  In 1900, the modern nation states of Europe faced many challenges in terms of how they were run, with poverty and disease still prevalent. The largest problems were more or less successfully addressed by 2000. The road involved world wars and civil wars, but the essential recipe to the problems prevalent in 1900 has been found and implemented in most countries in Europe. In turn that recipe has been copied in many other places.

  The problem of how to organise the economy has been addressed via the mixed-market system and the general organisation of a national bureaucracy in large semi-autonomous institutions with specific roles, such as national police systems and national water supply systems.

  The problem of how to get legitimacy in the whole system and turnover amongst the elites has been largely solved by the universal democratic franchise, a non-religious non-ethnic story telling national identity, and a basic safety net for all.

  The problems of low health and low productivity in the general population have largely been solved via national health services and free state-organised education.

  The problem of over-militarisation and a highly disruptive nobility class oriented around land rents has been solved in Western Europe by having most of them killed or displaced by two World Wars. We have also outsourced the gravity point of the military to the Americans, greatly increased human capital investments, and been lucky to have had few natural resources. Combined, they have prevented the production of lots of new barons.

  What are the main challenges facing European countries today in terms of how our societies are organised? How might these challenges be addressed? Let us not bother with small stuff like Brexit or fake news, which are basically historical blips and part of the ongoing theater of politics, but only talk about general challenges to our survival and quality of life.

  One challenge is that of the internet to national identity, national taxation, and national truths. Our countries face the problem that the population in many ways lives and trades online in an international no-man’s land that is conducive to internationalism, tax avoidance, and the creation of truths on the basis of economic interests and religious ideologies rather than national interest.

  I suspect that the route now explored in Russia and China is going to win out, which is the emergence in each large region of a bureaucracy that controls the important aspects of the internet as pertaining to that country or region. This partly involves a nationalisation of some of the key functions now performed by private companies (search functions, social networking, market places), as well as the establishment of a national internet police service and a national internet identification service. You see a lot of steps in this direction.

  We cannot know how this nationalisation of the internet will go, but I suspect that we will end up with a system whereby anyone on the internet will have to wear a unique nationally-distributed device that identifies them and their activities. I am thinking of a biometric identification device that will unlock financial, democratic, and other functions on the internet, but that is of course also related to their taxes and propaganda behaviour.

  A quite different challenge is that of climate change and other international environmental problems like too much plastic in the oceans and too few fish.The ‘old approach’ of letting someone own the common resource (the oceans or the climate) is unlikely to work. The ‘obvious approach’ of having a world empire in which a world bureaucracy enforces an international solution is unlikely to emerge because I think nation states will continue to win the political battle for hearts and minds, beating all international ideologies, as nation states have done in the previous 500 years.

  I suspect that we will see coalition-of-the-willing engineering solutions to many of these problems. As a non-engineer I can only take a wild guess at just what the winning solutions will look like. The way the marine scientists in Australia are now planning to essentially (genetically) engineer a heat-resistant Great Barrier Reef ecosystem is a good example for how I think lots of other environmental challenges will actually be tackled.

  I imagine autonomous vessels with artificial intelligence that roam around the oceans to collect the surplus plastic, organised by a UN-type organisation.

  I imagine huge national marine ponds floating in the oceans to spawn fish and other marine life, with larger water territories emerging on the basis of regional cooperation, perhaps slowly converging on global cooperation.

  I imagine groups of large countries combining to pump reflective aerosols into the higher atmosphere to cool down the planet, resisted by other countries who want it to be warmer.

  I foresee both national and regional attempts to preserve and increase biodiversity, including the creation of new species (“how much diversity do you want? Labs can provide!”).

  Hence I suspect we will get a patchwork of specific alliances that try engineering solutions to specific global environmental problems.

  Another challenge is that of the disconnect between mobile international elites and the majority populations of the nation states. This problem has exacerbated elite tax evasion, attacks on the stories of national identity, widening inequality, and political corruption on a scale not seen after WWII.

  I suspect that we will see broadly the same solution to this in the 21^st century as we saw to a quite similar problem of elite-disconnect in the early 1900s: political strife resembling civil war culminating in the renewed supremacy of the national project as the dominant political organising force. I just cannot see any form of internationalism supplanting the nation states, though we might get large blocks of nation states becoming more and more like nation states.

  The challenge for those who mean well is not how to stop the coming wave of nationalism, but rather how to channel it in a way that maximises it benefits and minimises its damage. It might be that we go the Swiss route to involve populations much more in their own national stories via much more participative democracy. We might go the Chinese social-shaming route wherein everyone, including the elites, have a running social score telling the others how well they are behaving. We might get fascist utopias wherein a small elite enforces a very narrow conception of scientific and genetic purity on a whole population. We might get wild experimentation of hybrid humanoids and AI systems given the responsibility to look after the rest of the country.

  I think that there will be a great pull towards new systems that are seen to work in other countries, which at the moment means the systems in Northern and Central Europe. If they can show how to rope their elites back into the national fold, then I can see their examples getting a lot of traction elsewhere. The Dutch and German approach of mandating a limit to the incomes of the managers of state-connected institutions is an important example of new attempts to force the elites back into the fold.

  Yet another challenge is the continued increase in the number of ways in which small groups can kill billions of people by design and by accident, via the proliferation of nuclear technology as well as cheaper biological and artificial intelligence systems.

  I suspect we won’t do anything serious about this until at least one of these risks materialises in a big way, such as via a nuclear attack by an extremist group, a mistake, or a run-away AI experiment that manages to provoke a large-scale military conflict costing millions of lives. Even then, I suspect the solution will be very much hap-hazard and oriented towards the exact nature of the catastrophe, ie a band-aid.

  It is hard to see a general solution to this general problem emerge because national sovereignty and the strong incentives for leaders to grand-stand will be in the way of any more permanent solution that would require countries and elites to give up their power. I thus suspect this problem will not be solved this century and will be part of the luggage of the next one.

  My anticipated ‘solution’ in the long-long-run is the emergence of actual gods that will rule us and whom the human survivors will worship, ie the end of nation state supremacy and the emergence of a pluralist theocracy in which humans are no longer the dominant entities. However, that’s a highly uncertain future possibility and part of a larger and different conversation.

  Another international challenge is that the areas of the world producing more children are those with the least well-run governments, leading to a massive and disruptive migration flow from poor to rich, threatening the social integrity of some destination countries. In turn, this migration takes away the pressure on the elites in the countries from which they come to really reform.

  I see a combination of three factors that might solve this: i) dropping fertility rates even in the poorest and worse-run countries due to things like the increased presence of the internet and mobile technology, which in turn increases the returns to educational investment everywhere, which in turn makes kids expensive; ii) special economic zones in other continents set up by Western countries and China that effectively become well-run colonies that absorb most of the local migrants (pretty much like Hong Kong and Macau in previous centuries) ; iii) continued globalisation of languages and culture that will reduce the cultural distances which will reduce the disruption associated with migration flows making people in richer countries less bothered about in-bound migration.

  Finally, there are the dangers to world peace emanating from flaws to the political institutions of the main super-powers, with two main sub-problems that I see as the biggest threats: America will have to get used to its lost dominance, and China is inherently politically unstable because it lacks a separation of powers. This is really tricky. Very few realise that both problems exist and are serious; neither the Americans or the Chinese want to acknowledge the problem, making a transparent solution to them impossible; and I do not see historical solutions to either type of problem that did not involve large-scale blood-letting. They are design flaws, one inherent to national pride, and the other to collectivist empires.

  I am not aware of an historical instance where dominant nation states learned to get comfortable with being subservient without getting a bloody nose, or worse. The UK didn’t stop dreaming about its Empire till the Americans forced them to back down in the Suez crisis of the 1950s and even now some of the UK elites dream of the glory days at the expense of the present. French wounded pride was partially responsible for the Second World War via their insistence on German humiliation in the treaty of Versailles. It took a devastating defeat with millions of casualties to get the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires to get used to their lower status. Etc.

  Similarly, the Chinese political system never learned in their more than 2,000 year history as an imperial bureaucracy to avoid major civil wars as the only way to have significant leadership change. The Chinese suffer from an inherent problem with collectivist winner-take-all decision making systems, which is the lack of a separation of powers that makes it impossible for a previous elite to be secure in some of their property rights when a new elite takes over, which in turn makes old elites fight to the death to hold on to power.

  From 1945 till now there were three large internal Chinese conflicts directly caused by power-struggles at the top: the communist takeover of 1949; the Great Leap forward of 1960; and the Cultural Revolution of the 1970s.

  Part of the problem is that the Chinese are not taught in school that they lost over 50 million people last century because of elite power struggles. For instance, instead of being told that the Great Leap forward was a Mao-induced disaster that cost 30 million people, they are told there was unusual weather in that period leading to famines. There is hence no open awareness of the flaws in their political system.

  The tell-tale sign of increased pressure at the top is an ideological purity drive, invariably invoked by a threatened incumbent elite faction to marginalise another one. Mao in the late 1950s inflicted an ideology of a Great Leap Forward, and then in the Cultural Revolution inflicted the ideology of his little red booklet. Both heralded disasters.

  The Chinese were lucky in the late 1970s to be led by Deng Xiaoping who managed to get the Chinese Communist Party to adopt a system of gradual elite renewal that worked from 1980 to 2010, but with his death the natural tendency of winner-takes-all politics has been re-established.

  Xi Jiping has consolidated ultimate power in his hands and that of the group around him, just as Mao did in the 1950s. Mao needed a catastrophe every 10 years to fend off the opponents. With the death of Deng Xiaoping and his pragmatism, the Chinese leadership has now returned to ideological slogans of the Mao era.

  Mao used purity drives to mobilise idealistic young people against political opponents. There are indications a new conflict is brewing right now, with a new ‘social virtue’ drive sweeping through China. It probably won’t get too bad whilst growth is easy, but the inherent instability is there.

  So the odds are that the US problem will cost other countries a lot of lives and the Chinese will continue to have civil strife from time to time. I don’t think there is much we can do about either, so let us hope we are lucky and that both will be contained.

  On the whole, I am optimistic about this century, with many indicators of humanity’s progress looking very healthy indeed. Our population levels are likely to stabilise; our ability to feed ourselves looks guaranteed; poverty rates are falling; the incentives to be nice to each other keeps increasing due to the increased connections between our economies; and we are likely to live much longer too. The main dangers come from the same place as the solutions: technology and politics.

April 26, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Some Night Buses barely used

  The Age ran this story based on data FOI’d by The Greens:
  Running on empty: Secret data reveals Melbourne’s ‘ghost buses’

  I got to take a look at the data, focusing on Night Bus routes.

  The current Night Network commenced in January 2016, following a 2014 election pledge by Labor to introduce all-night trains (on all suburban electrified lines) and trams (on 6 routes), as well as coaches to regional destinations. Night Network started as a trial, but was made permanent in 2017. Night Bus routes were designed to complement the Night Train and Tram routes.

  Data has been scarce, but anecdotally the trains and trams have had reasonable patronage. In 2016 it was reported that there were 35,000 people using the Night Network each weekend.

  

  This newly available patronage data reveals details of how the Night Buses specifically have been performing.

  Here’s how it looks – the source data included patronage for the entire year, and an estimated average per weekend night. I’ve compared the latter to the number of services, which gives us the average number of passengers per service.

  Route	Description	2016-17 tota boardings	Outbound frequency	Passengers per weekend	Passengers per service
  941	City, Footscray, Sunshine North, Taylors Lakes, Watergardens	1,398	60	20	2
  942	City, Footscray, Sunshine, Deer Park, St Albans	3,205	60	54	2.7
  943	Watergardens, Caroline Springs, Melton	707	60	8	0.57
  944	City, Newport, Altona, Altona Meadows, Point Cook	2,387	30	38	1.31
  945	City, Geelong Road, Tarneit, Hoppers Crossing, Werribee, Wyndham Vale	3,236	30	51	2.13
  951	City, Moonee Ponds, Brunswick West, Pascoe Vale, Glenroy	2,432	30	46	1.77
  952	City, Footscray, Maribyrnong, Airport West, Gladstone Park, Broadmeadows	3,648	30	60	2.14
  953	Broadmeadows, Meadow Heights, Roxburgh Park, Craigieburn	116	60	2	0.13
  955	City, Brunswick, Ivanhoe, Bundoora, Mill Park, South Morang, Mernda	3,003	30	48	1.6
  961	City, Collingwood, Eastern Freeway, Templestowe, Doncaster	5,507	30	82	1.95
  963	Ringwood, Mooroolbark, Lilydale	90	60	2	0.1
  964	Croydon, Kilsyth, Mt Evelyn, Lilydale	67	60	2	0.1
  965	Lilydale, Woori Yallock, Healesville loop	435	120	6	0.75
  966	City, Kew, Doncaster Road, Box Hill	2,123	30	45	1.67
  967	Glen Waverley, Burwood Highway, Bayswater (returns via Bayswater North, Ferntree Gully)	448	60	8	0.36
  969	City, Caulfield, Ferntree Gully Road, Rowville, Wantirna, Ringwood	3,663	30	74	2.64
  970	Carrum, Frankston, Mornington, Rosebud	1,394	60	14	0.52
  978	Elsternwick, Ormond, Huntingdale, Mulgrave, Dandenong (returns via Princes Highway)	1,090	60	14	0.7
  979	Elsternwick, Bentleigh, Clarinda, Keysborough, Dandenong	541	60	6	0.3
  981	Dandenong, Berwick, Narre Warren South, Cranbourne	213	60	3	0.17
  982	Dandenong, Endeavour Hills, Hampton Park, Cranbourne	343	60	5	0.28
  	ALL NIGHT BUSES	36,046		588	1.26
  701	Oakleigh – Bentleigh via Mackie Road & Brady Road (For comparison – see below)	175,612	30-60	369	18.96

  Some conclusions from this:

  • The City routes do better than the suburban ones. No real surprise there – the suburban routes are timed to meet trains, but obviously people favour a one trip ride, especially at night. (See also footnotes below.)
  • The most-used routes are those running every 30 minutes (rather than hourly) except for the 941/942 which each run every 60 minutes but provide a combined 30ish minute service between the City and Braybrook.
  • But even the most used routes are only averaging 2-3 boardings per service. That’s really not very good.
  • Passenger numbers are probably higher for outbound services, lower for inbound services. But even 6 people per service isn’t outstanding for what are mostly quite long routes.
  • Hourly suburban Night Bus perform very poorly. Those routes are timed to meet hourly trains, so upgrading them to half-hourly may not help unless the trains switch too (which would be good).
  • For comparison I’ve included figures for regular daytime route 701, one of my locals. It only runs every 30 minutes on weekdays, 60 on weekends/evenings, but it gets 7 times the number of boardings per service of the best performing Night Bus route. And on a typical weekend that one route gets 369 passengers; more than 60% of the number of passengers on the entire Night Bus network.
  • The worst performing Night Bus routes are only getting a passenger on one in every ten services. 90% of trips don’t pick up anybody. That’s an absolutely appalling waste of money.
  • The total number of Night Bus boardings per weekend in 2017 was 1,133.
  • The Age reported in 2016 that there were 35,000 boardings each weekend across all of Night Network: train/tram/bus. If we assume these figures are comparable (at least for the purposes of a rough estimate) then that means only about 3% of night trips are on Night Buses. (And that’s with only six Night Tram routes, and Night Train running only hourly!)
  • In comparison, for all public transport boardings, buses usually account for about 21% of trips around Melbourne.

  So what can be done?

  It’s not hard to conclude that the Night Bus network urgently needs a shakeup.

  As noted in a previous post, a big part of the problem is that the route structure, unlike the trams and trains, is completely different to the daytime routes.

  This means that the routes are unfamiliar to passengers. It also means in some cases people can’t get a bus before midnight, but can after midnight. This makes no sense.

  They would do better to scrap the Night Bus routes and start again, by using those resources to convert the busiest daytime routes into 24-hour routes. This could include both buses and trams – since Night Tram only covers 6 of the 24 routes that run during daytime.

  Even running as nighttime variations of existing daytime routes would be better than the current situation.

  For instance, route 966 is similar to daytime route 207 (one of the busiest bus routes), but diverts along Tram 48 (which does not have Night Tram service) for some of the distance, and terminates at Box Hill at the outer end. So call it 207, or even 207a or N207 so that people know it’s basically the same route.

  And if service coverage is absolutely needed to areas which are barely getting any passengers, maybe other cheaper options can be examined, such as on-demand buses or carefully targeted taxi/Uber subsidies. (Noting that these can be even more expensive to run, and don’t scale up if they become popular.)

  With so much pressure elsewhere on the public transport network, including on buses, resources have to be carefully allocated. There’s no point running buses that nobody uses.

  

  Footnotes

  Some notes on the data as provided:

  • Any transcription errors are entirely my own fault
  • The data set included all Melbourne bus routes, with boarding data provided for 2016 and 2017. (I’ll look at non-Night Bus routes in a later post.)
  • It was broken up by weekday/Saturday/Sunday. In the Night Bus context, this appears to mean before 3am Saturday; Saturday 3am to Sunday 3am; and Sunday after 3am – this is complicated, which is why I’ve used total numbers for the whole weekend.
  • A few numbers appeared in the 2016 data for old Nightrider routes. This might be because it was by financial year. I’ve concentrated on the 2017 data, which only shows the Night Bus routes.
  • It is, of course, possible that some quiet routes have seen patronage growth since 2017. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
  • Some services only run part of the route. This is one reason I avoided trying to measure boardings per service kilometre, which is sometimes used to evaluate bus service performance.
  • Suburban hourly Night Buses are timed to meet outbound trains. But some Night Bus stops are located too far from “connecting” stations to provide a seamless connection.
  • What happens when Night Trains are replaced by buses for planned works? Well here’s an example: outbound Craigieburn Night Trains normally reach Broadmeadows at 55 past the hour, and the 953 bus departs five minutes later. But this weekend it’s bus replacements – arriving at 12 past the hour. The “connecting” 953 schedule hasn’t been changed. And planned works are not a rare thing at the moment.
  • Thanks to the Victorian Greens for FOIing this data, and to The Age’s Timna Jacks for passing this it on.

April 23, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Bike parking: the next generation

  This caught my eye: a commuter at Aircraft station:

  …uses the station five days a week and said she had given up trying to get a park at the station.

  “Because of the traffic congestion on Point Cook Road and because of the lack of car parking facilities at the station, I choose to walk or to cycle to the station

  Star Weekly, 2/4/2019 “No love for Aircraft train station“

  Aircraft is not unique in this regard. No suburban railway station has enough car parking to meet demand. It’s basically impossible to achieve. It’s extraordinarily expensive, and doesn’t scale up.

  

  If someone walks or cycles to the station instead of driving, is that actually a bad outcome?

  The caveat:

  “The footpath’s broken, it’s very narrow, the railings either side of the footpath are inadequate and inappropriate.

  “I lock my bike to the fence … there’s just no bike security.

  All of these could be fixed without just giving up and expanding the car park at huge cost, so it fills up a few minutes later each morning, and generates more car traffic into the precinct.

  Unfortunately, it looks like the nearby level crossing removal won’t provide upgrades to the station either way.

  

  Bike cages? Or something else?

  In Europe and Asia, you see huge numbers of bicycles parked at railway stations. Could we get the same outcome here?

  (The image above is from Singapore; the image at the top of the post is from Bruges, Belgium.)

  I’m not sure a cage is necessarily much more secure than locking a bike to a fence. Almost anybody can get a bike cage card key. And bike cages are pretty expensive to install en masse – around $100,000 for a standard cage (fitting 26 bikes). That’s a lot cheaper than car parking, but still quite pricey.

  I’ve been reliably informed that bike theft can be a problem, but it almost never happens if a D-lock is used – because D-locks can’t be cut through with bolt cutters.

  (Angle grinders are a different story. This is why many people use a cheap bike to park at the station, not an expensive one that may attract thieves.)

  The Aircraft commuter’s situation is not unique. Many people would like to drive to the station. They’ll never be able to do so, because providing a car spot for all of them is completely impractical.

  Station car parks are often very prominent, usually taking up more space than the station itself, but that’s because cars take up so much space. The statistics show that most people don’t drive to the station. Not even in Zone 2.

  Most people walk, cycle, or catch a bus or tram to the station because it’s the best (or least worst) option for them. Given costs of providing station parking make it impractical on a large scale, it’s good that most people can find another way.

  But the article is right – bicycle parking could be a lot better than it is.

  The next station out from Aircraft is Williams Landing, which has 666 car park spaces [1] – also full early each morning.

  It turns out that a lot of people are cycling to Williams Landing.

  

  When I took a look one weekday afternoon, I found the bike cage was packed full of bikes.

  …and nearby, this fence had a long row of bikes along it.

  

  This is good. The more people cycling, the better.

  So what’s the best way to encourage even more people to cycle?

  Better bike lanes and paths will help, but if every fence already has a bike chained to it, what about more station bike parking, on a large scale?

  The Wheelie

  If more Parkiteer bike cages are expensive, are there cheaper options?

  Turns out the Department of Transport and Monash University have been working on something: The Wheelie.

  “The Wheelie”
  A bike parking device (BPD) co-developed by Transport for Victoria and the Mobility Design Lab @MonashUni.
  
  Find out more: https://t.co/yv1IkVAdsz@monashada @figshare #monashfigshare #monashresearch pic.twitter.com/U38TnGbQTV

  — Monash University Library (@monashunilib) August 23, 2018

  It’s a simple metal structure that is compact – designed to fit into an area the size of a parking space – and can cater for up to nine bikes.

  It looks quite ingenious, and could help cater for a lot more bike parking around stations as well as places like university campuses.

  I’m told the cost is under $1000 to manufacture it, plus some installation costs – kept low by not needing excavation (which in turn can impact underground services) – it’s just anchored to a block of concrete. Unsophisticated, but effective. And the design is Creative Commons, so anybody can make and deploy them.

  The key is to target installation sites carefully: probably better at staffed stations, in view of CCTV, in a well-lit spot, and preferably undercover.

  Cycling’s not for everyone. (I don’t currently have a bike.) And connecting buses should be better.

  But if this new design provides a cheap affordable way to get more people to railway stations without them having to drive and add to local congestion, then that’s a win for everybody – even those who do have to drive.

  • [1] The new PTV web site just says the station has parking, with no detail. Only the old web site specifies the number of spots.
  • Lead photo: bike parking at Bruges station, Belgium

April 21, 2019

• Daniel Bowen The importance of contingency plans

  I could moan on about Friday night’s experience with the replacement buses (a combination of poor night-time service provision and inaccurate passenger information) but you can read about that on Twitter, so instead let’s look at Monday night’s south eastern train problems.

  It often takes multiple factors to result in a real mess.

  So it was on Monday.

  • The Frankston and Cranbourne/Pakenham lines were closed for scheduled works, replaced by buses between the City and Caulfield
  • Many passengers had switched to the Sandringham line to avoid problems with those buses
  • Around 4pm, tragically a pedestrian was struck by a Sandringham line train between Brighton Beach and Hampton, forcing authorities to suspend services
  • And… an infrastructure issue at Elsternwick meant it was difficult to terminate trains halfway along the line – so the entire Sandringham line had to be closed.

  This last one was the icing on the cake, resulting in huge queues on Princes Bridge and around Federation Square for buses.

  COMMUTER CHAOS: There are huge queues for replacement buses after trains on Sandringham line were suspended. #9News pic.twitter.com/KGfrWCXty4

  — Nine News Melbourne (@9NewsMelb) April 15, 2019

  In the past, they would have been able to run trains from the City out as far as at least Elsternwick.

  If this had been possible, it would have had numerous benefits.

  • At least half the passengers could still catch a train to their destination
  • Far fewer passengers would need to be moved by the limited buses available
  • Buses wouldn’t have got stuck in inner-city traffic
  • Bus round trips would have been quicker, allowing them to move more passengers more quickly

  Could they have run trains as far as Brighton Beach? It’s not clear. Some AM peak trains originate there, but sources say trains can only terminate on platform 1, which is not normally used, and is fenced off. This in turn would require the train to be emptied at Middle Brighton, where there are no staff – and this is not a great location to change large numbers of people onto bus replacements.

  

  So what was the problem at Elsternwick?

  Until recently, terminating trains at Elsternwick for planned works or unplanned incidents was a common occurrence.

  Sandringham line suspended berween South Yarra – Elsternwick due to an ill passenger incident at Richmond. See https://t.co/fE9E9Hyp10 for more info. pic.twitter.com/BgR3MhyYAM

  — Metro Trains (@metrotrains) February 20, 2018

  But back in January, Metro flagged to their people that it was no longer possible, except in specific circumstances, and required extra measures to be taken.

  Also this weekend: the entire Sandringham line is closed.
  Rumour mill says some kind of infrastructure issue at Elsternwick making it now near-impossible to terminate trains there. So works now close the entire line instead of half of it. #MetroTrains https://t.co/78Emnnv4ci pic.twitter.com/2E8Vkxg0cI

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) February 8, 2019

  Interviewed on Tuesday by ABC’s Jon Faine, PTV boss Jeroen Weimar gave an indication of the complications.

  We have a turning point at Elsternwick, but it’s a manual turning point, it requires people to go out under safeworking orders. It’s something that you can’t activate on the spur of the moment. … It’s an old-fashioned manual set of points. That introduces a number of risks for people working in that environment. … It requires people to be working on a live railway, and when you do that without going through a safe and effective planned process, mistakes get made, and things get a lot worse.

  Jeroen Weimar, 16/4/2019 on ABC Radio Melbourne (46 minute mark)

  So is it really more difficult to get the right staff on-site at Elsternwick to go through the process, or to conjure up hundreds of buses to move thousands of train passengers, knowing they’ll never cope with demand?

  In light of Monday’s mess, are they going to fix it? It turns out, yes. Jeroen Weimar again:

  There’s some work that we’re doing next month at that location in Elsternwick, so there’s an upgrade program in place, which … will replace and update that set of points into an automated system so that we can turn around trains…

  Jeroen Weimar, 16/4/2019 on ABC Radio Melbourne (48 minute mark)

  I doubt this upgrade is directly in response to Monday, but rather with the knowledge that during May and June, they’re going to close the Sandringham line for more metro tunnel works.

  Melbourne’s train pain in set to spread to the Sandringham line, shutting down for weeks in late May and June, as part of the metro tunnel project. @BrendanDonohoe7 #7NEWS pic.twitter.com/xfaFMzZkKZ

  — 7NEWS Melbourne (@7NewsMelbourne) April 17, 2019

  The upgrade is good news. It makes sense to make Elsternwick capable again of terminating trains.

  Obviously the less of the line gets closed, the less impact and the easier it is to manage.

  

  How many points?

  What of the broader network?

  In recent years, Metro have been removing points around the network, on the basis that less complicated track layouts result in fewer locations where trains need to slow down, and also mean fewer infrastructure faults.

  This has some merit, but some level of flexibility is needed. (Recent changes at Caulfield mean trains from Dandenong can only terminate on platform 3, for instance. This has contributed to long delays in peak during bus replacements.)

  Unfortunately, accidents will happen. An accident near one end of the line shouldn’t close the entire line – especially at the City end.

  Ultimately, when incidents or planned closures take place, the infrastructure and the broader network needs to be able to cope.

  • Lead pic: James Oaten, ABC
  • April 2014: A similar scenario, nicknamed “Trainageddon” knocked out the Sandringham, Cranbourne, Pakenham and Frankston lines between the City and Elsternwick/Caulfield

April 16, 2019

• Daniel Bowen PPTN – a good idea – in principle

  The PPTN is the Principal Public Transport Network. The state government describes it as follows:

  The Principal Public Transport Network (PPTN) reflects the routes where high-quality public transport services are or will be provided.

  It supports integrated transport and land use planning by encouraging more diverse and dense development near high-quality public transport to help support public transport usage.

  In other words, it’s Melbourne’s attempt to tie good public transport into planning and land use.

  For instance, recent changes to the state planning provisions include relaxed requirements for parking near the PPTN (section 52.06-5), and discourage major facilities from being too far from the PPTN (section 17.02-2S).

  And it’s specific about what form the PPTN should take (section 18.02-2R):

  • A metro-style rail system.
  • Extended tram lines and the establishment of a light rail system.
  • Road space management measures including transit lanes, clearways, stops and interchanges

  It all sounds very positive. The theory of concentrating major development around good public transport, improving services, and allowing reduced parking can lead to good outcomes.

  In effect it’s trying encourage development that will lead to people using public transport over cars, at least some of the time.

  

  Residential parking

  Residential car parking can get people very riled up. My reading of the current requirements is there’s currently no difference to off-street parking for residents, whether the development is on/near the PPTN or not. In both cases it’s:

  • 1 car park for each one or two bedroom dwelling
  • 2 car parks for each three or more bedroom dwelling

  The only difference is that for developments not near the PPTN, there’s an additional requirement of one visitor car park per 5 dwellings in the development.

  All this is a minimum. Property developers are able to build more car parks if they think their customers will buy them.

  The problem is that car parks are expensive, especially the underground car parks normally associated with medium density developments of the type popping up around railway stations. Cost of parking adds to the cost of housing. And lots of car spaces encourages car ownership, and inevitably, car usage.

  There are cities in the USA where they are completely removing the parking requirement for some homes around mass transit.

  There’s no provision for this yet here, but the City of Moreland is seeking to override the rules, by allowing developments with no off-street parking in certain locations close to good public transport.

  It’s not a requirement for no parking. Again, it’s up to the developers to figure out what the market wants.

  These areas already have low rates of car ownership – so why not improve housing affordability for people who don’t want to own a car, or want to own fewer cars? As long as local streets have parking restrictions that prevent people parking lots of cars there instead, it can work.

  (By the way, the Age’s story opens with: It’s a brave piece of social engineering – as if seeking to imply that requiring lots of parking isn’t engineering car dependency.)

  

  Issues with the PPTN

  I think the theory is good. But there are some problems with the PPTN as I see it:

  The PPTN isn’t dense enough. It’s basically the existing train and tram networks, and some bus routes. If you assume that only the PPTN routes will be the ones that are really competitive with car travel, by providing long hours and fast, frequent service, there are some vast gaps.

  Okay, so it’s just the principal network. Not every route can be part of it. But for instance, the PPTN includes no routes at all south of Frankston – not even to Mornington. That just seems illogical.

  (More on this topic from Peter’s excellent Melbourne On Transit blog.)

  The PPTN’s implementation is patchy. In fact, some of it doesn’t exist at all.

  The PPTN mapping tool shows, for instance, a bus route along East Boundary Road, between Centre and North Roads. Good idea, except than no such bus route exists. One will be introduced in June, but it’s unclear how frequently it will run.

  #Bentleigh locals wondering what happened to the new bus route from Moorabbin to Chadstone: it's in the latest @NStaikos newsletter – starting 16th June.
  Note the route has changed a bit due to the difficulty of using the Tucker/South Road intersection. #SpringSt pic.twitter.com/X262HXtqC4

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) March 19, 2019

  Even where the PPTN does exist, service quality varies widely, and it’s improving only very slowly.

  It’s quite reasonable to assume that people living close to a railway station will (at least on the better served lines) be able to often use that service instead of driving. At the very least, they might be able to own fewer cars in their household than they would elsewhere.

  The same might even be the case along some tram and frequent Smartbus or other high quality bus routes. But it’s highly unlikely along the many less frequent routes on the PPTN.

  Buses can be improved, and relatively cheaply compared to major infrastructure projects. The bureaucracy has, or at least had, a plan to make them better. But it’s never been fully published, and there’s no hint of funding to make it happen.

  This is not helped by literally billions of dollars instead being built on new motorways – the West Gate Tunnel (which includes substantial government funding, despite it being privately built) and the North East Link – which will only serve to help grow car traffic.

  

  Great potential

  The PPTN, and the associated planning provision, have great potential to help coordinate public transport and urban development.

  But a lot more effort needs to be put into planning a more extensive PPTN, and of course actually implementing it.

• Club Troppo Adam Smith was a feminist economist: Care – the essay

  This recent essay in the Mandarin is a reworking of an essay I wrote in 2016 in a string of essays in which I developed the idea of the Evaluator General. I was following Gary Sturgess’ suggestion that governments should not think of themselves as producing complex services in a market, but rather as stewards of a supply chain as Toyota does. In that context it rather jumps out at one that the challenge isn’t to identify things that can be contracted out (though that should always be considered part of one’s repertoire) but to understand and so, try to improve what you’re doing. Of course the system pretends to do that via various bodgied up KPIs and so on, but the great guilty secret is that we keep restructuring things without attending to the most important thing of all. Knowing what we’re doing.

  Then a chance encounter with a book on The Ethics of Care led me in a new direction which arises from the observation that many systems of government service delivery or funding should be built as systems of care first and markets only to the extent that that makes sense within that broader context. It seems to me that this provides an excellent framework for building and delivering these services.

  Nicholas Gruen explores ways in which economics marginalises care for others and what an ‘economics of care’ might look like. This fills out part of the intellectual context for his proposal for an Evaluator General. 

  Late ‘second wave’ feminist Carol Gilligan’s 1982 book In a Different Voice argued that men’s and women’s ethical frames are different. Men tend to foreground justice and abstract duties or obligations; women empathy and compassion defined in concrete relationships.¹ This provided a springboard for ‘care ethics’ which is well summarised in this passage from a review of Virginia Held’s ‘The Ethics of Care‘:

  First, “the focus of the ethics of care is on the compelling moral salience of attending to and meeting the needs of the particular others for whom we take responsibility”. Second, from an epistemological perspective the ethics of care values emotions, and appreciates emotions and relational capabilities that enable morally concerned persons in actual interpersonal contexts to understand what would be best. Third, “the ethics of care rejects the view of the dominant moral theories that the more abstract the reasoning about a moral problem, the better because the more likely [to?] avoid bias and arbitrariness, the more nearly to achieve impartiality. The ethics of care respects rather than removes itself from the claims of particular others with whom we share actual relationships”. Fourth, the ethics of care proposes a novel conceptualization of the distinction between private and public and of their respective importance. Finally, the ethics of care adopts a relational conception of persons, which is in stark contrast to Liberal individualism.

  This offers a useful counterpoint to dominant paradigm, awash, as it is with abstraction, universalism, instrumentalism and so, manipulation.² So, here are some introductory reflections. We start with Adam Smith whose work is a constant reminder of how few of the intellectual riches he offered grew in modern soil. I then discuss the implications of ‘care ethics’ for what we’re all assured is the ‘market’ in human services. I conclude by asking whether, against the eclipse of this feminine perspective in our culture feminism should have a role in reasserting it alongside its legitimate role as an ideological vehicle for women’s interests in a world that’s unfair to them.

  Adam Smith and the ethics of care

  Adam Smith’s work was built on the ethics of care. He was very urbane and not easily roused to passion. But the two most passionate passages in all his writing are one referring to the tribes of Africa being captured as slaves as “those nations of heroes” and this one:

  What are the pangs of a mother, when she hears the moanings of her infant that during the agony of disease cannot express what it feels? In her idea of what it suffers, she joins, to its real helplessness, her own consciousness of that helplessness, and her own terrors for the unknown consequences of its disorder and out of all these, forms, for her own sorrow, the most complete ³ image of misery and distress. The infant, however, feels only the uneasiness of the present instant, which can never be great. With regard to the future, it is perfectly secure, and in its thoughtlessness and want of foresight, possesses an antidote against fear and anxiety, the great tormentors of the human breast, from which reason and philosophy will, in vain, attempt to defend it, when it grows up to a man.⁴

  This is philosophy as homage to care.The baby observes its dependence on its closest relations and from fear and love comes to crave approbation and fear disapprobation. The Theory of Moral Sentiments is built up from reflection on how people care for each other—and how they care most for those closest to them. Their care, their sympathy, radiates from them towards others with an intensity which is inversely proportional to their social proximity.⁵ Smith built towards universal values via concrete experience. One did not trump the other. But one—the universalist command of principle and policy—trumps the ethics of care today, both in economics and in policy.

  The ‘market’ in human services

  This perspective helps us see that the whole agenda for opening up human services to competition is built on the metaphor of human services as a ‘market’. And what are markets waiting for if not to be opened up? Of course, those weasel words ‘other things being equal’ are thrown about, and given them, who wouldn’t want services opened up?

  If one takes markets as the ‘ground’, the place in the chaos at which one sets intellectual anchor and tries to make sense of the world, we end up concluding that, because this market doesn’t meet the preconditions of efficiency, policy should provide them as it opens up service provision. At this point we might it’s reasonable to be suspicious that if the market at the end of our reform efforts will remain profoundly imperfect, reforming the few imperfections we can might not make things better. ⁶  Perhaps more to the point, empathy is of the essence in caring relationships. It is, as Smith argued, the principle mode of cognition of one human by another and the sentiment that binds both small and large groups together in a shared culture.⁷ Also, it’s integral to the efficacy of direct caring relationships.

  Further, in many human services we don’t really know what we’re doing. Though bureaucrats run up benchmarks against which they can administer programs with every sign of pursuing ‘best practice’ and being ‘evidence based’, the KPIs that emerge tend to meet the needs of those who designed them.

  They look good on the ‘dashboard’ that’s shown to the minister, who then brandishes it publicly to demonstrate that they’re delivering on their policy. If it’s an employment program like JobActive there’ll be plenty of data about the activities of the program – helping with interviews and job-readiness. If it’s a child protection program there’ll be lots of data about notifications of children at risk, and activities to detect problems and fix them.

  But will the data throw light on critical counterfactuals? If it’s Job Active we need to know what would have happened without JobActive – is it helping or just being given credit for what would have happened anyway? If it’s a child protection program are the children being removed from neglectful or abusive parents doing better once removed? Even data from well-functioning private markets – which are generated between buyer and seller – don’t typically throw light on these kinds of system questions. Further questions include these: Will the program measure the right things so that it can generate unfolding insights about how to improve its efficacy, whether its metrics are being gamed and if so how, whether the conditions of the program are changing as it unleashes its own incentives or as other developments unfold and so on?

  None of this is to defend arrangements as they are. Indeed I’d offer precisely the same critique of the existing system— that it isn’t generating the kind of information that’s necessary to understand how well it’s working and how to improve it. Put differently, the preeminent task is not to configure ‘the market’ as open or closed but to understand what we’re doing and then try to improve it.

  Alternatives to ‘market’ thinking in human services

  Here is a list of the four ethical elements of care provided by Joan Tronto. From Wikipedia:

  1. Attentiveness
     Attentiveness is crucial to the ethics of care because care requires a recognition of others’ needs in order to respond to them. The question which arises is the distinction between ignorance and inattentiveness. Tronto poses this question as such, “But when is ignorance simply ignorance, and when is it inattentiveness”?
  2. Responsibility
     In order to care, we must take it upon ourselves, thus responsibility. The problem associated with this second ethical element of responsibility is the question of obligation. Obligation is often, if not already, tied to pre-established societal and cultural norms and roles. Tronto makes the effort to differentiate the terms “responsibility” and “obligation” with regards to the ethic of care. Responsibility is ambiguous, whereas obligation refers to situations where action or reaction is due, such as the case of a legal contract. This ambiguity allows for ebb and flow in and between class structures and gender roles, and to other socially constructed roles that would bind responsibility to those only befitting of those roles.
  3. Competence
     To provide care also means competency. One cannot simply acknowledge the need to care, accept the responsibility, but not follow through with enough adequacy – as such action would result in the need of care not being met.
  4. Responsiveness
     This refers to the “responsiveness of the care receiver to the care”. Tronto states, “Responsiveness signals an important moral problem within care: by its nature, care is concerned with conditions of vulnerability and inequality”. She further argues responsiveness does not equal reciprocity. Rather, it is another method to understand vulnerability and inequality by understanding what has been expressed by those in the vulnerable position, as opposed to re-imagining oneself in a similar situation.

  This seems to me to be a more promising list of considerations than the list of requirements for market efficiency—which are a lot longer than this list of requirements for perfect competition:

  1. All firms sell an identical product;
  2. All firms are price takers—they cannot control the market price of their product;
  3. All firms have a relatively small market share;
  4. Buyers have complete information about the product being sold and the prices charged by each firm; and
  5. The industry is characterised by freedom of entry and exit. Perfect competition is sometimes referred to as “pure competition”.

  In this vein, the UK Institute for Government offers a list with some family resemblance to the abstract list from the economics textbook here:

  To support effective market stewardship, government departments and other commissioning organisations should:

  1. Clarify roles, responsibilities and accountability arrangements
  2. Be more considered, open and flexible in design
  3. Focus on competition, market structure and market dynamics
  4. Increase transparency.

  The (masculine) psychopathology of economics and management

  What’s going on here has its analogues in psychology. The book Love at Goon Park tells the story of Harry Harlow of the ‘terry towelling’ monkey experiments which rescued Adam Smith’s point from the scientism of mid 20th-century behaviourist psychology:

  Professor Harlow has already been asked to correct his language: He’s been instructed on the correct term for a close relationship. Why can’t he just say “proximity” like everyone else? Somehow the word “love” just keeps springing to his lips when he talks about parents and children, friends and partners. He’s been known to lose his temper when discussing it. “Perhaps all you’ve known in life is proximity,” he once snapped at a visitor to his lab at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “I thank God I’ve known more.” … Who wouldn’t believe that love was, at its best, a safe harbor — a parent’s arm scooping up a frightened child, holding it heart to heart? It’s hard to believe, in retrospect, how many powerful scientists opposed this idea.

  What (the hell!) was driving this? Clearly not science, but a kind of scientism, in which ‘love’ was somehow tainted – to be ruled out by the framework itself – peremptorily, not on its merits. I had a milder, but similar frisson of resistance myself when I came across the centrality of the idea of empathy in design, but on understanding it, came to support the idea.

  Technologies of empathy

  What we need to deliver care are technologies of empathy.⁸ There’s little empathy in the existing system which is an unpromising foundation on which to open it up or otherwise marketise it. Opening these systems up to competition might make things better. It might make them worse.⁹

  What we do know is that we’re not focusing on what matters. And what matters is whether we can become properly intentional (or to adapt the term above, attentional) towards the caring role when it is not being provided organically within the society.

  In this regard, there’s a deep lacuna in our ideologies. If you’ll permit these ideal types, to liberalism (and its mathematisation – neoclassical economics) the problem is largely invisible. To socialism or social democracy it’s a task for government to be overseen by a bureaucracy (rather than a task looking for institutions that might learn to perform it). Only in (Burkean) conservatism does what is provided by families and civil society come into full focus as a foundational quality of a functioning society. But, having made the giving of care in families and the maintenance of traditions of social concern, cooperation and coordination central to a functioning society, it has nothing to say about how to build such things where they’re damaged or require development in some way.

  And it seems to me that the ethics of care offers some resources for developing that – for conceiving, developing, proving and resourcing technologies of empathy with which we can tackle those issues intentionally, rather than ignore them (as liberalism does) or assume governments can deliver them (as social democracy does by default) or consign them to a private sphere which is then effectively shunted off the stage of public concern.

  The feminist roots of the ethics of care

  In this regard, it seems that feminism’s relation to what I call technologies of empathy has been a little like conservatism’s relation to family and civil society. It acknowledges their centrality. Unlike conservatism, it stresses the marginalisation of care from political and economic life (this might be expressed in critiques of the low wages going to the ‘feminised’ jobs in our economy). But where conservatism then offers nostalgia for the good old days when Big Government hadn’t damaged family life coupled with reticence towards any political project focused on using the resources of the state to rebuild and maintain it, feminism offers naturalism and culture war (I’m offering a caricature to make the point clear).¹⁰

  Feminist care ethicist Folbre puts it this way:

  Liberal feminism has demanded greater individual rights for women. Social feminism has demanded greater social obligations, especially for men.… Women know they can benefit economically by becoming achievers rather than caregivers. They also know, however, that if all women adopt this strategy, society as a whole will become oriented more toward achievement than care.

  Our economy, and arguably our society more broadly rewards care more poorly than self-assertion.¹¹  This is a dilemma indeed, shared by all men and women with an interest in living in a more balanced society, but particularly by women who are more often expected to make the necessary sacrifices. By contrast, finding ways to inject the ethics and the technologies of care and empathy into government funded social programs (not least by paying proper attention which includes building and honouring the evidence) carries only benefits: Benefits to those delivering the services, those who receive them and to the economies and societies of which they are a part.

  References

  1. From Wikipedia: Subsequent research suggests that the discrepancy in being oriented towards care-based or justice-based ethical approaches may be based on gender differences, or on differences in actual current life situations of the genders.
  2. I note parenthetically, or footnotically, that care ethics seems to make a lot better sense of the ethics of our ethical responsibilities to animals, than Peter Singer’s claimed utilitarianism which I can’t make head or tail of.
  3. At this point Grammerly helpfully highlights the last three words indicating that there’s a “qualifier before non-gradable adjective” – I suggest Grammerly take it up with Adam Smith.
  4. It seems reasonable to speculate that the passage is really about his own mother. Smith was a sickly child whose mother feared for his life as an infant.
  5. Smith’s simpatico with care ethics has been noticed in the literature—indeed Annette Baier dubbing Smith’s friend and mentor David Hume the “women’s moral theorist.” Baier argues that Hume denies “that morality consists in obedience to a universal law, emphasizing rather the importance of cultivating virtuous sentimental character traits, including gentleness, agreeability, compassion, sympathy, and good-temperedness”. These ideas about Smith as a ‘proto’ care ethicist have been pointed out since the early 2000s and dealt with in this plodding essay. Incidentally, Annette Baier married Kurt Baier, Dunera Boy and my Dad’s closest friend, confidant and mentor in the camps and in Melbourne after the war – at least until he met my mother.
  6. The ‘theory of the second best’ tells us to be suspicious that addressing any one source of market failure improves things if one doesn’t address all the sources of market failure. But since that’s generally impossible, I think this is a reasonable way to proceed so long as you keep your wits about you and understand, as Hicks did in a different context, that you’re taking a dangerous step. But here there will remain numerous profound imperfections in the market after any reform we can manage. In any event there are more compelling, commonsensical reasons for being suspicious of this approach to which I now turn.
  7. He used the word ‘sympathy’ as the singular fulcrum or engine of society aspiring to the ‘Newtonian method’ of rhetoric in which “an immense chain of the most important and sublime truths, all closely connected together” were explained “by one capital fact, of the reality of which we have daily experience”.
  8. I note here, by way of aside that empathy can’t ‘scale’ mechanically, it has to be grown. I suspect one attraction of ‘contracting out’ is the idea that it scales.
  9. Folbre offers this point about empathy and choice: Choice is a funny thing, affected by both moral values and by social pressures. Often what we choose depends on what we think other people will choose. It’s harder to stay honest if we see other people cheating. It’s harder to engage in teamwork if other team members are shirking. It’s harder to take on responsibilities for the care of other people if those responsibilities don’t seem to be shared. This is why too much choice—or too little social coordination of choice—can lead to outcomes that can be just as problematic as having no choice at all.
  10. My definition of culture war here consists of these elements: 1) the world is separated into goodies, or those on whose behalf the culture war is waged (in this case woman) and baddies, those standing in its way (in this case men and established structures of power and patriarchy); and 2) the benefits we seek will be delivered by the goodies winning. Any transformations that are necessary to delivering the benefits are either not considered, or assumed simply to follow from the goodies’ success. (At its crudest and most pronounced we see this in the sentimentalisation of revolution. A more prosaic example is the idea that we’ll have more and/or better innovation by sending more money to universities and hiring more STEM teachers).
  11. This article offers an empirical illustration of the association of self-assertion with the masculine, something which marginalises the feminine and the ethics of care in our culture. Here’s a chart of the extent to which Hillary Clinton adopted ‘masculine’ opposed to ‘feminine’ mannerisms of language. Those years in which she campaigned her language became more ‘masculine’.

  

• Club Troppo War on empathy, war on confidence, war on context

  Cross posted with the Mandarin

  Nicholas Gruen has argued that it’s much harder to realise evidence-based policy – both institutionally and intellectually – than many calling for it realise. Here he explains how putatively ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’ approaches can, paradoxically, compromise their efficacy by squeezing out empathy and relatedness.

  Russ Roberts has (yet another) great interview on EconTalk. He’s always been gregarious in his interests, but is becoming more so—and also more sceptical of social progress and of economics as a master discipline. Be that as it may, on listening to this interview with psychiatrist Gary Greenberg on the placebo effect it struck me that a phenomenon of some interest to me might be far more general than I’d imagined.

  War on empathy

  Empathy tends to get squeezed out of interactions between bureaucracy and the life world. And even professions that one might imagine would be built on empathy — like social work — often operate according to other professional imperatives. Hence, the power of finding ways for the community to administer social repair through the empathic bond of peers rather than professionals, as The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI), which I chaired until the end of 2016, tried to do with Family by Family.

  In any event, the basic idea promoted by Greenwood (slightly extrapolated by me) is this: as medicine was made more scientific, the placebo effect was discovered, and then marginalised. Yet it was of unarguable therapeutic power. Of course it’s entirely appropriate that, if one is looking for drug therapies, one wants to find drugs that, other things being equal, do better than sugar pills.

  But in the process, the trail goes cold on keeping the placebo effect in the frame, not only for what it might help us understand, but, more remarkably, even for its therapeutic potential. There’s been vanishingly little investigation of the joint effect of the drug and the placebo acting together. And it turns out that, investigating the placebo effect more broadly, it seems likely that it has something to do with empathic bonds — between some source of authority like the doctor and the patient. Or perhaps from anyone.

  War on confidence

  We seem to do better when we feel ourselves to be of concern to others, not just mentally, but physically. Whodda thunk?

  Note also Greenberg’s comment, “confidence is probably one of the most poorly understood and one of the most important aspects of our daily lives”.

  Surely enough, confidence was critical in Family by Family. Single mothers had so internalised the description of themselves as bad mothers (and by any comparative standard they had certainly done some bad mothering), that they were crushed and unable to change. Every one of the success stories that I learned of seemed to me to operate very directly, through confidence.

  To extrapolate further, we’re at the stage in drug therapy that we got to with our understanding of genetic causes of disease. Having discovered lots of low-hanging fruit, it’s all getting a lot harder. And it seems the world is more complex—vastly more complex—than the relentlessly reductive models we’ve had in our heads but which generated the early successes.

  Of course, one of the things reinforcing all this is commercial interest. You can patent and market a molecule, so the ‘drug theory of physical wellness’ is well supported by the pharmaceutical capital market. Mobilising the placebo effect — much less so. (This is something that’s not handled as crisply as it might have been in the podcast, IMO.)

  The fruit that’s not hanging so low are all the chronic maladies that dominate our health discourse today — obesity, diabetes, anxiety and depression, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, to name a few. Drug therapy has worked poorly here. It’s possible, perhaps likely that, by understanding the placebo effect — or those things that drive it — renewed progress might be possible.

  The war on context

  This hasn’t just been a war (however inadvertent) on empathy and on the importance of confidence. It’s been a war on context.

  A certain paradigm of science is asserted in which science offers knowledge that is lifted from context. Of course, if you can do it, and your goal is mastery of nature, well and good. You’d expect this to be the low-hanging fruit and you should go pick it.

  Alas, the lavish rewards this produces — for outcomes, methodologies, disciplines and careers — then compromises what might be the next phase of progress in areas where context matters.

  I almost wrote ‘more difficult’ areas. But context-dependent knowledge also exists on a spectrum from low-to-high-hanging fruit (slaps wrist for mixed metaphor).

  A program like Family by Family isn’t rocket science. It makes a lot more sense than most standard practice now. It’s just countercultural in the empathy-starved careerist bureaucracy we’ve built to deliver child protection services — an environment that has been unable to even detect strongly above-average performance, let alone find ways to learn from and spread it.

  This kind of knowledge is scientific knowledge too, but arises when one adapts one’s scientific tools to the task at hand, rather than simply aping techniques that worked elsewhere.

  With the renewed enthusiasm towards evidence-based policy in the context of the Thodey Review (while we expand cashless welfare cards for political reasons contrary to all the evidence) the test will be whether anything we do will promote rigour, thoughtfulness and attention to what the evidence is telling us given our objectives and the multiple contexts in which we want to achieve them.

  The two alternatives to this are that nice words are said about the report and it’s ignored, or it provokes a new birth of scientism in which the quest for contextless knowledge generates little useful knowledge at all.

  Postscript: an interview with Leon Gettler on the subject of this post

April 15, 2019

• Club Troppo An unpublished column on Brexit: until now!

  From around January this year I’ve tried to get the column below published – in the Guardian UK where my previous column was published. Unfortunately, and even after endless cajoling via the Guardian at this end, I couldn’t get a reply which is piss poor but there you go. Martin Wolf tried for me at the FT. At least they responded – but with a ‘no’, which is fair enough given the oversupply of articles on Brexit. Anyway as it fades into irrelevance and the Brexit Brouhaha Burbles on I thought I’d pop it up here.

  The result of the 2016 Brexit referendum looms over the career politicians assembled in the Palace of Westminster as the black monolith loomed over the apes in the movie 2001.

  It’s taken over thirty months of thrashing through actual options – as opposed to the wild partisan imaginings in the campaign – for a ghastly, if entirely foreseeable realisation to dawn. Despite the people’s clear instruction to Leave, any specific way of doing so would command far less than the 48 percent vote for Remain.

  In the teeth of the greatest crisis of British statecraft since World War II, the institutional imperatives of political combat ensure the politicians perform rather than deliberate. Not only Corbyn, but extraordinarily enough, May has clung to fantasies about getting a better deal, though the end game will presumably see her change her tune.

  How did it come to this?

  A year ago, I argued for a ‘Brexit Deliberation Day’ in which ten citizens’ juries of around 50 people selected, as legal juries are, by lot from local communities around the country would consider Brexit. In such circumstances, citizens’ opinions move systematically as they better understand the issues in discussion with peers.

  Isn’t this a job for parliament? Parliament forsook deliberation for ‘the numbers’ as the party system consolidated in the nineteenth century. In the last half century the struggle for the consent of the governed has become as professionalised, as optimised to win votes as McDonald’s use of salt, fat, sugar and advertising is to win customers.

  Like other aspects of our fast food culture – the linkbait to deliver clicks, internet and tabloid trolling to deliver outrage – it’s slowly poisoning us. Today’s politico-entertainment complex makes parliamentary deliberation impossible – as rare and pointless as playing chess with a badger.

  Many people supported my proposal but said it was too late. It should have happened before the people voted. Indeed: As it does in the US State of Oregon in which citizens juries deliberate and advise the electorate before any citizen initiated referendum: As has occurred in Ireland’s recent string of successful referendums.

  Whenever my proposal has been considered by those with the funds to make it happen, the answer’s been the same. It is too late now. Instead they’ve funded the usual political campaigns – with all their self-righteousness, manipulation and polarising propaganda that the pro-Brexit vote was a protest against – however careless, however futile that vote was.

  And here we are. As each day passes, the need to find a new way grows more, not less urgent. If you’re focused on March 29 thinking it’s too late to organise a Brexit Deliberation Day, you’re probably right, though a citizen assembly chosen by lot is still possible and would reflect the people’s considered will in contrast to the polls.

  But this crisis will morph into new dramas well beyond March 29th with no obvious end in sight. And, beyond Brexit, modern democracies are turning to self-harm with increasing regularity. Pursuing similar imperatives as Corbyn and May, the greatest achievement of Australia’s parliamentarians of 2013 was abolishing carbon pricing against the better judgement of an overwhelming majority of them. It’s given up on climate change, paralysed the energy market generating soaring energy prices and robs the budget of $10 billion each year. The Republicans in Congress are waving through a trade war against their better judgement. Who would have believed it?

  We must look beyond March 29th if we’re not to waste this crisis. It gives Britain the chance to begin the process of healing its own democracy and showing others how. From a citizens’ assembly, a cadre would emerge that was well informed on Brexit and, as a group, enjoyed popular legitimacy as embodying ordinary Britons’ considered will. It could be polled to determine ordinary people’s considered opinion as developments unfold.

  Imagine that cadre doing what a citizens’ assembly on nuclear power in South Australia did, appointing representatives of the best among them as spokespeople. That council of citizen jurors could have been operating, shadowing negotiations in Brussels, and parliament, shaming our representatives to put our interests first.

  Surveying the scene on another occasion when Britain was searching for its soul, and fighting for its life, George Orwell wrote “The past is fighting the future and we have two years, a year, possibly only a few months, to see to it that the future wins”.

  Whether they knew it or not, the apes were in the same situation as they stared at the inscrutable black monolith that came among them.

  It’s the situation Britons again find themselves in today.

April 14, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Parking in the bus zone

  I’ve mentioned this in passing before, but what the heck.

  This is a bus stop on Jasper Road in Bentleigh, opposite Our Lady of the Sacred Heart College.

  Normally it’s used by local bus route 701. It’s also used when there are planned rail replacement buses running, as the designated stop for Patterson station. These ran this weekend just gone, and will run again over the coming Easter long weekend.

  

  Back in 2006, under a government plan called Meeting Our Transport Challenges, route 701 was one of the first to get extended hours, with services until about 9:30pm, and the introduction of a Sunday service – only hourly, but better than nothing.

  When the rail replacement buses run, they are scheduled until about 1am outbound, with services all night on weekends.

  Here’s the bus zone for this stop:

  

  These hours apply on both sides of the road.

  Not only can someone park their car in the bus stops after 7:30pm, two hours before the last bus, but they can also park here all day on Sunday and on public holidays, blocking buses.

  This could make it near impossible for someone with mobility difficulties to board or alight the bus.

  Most other stops in the area have been changed to full time bus zones. It’s only this one (one of few that actually gets 24-hour buses during rail replacements) that hasn’t been updated.

  Some local stops have just a bus stop sign – no specific bus zone is marked. This is actually better than having a part time bus zone – regulation 195 prohibits stopping/parking there, regardless of the time (though plenty of people don’t understand this rule).

  I’m not even sure whose responsibility it is to update the signs to reflect bus timetables. In this case it’s not the council; it’s a Vicroads-managed road.

  Over the years I’ve raised this multiple times with various people via back channels, but today I’ve tried putting it into Vicroads directly. Will see what happens.

  But I’m amazed it’s gone unnoticed for more than 12 years. And I’m wondering how many more there are like this?

  • Update 1pm. I sent an enquiry about this to VicRoads. They have referred me to PTV, so I have forwarded the enquiry to them. (Obviously the merger has only just been announced!)

April 09, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Train Pain

  If you were following me on Twitter on Monday morning, you’d know that I made a decision I came to regret: I travelled to work on the train to Caulfield and the express rail replacement bus into the City.

  In short: the buses were hopelessly swamped by people. It was a long wait (43 minutes) in the bus queue; then a bus trip from Caulfield to the City that took more than an hour.

  The trip that normally takes about half an hour from Bentleigh to the City instead took two hours.Read this Twitter thread for the grisly details.

  In the cold light of day, here are some thoughts on this.

  

  The good stuff.

  The information has been pretty good. Lots of signage. Lots of staff making announcements on the train, on the station before the works started. It was pretty clear where to go.

  There’s also been no shortage of advance warning: signs at local and CBD stations (the latter perhaps a little overwhelming), flyers handed out at stations, announcements on stations and trains, TV and radio advertising, press calls, web site updates.

  There have been some errors along the way, and some of the media messaging was overly alarmist – leaving for instance some people assuming the Sandringham line is closed every day. It’s not – it’s only closed on some weekends. A simple calendar might have helped.

  On the ground at Caulfield, they seem to have tweaked the verbal messaging from announcers to say “to the City”, which is much clearer (and more correct) than the previous “to Flinders“.

  The massive tents at Caulfield are a smart idea. Ideally you don’t want long queues. But if you do have them, you especially don’t want people in long queues in the rain.

  It reminded me a bit of the queues for rides at an amusement park. But not as fun.

  I found passengers were remarkably calm while queuing. Maybe they were all posting furious messages on social media, but nobody got visibly shouty or upset, nobody jumped the queue, and (gods be praised) nobody lit up a cigarette inside the tent.

  Metro was taking the operation seriously. I know this because I saw Metro CEO Raymond O’Flaherty walking around checking things out, with a suitably serious look on his face.

  It’s school holidays and university mid-semester break (at least for some). This helps reduces travel demand, especially in the morning peak. The trains were quieter than usual. If these disruptions have to occur, now is the right time.

  Running a stopping-all-stations every 7 minutes service from Frankston to Caulfield made sense to keep things simple and minimise passenger waits for trains. It’s similar on the Pakenham line, though Cranbourne passengers have to change at Dandenong, which adds to their travel time.

  Happily for outbound passengers, trains on the Dandenong line run at least every 10 minutes until almost 10pm; until about 8pm on the Frankston line. High frequency makes outbound connections off the buses fairly easy.

  On the bus there were delays due to traffic, but it seemed minimal delays due to just traffic lights themselves – apparently Vicroads was making some effort to cut delays to buses at lights, which was good… except…

  Buses still faced long delays getting across Princes Highway because someone decided that cars on the highway are more important than scores of buses packed with people.

  Edit: As far as I can make out, the express buses were split between Federation Square (via the M1) and Arts Centre (via Dandenong Road/St Kilda Road).

  

  The problems

  Train delays approaching Caulfield. Ours stopped for about six minutes, but this was nothing compared to some of the delays on the Dandenong line, with some trains stuck for an hour or more.

  A big factor in this was crowding on the platforms. Caulfield station is not a modern design. Especially on platforms 2 & 3, the gates and ramps cause a bottleneck. (With the metro tunnel likely to increase Caulfield’s interchange role, an additional concourse would be a welcome upgrade.)

  The track layout is also problematic – sometime in the past few years, the layout has been altered so that trains from Dandenong can only terminate on platform 3. The less busy Frankston trains could use platforms 1 & 2.

  The sheer number of people meant crowding in the subway. The crowding in the subway backed up onto the ramp, and then up onto the platform, preventing empty trains from departing.

  But the biggest problem was bus throughput. Standing in the queue for that 43 minute wait, there would be times when no buses at all would arrive for 5-10 minutes. Then a few would appear and fill up.

  The crowds could have been handled much better if the stream of buses was constant.

  “Buses replace trains”
  No, they really don’t. #TrainPain #bustitution #MetroTrains pic.twitter.com/k65FAL2PKt

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) April 7, 2019

  Bus delays

  Some express buses earlier in the morning had departed with spare capacity aboard, despite people still queuing. (This was actually shown in the timelapse in Channel 7’s news story.)

  This needs fixing urgently – apart from making some in the queue needlessly wait, it wasted bus capacity that could have been used later in the morning to keep more people moving. Express buses shouldn’t leave unless full if people are waiting. Only stopper buses need to leave with space for more passengers.

  

  Bus throughput was also affected by severe traffic delays – buses despatched to the City had a slow trip in, limiting the number of trips they could run.

  • Unbelievably, Normanby Road in Caulfield was still available to general traffic in both directions, with buses having to negotiate a sea of bollards. Did they seriously not think to just close it off?
  • There were also delays on Sir John Monash Drive for buses trying to enter and leave the precinct. Given the numbers of passengers, it would easily be justified to close down that section of the road (from Queens Avenue to Dandenong Road) to other traffic – or allocate an extra bus lane that can be used to get onto Burke Road.
  • At the very least, more time should have been given for buses getting across Princes Highway.
  • Each morning peak the M1 has been clogged. On my trip was a crawl from joining the freeway at Burke Road, up until about Toorak Road. (Can the automated signage on the “managed motorways” be programmed to show bus lanes? If not, maybe this should be factored into designs for future rollouts.)
  • After leaving the freeway there was another crawl along Batman Avenue, mostly caused by the sheer number of buses.

  At this point on my trip I was looking on Google Maps at the traffic further along and onto Flinders Street and thinking/hoping they’d route some buses over to the Arts Centre to avoid it – as has been the case during previous rail closures.

  Unbelievably, they didn’t. Instead our bus and all the others headed straight into a kilometre-long queue of buses and other traffic.

  You know how some people claim that unlike rail transport, buses can easily adapt to changing travel demand and traffic patterns. Yeah. Not unless someone tells the drivers.

  

  Eventually bus drivers started letting passengers out to walk the rest of the way. As I walked, I found a long queue of buses all the way to Federation Square.

  Authorities implied it was because of the vegan protestors occupying the intersection at Swanston and Flinders Street. I don’t buy that.

  • Any westbound traffic delayed by the protest was separate from the bus route, because the section of Flinders Street used by the buses (from Exhibition to Russell Streets) was closed to other vehicles
  • Exactly the same problem happened again on Tuesday morning – with no protestors. And again on Wednesday morning.

  Introducing temporary dedicated bus lanes for commuters during the mega rail shutdown has been ruled out. @DougalBeatty #9News pic.twitter.com/jJvHKxWr6l

  — Nine News Melbourne (@9NewsMelb) April 9, 2019

  To me it looked like the bus jam was due to a slow turnaround at Federation Square. They should have been getting buses unloaded and out again as quickly as possible so they could get back to Caulfield and pick up more passengers. Again the despatch procedures seem to need reviewing.

  The lack of a dedicated bus lane on Batman Avenue didn’t help either, though it wasn’t as big a problem as on the M1.

  For a bus and it’s driver, the round trip would have been at least 60 minutes inbound plus 30 minutes outbound. No wonder there were queues at Caulfield.

  

  Is the strategy right?

  The government says 600 buses and coaches are being used this week for rail replacements, and presumably most of them are on the Caulfield to City run. But are they being used in the best way?

  Getting everyone to Caulfield by train and then using lots of buses to the City worked during quiet times on the weekend when passenger numbers were lower. It struggled a bit with football crowds, but it really struggles with peak hour commuters.

  It’s a firm reminder that buses can’t replace trains. It re-created the mess that occurs every weekday on the Doncaster corridor, where buses try to do that job.

  The Doncaster buses are incredibly messy, but at least they have bus lanes on the freeway inbound, and along Hoddle Street and Victoria Parade. This was specifically ruled out by authorities – who chose instead to rely on traffic light priority (but then didn’t provide it crossing Princes Highway).

  If they’re not going to give hundreds of packed buses the priority they deserve, would a better strategy be to shift more people onto the neighbouring rail lines, and run extra train services?

  • A bus connection from Moorabbin to Brighton Beach on the Sandringham line (as used in the past) for people from stations further south
  • Another from Westall to one of the Glen Waverley line stations for the Dandenong line passengers

  With reduced holiday demand, and extra services, would they cope? (The Sandringham line is running extra services anyway – the usual 8 trains per hour in peak is 10 per hour during the works. These have been pretty crowded.)

  There would be some level crossing impacts from more trains of course, but the shorter route for buses would mean fewer delays for them, and if enough extra trains could be provided, they would cope with passenger numbers so much better. (A packed train would be about 20 bus loads of people.)

  For passengers closer in, the mix of stopping and express buses from Caulfield to the City would get a better run thanks to reduced passenger numbers and congestion – in the station at Caulfield and on the roads into Federation Square.

  This sort of operation might use fewer resources, making the overall rail closure cheaper.

  Boosting regular routes

  A more radical change would be to run the above Westall and Moorabbin shuttle bus connections, but also deploy some of the hundreds of buses being used to boost local cross-suburban routes that connect the train lines, more widely distributing passengers across more stations.

  Some passengers are seeking out these local tram and bus routes anyway, including some prompted by advice from Metro staff who knew about the chaos unfolding at Caulfield.

  There have been reports of crowding on the 630 bus (North Road) and 67 tram (Glen Huntly Road) thanks to no extra services and (some) use of small trams. Presumably this is also an issue on the inner-suburban tram routes in the southeast.

  For me, I used this method to get home on Monday. It was 58 minutes from Flinders Street to Bentleigh (via Middle Brighton and the 703), and that included a 17 minute wait for a late bus. Far better than the two hour trip in the morning.

  

  Boosting those local bus routes and encouraging their use would be making the best use of buses – which are not really suited for long haul high capacity routes. It would also help educate passengers on their alternate routes during future unplanned shutdowns.

  Obviously it’s a fine balancing act to try and make sure the swarms of passengers displaced by the rail shutdowns don’t swamp other services and replacement buses.

  A good balance has not been reached this week.

  

  The first weekday is always the worst. The queues at Caulfield have moved better on subsequent days. But that’s not an excuse.

  It’s like when they say the first week of the university year is worst. Waiting for people to give up and try something else (such as driving) is not a good outcome. (Fair enough, for universities, sometimes travel patterns genuinely change after the first week or two.)

  As of day three, the bus delays haven’t gone away – on the M1 and Batman Avenue, and around Caulfield, they have continued each peak hour.

  The strategy used for this works period needs to be reviewed.

  With continuing (and very welcome) works on level crossings, the metro tunnel, and upgrades for the new trains, these major rail closures will keep happening. While they do, the city and its transport network need to continue to function.

April 07, 2019

• Daniel Bowen The monetary cost of driving

  One of the issues that contributes to excessive car use is that it’s not straightforward to calculate the cost of driving.

  Once you have the car, the cost of each additional trip you take in it is obscured. Apart from tolls and fuel costs, many might see an already-paid-for car sitting in the driveway as “free”, making it an easy option. This is why good alternatives are not based around park and ride, but instead aiming to replace the entire trip, enabling households to own fewer cars.

  I thought I’d have a go at calculating the total cost per kilometre of my car.

  Obviously there are a lot of variables, so each person’s result will be a bit different.

  Depreciation: The Lancer I bought last year cost me $18,000 new. If I assume it’ll be near-worthless by the time it gets 200,000 kms on the clock (I’m not actually likely to drive it that much while I have it, but later owners might), then that’s depreciation of 11.1 cents per kilometre.

  Some of the other costs are annual fees, so the cost per kilometre will vary according to how much I drive. The Australian average is 15,000. We’re well below that in my family, though it’s increasing a bit since one son got his P-plates last month. I’m going to use 8,000 km as an estimate.

  Insurance: $708.20. (It’s definitely gone up since having a P-plater behind the wheel!) That’s 8.9 cents per kilometre.

  

  Registration: having just bought the car, it was paid for the first year, but ongoing annual cost is $816.50. That works out to 10.2 cents per kilometre.

  Servicing: This will vary a lot, and will get more expensive as the vehicle gets older. But for now, because I bought a brand new car, this is capped at $230 for each of the first three years = 2.9 cents per kilometre.

  Petrol: The car’s got an information display which can tell you various things. One is how many litres per 100 kilometres it’s burning. From my observation this usually varies between 6 and 10, depending on whether we’re driving on country freeways with little traffic, or start-stopping along a busy city road. (On the bright side it never gets driven in commuter peaks.) The official government number for a 2017 Lancer is 7.4, but let’s be a little pessimistic and use 8.

  How much does petrol cost? The Australian Institute of Petroleum reckons in Victoria the average price in 2017-18 was 135.2 cents per litre, which seems roughly right, though I wonder if it’s creeping up.

  So every 100 kilometres we’re using $10.816 of fuel, or 10.8 cents per kilometre.

  

  What about tolls? We only use tollroads occasionally, perhaps about $50 per year, so I think I’ll exclude this for now.

  So the cost for me is: Depreciation 11.1 + insurance 8.9 + rego 10.2 + servicing 2.9 + petrol 10.8 = 43.9 cents per kilometre.

  (Contrast: public transport within Melbourne is generally $4.40 for any individual trip of up to 2+ hours, with a cap of $8.80 per day, but it gets a lot cheaper if you buy a Pass and use it regularly.)

  Obviously there are a lot of costs that motorists don’t pay for directly. Driving is very heavily subsidised.

  But having a number, even if it’s only an estimate, means I can quantify how much it’s costing each time we use the car.

  Did I miss anything, or mess it up? What’s the cost in your household? Leave a comment!

April 04, 2019

• Daniel Bowen The merger

  The Victorian Department of Transport is expanding, absorbing Vicroads and PTV to one big agency.

  We’ll have to see, but potentially this could be good. Better integration of different transport planning roles could benefit street-based public transport in particular.

  Recent changes, moving some PTV roles into DOT (and/or the apparently shortlived Transport For Victoria) were just confusing.

  Major projects authorities, such as those delivering the metro tunnel and the North East Link, will stay separate.

  

  The most visible thing to the public is the branding. Does this change mean yet another expensive re-branding exercise, putting new logos on everything?

  If that happens, hopefully they won’t go for the nuclear approach. Since the 1980s, we’ve had (just in metropolitan Melbourne):

  • Victorian Railways/Vicrail
  • Metropolitan Transit Authority/The Met
  • PTC
  • Bayside Trains/Hillside Trains /Swanston Trams/Yarra Trams
  • M>Train/M>Tram/Connex Trains/Yarra Trams
  • Connex trains/Yarra Trams
  • Metro trains/Yarra Trams
  • and now PTV.

  What next?

  The current PTV designs are mostly good – the colours, lines/patterns, typefaces all work quite well. The PTV logo itself is a bit meh – maybe it’s possible to start by just removing it.

  If it’s replaced with something new, I’d prefer a more compact logo, with a name that’s easier to drop into conversation. (The Met might have been the best recent one for this.)

  But the whisper is that the branding already seen on the Mernda line extension and the Huntingdale and Monash bus interchanges shows the way forward – most signs with no operator branding.

  What this means for Vicroads branding is another question.

  Of course, it’s how this new body works, and whether it provides improved planning and delivery, that really counts. Time will tell.

  • PTUA: State concludes its re-centralisation of transport planning: but to what end?

April 03, 2019

• Club Troppo We know WHAT we need to do. Will someone tell us HOW?

  When policy problems are complex, we need to understand and learn from the front line. With desperately need to improve the early, middle and late stages of institutional learning and change-making, to enable successful policy development.

  From the recent Mandarin article.

  It’s election season in Australia.

  I can feel the announceables coming on; indeed whole focus groups of them.

  Pilots make an easy announceable. They’re cheap, they sound innovative and they’ll be conveniently off the books by the time some new announceables are needed. Pilots are to policy what start-ups are to innovation: cheap, worthwhile and almost invariably around for a short time before they’re replaced by new ones. And most of them are unsuccessful.

  Innovation policy has a name for the problem. It’s called the Valley of Death, and refers to all those byways and traps that must be navigated before the Good Idea can make it into a successful product. A similar valley of death bedevils innovation in government.

  And while these problems are frustrating in markets, at least markets are an open system capable of being disrupted (as we say now) by competitors with enough nous and other resources to do so.

  Innovators in government face a similar thicket of obstacles, but in a centrally planned system, it can be virtually impossible to get through — because if you’re a small new initiative, you’ve got few champions fighting for you, and plenty of people within the system to whom you’re an inconvenience or worse.

  Through thick and thin: Improving policy in Australia’s regions

  These things came to mind as Lateral Economics was working on a report to the Regional Australia Institute, Through thick and thin: Improving policy in Australia’s regions. Yet just as Australia has managed some commercial start-up successes, a few Atlassians and Seeks, so too there are a few government innovations that have scaled — although only one in regional policy.

  Not only does this prove that it’s possible, it helps us understand how such success might be replicated.

  At least during the reform glory days from 1983 to 2001, Australia excelled at top-down economic policy reform. This included the setting of tax and benefit levels (whereby Australia has the most targeted welfare system in the world) and adapting existing infrastructure like the tax and benefits system in new ways, as we did with HECS and the Child Support Agency.

  Scrapping stuff that probably never made economic sense — like tariffs, shopping hours and the two-airline policy — was also something we led the world in. However beyond this, we’re coming to realise (aren’t we?) that even back in the glory days we weren’t so flash where problems are complex.

  The obstacle course

  When problems are complex, we need to understand and learn from what’s happening on the ground.

  Adapting language from anthropology, we call the former policy problem, which is amenable to top-down reform, ‘thin’, and the latter, more complex problem, ‘thick’.

  Whereas thin problems can be effectively designed and managed from the top, for thick problems, institutional learning must travel up the chain of command as well as down — from the outfield to the centre and also in the other direction.

  However, there are profound institutional and cultural obstacles preventing this from occurring, and where it does occur, preventing it from being embedded or properly institutionalised.

  The greater status given to policy-making compared with delivery is a central obstacle to achieving what must be achieved if small-scale variations and experiments in the field are to be learned from — which is to say:

  • assessed and understood; and
  • scaled on their merits.

  In our report, we anatomised these inadequacies in terms of the early, middle and late stages of the necessary process of institutional learning and change-making — which we summarised using a rhyming triplet: Will — Skill — Fulfil

  We found deficiencies of practice in each of these stages:

  Will: Governments frequently announce their intention to introduce some new policy or approach. Then, poor attention to detail often follows and the initiative quietly dies. Sometimes little progress is made beyond announcement or some stated intention. On other occasions, a pilot proceeds and appears successful but is not continued further as priorities change.

  Skill: Pilots, trials and other small-scale initiatives are often used to develop new skills and investigate the value of various new approaches. Some pilots have trialled integration of service delivery and funding streams between agencies — one of the holy grails in ‘joined-up government’ — but this has been very rare. More disconcertingly, the scaling of such learning into larger programs with learning feeding back to agencies has been rarer again.

  Fulfil: For innovation to be truly ‘fulfilled’ in our lexicon, it needs to be grown to the appropriate size and to become incumbent — embedded within organisational and political expectations and business-as-usual.

  The Landcare example

  We can think of only one example where this has occurred for regional Australia: Landcare.

  Landcare was a highly successful initiative in which a range of success factors coalesced:

  • It had high-level political support throughout.
  • This coincided with its being a very cost-effective and popular response to a policy and political enthusiasm of the time, ecologically sustainable development.
  • It was not expensive and was seen by the government as saving money in a range of respects.
  • The above factors led to early scaling, which was not difficult to do as the principles and administration of the program were relatively straightforward.
  • It did not require any difficult cross-agency collaboration or funding.

  Partly because of a political culture that valorises announceables, pilots and small-scale policy innovations are relatively easily established, but then tend to disappear, often irrespective of their merits, to be replaced by new announceables, many of which are also pilots.

  The need for accountability: some recommendations

  Governments urgently need to establish greater accountability for the extent to which the system as a whole supports a healthy process by which trials, pilot programs or just variations within existing programs are widely learned from and grown in scale and impact where appropriate.

  In light of this we offered the following recommendations:

  • Existing regulatory ‘sandbox’ approaches offer some promise but risk repeating the mistakes of the past. Policy ‘labs’ such as NESTA, Y-Lab and the Auckland Co-Design Lab, offer worthwhile models for pursuing thick policy problems, within which regulatory ‘sandbox’ ideas could happily sit.
  • As many of the issues relevant to regions span federal, state and local government, such bodies should have a federal remit. They should then work with governments at all levels and other stakeholders including users and the general public to make the thick journey to better policy and delivery.
  • Where pilots are established, their monitoring and evaluation should be provided in a way that is:
    • expert and collaborative with those in the field to help them optimise their impact; and
    • independent.
  • A unit like a behavioural insights unit could be a useful base from which to build such independent capability, ensuring the rigour of the process. But an additional objective would be the transparency of the project from outside. This will be important for the local community to be aware of the progress made. And this will assist the prospects of expanding small projects where they’re generating strong benefits and embedding them in the community’s expectations, and so in the minds of politicians ultimately responsible for decisions on the projects’ destiny.
  • There should be a register of such projects and small policy initiatives, with reporting each year by the auditor-general on the quality of the knowledge they have generated (and by implication the quality of the monitoring and evaluation being undertaken), their success or otherwise and, more importantly given the failings in the current system, in applying the lessons learned, including by adapting and growing the initiatives.
  • It would make sense to limit such an approach on regional initiatives as a trial, though if the ideas in this report have merit, they should have a wider impact.
  • An innovation fund should be established by the federal government to fund innovative programs that vary existing mainstream programs in ways that establish better knowledge about the impact of those programs under different conditions. Thus, for instance, one might trial more generous means-testing of welfare to understand the behavioural responses to such changes, and to optimise the impact of tapering welfare payments as people transition from welfare to work.
  • We should tackle the dominance of policy over delivery in the values of public service beginning with an audit of the extent to which leading successful learning and innovation in policy delivery is considered an important qualification for promotion in the public service, and take concrete steps to improve perceived problems in this regard.

  This article has been adapted from a report commissioned by the Regional Australia Institute. RAI’s Regions Rising Conference will be held in Canberra on April 4-5.

April 02, 2019

• Club Troppo Paul Krugman’s incredible invisibility trick

  It’s impossible to avoid misjudgements in life or to get all one’s predictions right. But should economists get caught out quite so often. 

  Paul Krugman is honest and self-critical. So he’s up for identifying what economists missed about globalisation – including himself.

  Of course, everyone’s wise in hindsight. Still, Krugman keeps reporting that economists ignored things that were … kind of obvious.

  For one person to miss something is a misfortune.

  But a whole profession doing it, again and again, seems like carelessness.

  I’ve previously locked horns with Krugman regarding his own tolerance of economists ignoring things that were staring them in the face — about which more shortly.

  In any event, Krugman was in Melbourne recently to give an informative and enjoyable lecture in Max Corden’s honour (watch below).

  One of his central points was to defend trade theory against ignorant critics.

  As he pointed out, although some critics accuse economists of arguing that free trade is good for everyone, that’s not economics speaking, but certain economic zealots pushing a barrow.

  Standard trade theory suggests that freer trade will generate winners and losers. If imports decimate an industry, investors and workers in that industry will suffer harm. This is inter-industry trade expansion such as we’ve seen in Australia recently with increased imports of cars wiping out Australian car manufacturing, paid for by increased exports — mostly of iron ore and other primary commodities.

  This was the trade that was implicit in economists’ models. But as Krugman points out, economists started realising that something else was going on from around the 1960s on.

  The fog of clear thinking

  Turns out Krugman blames clear thinking.

  If you think clearly — well you kind of just miss stuff. And it turns out that this clear thinking — which, of course, all your best colleagues are doing — leads them to miss stuff too. Even more worrying, they miss exactly the same stuff.

  Here’s Krugman explaining how economists twigged to new realities of trade from the 1960s on:

  “If you look at where trade was growing, it was growing within Europe at the time and between countries that look quite similar. It was intra-industry trade among similar countries.¹ What was that about? Actually, that was an interesting thing because it was really very hard for people to … It was very hard for economists with formal models to even talk about that. For a while there, there was an advantage to not being, not thinking too clearly because if you didn’t think too clearly you could say, “Oh yes, obviously there’s advantages of large-scale production and you can produce a smaller number of products at large scale, export those, import other stuff.” But then economists would say, have you modelled that in general equilibrium? How do I handle the market structure? I can’t do that so it must not exist. Well, actually, we managed to pull that together.” (Emphasis added).

  I’ll expand on the invisibility of intra-industry trade shortly, but Krugman is on his way to explaining another disappearing trick.

  As he argues, just after his own ‘new’ economic theory of trade and geography made it possible to ‘see’ intra-industry trade, a kind of intellectual Murphy’s Law intervened. Just as the discipline was coming to understand what was really going on … what was really going on changed.²

  The 1990s saw the transition from Pax Americana to Pax Sinica, with the most populous and fastest growing country in the world, China, exporting its way to prosperity. And this intensified inter-industry trade with all its disruptive potential.

  But isn’t it kind of obvious that, once China gets in on the act in a big way, the magnitude of things is going to change and that, with China’s very different labour costs, a lot of the trade expansion will be inter rather than intra-industry trade?

  There was a further problem.

  As we’ve known since at least the early 1900s, when Alfred Marshall documented it, manufacturing industry is very regionally specialised. So that means that, even where impacts are small at the national level, they can be very damaging for specific towns and regions — as it was for Hickory, North Carolina faced with a surge of Chinese furniture imports.

  

  Krugman acknowledges his own failure to anticipate this.

  “Having been a participant in a lot of the debates about trade and wages in the 90s I can say … I certainly missed … I wasn’t thinking at all about the dynamics of rapid change.”

  So good on him. And I’m not particularly critical of him for not foreseeing it. He’s a busy guy writing two op-eds a week — #Srsly! — but he only does that in his spare time. His main job is thinking about stuff, and he happened to be thinking about other stuff. No-one can think about everything.

  One can’t ignore the dynamics

  But I am critical of him for is for his continuing complacency about his profession.

  Note how he says he and his fellow economists weren’t focusing on dynamics. Well, it was those dynamics that the community was anxious about — they’re really everything in the political discussion of trade.

  Krugman wasn’t thinking about dynamics because he was doing ‘comparative statics’ or comparing one long-run state with a counterfactual long-run state. And that was because that’s how trade theory has been built.

  That great prize of modelling imperfect competition in ‘general equilibrium’, for which Krugman got another Great Prize, wasn’t the most important thing we needed to know about trade. Indeed great economists of the past had warned us it was unlikely to tell us much — warnings which were vindicated in hindsight. But that was what floated the discipline’s boat.

  As Keynes famously said regarding similar problems in macro-economics (and some readers may not be familiar with the whole quote):

  “The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run, we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if, in tempestuous seasons, they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again.”

  It seems to me all this is entirely forgivable for any one person. That’s why we have professions. And if a profession is too myopic, that’s why we have other professions. And if those professions are too myopic, that’s why we live in an open society. If it’s commonsensical, someone will point it out. But here it turns out that, for Krugman none of these resources were available.

  Reflecting on whether or not economists should have considered the dynamics of change Krugman says this:

  “I think I can say with a fair degree of confidence that basically, nobody was, that this was just not the way that economists were thinking about the issue. We were thinking … in terms of long-run equilibrium models, which seemed reasonable but was actually missing a lot of what was going on.”

  So, things that were both obvious when you thought about them even informally, and obviously important were invisible. They were invisible to a whole profession and … well, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. I guess that’s clear thinking for you.

  To show you this invisibility trick in all its glory, here’s Krugman’s Nobel acceptance speech commenting on his theorising about intra-industry trade and the importance of industry-specific economies and scale and specialisation in driving trade:

  “You may think all this is obvious, and it is — now. But it was totally not obvious before 1980 or so — except for some prescient quotes from Paul Samuelson, you really can’t find anyone describing trade this way until after the theory had been laid out in mathematical models.”

  The plain English version came later:

  “And you should bear in mind that economists have been thinking and writing about international trade for a couple of centuries; to come along and say, “Hey, we’ve been missing half the story” was a pretty big thing.”

  As I wrote in my article on Krugman’s reaction to my speech launching Max Corden’s memoirs:

  For all his brilliance, I’m repeatedly shocked at Krugman’s complacency regarding his own discipline.

  What could Krugman possibly mean when he tells his Stockholm audience that “the plain English version” came after his theory?

  What’s his response to the list I mentioned in my speech?

  • Hicks (1959)
  • Linder (1961)
  • Elkan (1965)
  • Vernon (1966)
  • Balassa (1966)
  • Drysdale (1969)
  • Grubel (1967)
  • Gorden (1970)
  • Lloyd (1975)
  • Bhagwati (1973)
  • Gray (1976)
  • Krueger (1978)

  I’m genuinely baffled, given Krugman would be familiar with most if not all these authors.³

  There were plenty of canaries in the coal mine regarding the China Shock. They just weren’t giving seminars in the economics departments of the Ivy League.

  All of this reminds me of Robert Solow’s devastating observation, “Sometimes I think it is only my weakness of character that keeps me from making obvious errors”.

  Solow was a passionate believer in an older style of economic thinking, in which formal analysis developed in close dialogue with — and ideally was enveloped by — close discursive reasoning, though in the passage just quoted he was speaking about the pull of left and right wing ideology.

  Still, sometimes I think it’s Paul Krugman’s and his professions ‘clear thinking’ that leads them to make obvious errors — at least until after the event.

  References

  1. As he pointed out, economists have always argued that even though freer trade can be expected to lead to aggregate gains, it comes with substantial adjustment costs. This is because the standard understanding of trade was that it was driven by comparative costs. And this was always understood to involve expanding inter-industry trade. Thus Australia would export more coal, wool and iron ore and import more cameras clothes and cars. That’s obviously disruptive for the poor souls employed making clothes and cars (I’m not sure how many cameras we ever made but we probably made Box Brownies at least.) But if Australia exports Commodores and imports Mercedes it’s a very different story.
  2. As an aside my favourite example of this law is Malthus’s Principle of Population — perhaps we should call it Malthus’s law in his honour. It took until 1798 for someone to come up with an explanation for why human beings stayed close to substance despite considerable growth in economies and in technology — which was that population grew geometrically and would eventually absorb any additional production — which Malthus assumed would grow linearly. This was a very powerful explanation for a stylised fact which applied more or less to the whole of human history. But it was changing just as Malthus cooked up his theory. Today our living standards are around 25 times subsistence — smashed avocado brunch, anyone?
  3. The only way I can think of to rescue some semblance of sense in Krugman’s assertion is to say that by ‘no-one’ he means no-one who matters. But even this is hard to square with the list. He described Max Corden as a great economist in his lecture. And John Hicks is amongst the greatest economists of the twentieth century. So it’s not even economists in the top draw. It seems like a kind of tautological statement that economists who thought about trade in a particular way didn’t see it.

March 31, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Mobile Myki – not available for uni students

  UPDATE: SEE BELOW

  Mobile Myki was made permanent last month. Even though for now it’s only available on Android phones, it’s great that it’s increased the options for public transport ticketing.

  So if you’re a senior (60+) and you want to use Mobile Myki?

  No problem – grab your Android phone with NFC, install Google Pay and load it up.

  If you’re a tech-savvy tertiary student, with a PTV Tertiary Student Concession Card, and you want to use Mobile Myki?

  Not so fast! It turns out only a few specific types of concession fare can be used with Mobile Myki.

  The following concession categories are currently available as a Mobile myki:

  – Child (Code CH) – customers aged 16-18 years only;
  – Victorian Seniors Card holders (Code VS);
  – General Concession (Code GC) – Interstate Seniors Card and Interstate Pensioner Concession Card holders only.

  For all other concession categories, Mobile myki is not currently available, and another type of concession ticket must be used.

  – PTV Fares and Ticketing Manual 2019, page 12

  This is not an April Fools joke.

  Apart from tertiary students, Health Care Card holders are also excluded from the list, as well as some other types of concessions. Children under 16 are excluded, perhaps because Google Pay needs to be linked to a valid credit or debit card.

  Why is this? I don’t know, but I’ll see if I can find out.

  Given it works fine with Visa and Mastercard debit cards, there should be no concerns about the use of credit cards for low income earners.

  Maybe there’s a good reason. But it seems completely illogical to exclude a huge number of tech savvy public transport users who happen to use concession fares.

  UPDATE Monday 5:30pm: The government has been in contact to advise that tertiary and other concession card holders can use Mobile Myki, by choosing the “General concession” option in the app. It appears the Fares And Ticketing Manual, normally the bible for these types of issues, is incorrect – perhaps the new Mobile Myki information was added in a hurry.

• Daniel Bowen Old photos from March 2009

  Here’s another one of my regular posts of ten year old photos.

  That month I upgraded to a Nokia N95 phone, which took far better photos than its predecessor, the Nokia 6230i.

  Swanston Street opposite the City Square – the old pre-platform tram stops. I’d actually been trying to take a photo of my London Oyster card with the trams in the background. The camera consistently failed to get the Oyster card in focus, but the crowds packing onto the trams are probably more interesting to look at now. (Remember, this was before the Free Tram Zone was instituted.)

  

  At the time I regularly used Glenhuntly Station some days, after dropping the kids at school. Here’s the outbound platform one morning…

  

  …and the level crossing in the afternoon.

  

  Easter was approaching. In Centre Road we see a rather cruel way to treat the Easter bunny.

  

  Supermarket trolley as art? As in the photo above, the level crossing (now gone) is in the background. It also appears at the time that Telstra didn’t take great care to keep their payphones clean. This is also adjacent to the old electorate office of then state member for Bentleigh, Rob Hudson.

  

  A trip to the Yarra Trams control centre, then in Eastern Road, South Melbourne. I’m not sure these days that they’d let me take a photo.

  

  Footscray station, before 2009-2010 pedestrian bridge upgrade, and before the Regional Rail Link added two extra tracks (and resulted in the upgraded bridge being partly demolished so it could be extended). These photos were taken for an April Fools Day gag.

  

  

  I must have been up early this morning. Hot air balloons over the City.

  

  I went to the Grand Prix. I have little interest in Formula 1 cars – I went to see The Who perform after the race. Here we have trams to the GP departing from outside Southern Cross Station.

  

  I wandered around the GP circuit waiting for the concert to start. I’d have to admit the cars are impressive from an ear-splittingly-loud and very fast perspective.

  

  The Who was excellent.

  While the tram shuttles back into the City were very good, those heading outwards were less impressive (this is St Kilda Junction), and the rest of the network was running its standard poor Sunday night frequencies, so I had to wait ages for a train home. The next day I got this point into Hansard.

  

March 27, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Private operator, private profits

  My blog’s RSS feed has been having problems. This has also affected some email subscribers. I think I’ve found the problem, so hopefully both are working again now.

  Just a quick post:

  The Age and Herald Sun reported yesterday that Metro Trains Melbourne made an annual profit of $29 million, on $786 million of revenue — despite still regularly missing punctuality targets.

  I’m not sure the fact that they’re taking a profit is really a surprise. They’re a private company, and they wouldn’t be in this game otherwise.

  Is the 3.6% profit high, or low, for a company earning $786m in revenue per year? I dunno.

  Metro Trains is defending winning a big pay rise from the taxpayer, while delivering services below official targets. The Hong Kong based company missed targets for running trains on time in most of the past 14 months. @BrendanDonohoe7 #7NEWS pic.twitter.com/xr12Sb7p72

  — 7NEWS Melbourne (@7NewsMelbourne) March 27, 2019

  Of course, if Metro misses targets, a lot of the blame should really be on the poor state of rail infrastructure – owned by the government. Upgrades are finally happening, but that follows decades of neglect.

  I think the broader question is whether the taxpayer is getting value for money overall from the train network (regardless of whether the operator is private or public).

  I’m particularly concerned that there’s such a huge amount of infrastructure/fleet investment (capex), as well as the fees to the operators (opex), but the service provision still has a strong concentration on commuter peaks.

  This means that a lot of the assets are only being fully used for a few hours a day, despite strong travel demand at other times (both on the roads and on the trains).

  

  A moderate increase in opex would provide for all-day high frequencies (eg most stations with trains at least every 10 minutes for most of the day) that make much more effective use of the overall spend, and better match current travel demand by making the system so much more useful for people.

  How much money are we talking about? One estimate I’ve seen is $100m per year. To put that in perspective, that’s about the same cost as the 2015 fare changes that capped zone 1+2 fares, and introduced the Free Tram Zone.

  While people welcomed the two-zone discount, it’s not clear if it made a big difference to patronage. The Free Tram Zone benefits CBD motorists, and crowds out fare-paying users – it might be a good example of what Chris Hale wrote in The Age last year: a public dollar frittered on fare discounting is invariably a waste, whereas that same dollar invested in better off-peak service gets great results.

  And any increased spend on services would be offset by additional fare revenue from increased patronage, of course.

  The idea that trains only run every 30 minutes after 7pm (and 20-40 minutes in daytime off-peak/weekends, despite crowding) is just crazy for a city of 5 million in the 21st century.

  It’s high time it was rectified.

• Club Troppo Crikey group sub: it’s on again
  

  Put in “Crikey” to DuckDuckGo’s image search (Google is for data donating chumps) and you mostly get Steve Irwin and crocodiles. And Pauline, who, as we speak, is, between takes of Dancing with the Stars, fighting for second amendment rights for terrorists and us law abiding folks, so we can shoot them before they cause too much trouble to our way of life.

  The ClubTroppo Crikey Group sub is on again.

  Please email me on ngruen at G mail if you’d like to participate.

  Please put ‘crikey’ in the subject heading to reduce your chances of your email getting lost in translation

  (All emails are translated – for obvious reasons).

  Those getting a subscription will also be flown First Class to the city of their dreams to meet Camilla Parker Bowles and her fictional Great Aunt Sally Bowles of Goodbye to Berlin for the unveiling of the latest vehicle in ClubTroppo’s Garage of automotive delights.

March 21, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Some thoughts on high speed rail in 2019

  There must be a Federal election coming.

  The Greens have declared their support for funding and building a full fast rail network on the east coast of Australia, serving Brisbane, Gold Coast, Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne (as per the official study from a couple of years ago).

  Yesterday Labor made a pledge to get started on buying the corridor for the same network.

  And today the Coalition has pledged $2 billion for fast rail between Melbourne and Geelong – upgrades and additional tracks so that trains run at an average 160 km/h (rather than this being the top speed, as now). The investment would also include business cases for other projects.

  The proposed east coast HSR network

  The study is well worth a read if you’ve never had a look.

  It would run between Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. Gold Coast and Canberra would both be served by spur lines. This means compromising on timetable frequency and operations. The study says this design reduces the required station footprints, and speeds up the journey for through trains.

  

  Let’s assume this plan is the most feasible. Fast rail has shown proven benefits in many countries. If all this investment occurred in Australia, it could cut air travel and spark development along the route – at least in the areas served by a station.

  But there’s a catch. There are doubts about HSR’s viability for interstate travel in Australia. Our geography – the distances involved – makes it really difficult.

  Unlike in Europe or Asia, the planned line between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane is, I suspect, with current technology, a bit too long to be really competitive against air travel, with too few large intermediate destinations.

  Will conventional rail technology increase speeds in the coming years? It’s hard to say. Regular service speeds of about 320-350 km/h seem to have been the maximum for about 20 years. (But I’m a terrible futurist.)

  It probably makes sense to reserve the corridors, but I’m less sure about trying to build the whole east coast network right now – especially with such a backlog of public transport projects in major cities and along regional corridors.

  

  What’s most viable right now?

  Rather than try and take on building a full HSR system which might cost tens of billions of dollars with sub-optimal travel time outcomes, what if the most obvious portion, Sydney to Canberra, was the focus for now?

  That’s the sector that’s relatively straightforward. At an expected 64 minutes by train, it is a short enough distance to be competitive with air (55 minutes plus transit time, which could easily be another 30-60 minutes), and long enough to be competitive with road (about 180 minutes).

  There are also fast-paced improving local connections at each end.

  It would be a good first project, and if done well, gain good political support for further extensions or lines elsewhere, thanks to serving Canberra’s politicians.

  To be fair, the study actually said this should be the first section. I’m just not sure the politicians are paying attention.

  Think local and regional

  While we wait for east coast high speed rail, there’s a compelling argument for upgrades to the existing regional lines for intra-state travel (such as Melbourne’s commuter lines to Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo, Seymour/Shepparton, Gippsland) to get ensure the existing fleet can attain and stick to their maximum speeds for more of their trip: full duplication, for a start, and provision and separation of metro services, especially to Melton and Wyndham Vale.

  In this respect, the Federal Coalition’s pledge today makes some sense. It seems like quite a lot of money for only a moderate time saving – if the train fleet needs to be replaced, should they be aiming for higher speed than average 160/top speed 200?

  Of course, assuming it includes track amplification, there would also be capacity benefits for Melbourne’s west.

  With any of these plans, high speed rail needs to be accompanied by boosts to local public transport connections around the regional stations. If a major rail line is reliant on park and ride, that will severely limit patronage.

  So, as always, excuse my rambling. What I’m trying to say is this:

  A full interstate HSR network along the east coast has a lot of potential… eventually. But I suspect shorter distance projects are probably more viable right now.

  • I see Albo recently claimed that Sydney to Newcastle by train is slower now than 50 years ago. I’d be interested if anybody has fact-checked this claim. Every such claim made in Victoria is invariably wrong.

March 18, 2019

• Club Troppo The Guru recipe

  [I just read a self-help book and, like Don Quixote, need to vent…]

  My 10 rules for becoming a successful guru:

  1. Appear popular at the start: humans are just like dogs that follow other dogs. So have a legion of disciples and followers. Make them up when you start out. Don’t hesitate to hire actors and internet helpers.
  2. Give the audience the keys to the universe: flatter your audience by giving them a story wherein they are the heroes capable of great feats as long as they follow a recipe that you are a part of. A good guru knows the secret worries and desires of his audience and orients his stories towards those. If the audience fears asteroids, spin them a story about how the mind can influence the forces of the cosmos responsible for the trajectory of asteroids. If the audience secretly wants to control the weather, tells them about the magical rain dances. If they want to be healed, tell them your theories cure cancer or whatever else they worry about.
  3. Fit the story within the culture of the audience so that the mechanisms sound familiar and validated. Truth is completely irrelevant for this and is often a hindrance, so you only need to use familiar words and concepts, replacing the actual theories with whatever suits your story. When you talk to a Western audience where science is the source of truth and power, you thus stack your story full of the latest terms in Western science, whether that is gravitational waves, Higgs-Boson particles, intergenerational epigenetic transmissions, blockchain, Modern Monetary Theory, or whatever it is that your audience is likely to have heard of in the news. Use those terms, explain them in a way that is roughly right, and then claim some theory about them that is complete nonsense but suits you.
  4. Do not tax the intelligence of the audience for if they were smart enough to understand all the things you refer to, they wouldn’t be interested in what you had to say in the first place. So explain things in a very light and emotional storytelling manner. Speak of quantum waves as if they are friends with whom you can have a conversation. Talk about the mysticism of the carbon cycle as if your audience was born with the buttons in their hands that ruled the minutest details of that cycle. Your audience will love you for it because it will make them feel they finally understand these things in a way that makes them feel smart and powerful. Indeed, you basically cannot overdo this part: all that happens if you are spectacularly wrong in one story about some part of modern science is that you lose those members of the audience that really know that part, a negligible number.
  5. Set your audience up slowly with a hook: offer them something cheap that draws them in and only when they are in so far that they become slightly dependent on more do you increase the demands on their purses. The key thing here is that the audience will trust you if they want to trust you and hence only after you have managed to create a continued need for your message. This is a subtle game of hints, ‘proof’, personal ‘testimonies’ of your previous disciples, stories of how you really are uninterested in money, etc.
  6. Your appearance is everything so look the part and be seen to believe yourself, ie walk the walk. Whether you truly do is irrelevant because what matters is the appearance. Truth is no obstacle at all. If your audience needs you to have travelled the stars, simply tell them aliens abducted you and took you for a ride. If the audience wants to hear you spent 10 years in a cave in Tibet, then just tell them that is what you did. If they need you to have 100 kids and 50 wives, just make them up. If there is too much well-known information out there to prove you couldn’t possibly have done what your audience wants to believe, pretend you were in contact with someone who did who was your guru and that you are now following in his footsteps. Similarly, dress and behave the way the audience expects you to, whether that means you must have an enormous beard or a weird antenna sticking out of your behind. Remember the important lesson of Machiavelli: people believe what they see and hear. Don’t worry about the very few who look at your actions and deduce who you truly are: they are not into gurus anyways so you lose nothing by not appealing to them. Your potential followers resent such skeptical characters, so they are no threat to you at all (indeed, the more noise skeptics make about you, the better).
  7. Entertain and be charming. You have to make the audience want to be you or sleep with you. If you can’t be entertaining and charming, don’t even start.
  8. Have a bible. If need be, you can have a follower write that bible, but you need a holy book that people can pick over and worship.
  9. Be ambiguous: no two people truly want the same thing. So in order to have many followers you must create enough ambiguity in your story such that they can all believe something different. Like the bible, tell many different sides of the same story such that different members of the audience can buy into different aspects.
  10. Be scarce: a guru is like a Ferrari and must not be seen to be available to everyone because that limits the value to the audience of having one. They want to feel special. So when things take off you must become sparing with your time and your new public utterances. Indeed, the best thing is then to die.
• Club Troppo Scaling knowledge: Should our disciplines have mesh or tree-like relation to each other?

  I’ve just been reading some of Tim Berners-Lee’s Weaving the Web about building the World Wide Web and it put me in mind of Paul Frijters’ recent post on teaching the social sciences. Paul argued that:

  The biggest change needed is to teach the material in terms of basic patterns, with more complex arguments taught later as combinations of basic patterns. Another change needed is to enforce a single language on the entire curriculum. Finally, what is needed is far more use of virtual reality-teaching and field trips so that students experience the phenomena they are meant to understand, unlocking their visual acuity and emotional skills as learning tools. Students should learn with their whole being, not merely with their abstractive capacities.

  Regarding the first two points, ¹Berners-Lee’s frustrations with the world before he changed it seem to mirror Paul’s. He was frustrated with the ‘tree like’ organisation of knowledge ². and wanted to invent a looser, more ‘associative’ form of knowledge architecture which he called ‘mesh’.

  Be that as it may this seems like quite a big deal to me. Indeed, as the internet grew in order to effectively scale it needed to move away from ‘tree-like’ architectures for sending data packets through the net as outlined in this write up of the Border Gateway Protocol (or as us aficionados call it the BGP – some of us have only been aficionados for the last couple of minutes, but we’ll leave that to one side).

  Anyway, the way knowledge started being classified in the 19th century was by discipline. Sometimes a discipline disappeared because it was discredited – as in the case of phrenology. But mostly the disciplines stayed in place and each spawned endless sub-disciplines. The disciplines are tree-like structures of knowledge, sometimes paying obsessive attention to their unitary structure as in the case of micro-foundations in economics and selfish genes as in the case of neo-Darwinism.

  There are occasional cross-overs, as in the case of behavioural science and economics or imaging and psychology or evolutionary psychology for instance. Interdisciplinarity is spoken of at least by some with reverence, but all the disciplinary incentives are against it and the tree-like structures of each discipline remain in place. Thus these crossovers might be likened to rhizomes rather than any real challenge to the tree-like structure of disciplines and plantation like structures of knowledge generally.

  As knowledge has proliferated over the last two centuries, you’d expect some re-architecture of the relations between disciplines, but there’s been no systematic change whatever, and what occasional change there has been, has been limited to ad hoc marriages of sub-disciplines where new technical possibilities present themselves or where exhaustion with the sterility of one discipline sets in and some (usually very limited) reaction is in order. An example of the former is where MRI imaging is now used in psychology and even in philosophy and of the latter is behavioural economics or the empirical or ‘Freakonomic’ turn in economics (though this is also to some extent the response to the new technical possibilities of ‘big data’ and desktop computing).

  1. I won’t comment on his third point other than including it here because of its importance and my strong agreement with it. ↩
  2. The paper proposing that he work on what became the World Wide Web had a heading “The problem with trees” and began “Many systems are organised hierarchically” ↩

March 17, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Metro tunnel and level crossing works

  I was going to blog a few quick things from the past couple of weeks. That post grew too big, so I’m splitting it up…

  Bustitution is coming

  With the number of rail projects underway, it should be no surprise that there seem to be major works happening somewhere, every school holidays.

  In fact for the April school holidays there is so much going on that they’ve scheduled some works to happen beforehand, and labelled it an “autumn construction blitz“.

  The big (weekday) shut downs include:

  • Werribee line (Werribee to Laverton) closed for two days last week for level crossing works at Aviation Road
  • Mernda line (Epping to Bell) for four days next week and then again (Epping to Thornbury) for a week in early April for level crossing works at Reservoir
  • Frankston line (Mordialloc to Frankston) for three days in early April
  • …and the big one: the Frankston and Cranbourne/Pakenham lines (Caulfield to City) will shut for more than two weeks around Easter

  And that’s leaving aside a host of evening and weekend closures affecting numerous other lines, as well as V/Line.

  

  On Friday some detailed bustitution flyers were released. They’re worth a look if you’re on one of the affected lines. You’ll find them via the PTV page or on Metro’s web site.

  One particular unfortunate change from previous shut downs is that recent infrastructure issues at Elsternwick now mean the entire Sandringham line is closed during works, even when they only affect South Yarra.

  As usual, it’s worth checking information before you travel, and considering alternative routes rather than assuming catching the replacement buses is the quickest way to get where you’re going.

  

  Cheltenham and Mentone crossings

  Last week some details of the Cheltenham and Mentone grade separations were released.

  Mentone: One thing I’m less than happy about is that the station entrance will be a long way from the bus interchange. Currently the buses stop right next to the entrance to platform 1.

  

  I hoped this might just be an issue with the artists impression. It’s not.

  Hi, we worked closely with transport agencies on the best location for buses & investigated a range of options. For reasons including not splitting bus stops, we are leaving the interchange where it is. There will be electronic displays to help guide passengers between services.

  — Level Crossings (@levelcrossings) March 15, 2019

  Cheltenham: I haven’t had a close look at this one yet (there’s precious little detail on either, in fact) but they have gone ahead with the plan to include a third platform.

  The existing station has a third platform already. The difference is this one will be connected to the main line from both ends – enabling more operational flexibility. That why there are some references to a “third track” – this will not include an actual third track to Southland (to the north) or Mentone (to the south).

  Dandenong area crossings

  Designs have also been released for South Gippsland Highway at Dandenong South (Pakenham line) and Evans Road in Lyndhurst (Cranbourne line).

  In both cases these are elevated road over rail – sky road!

  

  The problem with road over rail is it’s generally terrible for pedestrians, making them walk a long way in a hostile environment to get over the rail line.

  I don’t know the area well, but this might be more of a factor in Lyndhurst (mostly residential?) more than Dandenong South (mostly industrial?).

  Again, the lack of detail means it’s unclear to me if either of them include bike lanes over the bridges.

  They both seem to only have a pedestrian path on one side of the bridge, and on South Gippsland Highway, it’s not clear where the existing bus stops will be moved.

  If you’ve got feedback about the newly released designs, be sure to send it in via the Level Crossings web site.

• Left Focus The Prospects for Socialism Today
  
  
  
  

  

  
  
  
  
  
  Dr Tristan Ewins
  
  
  Writing in the Herald-Sun, Chris Collins (11/1/19 ) argues that the Nordic countries have never been “socialist” because they have not conformed to the original Marxist definition of the centralisation of the means of production in state hands. In reality, though, there were always a variety of definitions, and even Marxists themselves have revised their understandings.
  
  
  Socialist aspirations include ending exploitation and the class system ; and reducing inequalities to a fair level. In Marx’s words, to advance the principle “from each according to ability, to each according to need’. That should include a strong welfare state and social wage ; involving not only natural public monopolies and strategic state ownership ; but also producers’ and consumers’ co-operatives, democratic funds, and a mix of competition, markets and planning.
  
  
  Socialism also means building an economy focused on ‘use values’. (ie: not just maximising abstract exchange value ; eg: preserving the natural environment) But we’re in a global economy: which means we have to live with the transnational corporations. They are at best ‘a mixed blessing’: at times spurring innovations and job creation ; but also unacceptable inequalities in wealth and power ; as well as collusion, monopolism, planned obsolescence and so on. But also arguably the consequence of bourgeois dominance is that we live in a ‘One Dimensional Society’ where substantially different social alternatives are excluded from mainstream discussion. What’s needed is robust pluralism: where socialism is part of the debate ; and hence a genuine option in the broader context of democracy.
  
  
  In response to writers who attempt to put Swedish Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism in opposition to one another: for key Swedish thinkers and politicians such as Wigforss, Palme, Rehn, Meidner etc the Nordic Model was definitely a kind of socialism. The 'high water mark' was with the Meidner Wage Earner Funds proposals of the 70s and 80s. That marked the end of a 'corporatist consensus' (institutionalised consultation and co-operation) which developed over several decades starting from the 1930s. The model has been in slow retreat since. But its past successes over many decades still give a sense of what is possible.
  
  
  Importantly, the wage earner funds were to be structured in such a way as to compensate workers for prior wage restraint. But the extent of that wage restraint had been such that the funds would eventually deliver economic control to workers over many years. One of the biggest problems with the funds is that they focused on workers alone rather than the broader category of 'citizens'. (hence excluding pensioners for instance) In 1983 Australian Leftists like Laurie Carmichael wanted ‘Nordic Style’ policies in return for wage restraint under the the Government of Bob Hawke and 'The Accord'. Unfortunately nothing of the sort was actually delivered.
  
  
  That said: what kind of state is in a position to deliver on socialism?
  
  
  Leninists are inclined to oppose the ‘liberal bourgeois state’ to the kind of state which existed under the Bolsheviks. A ‘workers’ state’. Trotskyists would argue it had become a ‘degenerated workers’ state’ under the domination of Stalin.
  
  On the other hand, by certain interpretations a genuine workers' state is a democratic state ; where we can interpret 'the dictatorship of the proletariat' as a 'manner of applying democracy' ; the 'democratic dictatorship' of the working class majority. (widely misinterpreted, the term always referred to the democratic rule of the working class as opposed to the rule of a single man such as Stalin) The ultimate aim is to create a ‘pure democracy’ where the state represents all people ; and the class system is permanently transcended. Finally, the State itself is presumed by Marxists to ‘wither away’ with the end of all class divisions and antagonisms. One flaw of this thinking, however, is the presumption that over the long run 'only class antagonisms matter' to such a degree that some kind of state power is necessary either as arbiter ; or to enforce interests.
  
  
  Arguably Sweden enjoyed a decades-long 'equilibrium in the class struggle' or otherwise what Korpi called a 'democratic class struggle'. Where the class struggle was in some ways 'institutionalised' between social democrats, unions, employers. Concessions were made based on ‘the balance of class forces’ ; but open escalation of conflict was avoided as being in no-one’s interest. Then in the 1970s and 80s the Social Democrats and the LO (‘Landsorganisationen’ ; or Swedish Trade Union Confederation) attempted to assert their democratic leverage to achieve previously unheard of economic redistribution and democratisation. Again: even with over 80% unionisation coverage they still failed. And Social Democracy has been on the defensive there largely ever since. If anything, this gives an idea just how difficult the struggle can be.
  
  What we need is a democratic state which is not a medium for direct OR indirect bourgeois rule. Nicos Poulanztas wrote about a 'logic of the class struggle' which 'imprinted itself upon the state field'. I'm not a structuralist (as Poulantzas was) ; but in a way that makes sense. The state tends to defend bourgeois interests ; but not totally. It is not a 'simple instrument'. It is much more complex than that. Rather, it has its own internal contradictions and internal struggles. What we need is a state which is fully committed to the implications of democracy: as opposed to the direct or indirect rule of the bourgeoisie.
  
  The problem is that capitalism is supported by a clear majority of states ; as well as by the transnationals which are an expression of and foundation for global bourgeois dominance. Even assuming a state which breaks POLITICAL bourgeois dominance at a local level ; there are still the remainder of bourgeois states internationally; and global bourgeois economic power ; and economic co-dependence.
  
  
  Think about revolutionary France. The Revolution was diverted into Bonapartism. (the rule of the French Emperor, Napoleon I) And eventually with the Congress of Vienna there was total Restoration of the "Ancien Regime" in France, and the consolidation of monarchies and their traditional bloodlines elsewhere in Europe. Liberal Democracy did not really take hold through much of the world until the Bolsheviks put much of the European bourgeoisie under such pressure as to implement the crucial concession of universal suffrage. This had long been a key Social Democratic and Marxist demand. We're talking about a period spanning over 100 years. (throughout which we had other revolutions and struggles ; eg: 1830, 1848, 1871) Thereafter the bourgeoisie and its representatives have spent another 100-odd years thinking of ways to divide the working class against itself to prevent it from realising the potential of the suffrage. The splintering of the working class culturally and economically has made it increasingly hard to realise the solidarity we need to bring about the change we want. Narratives on ‘political correctness’ and ‘left elites’ have just this effect ; and sometimes by neglecting class interests we play into the bourgeoisie’s hands.
  
  
  Critics of socialism often declare that they don’t want ‘statism’ or state domination. And this they associate with socialism. Well, no - we don't want Stalinist-style 'statism'. (though I hate the term 'statism' as it is commonly used to stigmatise any place for the state ; even a democratic state) But 'wresting capital by degrees' from the bourgeoisie still sounds like a good idea - if done properly – and if only it were possible. The problems of exploitation and economic polarisation still demand our attention as practical and moral questions. And after all, radical redistribution of wealth is what the Swedes were attempting with the Meidner wage earner funds in the 1970s and 1980s .
  
  Arguably the Mixed Economy represents progress towards that goal. Though the ‘mixed economy’, social wage and welfare state can be supported by far more ‘moderate’ forces who want nothing more over the long term than to ameliorate inequality and ‘save capitalism from itself’.
  
  
  "Wresting capital by degrees" from the bourgeoisie can imaginably involve a mix of public, co-operative and other democratic ownership - as opposed to 'Stalinist Statism'. But the process cannot be finished because bourgeois interests reinforce each other globally. Currently, there is no (acceptable) ‘way out’ of capitalism. But if we mobilise we can at least force compromises which are in workers' and citizens' interests. And we can convince the bourgeoisie that compromise is sometimes in its own interests. (again ; 'saving capitalism from itself') For example: natural public monopolies can reduce cost structures not just for citizens/consumers/workers – but also for business. And a state-owned savings and loans bank (with a charter promoting competition and ethical banking) could inject competition into the sector of benefit both to business, and to most ordinary people.
  
  
  Importantly - forcing compromise through struggle is in some ways more involved than just 'gaming the system'. Over the long term who knows what's possible? Again: think about Revolutionary France - and the hegemony of liberal democracies which only finally arose more than 100 years later. We can only hope it will not take a catastrophe such as the First World War was to provide enough impetus to drive qualitative change ; to challenge the class system and the ‘defacto rule’ of Capital.
  
  If anything the Global Financial Crisis gave a sense of capitalism’s enduring instability ; and that (should another crisis occur) radical interventions may be necessary ‘to save the system from itself’. But public dissatisfaction with “bailouts at the peoples’ expense” may drive strategic socialisations sooner than we think.
  
  
  Socialism is not ‘inevitable’ as the old Marxist Centrists used to insist. We cannot anticipate all the policy innovations which may help ‘save the system from itself’. But over the long term a more generalised breakdown cannot be ruled out either. Socialists need to stand prepared for all manner of contingencies. Global organisation and dialogue are necessary to best prepare for those contingencies. That means not responding to discourse on ‘globalisation’ as an excuse for defeatism. It means working out the possibilities of domestic social democracy/democratic socialism ; but also building the organisation and dialogue necessary to give rise to internationalist responses. The current Socialist International is not an effective vehicle for this. Can it be reformed? Or do we need new forms of international organisation and dialogue?

March 14, 2019

• Club Troppo Review of Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline: Guest Post from Simon Molloy

  Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline could upend our thinking about our future of planet Earth with far reaching implications for policy on climate change, immigration and border control, defence, education, child care, and jobs, to name just a few.

  In the face of Hollywood’s habitual dystopianism we have become inculcated with familiar mantras: we are facing a global population crisis, humans are a plague on the planet, we are poisoning the Earth and so on.

  These population mantras are wrong. Not just wrong; diametrically wrong, according to the book’s Canadian authors, Darrell Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs, and journalist, John Ibbitson. They say, “We do not face the challenge of a population bomb but a population bust”.

  Based on extensive research aimed at assessing the trajectory of global fertility rates, they argue that “one of the great defining events of human history will occur in three decades, give or take, when global population starts to decline. Once that decline begins, it will never end”.

  Even before the arrival of Bricker and Ibbitson’s new work, the population pessimists were overstating their claims. The UN forecasts that population will peak at around 11 billion in 2100 then settle into gentle decline.

  But Bricker and Ibbitson assert that the UN has got it wrong. Their investigations suggest that fertility rates are falling much more rapidly around the globe than the UN thinks.

  They point out that populations are already declining in two dozen countries – by 2050 it will be three dozen. Japan’s population is expected to fall from 127 million to 95 million by 2053! They say that global population will peak at about 9 billion or less between 2040 and 2060 – a lower and earlier peak than the UN predicts. They also say population post-peak will decline much more quickly that conventionally thought.

  Their conclusions are based on published statistics and a series of interviews on every continent supplemented by recent survey data about planned family size.

  It has long been known that increasing per capita incomes, economic development and urbanisation led to declining fertility. But in developing countries, fertility rate declines appear to be running well ahead of what could be expected on the basis of their stage of economic development. Why? The answer is female education and information technology. Female school enrolment is rising rapidly and access to information is exploding. Women are being better educated younger, both formally and informally, than ever before. As a result, they are choosing to have fewer babies.

  Interviewing a group of women from a slum outside New Delhi, Bricker and Ibbitson report, “From time to time, the women reach under their robes and glance at a backlit screen. Even in the slums of Delhi, women can access a smartphone, a carrier plan, and a network. Even in the slums of Delhi, they hold the sum of human knowledge in their hands”.

  The authors dismiss claims that religion and culture dominate other drivers of fertility rates. Claims that, for example, Muslim countries, have higher fertility rates than elsewhere due to religious factors can’t be sustained. The 2010-15 fertility rates for Iran, UAE, Qatar, Turkey, Bahrain and Kuwait are all at replacement (2.1) or below and are probably continuing the fall. Developed Muslim countries have low fertility rates just like non-Muslim developed countries. They also argue that immigrates adopt their new homes’ birth rates in one or, at most, two generations.

  Economics and education trump religion. Remember when Catholics used to have big families? This is another reason to prioritise education, connectivity and economic development on the global agenda.

  What does this mean for governments and policy in Australian and elsewhere in the world? It changes almost everything.

  On climate change, other things remaining equal, falling population means we can be less worried. The costs associated with any set of carbon mitigation policies are less justified in the face of lower projected population. Bricker and Ibbitson point out that “if the UN’s low variant [population growth] model played out, relative emissions would decline by 10 percent by 2055 and 35 percent by 2100.”

  Notwithstanding the tragedy and visibility for refugees fleeing war, the long-run trend of immigration is downwards. This is because of falling birth rates in developing countries but also because of rising incomes there – there will be fewer people with fewer reasons to leave. Immigrants will become scarcer and, as any economist will tell you, this means their value will rise. Countries will, in future, compete with each other to attract a diminishing supply of immigrants to shore up their falling populations. Countries will compete on the basis of their average incomes, quality of life, and the successfulness of immigrant integration.

  Governments will, no doubt, attempt to raise domestic fertility rates. In other countries, the authors report, such efforts are very costly and only very marginally successful. As average incomes rise, the opportunity costs associated with having children do likewise. Perhaps one of the outcomes of population decline will be the emergence of a comprehensive accounting of the costs of child-rearing for parents. These costs include, not only all the usual expenses, but the enormous child-related detriments to career paths, borne mainly by women. A ‘baby bonus’ of, let’s say, $20,000 – per year – anyone? Maybe more.

  Population decline is likely to lead to geopolitical instability. Bricker and Ibbitson says that, following its disastrous one child policy and its prohibition of immigration, China’s population could be, astonishingly, as low as 650 million by 2100 if its fertility rates fall in line with those in Hong Kong and Singapore at 1.0 or lower. The associated changes in economic and military power will redefine strategic priorities.

  Economic growth will be slower. AI, rather than being a threat to jobs, may come just in time to complement a shrinking workforce. The economic and social consequences are too complex to predict.

  And what of the collective psychological implications? It’s one thing to recite platitudes about the ‘human plague’ but it’s entirely another, and somewhat chilling, prospect to contemplate a shrinking human footprint on Earth with no end in sight.

  Bricker and Ibbitson’s ideas are a huge reset on thinking about the future, presenting a radical vision of the most important parameter that there is – the number of us that there are.

  Simon Molloy is an Australian economist who consults on telecommunications and technology in Australia and the developing world. He is Managing Director of consultancy, System Knowledge Concepts Pty Ltd.

March 13, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Bus stop stripes

  Sometimes I notice tiny things, and wonder what they’re about.

  Have you noticed that some bus stops have a small colourful stripy bit of tape?

  https://www.flickr.com/photos/danielbowen/46639362384/

  Intriguingly, many of them seem to match the colours of the logo of the bus operator for that route – even if the buses themselves are now all in the standard PTV orange livery.

  Here’s one on a Ventura route (blue and yellow):

  https://www.flickr.com/photos/danielbowen/40397070633/

  I should have guessed it, but a well-informed Twitterer had the answer:

  They’re timing points. Spots along the route where the bus driver needs to check their timetable and may need to wait if they’re early.

  Many of them seem to be at major stops such as railway stations, though some are not.

  This raises another topic: with many level crossings being removed, which cuts delays along bus routes (particularly highly variable, unpredictable delays), are bus timetables being re-written?

  It appears not. A few weeks ago I caught a southbound route 626 bus at Carnegie station that arrived at the stop almost five minutes early. And that was in the PM peak.

  The 626 timetable still allows 8 minutes for the 850 metres between Chestnut Street/Dandenong Road (the stop before the station) and Koornang/Neerim Roads (the stop after the station).

  Its sister route 623 is the same. You could (briskly) walk it in eight minutes.

  Back when the level crossing was there, it probably made sense to allow that much time. Not so much now.

  

  As level crossing removals proceed across Melbourne, authorities should be reviewing bus timetables and taking the reduced delays into account.

  After all, speeding up street-based public transport is one of the key non-motorist benefits of grade separation.

  Timetable tweaks may not be enough to run extra services with the same buses, but they can at least help cut unnecessary delays – particularly for bus passengers not boarding or alighting at those timing points.

• The Northern Myth Which way? That way! The High Court issues a mud map for native title compensation

  

  This is a guest post by Megan Brayne, a lawyer and Director of Comhar Group, a legal and policy advisory firm specialising in native title, environment and planning and climate change law.

  Yesterday for the first time the High Court determined compensation for native title, and lawyers are pretty excited.

  Native title holders are entitled to compensation when States or Territories do things like grant leases and freehold lots that extinguish (legal speak for destroy) or permanently impair native title.  That’s because non-indigenous people have the right to compensation on just terms if a State or Territory compulsorily acquires their property (kind of like in the nineties movie The Castle).  The right to compensation applies to actions that occurred post 1975, when the Racial Discrimination Act (Cth) 1975 was enacted.

  However, the problem is that in 1975 States and Territories all over the country didn’t know native title existed.

  They went around for decades happily granting leases and freehold estates which extinguished or impaired native title.  Later, in 1992 the High Court found that native title existed in the famous Mabo case.  The Native Title Act (Cth) 1993 (Native Title Act) was enacted shortly after, and made provision for compensation for certain State and Territory actions that occurred after 1975.

  Unfortunately this was not the end of the confusion.  For example, States and Territories were under the misapprehension that non-exclusive pastoral leases that existed at one time or another across much of the Australian land mass had extinguished native title, and continued to grant leases and licences and other tenures on them.  In 1996 the High Court held in the Wik case that native title had largely survived the grant of non-exclusive pastoral leases, and co-exists with them.

  The Native Title Act provides that compensation is payable on just terms, to compensate the native title holders for any loss, diminution, impairment or other effect of the act on their native title rights and interests.  So how did the Courts quantify what should be paid to traditional owners in this case?

  The High Court supported the idea there are two components to native title compensation.  Firstly, an amount for economic loss associated with the impact on native title.  The High Court found this is up to 50% of the freehold value.  Simple interest is also payable from the date of extinguishment, which adds up.  This means that traditional owners in towns with higher property values such as Broome or Katherine will be awarded a greater amount for economic loss than traditional owners of remote areas where property is not as highly valued.

  A separate component is payable for non-economic (cultural) loss.  So, for example, where State or Territory actions interfere with a significant site, the cultural loss will be higher.  The High Court rejected the Commonwealth and Northern Territory’s arguments that the compensation awarded for cultural loss awarded by the trial judge ($1.3 million) was manifestly excessive.  The Commonwealth had wanted to limit the value to $230,000 and the Northern Territory to 10% of the value for economic loss.

  Yesterday’s High Court case involved 53 acts being the grant of leases, freehold lots and a cemetery reserve in Timber Creek, a small town (population 230) half way between Katherine and Kununurra.  The end result was the High Court awarded the total amount of $2,530,350 including interest.  This comprised:

  (a)   Economic Loss:  50% of the freehold value, being $320,250.

  (b)  Interest on the sum of $320,250 calculated at $910,100.

  (c)   Non-Economic Loss (cultural loss) of $1.3 million.

  Lawyers will be excited and busy this week. Government lawyers will be reading the decision closely and working out how to proceed.  Often where States or Territories have granted tenure for specific projects (such as a mine) there is a contractual agreement between the State or Territory and the project proponent that passes compensation liabilities through to the proponent, so there will also be some company lawyers busy assessing potential liabilities.  Lawyers who represent indigenous groups will be carefully considering where to go next.

  For all stakeholders, the decision provides some certainty but leaves open significant areas for negotiation and disagreement.  This is unlikely to be the last time the courts will be asked to consider native title compensation issues.  Much will turn on the facts of each case, such as the nature and content of native title rights and interests and the impacts on culture of the particular acts.  The High Court’s assessment provides useful guidance but cannot be rolled out en masse.

  The High Court has delivered a road map for calculating native title compensation, but just how we all navigate it remains to be seen.

  The case is Northern Territory of Australia v Griffiths and others [2019] HCA 7 available here: http://eresources.hcourt.gov.au/downloadPdf/2019/HCA/7

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  The post Which way? That way! The High Court issues a mud map for native title compensation appeared first on The Northern Myth.

• The Northern Myth The long overdue and well-deserved death of “political correctness.” An explainer by Michael Vaughan.

  

  This is a guest post by Michael Vaughan, a former journalist with The Age, crikey.com and a few other joints.

  He has been on the road for the past five and a half years and spends most time in the Territory.

  It’s time to give the arse to the overworked, overcooked and inaccurate term “political correctness“. Yeah, really, flick it.

  Now before you start accusing me of being a champion of some sort of misogynistic bullshit or no doubt myriad other things, a moment if you please.

  The evolution of the term political correctness had its origins, if you believe the interweb thing, in the mid-20th century when Marxists and Leninists used it to describe a class-conscious, militant political leader. As in someone who was a politically correct fit (think party lines here) for the job at hand and who could uncompromisingly wield a big stick (no, that is not a euphemism, thanks very much) and get things done.

  Yeah, it really was a political term.

  Today, it’s a whole new ball game.

  Anyone who takes umbrage at something you say, however innocent it may seem to you, will lead to the jack-booted PC coppers coming down on you quicker than a priest RSVPing to an invite for a children’s party.

  Seriously, what does the term have to do with politics? Well, jack shit really, unless you’re describing those foolhardy, look-after-themselves bludgers (insert laughter track here) running Australia at the moment (and those in just about every other country although New Zealand, under the crackerjack, Jacinda Ardern, is a standout exception).

  The feds here are the epitome of political incorrectness, according to the Marxist/Leninist definition. And just for balance, those in the Opposition parties are not the flashest mob going around and are certainly not on my dinner party guest list. But I digress.

  Political correctness (the current definition is “Avoidance of expressions or actions that can be perceived to exclude or marginalise or insult people who are socially disadvantaged or discriminated against“) has taken madness to a new level. Note well that there is no mention of politics in that definition.

  The most productive thing political correctness has done is to keep dictionary editors in jobs. The Macquarie Dictionary word of the year in 2018 was #metoo … I always thought it was two words (the year before it was, for fuck’s sake,  Milkshake Duck) … but let’s include the likes of slut shaming, mansplain, victim shaming, bropropriating (stealing an idea from a woman and putting it out there as your own) or manterrupting and a million others finding their way into the lexicon.

  Seriously? It’s time those editors got off their collective fat arse and redefined political correctness for what it really is.

  And anyway, I prefer the definition attributed by some to former US president Harry S Truman in 1945: “Political correctness is a doctrine, recently fostered by a delusional, illogical minority and promoted by a sick mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a piece of shit by the clean end.” Amen to that.

  When I was a kid, in another century, we used to refer to it as name calling and, yeah, we did it a lot. Everyone did then. From memory, Catholics were most often on the receiving end during my primary school years (nothing has changed for me. I enjoy giving those hypocrites as hard a time as I can. My favourite these days is “No, Jesus is not coming back. He wasn’t nailed to a fucking boomerang).

  Now it all comes under the heading of bullying. We lived by the adage “sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me“. It was drummed into us at home and at school or by anyone else who cared and it stood us in good stead. Maybe that adage should be taught to the kids of today. OK, not maybe, it should be taught to kids.

  Even British singer Joan Armatrading had a song “I Love It When You Call Me Names” although that song is about a couple indulging in some, as Norman Gunston used to say, funny business discipline-type behaviour, so that’s perhaps forcing the issue on several levels.

  An ex-wife, Monica, (yeah, I’ve had several wives and two of them have been mine) always refers to females as birds, probably a throw-back to the ’60s when girls were referred to as birds, brush, cuties, babes, skanks, spunks, sheilas, charlies et al. I can’t think of anyone getting their tits in a tangle when my ex calls them a bird.

  I have a former journalist mate, Robert, who has been a very dear friend for more than 45 years. Robert is proudly gay and because of that, I tagged him early on in the ’70s with the name Bondi. Why, you ask? Bondi is a fair way from Manly (that’s a geographical joke). Rob still sends me missives often on social media, the world’s most easily offended collection of sooky la las, and 40-odd years on he still signs them “Love, Bondi”. I love him for that.

  Another former journalist mate, Ron, is Chinese-Singaporean. He came to Australia, studied at a WA university and got a newspaper cadetship in a small town in the wilds of Western Australia. Both of Ronnie’s kids have Aboriginal middle names. Ronnie assimilated so well that (in his words and laughing) “I saw my family after a fair time here and they told me I was like a banana. You know, yellow on the outside and white on the inside.” We  still laugh about it when I call him the banana we get together. No offence taken, none meant.

  The reporting of politically incorrect things, for me, came to a head a while ago in an excellent Jane Caro yarn in The Sydney Morning Herald.

  A boxer was in the witness box at the Downing Centre Magistrates Court. He was charged with affray, but was pleading self-defence and said he had gone to the aid of a friend who was being viciously attacked.

  He was asked what the attacker had said to him.

  Defendant: (looking at magistrate Jacqueline Milledge) Can I say it?

  Milledge: Yeah, please.

  Defendant: You sure?

  Milledge: We won’t faint, I promise you.

  Defendant: You f—ing c—.

  Milledge: Heard that before.

  Defendant: Sorry, darl.

  Milledge (quickly): But don’t call me darl. That’s where we fall out with each other.

  You see the folly there? The SMH’s censoring of the words that didn’t offend the magistrate, yet the offensive term, darl, didn’t get the d— treatment. Go figure.

  Thankfully, magistrate Milledge doesn’t operate in the Northern Territory because she’d be at loggerheads with almost the entire Territory population because it  is, for me, the epicentre of what is perceived in some quarters as socially unacceptable comments and behaviour.

  I could make a long list of comments, names and tags that, by society’s current conventions, should have me behaving as if I’m offended.

  Here are a few.

  Recently I had reason to do some business with a Palmerston-based travel agent to organise some flights and accommodation for a trip to Melbourne.

  The agent’s representative, a pleasant, outgoing and bubbly three-wheeler, (that’s rhyming slang for sheila in case you were wondering) who is old enough to be my great granddaughter, but that hasn’t stopped her from referring to me as love, darls or (the more formal) darling. Why would I take offence? Well I wouldn’t. That’s her, that’s the way she is and I’m comfortable with that.

  The women in the tobacco shop, the check-out chicks at supermarkets and barmaids have variously labelled me as darls, love, mate and, my favourite, toots. I have a dear friend, Jodie, and I call her toots. She a feminist and isn’t offended by it because she knows it is a term of endearment. Me too.

  Even the woman in the bottleshop (yeah, I’m a regular) offers me a chirpy “g’day, mate/darl/love/hon/honey/buddy”. In another bottleshop (yeah, I’m a regular) a woman greeted with “g’day, bloke”. My immediate reaction was not to ask “did you just assume my fucking gender?” Nah, I went with it. In fact, I have a good mate who greets men and women with “g’day, bloke”. Then again, he’s a strange one. He’s the only person I know who will order a hamburger with the lot, but “No salad. I don’t like that green shit”. Again I digress.

  Yeah, there are tit shows sometimes at the local pub (and no, I haven’t been) and I even saw a bumper sticker on a 4×4 in inner Darwin. It read: “Stop the population explosion, start doing it up the arse“. There is all manner of non-PC merchandise from tea towels, T-shirts to bumper stickers for the tourism slogan CU in the NT. Even the nearest newsagent sells them.

  In the Territory, very few people even bat an eyelid over these sorts of things although there is now a push from some councillors to have the merchandise banned from sale on council land such as markets. Even the Nine News site ran the yarn with a pissant, censored headline “Fresh push to ban ‘See you the NT’ merchandise from being sold on council land”.

  Really? Whatever happened to becoming a journal of record? Anyway I reckon the councillors must be blow-ins from down south. I spoke to the newsagent about it and he summed it up well: “We’re Territorians, we need something to laugh about. It’s bullshit.” Having said all that, I did burr up when some bastard put an “I love gay porn” sticker on the back of my ute.

  That’s messing with personal property and it got fair up my frock. I didn’t like it.

  Anyway, the thrust of this yarn is to get together and rid the world of the expression political correctness unless we’re talking about those grossly overpaid public servants laughingly masquerading as state and federal governments.

  Socially correct or incorrect is a better fit for those things that, sadly, so easily often offend.

  As George Orwell wrote in Politics of the English Language, “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

  ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

  The post The long overdue and well-deserved death of “political correctness.” An explainer by Michael Vaughan. appeared first on The Northern Myth.

March 06, 2019

• Daniel Bowen TMBG – and crosstown trips

  On Saturday night at the Croxton Bandroom we saw They Might Be Giants playing a 1990s vs 2000s concert. The night before they’d done a 1980s vs 2010s concert.

  It was great stuff, very enjoyable.

  Now that I’ve heard Instanbul, Doctor Worm and Birdhouse In Your Soul live, I can die a happy man. And there were lots of other great songs – here’s a full set list. I particularly loved Man It’s So Loud In Here.

  This great pic from last night’s fantastic @tmbg gig by @richard_annable pic.twitter.com/qdSGrZiVVH

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) March 2, 2019

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  Obligatory transport content

  The last time I went to an inner-north pub gig, we took public transport. This time we drove.

  This was partly driving practice for my son on L plates, and partly because an earlier destination that afternoon would have involved bustitution.

  

  Heading home from Croxton back to Bentleigh in the car took about 40 minutes, with little traffic apart from on some sections of Hoddle Street.

  Google Maps tells me that by train it would have taken 56 minutes (including a 13 minute interchange at Flinders Street, which isn’t terrible, but isn’t terrific either) plus a short walk at each end.

  A couple of observations on that:

  • Google Maps’ estimate for the car journey, leaving at 11:40pm, is 24 to 55 minutes. I’m not sure 24 would ever be achievable, but it’s not hard to see how it could be a very long trip if there was an event at the MCG/sports precinct.
  • Even at times of relatively light traffic, train can be reasonably competitive with driving in Melbourne, particularly on trips with no freeways – but it’s really pot luck on wait times, especially for trips involving interchange between lines.
  • Quick interchange helps make public transport trips quicker. Changing trains could take up to 30 minutes in the evening, or even 60 minutes after 1am on weekends. Higher frequencies make for quick interchanges, and mean PT is viable for far more combinations of trip start and end points – not just the places that a single route serves.
    

  Trains every 20 minutes in daytime, and every 30 minutes after 7:30pm is completely inadequate for a city of Melbourne’s size. Fixing it would not be expensive because the infrastructure and the fleet is readily available.

  Sydney is now at 71% of stations with a train at least every 15 minutes until 11pm. It’s time Melbourne caught up.

March 05, 2019

• Club Troppo French Film Festival
  Festival Website | Films | Schedule

  Top Picks

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  The Trouble With You (Opening Night)

  Yvonne is the principled young widow of the local police chief who was killed in the line of duty. Each night she puts their young son to sleep with tales of his daring and bravery, and so naturally Yvonne is horrified to learn that her husband was not the embodiment of virtue as she had been led to believe-an innocent man named Antoine, has spent eight years falsely imprisoned as a result of his corruption! Yvonne decides to do everything she can to help return the hapless parolee to his regular life and devoted fiancé. Unfortunately, Antoine has trouble adjusting back to society, and soon blows a fuse that leads to an hilarious trail of destruction, where moral, social and romantic obligations are put to the test in a spectacular way.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

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  Amanda

  David is a carefree 20-something in the throes of a new romance with Lena, and lives a carefree life until an incident abruptly forces him to assume the guardianship of his seven-year-old niece, Amanda.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

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  By The Grace Of God

  Alexandre lives in Lyon with his wife and children. One day, quite by chance, he discovers that the priest who abused him when he was a member of a boy scout troop is still working with children. Determined to see justice served, Alexandre re-establishes contact with his boyhood friends – also victims of the same priest – François and Emmanuel. The men vow to ‘lift the burden of silence’. However, as the institutional weight and power of the Catholic Church bears down on this defiant group of survivors determined to tell their story, no one is left unscathed.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

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  Celebration: Yves Saint Laurent

  Two decades after its filming, Olivier Meyrou’s controversial yet exquisitely drawn portrait of France’s last great fashion designer, Yves Saint Laurent, has finally seen the light of day, having previously been withheld from release by Saint Laurent’s business partner, Pierre Bergé. Echoing its ambiguous title, Celebration goes behind-the-scenes to present both Yves the Legend and Yves the Man, as he prepares his final collection before the fashion house was sold to Gucci in 1999. Icons of the glamour industry and the many top models who have donned Saint Laurent’s gowns – show their unerring dedication to the fashion house and its namesake. And then there’s Yves himself – on the one hand, larger than life and, on the other, astonishingly reclusive, irritable and even inelegant.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

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  Girl

  Lara is an adolescent transgender girl from Belgium. Her struggle is not so much with her gender identity as with her passion to become a professional ballerina. Supported by her Francophone father and younger brother, she commences her journey into gender reassignment, yet her teenage impatience and the immense pressures of ballet push Lara to the brink.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Eye For Film

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Slant Magazine

  ---

  In Safe Hands (Pupille)

  In Safe Hands throws us deep into the milieu of the French social assistance services where the fate of one baby boy exposes the conflicting conundrums faced by many women – those giving up their babies and those desperate to have their own. When baby Theo’s birth mother surrenders him to adoption, child protection services, and officers such as Karine, are called to action, and the harsh realities of the adoption process are pulled into sharp focus. Karine entrusts Theo to Jean – no stranger to the foster system himself – who takes on the responsibility of the newborn until a suitable home can be found. Meanwhile, Alice has never given up the fight to be a mother and faces the prospect of this dream finally coming true, although nothing is certain.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ---

  Last Year At Marienbad

  Over half a century has passed; yet, Alain Resnais’ para-surrealist masterpiece is as powerful today as when originally released at the height of the French New Wave. Set within a breathtakingly ornate Baroque mansion seemingly frozen in time, which the camera captures through continuous panning of its sumptuous interiors, Last Year at Marienbad focuses on two central, unnamed characters – one a French woman and an Italian man. They may have been lovers at the hotel the previous year but the woman denies knowing him, while another man – possibly her husband – asserts his dominance by constantly challenging and beating the Italian man at the mathematical game of nim.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ☆☆☆☆☆ Slant Magazine

  ☆☆☆☆☆ The Movie Waffler

  ---

  Promise At Dawn

  Promise At Dawn is the ‘fictionalised’ telling of author and diplomat Romain Gary’s early life. We’re thrown into a tumultuous trajectory that twists and turns across a difficult childhood in Poland, a sun-drenched adolescence in Nice and through to piloting adventures in Africa. At every touchstone in Gary’s life, his mother Nina leaves her ineffaceable mark. With boundless dreams and huge aspirations, she is the momentum that propels Gary forward, eventually culminating in the novel of Promise at Dawn that he feverishly writes as his life comes to a close during the Dia de los Muertos celebrations in Mexico.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ---

  Sink Or Swim

  A disparate group of 40-somethings – all in the throes of mid-life crises – form a localswimming pool’s inaugural, males-only synchronised swimming team. Staring down ongoing ridicule and contempt from all angles, they engage a fallen champion, Delphine as their coach, supported by her tough-as-nails former swim partner Amanda. Unwittingly, the team members embark on an unlikely journey of redemption that sees each one of them rebuild some sense of their self-worth.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ☆☆☆☆☆ The Upcoming

  ---

  The Fall Of The American Empire

  Pierre-Paul is a listless loser with a PhD in Philosophy who feels his job as a delivery driver is well below him. His mundane life is turned upside down when, by luck, he finds himself saddled with a princely sum in stolen cash. Enlisting the help of an ex-con with a finance degree, Sylvain, and a Racine-quoting callgirl, Aspasie, Pierre-Paul considers what to do with the loot, as he tries to outmanoeuvre the heisters who want ‘their’ money back.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ---

  The Ideal Palace

  Based on the remarkable true story of Joseph Ferdinand Cheval. Set in the south of France in 1879, Cheval is a humble postman. He leads an unassuming life, seemingly revelling in the solitude of his 20-mile delivery routes and daydreaming about the world of wonders that he only sees through the postcards and magazines he delivers. He meets and falls in love with the breathtaking Philomène, and the arrival of their baby daughter, Alice, causes him to look at things in a different way. He sets about building a castle for Alice – one fit for a princess – that consumes the next 30-plus years of his life. This castle eventually becomes recognised as an enduring and important French historical monument.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ---

  Wine Calling

  This documentary offers ample servings of energy and enthusiasm, as it introduces us to the renegades – the rebels, the critical thinkers and the ethically minded – who have waged something of a revolution in Catalonia, in the south of France, as part of a rising global movement in improved taste and sustainability. In doing so, they’ve chosen the hard road but one of immeasurable satisfaction. As one of the winemakers confesses, “I’m giving birth; that’s what it’s like.” With Wine Calling, you won’t bear witness to a meditation on pastoral tranquillity; but rather experience something far more rock ‘n’ roll in spirit.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ---

  Kiss & Tell (Closing Night)

  Julien is a man haunted by a secret. Julien’s son, Alex, finds out that 17 year-old Eva has neglected to tell him he’s going to be a father. Eva’s mother, Véro, fears the worst for her grandchild. While Elizabeth, whose husband, Bertrand has disappeared into thin air, witnesses her home trashed by a search warrant.

  ☆☆☆☆☆ IMDB

  ---

February 28, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Some thoughts on transport network pricing

  On Saturday I participated in an Infrastructure Victoria session on transport network planning. It was described as a kind of speed-dating session – seven speakers doing quick 12 minute conversations with groups of 4-5 people.

  They suggested kicking off with an introduction to your view on the topic, then seeing where the conversation takes you. After a couple of goes you pretty quickly get into a rhythm.

  The thoughts below started as an approximation of my opening comments, but I’ve added a bit along the way:

  Fare pricing can be an important tool to help ease congestion – both on the roads and on public transport.

  

  The fare system we have now is a hangover from the 1980s.

  Before then, trains trams and buses had complicated, separate fares.

  In the early 80s they had a shake-up – and introduced the three zones in Melbourne, one inside the other.

  There have been tweaks and adjustments, but that’s basically what we still have today.

  • In 2004 they removed the Short Trip ticket from zone 1
  • In 2007 they got rid of zone 3; it merged with zone 2
  • In 2010 they removed the City Saver zone from Myki
  • Then in 2015 they made it so if you pay for zone 1, you’ve also paid for zone 2.

  So we now basically have a flat fare system in Melbourne. If you want to travel two stops on the tram, it’s $4.40. If you want to travel from Werribee right across Melbourne to Pakenham, that’s also $4.40.

  Given governments have an eye on cost recovery, this may mean upward pressure on that flat fare. It’s already risen at CPI plus 2.5% for four years running.

  And for short trips this can discourage people from using public transport – they might see it as cheaper to drive.

  There’s no peak/off-peak difference. If I travel on the train at 8am when it’s packed, it’s the same cost as at 11am when there’s plenty of space. (Of course, there has to also be a good frequent time-competitive service available at 11am. Off-peak service is very patchy around the network.)

  “Peak” crowding is not confined to commuting hours. CBD trams were already crowded at lunchtime before the Free Tram Zone was introduced. This has considerably added to crowding.

  

  There is the Earlybird discount – free rides before 7:15am. This is bit of a blunt instrument – it reflects what Metcard was capable of when it was introduced last decade. A free ride in the morning, but the usual price going home later. So there’s no incentive to make your trip home in the afternoon at a time when it’s quiet. It also only applies to Metro trains. Catch a bus to the station? Then you pay. This can encourage people to drive to the station instead.

  There is a discount of sorts after 6pm – you only pay one fare for unlimited travel until 3am. That’s good, but it’s also a reflection on the old ticket system – when paper tickets were around, there wasn’t enough space for a notch for every hour of the day!

  

  So having spent a billion dollars on a complicated smartcard system, we have it charging a $4.40 flat fare for almost everybody.

  But the Melbourne flat fare doesn’t apply outside zone 2. It jumps dramatically if you travel beyond Melbourne.

  People coming in from Geelong to Melbourne pay $13.40 one way – if instead they drive through suburban Geelong to Lara and get on the train there, it’s $4.40. The fare system is providing a huge incentive for people to drive through Geelong.

  Free station car parks are also an issue. Some of them get misused by non-public transport users. But apart from that, they cost tens of thousands of dollars per space – then they’re given away to whoever is lucky enough to show up early enough in the morning to get them – even if they have options to use a connecting bus, or walk or ride to the station. Those options need to improve, of course. (And maybe they could if all the money wasn’t spent on parking.)

  Park and ride is the least efficient way of getting people onto trains. How about investing in modes that don't require people to have a car to use public transport? https://t.co/z2PKjVYwT7 pic.twitter.com/zIbqOvEfBr

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) February 25, 2019

  So there’s plenty of scope to reform fares – Myki is capable of more zones, and off-peak discounts, and concessions for those who need them. This could be the way forward – but whatever the system, it’s important that the fares are affordable, logical, and equitable.

  They could start with easy stuff like re-introducing the once-proposed weekly cap, which would encourage Monday to Friday users to also use the system at weekends (as well as removing some confusion and doubt for people trying to decide between Myki Money and Myki Pass).

  

  Road pricing isn’t really my area, but it’s not hard to see how it’s similarly flawed. The only road pricing in Victoria is the toll roads. Again, it’s a hangover from past decades – tolls are to pay private toll companies that built Citylink and Eastlink.

  This means it’s free to drive through the CBD, but it costs money to bypass the City and drive over the Bolte Bridge instead, which is a crazy outcome.

  So the pricing on public transport and on roads is problematic.

  Politicians are terrified of changes, because inevitably someone ends up being disadvantaged, but it’d be good to see them have the courage to introduce reforms to fix some of these problems.

  Some people will always object to reform, but if the benefits can be quantified and explained, the broader community will take it on board.

  • For more reading: Infrastructure Victoria’s background report to the Community Panel
  • This page has some excellent history of public transport ticketing and fares in Melbourne and Victoria since the 1980s

February 21, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Why the Frankston line should come out of the Loop until 2025

  I’m sorry to go all Neville Shunt on you and drone on about railway timetables again, but I’m going to do it anyway.

  In an ideal metro system, that is a rail network designed to maximise capacity and frequency, one of the key things is to separate the busiest lines so they don’t share tracks.

  Melbourne has been making that transition, but it’s time for the next step.

  With that in mind, let me tell you why the Frankston line should be removed from the City Loop.

  

  How the Frankston line runs now

  Like many of Melbourne’s rail services, the Frankston line is a bit of a mess.

  It’s often delayed and overcrowded, and that’s partly due to the timetable.

  Here’s how it runs at the moment:

  • Weekday AM peak: about half the trains run express Cheltenham-Caulfield, Malvern-South Yarra, then direct to Flinders Street. The other half run all stations then into the Loop anti-clockwise to Flinders Street.
  • Weekday PM peak: reverse of the above. Except that expresses don’t stop at Malvern.
  • Weekday off-peak: all trains stop all stations, direct to/from Flinders Street. Almost all services are through-routed to Newport, so also run via Southern Cross and North Melbourne.
  • Weekend: trains stop all stations, into the Loop anti-clockwise to Flinders Street.
  • Saturday/Sunday early morning (all night service): trains stop all stations direct to/from Flinders Street

  Confused yet? That’s five variations, excluding stopping patterns.

  Apart from confusion, a huge problem is that during peak hours, when the rail network is at its busiest, half the Frankston line trains share the Loop tunnel with the Dandenong line. Two of the busiest lines on the network are squeezed onto the same track.

  In 2025, the Dandenong line will move out of the City Loop into the new metro tunnel. The Frankston line will then use the City Loop for all its services.

  But until then, the Frankston line should come out of the Loop.

  Here’s why.

  

  1. Fix the confusion

  Train lines with different stopping patterns at different times of the day/week are confusing. The change of Loop direction doesn’t help, of course.

  It’s particularly confounding for users who either only occasionally use the network, or who don’t always travel at the same time of day.

  Just ask anybody making a cross-town trip (say Bentleigh to Spotswood) where they should change trains for the quickest journey:

  • Morning peak: travelling east to west change at Southern Cross; west to east change at Flinders Street (but you might not need to change)
  • Evening peak: travelling east to west change at Flinders Street; west to east change at Southern Cross
  • Weekday off-peak, including evenings: no change, the train will probably go straight through
  • Weekend: travelling east to west change at Southern Cross; west to east change at Flinders Street

  Another example from me personally: Flagstaff is my usual stop, closest to work, so I use that if the train goes there. But if the trains aren’t running through the Loop, Flinders Street is almost as close (an extra five minutes walk). This means that if I’m heading home outside peak hour, I have to look at the timetable to check when the Loop trains run, which then determines which station I walk. It shouldn’t be this hard.

  Consistency is one of the keys to making public transport easier to use. They don’t for instance run half of tram route 58 via William Street and half via Swanston Street. They shouldn’t do this with the trains either.

  The peak express trains make sense to speed up long journeys and make use of the Caulfield-Moorabbin third track, but the Loop variations should be removed.

  

  2. Run more Dandenong trains

  Each City Loop tunnel can take a train about every 2-3 minutes. To make the Frankston line trains fit into the Loop, the Dandenong line timetable has gaps.

  The Dandenong line serves a huge growth area. It’s really busy and getting busier. The gaps create an irregular frequency which means some trains are more crowded than others.

  Currently a third of Caulfield Loop paths are given to the Frankston line (on roughly a 9 minute cycle). Giving the Loop tunnel over to the Dandenong trains exclusively would allow a more consistent frequency, allowing all the paths to be used, with a train every 3 minutes between the City and Dandenong, better catering for patronage demand.

  Some gaps would still needed to fit the V/Line trains, but this is only 2 paths per hour, not the 6-7 per hour the Frankston line currently takes.

  

  3. Run more Frankston trains too

  Untangled from the Dandenong line, they could also run more Frankston line trains. Currently in peak these are tied to the same 9 minute cycle (2 trains every 9 minutes).

  Freed from this, they could increase to fully use the capacity of the line, relieving crowding at the height of the peak.

  How many extra services are possible depends on the operating pattern, but theoretically you could be looking at a train about every 3 minutes – again, a 50% boost – if the express trains had a couple of additional stops – perhaps a skip/stop pattern between Caulfield and South Yarra – or just stop all those trains at the MATH stations and give the inner city a high frequency service to relieve the crowding.

  

  4. Reduce delays

  The current interaction of the Frankston and Dandenong lines means that if one is delayed, both are delayed.

  In fact the delays can easily flow across more than half the rail network.

  There are currently timetabled interactions between numerous lines: in peak hour, Dandenong interacts with Frankston, which interacts with Werribee/Altona Loop/Williamstown, which interacts with Sunbury, which interacts with Upfield and Craigieburn.

  The Sunbury, Werribee, Frankston and Dandenong lines also mix it with V/Line services from Bendigo and Gippsland.

  As Metro’s network planner Huw Millichip noted in this ABC article last week, this means that the single track in Altona affects half the network.

  “For example, a train out of Altona is one of the first trains we timetable because that one’s very constrained because of the way it needs to work through the Altona loop because it’s a single-line section. When that train gets to North Melbourne, it then effectively dictates the position of all the other trains that come through North Melbourne.”

  Add the Cranbourne single track as well, and no wonder there are constantly delays in peak hour!

  Some of those intertwinings are not easily severed until the metro tunnel opens in 2025, but Frankston and Dandenong can be separated now, reducing the effect of late running.

  

  5. No more surprise Loop bypasses

  Frankston trains are regularly altered to bypasses the City Loop. Metro does this to reduce Newport/Frankston delays cascading onto the busy Dandenong line.

  Statistics from PTV show that in the past 12 months, 587 Frankston trains were altered to bypass the Loop, or about 10 per week.

  The Pakenham and Lilydale lines had more bypasses. But most Frankston trains aren’t scheduled to run via the Loop anyway – I calculate the bypasses to around 3.7% of scheduled Frankston Loop services – more than double the number of any other line.

  Spontaneous changes like this play havoc with passengers, and add to pressures at interchange stations like Richmond.

  In the PM peak, Loop bypasses often mean people miss their trains home, delaying them even more, and causing crowding on other services.

  If Frankston trains never ran via the Loop, some people would have to change trains, but others would adapt their travel patterns to avoid the Loop in the first place.

  In fact, so many Frankston trains are bypassing the Loop that people are getting used to it.

  When my morning train is altered to bypass the Loop (for instance, yesterday), I see fellow regulars who usually go to Flagstaff who are (as I am) staying on to Flinders Street and walking from there. That to me says for many people it’s already a regular thing.

  

  7. Patronage won’t suffer

  The same thing happened on the Sandringham line (removed from the Loop in 1996) and the Werribee line (removed 2008). People adapted their travel patterns. Those lines are now busier than ever.

  Watch the Sandringham line at Richmond – many people change to the Loop, but more people stay on it to Flinders Street.

  Of course nobody likes losing their one seat ride, but history has shown that in the long term, these types of changes allow a lot more trains to run, fewer delays – and that helps get more passengers on board.

  This is precisely how most big city metros work. Think of London Underground: interchanges galore enabled by frequent services.

  

  Caveats

  There are some essential measures that need to accompany making all Frankston trains run direct:

  • They must run through to/from Southern Cross, every service, without fail. This ensures people headed to the west end of the City (and North Melbourne and beyond) have the confidence that they don’t need to change service.
  • Trains passing through Flinders Street need to move through without any delays for layovers or timekeeping or driver changes.
  • Dandenong line services have to be boosted to fill the void – this means both paths in the Loop, and capacity for those people who do need to change trains
  • Interchange facilities at Caulfield and Richmond need to be improved. At Richmond they’ve improved the shelter and the Passenger Information Displays in the past few years – the same is required at Caulfield. And in the longer term, Richmond needs a widening of the central subway; Caulfield probably needs an additional concourse – which will also be needed once the Metro tunnel opens.
  • To make full use of the Dandenong line capacity, the Cranbourne line needs full duplication

  In a dream world, there’d also be cross-platform interchange between Loop and direct trains, but that’s a huge complicated undertaking.

  More immediately achievable is that all day frequency also needs to improve. These lines do quite well at most times of day, but evenings and early morning need attention, and running more lines at 10 minute (or better) frequencies all day would help people get around all of the network.

  

  The time to do it is now

  This can’t wait until 2025 when the metro tunnel opens.

  Fortunately, the planets have aligned. 2019 is the perfect time to get the Frankston trains out of the Loop, because:

  • all the level crossings out to Dandenong are gone, so the line can now be filled with trains to make the most of capacity. Before now, it would have locked up the local road network, and prevented people at places like Hughesdale and Clayton even getting to the stations
  • extra trains are coming into service in the next few months as the first HCMTs come online, so the fleet is set to grow in size
  • Frankston is a politically sensitive line, but we just had a state election, so the government can have some confidence that any change now will give grumpy people a chance to get used to it, and reap the benefits from reduced delays and increased capacity, before the next election

  

  It has to happen

  Ultimately, moving Frankston trains out of the Loop will cause some inconvenience and consternation – even if only for the 6 years until the metro tunnel opens.

  But Melbourne is growing fast, and we’ve moved a long way from the days when every rail line on the network could squeeze through the four tracks in the Loop.

  Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment below – but remember, the public transport system is run for the benefit of everyone, not just you personally.

  A change like this about making the overall rail service more reliable, cutting delays and unplanned bypasses, and better using the capacity to its fullest, to cut waiting times and overcrowding.

February 18, 2019

• Club Troppo Burnheim on Gray on Hayek
  

  Friedrich Hayek was notoriously less savvy with photoshoots than some of his relatives.

  A few years ago I read some John Gray on Friedrich Hayek. In short, he’s very good on Hayek, though he seems to have moved on rather to larger topics, not always to good effect. Anyway, If you have the best part of an hour, you could do a lot worse than read Gray on Hayek back in 1982 when Gray was (I think) something of a fellow traveller (and it was less evident how badly some neoliberal reform would go – I’m looking at you GFC). And here’s an excellent revisiting of Hayek 33 years later. I recommend both heartily.

  I really should have written the words above just to let you know of two excellent essays, but I probably wouldn’t have bothered but for the reaction I got from John Burnheim when I sent him a link to the first essay above. Below the fold are the words he sent back in reply. As usual, there seems to be a vast depth of thought behind his words.  

  I think Gray is right about Hayek, but wrong in endorsing him. Hayek was a conservative liberal; whose hero was Mill. One libertarian had a point in characterising him as moderate social democrat. I once made a close comparison of him and Marx in relation to Socialism. Marx disliked socialism, but thought it necessary to destroy capitalism and open the way to Communism, the freedom of the producers. Hayek claimed to share the humanitarian values of the social democrats, but said he disagreed about how to realise them. Capitalism freed the producers and rewarded them for producing what people wanted. Market prices are the unique way of transmitting the necessary information. Marx admitted that he did not know how communists would achieve that. Both were wrong in their own way, but right in rejecting the egalitarianism of the socialist regimentation.

  Where both were wrong was in assuming that a society must have only one way of dealing with all human wants instead of admitting that different needs, especially needs for public goods might require different means of production and distribution or that a society consists pf a multiplicity of overlapping communities. Both suffered from the disease of philosophy.

  What I like about both is their emphasis on the importance of the dynamics of social practices as opposed to ideals as the determinant of social roles and their outcomes on a much broader front than the economy. But both fail to get it right, In H’s case because of his Kantian errors. One mistake was to accept the traditional idea that knowledge consists of nebulous pictures that we just see or look at. As C S Peirce discovered, knowledge of an object is a capacity to deal with it successfully in its theoretical and practical connections.

  Far from having no knowledge of things in themselves, we have extraordinarily precise and extensive knowledge of the external world, though we have not reliable imaged of it. Contrary to the traditional assumption that knowledge refers to perfect, immaterial ideas that get distorted in material instances, it turns out that matter can be known exactly, but spiritual ideas are complicated and messy. It is not the structure of our minds that brings order into live experience, but the structure of our methods of identifying, dissecting and interrelating things.

  However. because complexes have properties that go beyond those of their components, the knowledge of physical reality is of little use in helping members of complexes to understand the complexes to which they belong, and the modes of theorisation appropriate to those components themselves are often inappropriate to understanding the complexes, We know quite a lot about the components of our brains but hardly anything about its functional dynamics and how it is encoded with cognitive and emotive signifiers. What is pretty certain is that its workings are nothing like those of digital models.

  None of this is to say that we don’t have many snippets of knowledge independently of science. They and even much science is contextual in ways we cannot allow for. That is why I always present my views about solutions to practical problems as suggestions and it is in this guise that I believe one should read others

• Club Troppo When is a conversation not a conversation? When it’s a political conversation.
  

  This essay is cross posted from Quillette

  I

  It looks like liberal democracy is falling apart. But we can put it back together if we take democracy seriously enough—as seriously as the ancient Greeks.

  The chaos of Donald Trump was unimaginable just a decade ago. Brexit was a similar humiliation for Britain’s political class, leading to its bewildered paralysis ever since. How do such things happen? Perhaps because I admire economists’ deployment of very simple ideas to powerful effect, I’ve come to an approach to these problems that I think is simple and compelling.

  First, democracy is government by conversation. A political conversation should often be competitive—to sharpen ideas and measure their support. Yet, to remain a conversation rather than a parody of one, it must also be a co-operative search, if not for agreement, then at least for mutual understanding of where positions differ. However, this co-operative foundation for our politics has been largely extinguished by the weaponisation of political communication by professionals operating on the mass media, and, more recently by “trolling” on social media.

  Second, where elections bake competition into the operating system of representation, there’s another, even more time honoured way to represent the people. The ancient Greeks built their democracy around it and it hides in plain sight today whenever a jury is empanelled in a court of law. And, whether it concerns legal or political matters, deliberation within such bodies nurtures the collaborative aspects of conversation. Giving citizens’ juries and assemblies chosen by lot a role within our beleaguered democracy could see it renewed.

  II

  To become a politician you compete for election. You then join party colleagues competing against their opponents. Yet democracy implies limits to competition. We remain safe for now that no substantial political grouping perpetuates extra-legal violence. Yet something more fundamental is afoot.

  Though it apes the form of conversation, political communication has become as professionalised, as optimised to the competition to win votes as McDonald’s use of salt, fat, sugar and advertising is to win customers. Meanwhile, responding to similar competitive imperatives, the informational foundations of our democracy were being shorn away by mass media news values long before the internet arrived. Between 1968 and 1988, the length of presidential sound bites on US network news went from 43 to 9 seconds.¹

  The singleminded goal of each player in mass media political conversation is to manipulate it to their own end. Politicians rehearse “focus grouped” talking points and slogans like “take back control” and “roll up our sleeves” available on online lists (seriously!). Spokespeople cherry pick arguments, spurious or otherwise to defend their vested interest—until the they argue the opposite for their next client or employer. As Groucho put it, “These are my principles. If you don’t like them, I’ve got others.”

  Our language and etiquette are being transformed by the imperatives of political and ideological combat. The repertoire of “moves” now labelled “political correctness” have grown like bacteria in a petri dish in no small part because of their success as tactics in political debate. Taking offence, “checking” privilege, and associated strictures offer trump cards to instantly ideologise and emotionalise a conversation to one side’s tactical advantage.

  III

  In a healthy democracy, the journalist’s role should surely be to report and probe in the public interest. Yet almost invariably, issues are framed reductively in terms of competing participants’ talking points, with disagreements reduced to “he-said-she-said.” As Paul Krugman put it, the response to one of these competitors announcing the world is flat would be the headline “Views differ on shape of Earth.”

  When playing “ringmaster,” journalists simulate truth-seeking but again, their real schtick is usually reductively competitive. Their subjects’ talking points frame the issues with journalists stoking disagreement where they can—it’s so much more engaging and instantly relatable than exploring for common ground.

  They then celebrate their “savvy” as insiders to the whole process with breathless “race calling” commentary on who’s winning the debate—from ‘he-said-she-said’ to ‘he’s-winning-she’s-winning’. Only this isn’t really about who is winning the debate, but whose tactics are working better, at least for those within the insiders’ echo-chamber. As Todd Gitlin put it—again long before internet campaigning—rather than being informed on the issues, the audience is invited to become “cognoscenti of their own bamboozlement.”²

  A more recent variant on similarly reductive themes has been partisan mainstream media such as Fox News. Here the journalist MC and programming goes agent provocateur, for viewers to enjoy the fun of barracking for their ideology and hounding its enemies. As Fox News boss Chet Collier put it, “Viewers don’t want to be informed; they want to feel informed.”

  With these rules of engagement, political coverage becomes wall-to-wall bullshit—in the technical sense defined by philosopher Harry Frankfurt. The speaker’s concern isn’t with truth or (more shockingly perhaps) with its falsity, but with “putting themselves over,” whether as concerned, contrite, respectable, or compassionate. Until their next gig.

  Against all this, one can appreciate Donald Trump’s countercultural attraction—the least scripted, and most authentic, president in generations. A troll in his own cause.

  IV

  There’s been a flowering of marvellous political conversation on the internet. But that’s not where the political or commercial action is. For all its uncanny simulation of conversation, internet trolling completes the weaponisation of conversation.

  Where mass media’s production cost makes it necessarily ponderous, social media is improvisational, a place where anyone can mount a potentially devastating disinformation attack in minutes, destroying careers in an eye-blink. And while one can imagine strategies to counter inaccurate facts in “fake news,” how does one counter trolls spreading misunderstanding of others’ motives in a way that precludes the possibility of conversation?

  With mass media having done the softening up, social media is finishing the job. Our political system still delivers politicians afraid of not running the trains on time. But mainstream political conversation is a corpse, twitching as professional communicators and AI powered trolls commandeer human reflexes that evolved to foster communication and mutual understanding on the African Savannah, to stoke fear, loathing, and misunderstanding.

  V

  That we’re being increasingly betrayed by political elites is true enough. Until social media turned toxic, many imagined it enabling us to “take back control” (if I might use that term).³ Like the glamorous assistant disappearing once inside the magician’s cabinet, only to miraculously reappear moments later, here the populace disappear when we go looking for the culprit responsible for the toxic state of our political culture, only to reappear as our deliverer moments later.

  Though our choices and votes reward the clickbait and news values of the media and politicians practicing their own dark arts, we remain the victim throughout, not of our own folly, but of manipulation by an other.

  Can “we the people” save democracy by coming into our own as a deliberative force? We’ve been warned since Socrates and Plato on, that, left unsupervised, the hoi polloi become “the mob” at the drop of a hat. But surely the media diet of bread and circuses, this school of infantilism is part of this mess.

  VI

  Given the central role of the emotions as the motive force in political engagement, we should heed Martha Nussbaum’s advice in her book Political Emotions: not to banish them from political discourse – it would be impossible and unwise to try – but to strive for their health. Any functioning polity will mobilise and nurture the emotions of shared identity. This is necessary to the community’s survival if it must fight an enemy—as in World War Two. However, it can also be disastrous when it should talk more before fighting at all, or fighting on—as in World War One and most other wars that have ever been waged.

  Yet, as we’re observing, in a diverse, liberal society at peace, no matter how much it serves the interests of mass and social media operatives in revving us up to hit their KPIs, too heavy an emphasis on identity can be highly corrosive. It’s transforming our politics into competing witch-hunts against ritualised “others” whether they’re fat cat bosses, “elites,” tax cheats, skivers, or welfare queens.

  Against this, Nussbaum proposes that political emotions should inspire to worthy collective projects requiring effort and sacrifice from national defence to protecting the poor and weak. It’s partly by so doing that liberal politics must labour…

  …to keep at bay forces that lurk in all societies and ultimately, in all of us: tendencies to protect the fragile self by denigrating and subordinating others. .… Disgust and envy, the desire to inflict shame upon others.

  Nussbaum contrasts “masculine” emotions (associating them with competition and aggression) against the other “feminine” emotions (which build cooperation and care within the group). These emotions line up very neatly against the two ways of representing the people—by election and by lot.

  VII

  The same people whose eyeballs, clicks, and votes drive the toxicity of the politico-entertainment complex as served up by political elites behave differently deliberating amongst peers. When a citizens’ jury is first assembled, because its subject is political, most jurors arrive having assumed that there’ll be the usual combative fare, complete with activists revving things up—the usual politicking as road rage. They’re surprised at how respectful and cooperative others are. Then they remember that they’re just like them and things fall into place.

  “I’m a man, I’m six foot two,” reported one citizens’ juror considering the safety and vibrancy of Adelaide’s nightlife. “I have no considerations for my safety. Then being with other people—older, smaller, females—you learn that their experiences are very different.”⁴

  Imagine that issue presented on mass media. There’d be (say) feminist activists against domestic violence arguing against a hoteliers association spokesperson. The activists would want to be newsworthy to get media coverage, while hotelier’s spokesperson would present arguments we’d all know lacked all bona fides, cherrypicked to support their own interest.

  Citizens’ juries also engender substantial changes in view. They tend towards compromise rather than polarisation and pro-social, less punitive strategies for solving social dilemmas. In Texas, the proportion of citizens willing to pay a little more for wind and solar energy to address greenhouse concerns went from 52 to 84 percent.⁵ In Oregon, where citizens’ juries now preview all citizen initiated referendums to advise the populace, a mandatory sentencing proposal enjoying 70 percent opinion poll support received just three jurors’ votes in 24 after deliberations concluded. This seems to have been part of a swing reducing the vote in favour of the proposal by nearly 15%.

  VIII

  Even without any formal political power, a standing citizens’ assembly would reveal the people’s considered opinion as opposed to their unconsidered opinion measured by endless opinion polls. (Would you prefer the people’s considered, or unconsidered view?) This would have its own effect on elected politicians. If politicians won’t agree to fund a citizens’ assembly initially, philanthropists large and small can crowdfund it.

  Imagine how the energies of our vote hungry political elite might find more considered and cooperative ways through the dramas of Brexit or government shutdowns if there were a standing citizens’ chamber making their own collective views known.

  As the community’s experience with it grows, we should expand its power. Given elected legislators’ repeated inflictions of national self-harm for partisan reasons against their own better judgement, I’d give a super majority of (say) 60 percent of the members of a citizens’ assembly the power to impose a secret ballot on other legislative chambers. This could be helpful in Britain regarding Brexit, in America regarding Trump’s more obviously ill-advised moves over the government shutdown and trade wars, and in Australia where the imperatives of political combat saw parliamentarians abolish carbon pricing against their own better judgement of the national interest.

  Joseph Schumpeter was an early proponent of the idea that electoral democracy was, and should be embraced as, a competition by a political elite for the consent of the governed. This made some sense where national cultures and class structures were unitary and strong 80-odd years ago. But, taking it to its logical conclusion as we do today, reveals it as a category mistake. Democracy is not a product. It is, as Aristotle reminds us, a system in which everyone takes turn in governing and being governed.

  It’s time we set out on the hefty and happy task of setting it right.

  References:

  ¹ Adatto, K., 1990. Sound bite democracy: Network evening news presidential campaign coverage, 1968 and 1988. Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Reported also in John Tierney, “The 1992: Media; Sound Bites Become Smaller Mouthfuls” Jan. 23, 1992 athttps://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/23/us/the-1992-campaign-media-sound-bites-become-smaller-mouthfuls.html
  ² Gitlin, T., 1991. Bites and blips: chunk news, savvy talk and the bifurcation of American politics. Communication and citizenship, p.117 at p. 119.
  ³ See eg. Trippi, J. 2008. The revolution will not be televised, Harper-Collins e-books, Kindle edition.
  ⁴ The Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI), 2013. “Verdicts on the Jury, Views of jurors, bureaucrats and experts on South Australia’s first Citizens’ Jury”, mimeo, p. 6, currently available at https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/assets.yoursay.sa.gov.au/production/2014/08/22/01_45_56_391_Verdicts_on_the_Jury_TACSI.pdf
  ⁵ And see “The impact of deliberation on empathy and common interest”, Involve, more generally at https://goo.gl/NVrqsD

   

February 17, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Old photos from February 2009

  Another in my series of photos from ten years ago.

  Black Saturday, 7th February 2009. There were dire warnings earlier in the week about the fire risk, though I’m not sure everyone believed them.

  It was a stinking hot day. The car thermometer at one stage measured 47.5 degrees – here it is showing 47.

  

  That night we had dinner with friends at their house in Chirnside Park. This photo is timestamped 6:56pm: We could see smoke rising in the distance – but at the time, had little idea of what was happening. (My blog post at the time noted some truly remarkable and horrific photos on the Boston Globe’s web site.)

  

  The previous week: first day of school.

  

  On 3rd February 2009 I spoke to a rally outside state Parliament House – I seem to recall it was mostly about water issues, but managed to tie in transport – train operator Connex’s parent company Veolia, which was involved in one of the short-listed consortia bidding to build and run the desalination plant. (They didn’t win it.)

  

  

  This photo shows a morning of severe train delays. As the signs show, the train was an hour late reaching South Yarra.

  

  The view on Centre Road at Bentleigh – with the level crossing.

  

  Speaking to channel 7 on platform 3 at the old Bentleigh station.

  

  Flinders Street Station with its then mustardy paint job.

  

  Getting some work done while waiting for the train. Super grainy photo from phone camera.

  

  Amazing amounts of litter on the tracks at Glenhuntly. I’m sure it’s not normally this messy nowadays.

  

  Ad for the American version of Life On Mars at Richmond station. (I loved the UK version, can’t say I’ve watched this one.)

  

  I took this photo because the “Mind the gap” signage was new. This was at Footscray.

  

  Every February there’s a big publicity campaign for the Grand Prix in March. In 2009, the after-race concert included The Who – which I ended up attending. Also note the Punt Road traffic in the background, with two nortbound 246 buses in a row.

  

  February 2009 was also the month I got this new USB drive.

  By the way, load shedding was in the news the other week. I see from my old blog posts that it happened back in February 2009 as well. So anybody who claims it didn’t used to happen back when there was little green energy is completely wrong.

February 16, 2019

• Club Troppo The Public Goods of the 21st Century

  For those of you in Melbourne, I thought I’d let you know of a public lecture I’m giving on Thursday night this coming week details below. If you’d like to come, make your free reservation on this page.

  Thought Leadership Series Lecture | The Public Goods of the 21st Century

  Date:	Thursday 21 February 2019
  Time:	5.30pm – 7pm
  Venue:	Engineers Australia Level 30, 600 Bourke St, Melbourne –>
  Cost:	Free. Enrol here

  At elite and popular levels, we think markets provide private goods competitively and governments provide public goods like streets and street lights collectively. But, as the eighteenth-century founder of modern economics Adam Smith understood, the real story is much richer. Any social artefact of any sophistication from a conversation to a smart phone to a city is an ecology of competitive and collaborative elements at numerous levels within the system.

  This lecture will explore the landscape of the private and the shared in the 21^st century. Digital collaboration is burgeoning as with open source software whilst in the ‘analogue’ world, the public good of our social fabric is coming under immense pressure. The lecture will seek new ways of understanding these things to help build the world we want.

February 12, 2019

• Left Focus
  

  Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht

  
  
  Dr Tristan Ewins
  
  
  
  16/1/2019
  
  
  Comrade Marcus Strom alerted me and many others on Facebook that 15/1/19 was the 100th Anniversary of the brutal murder of Communist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht ; and the dumping of their bodies in the Landwehr Canal in Berlin. Liebnecht was an outstanding orator and leader. Meanwhile, Rosa Luxemburg (a Jewish Communist ; born in Poland – but migrating to Germany where the class struggle appeared the most advanced) is the best remembered today. This is largely because she is survived by a plethora of theoretical and practical political-literary work – much of it still relevant for the Left.
  
  
  The broad example of the slide into war ; and the murder of Rosa and Karl is still instructive today of the dangers of certain kinds of ‘social patriotism’. In 1914 the parliamentary caucus of the SPD (German Social Democrats) voted in favour of war credits – to fund the War. This was against the standing policy of the Second International. Specifically it was the right-wing leadership of the Social Democratic Government following the 1918-19 Revolution who ordered the murders. For genuine socialists, the names “Ebert, Noske and Scheidemann” will forever live in infamy. And deservedly so.
  
  
  It is disturbing to think that the SPD was perhaps the leading Social Democratic Party in Europe in 1914 – and yet it crumbled under pressure at the first real hurdle. Many socialists – including Karl Liebnecht and Rosa – tried to agitate against the coming blood-bath. Rosa was imprisoned for the duration of the war after distributing anti-war material. For years social democratic parties had talked about internationalism in the instance of a conflict. But in practice the German trade unions had been subverted ; had embraced a kind of ‘ethno-nationalism’.
  
  
  And they effectively fell into line in return for a handful of reforms.
  
  
  Therefore perhaps there was no social or economic basis for stopping the war. But the capitulation of the SPD parliamentary caucus set a demoralising example – which resulted in the split in the Social Democratic movement ; with the most uncompromising anti-war elements re-forming as Communist parties.
  
  
  Right Social Democrats ; people like Ebert, Noske and Scheidemann ; were sold on ethno-nationalism in Germany since the start (of the war). They capitulated again when some social democrats argued the war should only be supported insofar as it was concerned with ‘national defence' ; and never be allowed to turn into 'a war of conquest'. But the German Army hierarchy demanded open ended support for the war instead. Again, in 1914 the caucus rolled over entirely.
  
  
  Karl Kautsky – the leader of the ‘Marxist Centre’ – and for a time the most authoritative Marxist intellectual in Europe and the world - argued for a symbolic abstention on the issue of war credits. But this gained little traction. Lenin was to revisit Kautsky’s position following the October 1917 Russian Revolution, branding him a ‘Renegade’. But more on Kautsky later.
  
  
  The real worry is how the unions remained so conservative at the start of the war. And swallowed militarist nationalism hook, line and sinker. In any case the war was to destroy those same unions ; as worker’s organisation collapsed in the face of total war mobilisation. It shows that achieving intellectual leadership of a socialist movement is not enough unless socialist, anti-imperialist and internationalist values can be successfully imparted to a broader base. As well as a willingness to fight when the situation demands it.
  
  
  

  Who knows what motivations drove the German Social Democrats to support war in 1914? Fear of imprisonment or execution? Fear of the organisational destruction of the party? (False) assumptions the war would be short? Penetration of the caucus by government agents? Again: many social democrats insisted that support for the war be withdrawn once it became 'a war of conquest'. But the reality was that the Army had the guns. Again: the parliamentary caucus folded in the face of military pressure.
  
  
  But what many Leninist and Stalinist critics do not recognise is that by 1915 the 'Centrists' (ie: as in the Marxist Centrists) had began agitating for peace at Zimmerwald. Those people argued for a separate peace. So did the Revisionist Socialist, Eduard Bernstein. By comparison, Lenin argued for civil war - to turn the war into Revolution across all Europe if possible. For all Lenin’s criticisms of Karl Kautsky – by 1915 he (Kautsky) was himself openly fighting against the war. The critiques of Bolshevism by such diverse figures as Luxemburg, Martov and Kautsky – are still worth reading today as we grapple with the meaning and legacy of the Russian Revolution and its eventual descent into Stalinism. (though many critics under-play the severity of the conditions faced by the Bolsheviks ; and the role of Western intervention in fuelling the centralisation and resort to Terror which opened the way for Stalinism ; That includes destabilisation and support for the White Armies – which meant the threat of starvation and heating fuel shortages for ordinary Russians )
  
  
  Rosa Luxemburg is famed for her unique, libertarian Marxist contributions to socialist theory and practice. Her theory of the ‘spontaneity of the masses’ is more nuanced than shallow critics would allow for ; positing a dialectical relationship between Party leadership and proletarian initiative. She recognised early on the potential of the Mass Strike. Also, she feared the consequences of over-centralisation within the Bolshevik Party for any revolution ; and particularly the substitution of the Party – and later the Central Committee – for real, grassroots and participatory proletarian democracy. For her there could be no compromise or ‘middle way’ between Reform and Revolution. She was a strong critic of Revisionism ; including the positions of Eduard Bernstein.
  
  
  But there are traditions of Left Social Democracy which are not stained by that. For instance the Austro-Marxists. The Austro-Marxists built a participatory counter-culture (workers’ sports, radio stations, libraries, forums, orchestras) ; and progressively funded public housing and amenities like laundries and pools for workers. They even maintained their own militia to defend ‘the democratic path to socialism’. This contributed to the sense that ‘Red Vienna’ was ‘a showcase of Social Democracy’. Though they also made certain fatal mistakes (eg: letting go of their grip on the state apparatus of force in the 1920s) which made it easier in the end for fascists to seize power in 1934.
  
  
  So as against Rosa Luxemburg I believe a ‘middle way’ of ‘revolutionary reforms’ is possible. But on the 100th Anniversary of her death it is better to honour her very significant legacy. The legacy of her bravery and self-sacrifice. Of her intellect ; her uncompromising values ; her commitment to the working class and her faith in what she believed to be the coming revolution.
  
  
  On the other hand, the example of the 20th and early 21st centuries (including the rise of fascism ; and also of neo-liberalism) appear to have put paid to a sense that some ‘inevitable teleology towards socialism’ can be counted on. Historical outcomes are far more contingent and uncertain than the old Marxists were willing to admit. Even though the continuation of neo-liberal capitalism is likely to cause intense human suffering – with increases in the intensity of labour ; and further cyclical crises and class bifurcation. And environmental crises also. Perhaps old Marxist claims to ‘inevitability’ provided morale and confidence. (as Kautsky put it – “the proletariat’s belief in its own strength”)
  
  
  But while there is *hope*, notions of inevitability can no longer be maintained. Barbarism is as likely as socialism ; and that itself is a good reason to fight.
  
  
  Rosa’s fears were realised in the end as Bolshevism gave way to Stalinism. For Communists it is instructive to read her critiques of Bolshevism to get a sense of the dangers associated with Stalinism. And also even with Trotskyism and Leninism. Trotsky wrote of a ‘Soviet Thermidor’ in his critique of Stalinism, ‘The Revolution Betrayed’. But in reality Trotksy supported the same policies of centralisation which led to a situation akin to the demise of the French Revolution - with the rise of the Napoleonic Empire in the place of the Republic. (Stalin is seen as a ‘Bonpartist’ figure) ; Only Stalin’s repression of his own people – and his Terror against them - was far more extensive than under other ‘Bonapartist’ regimes.
  
  
  Compared not only with Stalin – but also with Lenin and Trotsky – Luxemburg stands for a kind of libertarian communism. To this day the leadership she provided with her activism and her writings – set a redemptive example for a Left which is often accused of ‘authoritarianism’ or ‘totalitarianism’. Luxemburg was a democrat and libertarian-revolutionary-communist ; and an uncompromising opponent of the wholesale slaughter of War ; and the Imperialist designs of the ‘Great Powers’.
  
  
  My personal inclination is more towards the example of the reformed relative (Marxist) centre following World War One. Especially the Austro-Marxists. (though I am critical of them on certain counts as well) But Rosa’s steadfast bravery ; her self-sacrifice in pursuit of peace, and for the liberation of the working class ; should always be honoured on the Left.
  
  
  Today’s Left needs to engage with past Social Democracy (and Communism) if it is to understand its past ; draw the necessary lessons ; and better plan for its future. This should also include a consideration of the sources of the split in Social Democracy in 1914 ; and the historical ramifications of that. Rosa Luxemburg ; and others like Karl Korsch ; showed that a different kind of (libertarian) communism is possible.
  
  
  A different kind of social democracy is also possible: committed over the long term to the pursuit of ‘revolutionary reforms’ which would deepen democracy, transform the economy , and over time challenge the class system.
  
  
  May Rosa Luxemburg (and Karl Liebknecht) always be honoured and remembered on the Left.

February 09, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Metro tunnel portal plans released

  Rail Projects Victoria has released some draft plans for parts of the Metro 1 project.

  The plans include both portals (where the tunnel connects to the existing aboveground tracks) and the western turnback – a facility to be added at West Footscray station to turnback (terminate and/or originate) train services through the tunnel.

  Below are some brief notes, but if you want details, you should go read the full draft documents and send in feedback to the project team.

  Eastern portal

  The eastern portal will be near South Yarra station.

  The Dandenong line will have a junction near Chapel Street that allows rail traffic to enter the tunnel (likely for all suburban services), or continue on the existing tracks to Richmond (V/Line and freight, and perhaps the occasional sports event special).

  South Yarra platforms 5+6 won’t be entirely abandoned – plans released some years ago and newer versions recently leaked both show the platforms being used in the future as the rail network continues to expand.

  

  Note the lack of South Yarra platforms for the tunnel. This is tricky: the only way they could be accommodated is underground, well west of the existing station – making any kind of passenger connection very difficult. The government also claims it could cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and require a lot of land acquisition.

  Western portal

  The western portal near South Kensington station does a similar job for the Sunbury line.

  Edit: I had thought the plans indicated the existing Sunbury line tracks to North Melbourne were set to be abandoned, but a commenter below found this diagram which shows them still present after the project is complete.

  Under normal operations, it’s expected North Melbourne’s platforms will become dedicated to the tracks from Werribee+Williamstown / Upfield / Craigieburn respectively.

  (The left of the first diagram below connects to the right of the second diagram)

  

  Notably the tunnel project will include improvements to South Kensington’s station entrance, but it appears no substantial upgrades to the station itself – it’s one of Melbourne’s dingiest, and with steep non-DDA-compliant ramps. Hopefuly there are opportunities to improve the station, including widening the platforms, once the old tracks are removed on the north side.

  Western turnback

  The western turnback involves additional track and a new platform 1 at West Footscray (which was itself only rebuilt and opened in 2013 as part of the Regional Rail Link project). The new platform will have a completely separate entrance, and is not aligned with the existing ones. Make your own conclusions about forward planning.

  

  I’m not sure why they decided on West Footscray instead of, say, Sunshine. Perhaps it was based on where short starting trains would bring the most benefit in the event of a disruption. As I understand it a similar turnback track is planned near Malvern.

  Originating short citybound trains on platform 2 of course is somewhat problematic when passengers will usually board citybound trains on platform 1.

  It’s good to see the tunnel project progressing, even if there are questions about parts of the design, and service upgrades are lagging.

  Anyway, read more about these plans on the project web site.

  The feedback period lasts until 22nd February.

• Club Troppo I Wish I’d Asked: Eileen Torney edition

  About a year ago my wife Eva and a friend of hers, Danny Finley started working on a program designed to tackle loneliness through intergenerational contact. Kids  are paired with older people in their community through contact between schools and aged care institutions. This is all developed with local communities, the first cab off the rank being Shepparton. A range of activities are ensuing, including story telling leading to the building of online oral histories, the teaching of recipes and cooking, dancing and the ‘reverse mentoring’ of computer literacy. It’s origin in the first of these initiatives is captured in Danny’s fantastic name for it – I Wish I’d Asked.

  There’s growing enthusiasm from local institutions including Rotary, the local council and Latrobe Uni which has a campus there.

  Anyway, the trigger for this post was Eva showing me some poems from Eileen Torney who is her 80s and lives in Shepparton Villages – a fantastically good aged care provider in Shepp. I liked them and reproduce them below:

  Privilege

  Generations of work and expertise
  had been repaid the farm was doing well
  my mother decided I should board
  at Genazzano a prestigious Convent school where her Aunt Mary was a nun
  not one who taught but a humble cook and cleaner pious unworldly subservient
  at the bottom of their clearly defined pecking order

  Dressed in our best clothes
  we visited Aunt Mary and in the stylish parlour
  my mother announced that she wished to enrol me
  and Aunt Mary went to fetch the Mother Superior
  who refused to come
  We cater for the rich was the message she sent
  send her to Vaucluse our cheaper school
  in vain my mother argued that she could pay the fees
  she thought that was what being rich meant
  Your home would not be suitable
  if she invited friends (though she had never seen it)
  send her to Vaucluse

  As I rise in the mornings my cat demands her treat she is a registered vet-checked and privileged cat. Outside the glass door a stray meows and pleads an illegal refugee but I couldn’t let it starve
  I poke a tray of pellets through the door and close it again tell it I run a soup kitchen not an adoption agency.

  I call one cat Genazzano
  and the other one Vaucluse.

  This video was not filmed in Shepparton and has nothing directly to do with I Wish I’d Asked, but it would be fun if it could be brought off!

  Wives and Mothers

  When she died in 1898
  her obituary made no mention of her name nor of her motherless baby daughter
  she was the ‘wife of Mr. John McManus who was the son of Mr. Bernard McManus and daughter of Mr. Patrick Seymour’
  I sent an email to her grandson’s wife informed her the family was cloned
  `Not a woman in sight’, I said
  daughter and wife

  not a real person

  Still in the nineteen-fifties
  we were wives and mothers
  we formed a committee
  to establish a kindergarten
  in a town which never had one before
  and many didn’t see the need
  we rejoiced when it opened
  and my children in turn attended
  I was committee secretary, duty mother when rostered
  still wife and mother and not much else

  not a real person

  By the nineteen-seventies society was changing
  adult education, equality for women
  my children independent now
  and grandkids would soon go to kindergarten
  I seized the opportunity to study, qualify and work
  and felt that I was Me at last

  perhaps a real person

  They held a reunion for the kindergarten’s founders
  I heard about it after it was over
  and a friend asked why I hadn’t gone
  “Why wasn’t I invited?” I asked the president
  rather peevishly
  “I didn’t think of you”, she answered

  not always a person

  I wonder where the years have gone
  some things are less important now
  I have knowledge enough to enjoy a good book
  eyes that still work though other things waver
  sunshine that warms and pictures in clouds
  time away from life’s pressures to take it all in
  people who care and are there when I need them
  for each day I am grateful

  to still be a person.

  

February 06, 2019

• Club Troppo What economic reform thinking might have looked like – if we’d bothered to do it

  I have posted this talk previously, but can now post the transcript, worked up from a YouTube transcript with thanks to Shruti Sekar for editing it. You can download the slides to which I was speaking from this link.

  Nicholas: [Slide 2,3]  I’m going to start with this quote from John Maynard Keynes which is a very striking quote, I think. And I guess the way I think about our situation, not just since the financial crisis but also, it turns out, over the whole generation of reform, is that, in a sense, we weren’t particularly serious. I don’t mean by that that we weren’t more revolutionary. It’s just that we reduce the thing to a formula very quickly and it ran out of steam very quickly. I’ll try to justify that claim as I go.

  [Slide 4] Reform; the sort of reform Maynard Keynes foreshadows in the quote I’ve read was based on new intellectual understandings largely from the academy. That was Keynesian Macro and that involved very substantial reform. Post sixties reform was built on some simple ideas which are quite compelling.

  [Slide 5] Stigler showed how regulation, which was often justified as protecting consumers, didn’t protect consumers but became a creature of the industry that it was regulating. Friedman’s critique of, if you like, the ‘vulgar Keynesian’ faith in a static Phillips curve. If anyone doesn’t know what that means, think of it as a predictable and linear relationship between unemployment and inflation, the idea that if you’ve got unemployment, you can always inflate your way out of it. There’s obviously something fishy about that. And if you read the literature of the time, the people who had any smarts kind of knew that too. But Friedman was the guy who pointed out what was wrong with it in his presidential address.

  [Slide 6] The other thing that reform was based on was what I call ‘policy hacks’. Quite specific ideas. And as an example, Friedman makes a point of distinguishing between funding and delivery. That leads to ideas like vouchers, where the state withdraws from delivery but maintains funding, and things like income contingent loans in Australia copied around the world. Coase is another fertile mind who starts thinking about distribution, property rights, and so on. And from that, we get spectrum auctions, emissions, permits, and so on.

  So good reform thinking offers insights that are specific, robust and actionable. And are they ideological? Well, all of the people I quoted to you are University of Chicago. An ideology got them to those ideas. They wanted the world to be more market-oriented, but the ideas themselves don’t need to be implemented in a pro- or an anti-market way. They are a repertoire of tips and tricks. And in the case of Stigler, if you say there’s regulatory capture, well, that’s good to know because if you’re there for the little guy, then you want to know about those kinds of things.

  [Slide 7]So what went wrong?

  1. I want to suggest firstly something we’re all familiar with.
  2. Reform ran the gamut of vested interests. An intellectual dumbing down and overreach. That’s the big one in a sense.
  3. But the one that sort of upsets me the most is that we came up with almost no ideas after the ones that I’ve presented you and the generation of ones that I presented you. Now, that’s an easy thing for me to say. It really only matters if I can give you the feel of what those alternative ideas might look like. And I’m certainly not going to be comprehensive, but I think… I’m hoping to impress to you that, hell yes, there were lots of other tips and tricks we could have moved on to and that they are particularly well-suited to the development of our economy.

  [Slide 8] So here’s a quick trip through vested interests. Here’s some examples. And maybe it’s better to look at the slides later, but here are some examples of ways in which the particular priorities are clearly ordered by vested interests. But here’s an important thing about using Australian sources, which is that Australia has an organization which is dedicated to the ten commandments of reform. It has an institutionalization of reform which is now called the Productivity Commission. And the thing is that the now Productivity Commission and its antecedents more or less went along with this ordering of priorities. At the same time as keeping the Smithian fires burning with hostility to vested interests, somehow took more note of certain kinds of vested interests than others. The record shows it far more concerned about vested interests down in the small end of town – workers on the wharfs and in factories – than the vested interests in the big end of town in finance, law and medicine.

  [Slide 9] Dumbing down is the really big deal. Just as in politics we love debates between left and right so in intellectual discussion and particularly in economics we love paradigm wars. It’s so much more fun to have a debate about paradigms. It gets the emotions flowing. You can have an opinion without knowing much. Now, the first reform episode that I talked about – post-war reform – is the result of a paradigm change. And in macro in that context paradigm wars made sense. The question was how to think about running a macro economy, and we changed the model and that changed the way we worked. I don’t think that’s true of Smithian reform. Smithian reform picks up all kinds of stuff in the zeitgeist and makes good use of them until it stops making good use of them. [Slide 10] And there’s a real analogy, I think, with politics as culture war. As Martin knows, I’ve got a real thing about the way in which politics, as we can just watch it, polarize as people head for ideological debate as opposed to discussing the issues in front of them. So I think there’s a real analogy there.

  [Slide 11] So the basic theory of this is that markets work miraculously, but it’s just so long as all those things hold, which just doesn’t tell you much, does it? [Slide 12] And so reform as deregulation, as becoming market-friendly, works when the background markets being acted on work tolerably well already. So where you can clear away the detritus of previous political deals and settlements and reveal a functioning market, it’s worth doing. So this regulation that we got rid of, airline regulation probably everywhere, certainly in Australia or in the United States, was never designed to improve the economic efficiency of the airline system. Likewise, tariffs in Australia, these were regulatory regimes that came out of political deal doing and providing they’re presiding over something which will function quite well as a market, you get rid of it and that’s what we did and that worked pretty well.

  The other thing that worked well, are policy hacks. So we had income contingent loans. We sort of launched that on the world. The Child Support Agency is a similar kind of thing, using the tax office to administer maintenance payments between spouses who won’t otherwise agree. Spectrum auctions, congestion charging, and so on. Again, none of these things strike me as noticeably free market or left wing or right wing. They’re technocratic tinkering and they’re very effective at that if they’re done sensibly.

  [Slide 13] And where did reform disappoint? Wherever it was difficult. In my country, it’s hard to think of a difficult sector that was reformed that we didn’t make an awful mess of. Now, it’s quite possible to argue that it was in a mess already. That’s an interesting argument, but I won’t dwell on that now. [Slide 14] So that’s just sort of a quick list of where market failure is pervasive. That’s a big list. And walking up to anything in there and saying “What we’re about is deregulation. We’re going to change some things on the basis that if it’s deregulatory, it’s good, and if it’s more regulatory, it’s bad,” that is not a recipe for policy success.

  [Slide 15] Now, just a few years ago, in fact, I can tell you the day. I was doing a radio interview on a Lateral Economics. One of the things I normally dislike is to be asked in an interview “Summarize your report in a sentence.” But as I was doing this report, it struck me that I did want to summarize it in a sentence. We were talking about how to make Australia a supplier of funds management to the world. Don’t worry, nobody took any notice. And if they had, who knows whether it would have been very successful? But that was what I said. “Global funds management should be thought of as a joint product between funds management firms and their regulators rather than this idea that economists have in their head, which is that the firms do the production and the state just regulates them”. If you think about the complexities of international funds management, successful funds management centres have governments and private providers of funds management getting their heads together and trying to work out how to do it. Now, they’re also involved in helping people avoid tax, but you can’t become a successful exporter of international funds management if your regulators and your funds managers don’t understand themselves as involved in the same venture.

  So now I want to give you a bit of theory. And by theory, I mean broad descriptive, reflective stuff. I don’t mean equations and so on. I want to talk to you about public and private goods. [Slide 17] So that’s a kind of a textbook definition of a public good. And both an economist’s idea of public good and the public’s informal definition of a public good is something a bit similar, I think, which is that public goods are those things which no one will supply if the government doesn’t. And that’s a quadrant that the Ostroms (Vincent and Elinor) cooked up and they said a public good is something which is non-rivalrous and non-excludable.

  Anyone like me to explain those terms? Yes, some people would. This pointer is a single thing. If I have it, you don’t have it. So that’s a rivalrous good. The words I’m using are non-rivalrous. I can use them. They don’t get used up. You can use them and so on. And excludability is, within this room, we can’t exclude someone from hearing the lecture but we have a place where we can exclude people and that allows us to charge a price. In the absence of excludability, paying a price is voluntary, which you will agree, is a different kind of transaction. So a public good is this coincidence of those two things. Now, that’s a definition of public goods as a problem. It’s important that you realize that economists have thought about public goods as a problem and they are focusing on excludability. So there’s the Ostroms’ “Public goods present serious problems in human organisation.”

  Man 1: I’m just wondering about the lighthouse because I know that it’s a textbook example.

  Nicholas: Yeah. Please, let’s do that over drinks because that’s a long, long story. But it’s a fair point. So our definition of public goods is oriented in a particular way. If you like these terms, I don’t much because they lead you to just get misunderstood by people. But if you like, it’s a neoliberal interpretation of what a public good is. And then there’s the other side of it. It’s hardly a problem that something is non-rivalrous. If you’ve brought it into the world, well, that’s a big opportunity, isn’t it, to share? So that’s the other side of it which doesn’t get focused on. And I’ll have more to say about that soon.

  [Slide 18]. As Adam Smith said, it is not from the benevolence of the brewer, the butcher, or the baker that we expect our dinner. These are private goods. They’re nice discreet things. And lighthouses are public goods. I want to suggest to you that that’s not a satisfactory way to think about public and private goods and that public and private goods are co-dependent and co-evolve. And to prove that to you or to demonstrate it to you, we’re going into the 18th century. [Slide 20] We’ve got on our 18th century gear, as you can see. A wig for the guy’s at least. The room we’re in may even be from the 18th century for all I know. And central banking has come into existence just a few years before the beginning of that century. And central banking is a public good that is a precondition for so much economic development. The Navy keeps floating around the earth and bumping into continents late at night. That’s not going to do. And we don’t need to build more ships. We need some knowledge which is a public good, which we know about the competition for Harrison’s clocks. There’s knowledge that’s come from Portugal from the 15th century that if you take lemons and various other things with you, the sailors won’t die on you. That’s some public goods that the 18th century fits us up with. And there’s the joint stock company. We’re in the presence of at least one Dutchman in the audience who I know, and they got on to this a little earlier. But anyway, the joint stock companies came into their own at around about this time.

  [Slide 21] We are now in the 19th century, as you can tell, and that’s the primary school I went to in Harkaway in Victoria. It was built by the Lutherans and bought by the government in 1867. Public education. Public sanitation. This extraordinary idea that the British came up with of a merit-based public service, an idea they nicked from the Chinese. Central bank notes, 1844. These are all extremely important public goods that are part of the economic development of the place. So the way I like to put it is that there is an ecology of public and private goods.

  [Slide 22] And here is Adam Smith and Hayek explaining that. So you know that stuff in Hayek about spontaneous order? Every example he cites is a case of something he could have called a public good but didn’t. I’m not accusing him of anything there. He’s thinking a different way. But the market that emerges out of self-seeking is a public good. Liquidity is a public good. Price discovery are these things that emerge or they co-evolve with self-seeking.

  [Slide 23] And in fact, our patron saint Adam Smith, good guy generally, built his whole economics on what I call the notion of emergent public goods. So in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, he talks about the evolution of human culture and he shows how this emerges spontaneously. And again, it doesn’t use the term public good. But culture becomes a public good, a regulating entity which enables us to sit in this room, nobody is stealing from anyone else, we all have rich expectations, and we’re all capable of constructing a public good which is this conversation. And then the Wealth of Nations is the same sort of story which I’ve given you. And there’s one other canonical public good which the government didn’t build and doesn’t appear in textbooks anywhere, but Adam Smith actually wrote a treatise on it and he explained its evolution in very similar terms. Anyone know what I’m talking about? Language. Isn’t it amazing? An emergent, a generative commons, as I heard it referred to on one occasion, which I think is a very fine expression, a very descriptive expression.

  [Slide 24] Very quick. Actually, because there’s not time, I will move on from that one.

  [Slide 25] And so here we have a rich ecology of public and private goods. Private goods are areas where we look after ourselves, and public goods are these things that can’t quite get their act together but we know we want them. Many of those things are not perfect. Public goods, they’ve got public good elements in them and that is a list of what is typically you get help from the taxman if you make donations. We sort of have quite a lot of this stuff fairly hardwired.

  [Slide 26 first picture] That is a picture of human collective intention. I have it on good authority, just from what I’ve read, that you will not find a primate holding down a branch for another primate to pick fruit from a tree. So we are good at creating collective intentions. And in fact, I so much prefer that to this idea of self-interest and altruism which, as Adam Smith said, or benevolence, is a weak reed and you wouldn’t want to rely on it. Well, we could rely on this idea of collective intention to slaughter many men who we celebrated the slaughtering of or the end of slaughtering of a few days ago. I think it was during World War one where Bertrand Russell said he wasn’t going to study a discipline that was built on a single principle that people follow their own self-interest. He thought that was an extraordinary proposition.

  [Slide 27] So for me, the world is a nested ecology of public and private goods. If you look at this picture, [Slide 26 second picture] everywhere you look, there are people acting on their own but they’re acting within a web of publicness. So there are two people playing chess and they’re competing with each other and yet the game they’re playing is a public good. It’s a public thing. A conversation is exactly the same thing. There is publicness and privateness shot through this picture at every scale that you look at, and that’s something I think is important to think about. And again, private goods, we see competition between private goods. And then public goods, these are the things which hold these social formations together.

  [Slide 28] So I think reform should never have been seen as deregulation except where it was a harmless thing to do or acquire the summary aesthetic of market orientation. It should have understood itself as refurbishing the institutions of the mixed economy.

  [Slide 29] So let me now give you an example of what I mean in the area of information. [Slide 30] We know about Hayek. Hayek tells us that it’s very important that the central planning is going to be a bit of a disaster because we need to use information about relative scarcity that is distributed throughout the economy. What the hell am I talking about, to the non-economists? Well, a farmer or a trader in grain knows the grain is not growing very well this year and the price of grain goes up and everybody economises on the use of grain and substitutes to other grain. That’s the price system of work and it’s incredibly powerful. On the other hand, what Arrow and Stiglitz and Akerlof, the people who come many decades after and point out that that’s not all there is to it, that asymmetric information is one of the main problems of markets. Remember, Hayek talks about prices. Prices are the only information that are well-reported in a market because they have to be agreed between buyer and seller, not anything else. So all this other stuff is up for grabs.

  [Slide 31] So remember this? Well, none of you will remember it from your lives, but you might remember it from books. This is the 19th century marketing patent medicine. And one has to wonder how far we’ve got from that. We’re much more genteel these days, but let’s just go through some things quickly. [Slide 32] Most advertising is not informational but symbolic. I don’t want to make much of that other than to say that that was a substantial topic in economics 50 years ago, very boutique now. We build conflicts of interest into things of immense public good importance, like the auditing of accounts. In governments, there are statements of regulatory impact and environmental impact, and they are invariably done or influenced by people who want to influence the outcome. The term “push the envelope.” [Slide 33] There’s an Ngram Viewer. It took off around about 1990. Likewise, stretch the envelope. I’ll leave you to draw the conclusions.

  [Slide 34] The importance of reputation. Here’s John Kay talking about the way in which reputation is the way that markets typically deal with asymmetric information. And that’s how we deal with it when we buy a computer, whatever sort of computer, and now we’re using it online in lots of ways. But regulation doesn’t do that. [Slide 35] Policy is stuck in early prototype. Imposing mandatory disclosure, which we know almost invariably doesn’t work. Regulation of professions sometimes a little more than a PR makeover. And that’s the case with financial advisors who get to call themselves government licensed financial advisors and then go and pursue conditions the way they always were. Most of these people don’t even have university degrees. And all of this regulation costs a lot of money, but it doesn’t tell us the most important thing we need to know, which is how can I find somebody who’s good at this? And it doesn’t do that for financial advisors. It doesn’t do it for surgeons. It doesn’t do it for lawyers. And there are lots of ways in which it could.

  [Slide 36] Quick romp through restrictive practices. In law, they’re as rampant as ever. And I’m not talking about the sort of standard economic textbook which is “Let everyone compete. Let solicitors compete.” The barristers, a lot of those barriers are down in lots of places. And if they made things better, well, they haven’t because the real problem is that the system is, infested with people who are gold plating things to their own advantage. So, lawyers control procedure and you end up paying $30 million for a fairly straightforward investigation about whether Andrew Forrest, an Australian, misled investors. $30 million in legal fees to the government agency.

  [Slide 37] And I’ll let you read that comment from Andre Geim who is a Nobel Prize winner. I think he’s British and he invented graphene. Because of the time, I will actually jump ahead a little and just say that he was told by a guy, “Don’t worry about patenting it because if you patent it, we will put a hundred patents out afterwards and you will spend the rest of your life defending our losses.” That’s why he didn’t patent it. Now, my point is this: Is this turning up on the list of economic reform targets? Have you seen it discussed by economists as things micro economic reform that we need?

  [Slide 38] Very quickly, it really does get a lot worse. So competitive incentives are crowding out the public throughout our knowledge and research infrastructure. Here’s two incredible quotes. 11% of pre-clinical cancer studies could be replicated. And to quote John Ioannidis, who is an expert on this stuff, “Overall, not only are most research findings false. Most of the true findings are not useful.” How can a true finding not be useful? Well, you do a randomized control trial between the placebo and a new drug and you get a result and you don’t know whether the new drug is better than the old drug or how it’s better. That’s an example. This stuff is being pumped out by universities all the time. They are meeting their institutional imperative and the public interest which is there and meeting these institutions together as best we can. And of course, we can’t do it perfectly. That falls by the wayside. [Slide 39] So none of these issues are a focus of economic reform, but in Australia, we have a list produced by the Productivity Commission of what is economic reform and making sure that non-pharmacists can own pharmacies as part of the economic reform. But this isn’t. So that’s the sort of thing that I want to refer to.

  [Slide 40] And again, where market failure is pervasive, I want to suggest what I said to you earlier that output should be thought of as joint product of competitive and collective (collaborative and regulatory) activity, an ecology of public and private goods, multi-layered, nested, and so on. The collective interest represented at different levels in different ways. For the same reason that markets work well when they do, what we need to try to do is devolve decisions to a level where the knowledge exists and the incentives to act well are strongest. And we’ve barely begun trying to think about that sort of stuff. Of course, this sort of political theory about words like subsidiarity and so on, but economists have barely articulated these kinds of things.

  [Slide 41] You’ve heard of the expression free rider problem. How many people have heard of the expression free rider opportunity? It’s sort of a countercultural comment and yet it’s more important than the free rider problem. That’s not a statement that free rider problems are not important. [Slide 42] It’s just that, as Thomas Jefferson told us, the free rider opportunity is so much more important, as Robert Solow could have told us with his productivity studies in the ‘50s and early ‘60s. This is the opportunity of non-rivalrousness, which of course has gone through the roof in the 21st century. Who can tell me a list of new public goods of the 21st century? Anyone got anything? Any thoughts? Not you. You know this shtick. The internet is a new public good. Yeah. It’s a late ‘70s public good, but any others?

  [Slide 43] We’re in the 21st century. You need a hat? That simply won’t do, so we’re just going to have to go with that. I made that slide before a certain presidential campaign. There’s a bunch of new public goods, not one built by the government. But we’re going to have to change our definition of what a public good is from a world in which we think of public goods as a problem to a world in which we want to at least keep in mind the possibility of public goods as an opportunity. So we’re going to call this non-excluded. The way in which Google made something a public good was not by being non-excludable, but by choosing not to exclude it.

  [Slide 44] So here we are. We are Google and we are thinking of the amount of value we can create. And this is the amount of value that Google can create behind a paywall. And it won’t get that many customers, but it will at least capture a lot of the value. And the alternative is to do it as a public good, in which case, on the back of my envelope, it will create something of the order of a trillion dollars’ worth of value. And here’s the thing. The cost of doing it, it can get 60 billion… It’s monetising just 6% of the value it creates. It’s getting by on the smell of an oily rag [32:14] but their costs are half that, so they’re rich beyond their wildest dreams. So that’s how these public goods have come into existence.

  [Slide 45] I’ll skip that too, but that’s an example of ecology of public and private goods on the platform. That’s a successful platform is something which gives you something and then turns it into a public good that is of interest to others. [Slide 46] So now we’ve got a new landscape and we’ve got those things in the textbook which is over there, and then we’ve got these emergent public goods, language being an example. Open-source software, the language instinct rendered into executive code, eternal extraordinary thing, executive, does stuff. Then we’ve got these platform public goods. But there’s a problem and the problem is that this thing is clicking a lot slower than we wish it was. The problem is that what happens when we get to a stage like, for instance, take roads, take the funding of roads, we could fund then… If you build a road, you can put billboards next to it and you make some money from billboards. The problem is you can’t make enough money from the billboards. So that is the equivalent on the net.

  And so the question is what global digital public goods exist in there that can’t be built by the market? There must be some. And I knew that I needed a kind of killer example of this to kind of capture people’s imagination rather than saying this is a nice theoretical proposition. We’re funny that way, human beings. [Slide 47] And so I came up with this sort of framework in about 2009, and then in 2012, I was looking at Ann Wojcicki who is the CEO of 23andMe, which is a consumer genomics company. She was married to Sergey Brin at the time. He’s the co-founder of Google. And things move fast in Silicon Valley. She no longer is. [Slide 48] And what 23andMe does is for then $99, now I think $149, I send you a little kit, you spit into the kit, send it back, they do a genomic analysis. It’s a partial genomic analysis and then they can tell you various things about ancestry if you’re interested in that or possible health issues that you might be interested in.

  [Slide 49] So here’s my example. I’m looking at this and I’m thinking she’s facing exactly the same decision that her husband had, which is “Do I build this as a private or a public good?” As a public good, I’ll try and explain to you why it is so much more valuable, but you can’t get enough money to do it. So that’s the cost of it and that’s going to make a loss. So the obvious thing, she didn’t know this. She’s an American and Americans don’t know that you’re going to have public health systems right there and then. And so I immediately think of Medicare. I’ve translated this into the NHS. The funding comes from the NHS. They get access to your data. It’s all voluntary. If this is icky to you, you just say, “No, I don’t want to do it.” The doctors are encouraged to nudge people in. “Do you want to do this? If you don’t, that’s fine. If you do, tick here. Spit here. We’ll sort it out.” And then it gets connected up to the health system: diagnosis, pharmacovigilance, research, population-based screening. If that’s not worth $100 per unit to the state, to the NHS, I’d be very surprised. And if it’s not worth it to the NHS, it’s surely got to be worth it to the economy at large.

  [Slide 50] So here we have public-private digital partnerships and that’s just an example. And you can do this. Any SaaS hub, any software as a service hub, you can think of similar kinds of things to do. [Slide 51] This is a start-up in Australia which does employee engagement. If government said, “We’ll fund this” or “We’ll have a tender so that this can be made available as a free thing,” you get a standard, you get data, you can connect firms up with their permission who have similar, or one firm might have solved an HR problem that another firm has, etc. You start to create all kinds of possibilities. [Slide 52] That’s software as a service on accounting.

  [Slide 53] And it doesn’t necessarily just have to be like this. An example I like is windows on workplaces. We debate the liberalisation in the workplace as if there wasn’t a problem knowing… It seems to me obvious that the fact that people don’t really know how good a workplace is before they get into it is a problem. Now, it might just be a problem we have to deal with, but it seems to me there are things we could do. We could, for instance, try and make sure that workers’ compensation premiums are published and prominently given to applicants for jobs as a proxy for safety. But it would also be nice to get employee engagement surveys out into the open so people can see from the outside which ones have got good employee engagement. Of course, you all know why it doesn’t happen, or you all think you know why it doesn’t happen because it might be embarrassing. Correct? But that doesn’t answer why the best firms don’t publish that. And I think the answer is because there’s no standard to report to. If PwC is doing a lot better than KPMG, KPMG can go and dig some stuff out of their survey which is done in a different way and present the data as if it’s as good. So standards are an emergent public good and we can help them emerge. Governments can use their convening power to help those things emerge. So, look, I will leave it at that. That’s another thing, but I’ll just leave it at that and hand over to Henry. [Slides 54,5 were skipped.]

  Henry: Thank you very much, Nicholas. Now I’ll ask Martin to give a brief response. Martin Wolf is probably well-known to all of you. I love the way he describes himself as a journalist that focuses on economics. So he’s someone who manages to be authoritative over economics without having the hard work or the boredom of having to study economics for a long time. I think it’s a great achievement. And obviously, he’s written extensively, particularly the Financial Times, but a whole range of books, a lot about finance but also about globalisation. He knows about the 0.0001% and how they live and what they think about. But with that, I look forward to Martin’s comments.

  Martin: Thank you. Okay. So first of all, just to spare the my teachers, I did do a graduate degree in economics. So the people who taught me, some of whom Nicholas knows, would be very embarrassed if my professional credentials were denied. Anyway, I was a professional economist for quite a while before I rose into journalism. Now, I think we want to get to discussion and Nicholas, as always, has raised an enormous number of issues. I think his lecture would make a pretty good book of about 400 pages and I imagine that many of you must feel a little bit overwhelmed. If you haven’t, if you don’t, then you shouldn’t be here because you’re formidable geniuses. So he has done a whirlwind tour of his thinking. I got to know his work over the last few years. He’s not somebody you come across that easily, but once you do, you become addicted. He is, I think, extraordinary original and imaginative and thought-provoking, and there are no buts there.

  Nicholas: Oh, I was waiting for the but.

  Martin: There are no buts there.

  Nicholas: However…

  Martin: However will come. So I do think not only that you should… There is a text which I’ve read. You should read it. You should look at his blog. I think it really is remarkably original. And one of the things he’s done in a very interesting way is to get into an area in which lots of other people are , in different ways. Somebody like [Noah] Harari, for example, in which is to try and think about what makes us human. And what he’s doing in part when he talks about public goods and private goods all mixed up together, he’s really talking about human beings as cultural animals and the way that shapes us. And of course, if you start looking at economics in that way, you end up thinking about it in a very, very different way. So it does actually go back in some rather important way to 18th-century thinking. It links up with some of the more interesting modern evolutionary ideas and also some of the more interesting cultural ideas. So I recommend this very, very highly. So that’s the first big point I wanted to make.

  But the second… I’m going to cover just two other areas and it’s completely different from what I carefully prepared. I knew that when I prepared my ideas, I would end up talking about something different. So I want to focus on, one, what is really, in all truth, this lecture covered far too much. It breaks all the rules of lectures in my view. And if I had been the editor, which I frequently am, I would have told him to focus on just one of the ideas. So one of the ideas in this, a very central idea, is what he calls hacks- which is the idea that if you understand a problem relatively well and look at it in a relatively non-ideological way, which is very difficult for you and me to do particularly nowadays, and you think about what you’re trying to solve, you can come up with some really quite clever ideas. And cumulatively actually we have generated quite a lot of very clever ideas. Some of them are very big clever ideas like legal systems which there have been some problems; and even bigger clever ideas like language because really nobody ever had that as an idea; but also lots and lots of concrete ideas to solve specific problems.

  And if you think about the last, this is very close to it I suspect. I don’t even remember when you cited him but it’s very close to Karl Popper’s idea of what he called piecemeal social engineering. Piecemeal social engineering in his counter to the Austrian school or his version of the Austrian school, you can think of this either way, is the way he thinks about it. And economists tend to rather like that way of thinking. Not all economists because there are lots of potentially ideological ones; rather like the idea of piecemeal social engineering. So to take one example that you mentioned, we have the question of how should we fund higher education and what role should students play in funding it or should it be free for them. But is that equitable given that they’re clearly going to be the more successful members? So there’s clearly a technical and political problem to solve in that sense. And he mentioned the Australian invention of income contingent loan scheme which we subsequently adopted and created lots of problems. We did it very badly.

  The point I would make about this is I’m very sympathetic to this view of things but it obviously creates two very big classes of problems. And these are, if you like, the political philosophy of reform if it’s piecemeal. And I think it has to be because revolutionary reform is, to put it mildly, rather disappointing. So the problem with piecemeal reform is, of course in practice as we know, one of the great mistakes of economics to ignore this. Everything is connected to everything else. So it’s usually very, very difficult to think of a way of fixing X which doesn’t create problems even if it was just stopping for Y, Z, A, B, C, D, and all the rest of it. And so,  going at things as a series of piecemeal problems, though I think probably the only way we can do it, creates very large intellectual problems of its own. Even more so, it creates very large political problems. And they are core if you think of them within the context of a political democracy which is these hacks are quite complex and some of them are really very complex. You can talk about, for example, congestion charging as an idea but implementing it in a sensible way and thinking about all these externalities associated with it is really, really hard.

  So in practice, piecemeal social engineering tends to me ruled by technocratic platonic guardians and this is profoundly anti-democratic. One of the reasons I think we’ve ended up in our intensely ideologically divided world, there are many other reasons for this, is people really don’t like that way of doing things anymore. Of course, it’s been made worse by the fact, which is pretty demonstrable while I’m coming to my last point, a major area, that it turns out that a lot of the technocrats were completely clueless. So if you have a combination of completely clueless technocrats and complexity and obscurantism, and he’s given plenty of examples of that, then what you’ve got is a recipe for complete collapse of confidence in the entire political system which is where we are. And so my challenge to Nicholas is how do we solve that? Finally, where do you get the license to do your piecemeal social engineering given where we are? It’s just something I’m thinking about. If you can solve that problem you’ve given me a chapter of my book.

  The final point I was thinking about is some of the really important things he said about the mixture of the economy we have today. So it seems to me another way of thinking about what he was talking about is we have developed a situation in which we have private monopoly ownership of crucial public goods. And in fact, pretty well all these platforms fall into that category. And that is I think a social catastrophe as well as an economic one. But they are public goods and they have clear public monopoly aspects. And so how do we fix that? Second problem is that a lot of these public goods have, and he didn’t use this phrase I think, carried with them a stupendous quantity of simply spectacular public bads. Like the perfect spread, as the way I think it goes, the famous remark about the internet, and it builds on Jefferson and so forth, is that information wants to be free. That information doesn’t necessarily want to be true. There’s no reason why it should be at all. False information spreads at least as well, if not, there’s quite a lot of evidence, better than true information. And indeed, the point he made on science is that science, he says, has become a system for disseminating public bads.

  Nicholas: So the thing you’re reaching for, Martin, is that information wants to be truthy.

  Martin: Information wants to be truthy?

  Nicholas: That’s the problem.

  Martin: Yeah. Okay. Yes. Okay. So the point is we’ve got the private dissemination of public bads, the private ownership of public goods, and we have the private creation and destruction of some key old public goods, which he does actually mention, at which the most important probably is money. And so, what I would like you to do is to think a little bit more about how the hell we manage systems which have these characteristics because the mix-up that we are now living with, in the areas which he focused on in his article over the introduction of money,  that you mostly focus on the information economy, aspects of the information economy, seems to me to be creating simply stupendous and, as things are at the moment, unmanageable public bad problems of various kinds. That will be all I would say and I will leave the other lecture.

  Henry: Okay. Thanks very much, Martin. Right. Well, that’s a huge breadth of area to go at and we’ve got about 35 minutes. So let’s see what anyone wants to come back and ask about.

  Man 2: Yeah. Just on your last point, Martin. Just to hear your thoughts. Could you counter some of these public bads with new public goods? So for example, if this information had a new system in which it’s been verified by so and so [52:11].

  Martin: So can I just comment on that one before you get to it? So here’s one area which I’ve been thinking about. But it’s conservative. I tend to be more conservative in this sense. So looking at what has happened in America, I’ve come to the view that the BBC is even more important than I thought it was. So if you’ve inherited an institution, not perfect, clearly not, but still it exists to do this, it’s rather important. And secondly, we have retained at least in relationship to television, though this is anonymous and not in relationship to newspapers, essentially I can’t remember the exact terms we used but the balanced and fair requirements which the Americans got rid of in the early ‘80s. So as things are at the moment, Fox TV or equivalents, Fox is obviously greater, couldn’t be created here. So that’s a pretty heavy-handed form of regulation and BBC is obviously quite an unpopular tax. But it seems to me that though we’ve got into terrible message here, we have avoided some of the more extreme dimensions because of these things which are essentially legacies of the past to start with.

  Nicholas: I completely agree with Martin that these are the many of the great issues of our time. The one thing that I’d want to do some fancy footwork on however is the idea that what I presented there was somehow whitewashing or not owning up to that. I mean, I wasn’t talking about that. As he observed and you may well have observed, I was talking about far too many things as it was. So I’m encountering a world and trying to say this would be a worthwhile thing to do. In fact, I think in some of these cases, and it’s certainly not comprehensive, but I think in some of these cases I can actually follow the logic that I introduced there to show how it could really do some quite powerful good.

  So take 23andMe. 23andMe gets your data. Okay? Now, it will sell your data. It will behave relatively well with it if it wants to hang around, one presumes. But that’s a very different story. And now the way I would envisage this is that the NHS observes 23andMe doing this and says, “Well, actually what we need to do here is we need to think about the sort of principles of governance according to which we would like to see it in the market for genomic data.” And then it will say, “Well, here’s our offer. We’re prepared to pay as much as $150 for a partial genomic sequence if they’re any use and $500 for a full genomic sequence.” It might take co-payments, whatever. And then if you take on board that funding, you sign on to a government structure in which this is open, the data is anonymised and used for research, and so on and so forth. None of this is going to happen with 23andMe on its own.

  So it seems to me, and I was trying to think of a nice term for that and I’ve just cooked it up in front of myself, tell me what you think, public envelopment. It sounds a little sinister, I suppose. But the point is that here we have these public goods burgeoning and a very dominant political class and economic class and they’re not thinking about this and they’re not going, “Oh, crikey, there’s an issue of public good obviously here. Let’s try to think about this.” Now, I don’t mean by that that they should take control of it, but they should own up to it as an issue and start talking about it. The BBC actually did this in a fairly ham-fisted way, but a way that should be recognized, because in around about 2005, ’06, ’07, the BBC refused to use Microsoft video stuff, all of which was freely available for them to use, because they made in principle statement that they would use open source software or their own software and they weren’t doing a favour to some private multinational. Again, a crude and not necessarily particularly helpful thing but the right instinct which is to say, “Put something in our intro.” And most economists didn’t even see it in their intro. So it’s in the intro. Don’t imagine that you’re going to be the great social engineering, you’re going to sort all this stuff out. But it’s in the intro, for Christ’s sake. And economists start behaving as if it is in their intro.

  A couple of other points would be the standard competition policy. And we’ve been remarkably slow, not really doing much about that. And the other thing to think about with regard to the great digital oligarchs of our age is that some of you will be familiar with the marginal cost controversies of the ‘20s and ‘30s, and that was all about what price should we pay for a London Underground ticket? And the textbook answer is the marginal cost not the full cost. Now it turns out on utilities that that’s hard. That’s analytically hard. It’s politically difficult. Guess what? It’s not hard in the digital world most of the time because the marginal cost is zero. And that’s exciting because it gives us some very clean kinds of potential policy hacks.

  So I would for instance say that Microsoft, which has something like 90% of the paid, it would be more than 90% of the paid, word processing software in the Office Suite. I would impose upon Microsoft an access regime. And the access regime would say this: Anyone can copy the look and feel of Microsoft because that’s in our wetware and there’s x network externalities to that. They can’t copy your code but you have to publish full documentation of the format so anyone can interact with it. And so I think it’s quite likely that we could unpick their monopoly power in a much neater way than monopoly power raises in the world of high fixed cost and non-trivial marginal costs. So those are sort of scattered thoughts, some thoughts that I think are helpful but they by no means solve the problem.

  Man 3: I think our faith in politicians has reached new lows.

  Nicholas: Yeah. A whole new subject.

  Man 3: Yes. In Australia, in the U.S., in the UK.

  Nicholas: Happy to give you another talk about that sometime. Go on.

  Man 3: I was thinking about examples of organizations that I think do a great job. You mentioned BBC. I think if I choose, even TFL is doing a great job too.

  Nicholas: I don’t know what that is.

  Man 3: Transport for London.

  Nicholas: Okay.

  Man 3: So it’s a unified, I think mixed economy, organization that runs pretty much every transport type in London. I was wondering, given all of the inhibitors to adoption of making public good products or services work, have either of you seen around the world anywhere an example of a new public service that has been brought to market successfully? So you mentioned 23andMe which has huge potential. And I can imagine what’s coming up in the next twenty years.

  Nicholas: Well, yeah, if you can copy them, sure.

  Man 3: Has anybody in the room seen an example of a new public Google service that is being successfully brought to the public that was actually [01:00:56] all the myriad best interests, regulatory reasons, etc. 23andMe is potentially very exciting. I agree.

  Nicholas: Well, I’m not that excited about 23andMe. I’m excited about genomic… Yeah. Yeah. Well, of course the mind naturally goes to Singapore because that’s the sort of thing that Singapore tries to do from time to time. I can think of some things they’ve tried to do but not anything very grand in terms of some grand new public good. The other thing I’d say is that I’m aware of two things in Australian policy which I call the uncovering of the commons and the development of an uncovered commons. And what I mean by that is that there are many things from which many people will benefit. But because so many people will benefit to a small amount, nobody has an incentive to take a large stake- a stake that will really keep people taking over. But if you look at two things, and you will have examples,I’m sure there are examples around the world, two things that the Australian Government had done in the last 30 odd years. There is a program called land care which is farmers looking after land with a little bit of help from the government, a little bit of money, a little bit of seeding, of voluntary activity, and so on. And so that’s what I call an uncovered commons. A little bit of help enables a whole group of people to act in small ways to advantage the whole.

  And an equivalent example is the Australian aid strategy which involved connecting up community groups, some expenditure on health and awareness. And we were sort of famously one of the least homophobic places in the world, which is kind of odd because our national cycle is a bit native. And we just handled it with great maturity and some real insight and intelligence. And that’s a bit of a case study as a good thing. I’m not that familiar with it. But there’s a couple of examples. Anyway, don’t forget the human side of things. This is something Smith understood that we have all this potential. And he’s a virtue ethicist really. I mean, we’re all trying to grow in virtue together. And the more virtuous other people are, the more we are and the more we can do, the more of these uncovered commons can be constructive.

  Henry: I just want to add to that. I mean, what we’re talking about here I think is institutional design and the institutional world.

  Nicholas: Just be careful. Institutional design or institutional evolution?

  Henry: Yeah. Both. And because.. [01:03:58]

  Nicholas: It’s incredible. Exactly. That’s right.

  Henry: And surely one of the things is there’s been a renewal, sort of, when we think back to the co-op movement. But now we’ve got a renewal of the social enterprises. We’ve got fair shares, we’ve got impact investment, we’ve got a growth in enterprises that have a sort of public-private dimension. Isn’t that a new and interesting thing?

  Nicholas: Yeah. It is a new and interesting thing. It’s very dangerously close to being massively overhyped, but it’s an exciting thing. But I think it needs something more and the state may…  David Cameron tried to do this with big society capital. Nice idea. That’s going to be a long time working out how the state fits into this. But if we want that stuff to do big things rather than lots of nice little things, we’re not there yet. We don’t know quite how to do that but it’s an exciting thing.

  Martin: I’ll just comment on this because I think you’ve raised a fascinating question and it sort of links with what Nicholas was saying which is why we are so unimaginative in a sense. So we have three huge legacies from the past. They go back to the 19th century I think, which we’ve never solved. Land, which you’ve introduced, right? Money and the corporation, the limited liability corporation. And they are hugely problematic. And as far as I can see, nobody has fixed it. You could say in some sense that certainly communism wanted to, but it clearly didn’t. And I think it’s quite astonishing how the people are beginning to think about the corporation, but they’re all three incredibly enormous. We really have to revisit that. Then we had the creation, which I think is absolutely central, of crucial natural infrastructure monopolies, which you mentioned. And basically, they all ended up as either publicly owned or private and regulated. And by and large, people have found both alternatives rather unsatisfactory, but some of them haven’t worked too bad. And I think many of us would feel we can still do quite a bit more work on this, perhaps nationalise one or two of them.

  But anyway, we understand the problem that this is a very special problem of knowledge and information which fortunately was a monopoly in the ‘20s, so we created the BBC. We wouldn’t do it now. But I think nowadays that’s the biggest new one because of the explosion of the whole knowledge industry which is such a complete nightmare and the one that we should be thinking about and really are thinking about as far as I can see at all. And there are so many dimensions. Nicholas was talking about science, the universities, and of course, the great platform [01:07:38] the internet and all the rest of it. And I don’t think there’s any really interested, I mean, new thinking here. So I have a colleague who sort of calls from breaking out of a stroke doing something about Google. I haven’t devoted a lot of thought about what should be done about Google. I haven’t read anybody who has produced something that says, “That’s what we have to do about Google.” I don’t know. But it is remarkable that these entities have emerged to such a transformative effect without anybody really thinking about their governments.

  So these are the categories I’ve put things into. They’re all problems we never solved. The infrastructure problem that we sort of know how to solve, even if we don’t do it perfectly, and the new monopoly problems with which so much rental value is associated which seems to me we’re just not thinking about it at all. But it sounds like Nicholas sort of. And so my answer to you is no, we stopped thinking about this quite a long time ago. It’s rather depressing.

  Nicholas: Can I just comment on [01:08:48].

  Henry: We’ve got lots of hands out there.

  Nicholas: Oh, sorry. Okay.

  Man 4: Yes. I’d like to make a  remark. So on the last one on what is a free market, I don’t agree that the limited liability corporations, because it encourages…[01:09:05]

  Martin: I didn’t say it was a bad thing. I said it’s a very problematic thing.

  Man 4: But to get to what I think is the core of Nick’s issues is that you sort of seem to me as a group of pragmatically minded economists who are sort of non-ideological and who in that sense would look out for opportunities or different kinds of theories as to how to tackle all kinds of problems in a fairly pragmatic way. But I think that sort of misunderstands a little bit how we as a country has learned. Because, I think we learned the most from lots and lots of experiments from other countries where they tried lots and lots of things for all kinds of very ideological or other reasons.  But we’ll copy it anyway if it works. So the Chinese are trying an alternative to Google, basically out of government control issues, and while that’s very successful we might copy it. They too are thinking of biogenetic hacks, so sort of having access to the whole population. If they get to, we’ll copy it. Other countries are looking to the house as a means of reducing the number of x politicians.

  Nicholas: Sounds like a means of increasing the number of x politicians.

  Man 4: No, no, no, because you keep them in the system and you stop it from becoming obvious.

  Nicholas: Yeah. Okay.

  Man 4: And so we look to each other as countries for all kinds of experiments without even knowing what theory they have.

  Nicholas: Sure.

  Man 4: And so it’s not really about understanding the problem. It’s more recognizing the solution when you see it.

  Nicholas: Yeah.

  Man 4: Which is a totally different kind of knowledge today. All you need is a group of well-interested people. They don’t even need to be well-informed. They don’t even need to be well-theoried.

  Nicholas: Sure. I just think I’m trying to use my discipline in a constructive way. But yeah, that’s absolutely true. Stuff happens and you try to learn from it.

  Man 4: And it also happens. I mean, there’s quite a bit of copying, thinking about, putting up more internet [01:11:15].

  Nicholas: Yeah, absolutely.

  Henry: Adam, you have…?

  Adam: Yeah. I just want to say thanks for the talk. It was really fascinating. Probably the best talk, I reckon. It’s a fantastic talk.

  Nicholas: Henry will be arriving for the second best talk. Henry will have the second best talk now because it’s now been surpassed. Sorry. Go on.

  Adam: I think the reason the talk was interesting was there were fresh ideas there, it seems to me. You’re looking at areas of economics that are underexplored. I thought they’re very interesting areas that you’re talking about. So I slightly disagree with Martin’s characterisation of it as a pragmatic kind of hack even though that is the way that you sort of presented it.  Because to me, there’s an underlying theory that’s trying to get out there which is to break down some of these ideological barriers about what we’re studying because, by implication, if you do that you’re going to generalise your theory of, say, public goods, right? You’re going to have a more general theory of public goods. One can account things like the internet much more easily than these textbook examples of lighthouses and things like this, right? Because the world has moved on. So my thing about where I think it should go then is that you should look at biology  and risk in biology because you’ve got 3.6 billion years of risk management on this planet. And it’s great that you have a history of the 20th century and the 19th century and the 18th century, but that’s 300 years of one species. And there’s so much over that I’d love to discuss with you. So many ideas. Information is what nature is all about, evolution is all about, and the breakthroughs that’s going on, signalling and…

  Nicholas: Digital information.

  Adam: Yeah. Yeah.

  Henry: So is there a theory?

  Nicholas: No. I mean, I look around. The way I think about this is is best described by Jerry Seinfeld. And he says in a routine, “Girls,” and he’s talking about men. He says, “Do you want to know what we’re thinking?” And they say, “Yes”. He says, “We’re not thinking anything. We’re just walking around, looking around.” And so I think these grand theories are actually trouble. There are people who come along and they do spend a lifetime working on something and they give us something that can be quite valuable. But I look around and look for things that fairly quickly I can put together with this, with that, and this goes with that, and then maybe we should try this and you can try it out. And biology, of course, is full of these things that you can take that from. Anyway, it sort of leads to my whole idea about we’ve got this idea that we’re in the image of science and science is about understanding the world in some kind of holistic way and then we make predictions. Well, that never worked out in the social sciences. But then we have enough knowledge to then say, “Well,” to then sort of somehow intuit, “Well, if we did this, then that would happen.”

  Now, we actually never have knowledge of that that’s good enough to do that but somehow we work out what to do. And that’s because most of the time the most useful thinking is normative thinking. What should we be doing? Now, of course you can’t do normative thinking without any idea of the substance that you’re interacting with but it’s the normative thinking for me that is the prime mover. It’s where you start and it’s where you come back to and then you learn as much as you need to about this system. And we have it all around the other way. Why? Because it helps build disciplines. It helps so people who are the custodians of the discipline can keep producing this stuff. But that’s a big theory all in itself and I’ve just contradicted myself.

  Man 5: I think I agree with the last speaker. I really enjoyed your talk. The one thing that surprised me most was that you were so critical of the idea of talking about paradigms. Seems to me that there is a genuine paradigm shift underway in economics. There’s a real difference between thinking that the economy works like an equilibrium-based, deterministic system and thinking that it works like a biological, evolutionary, context-adaptive system. And that’s not just philosophical. It is a mathematical difference. It’s a modelling difference. It’s a theoretical difference.

  Nicholas: And it would have made no difference to any of the things I said.

  Man 5: Well, that’s what I was going to turn into.

  Nicholas: No, it is true. It is true.

  Man 5: I was going to ask you what you really thought.

  Nicholas: Well, take the example of a public-private digital partnership. Okay? It enables us to do something that is not otherwise doable. Take the example of limited liability companies. You don’t need to know whether you’re in a biological world or a neoclassical world because we all know that the neoclassical world isn’t this beautiful Newtonian thing. We’ve got enough common sense to know that unpredictable things happen and that’s why we have limited liability companies. So I don’t want to say “People, you mustn’t talk about this stuff.” I mean, it’s interesting stuff. It’s just too interesting in terms of the amount that it yields.

  So I got into a big debate with Paul Krugman about whether it was so much worth his time building imperfect competition into trade when people like John Hicks had said before the event, “It’s not worth it. It’ll take you years and you’ll end up with answers which are basically- it depends because it’s all so complicated.” Okay? So there. That’s an explanation of what I’m doing. It isn’t saying you mustn’t talk about this stuff, but I do think that it sounds too serious. It’s too entertaining. People love having these fights. And there’s so much that we can achieve by just trying to use whatever paradigm we have constructively, thoughtfully, conservatively, carefully because it’ll get you a long way. And then sometimes you will really have to say, “Well, we don’t know what kind of world we’re in now and maybe we have to go and try and do some of that stuff.” What we’ve discovered with agent-based modelling and so on is that it’s really, really complicated and it’s really hard to make predictions. Hello. That’s imperfect competition. Okay? So just proceed with the possibility in mind that what you’re going to achieve is much less grand than it feels like having all the debates.

  Henry: Nicholas, can I just follow up on that?

  Nicholas: Yeah.

  Henry: Surely in your presentation you’ve shown how a particular paradigm of thinking about public and private has led to lots of problems. And your differential way of putting it takes you into a different place where maybe you even find some solutions. So isn’t that a paradigm?

  Nicholas: If you want. That’s a paradigm. It’s a little bit of a shift of focus.

  Henry: Yeah. Isn’t that what paradigms are is a shift of focus?

  Nicholas: All right. Okay. What’s that?

  Man 6: What you said was the single one sentence conclusion of your report, that follows very naturally from thinking about it as an evolutionary system. So it’s very difficult to put forward that conclusion that you did; that the output was co-produced by the financial sector and the regulators.

  Nicholas: Yeah.

  Man 6: If you’re seeing it as an evolutionary system, that’s more intuitive. That’s more obvious.

  Nicholas: Yeah.

  Man 6: So suggesting that the change in the theoretical paradigm would really support the arguments that you’re making.

  Henry: Martin, do you want to take it? Where do you come with this one?

  Martin: I’m very close to Nicholas on this. So the way I think about this now is you have to understand the sort of question you’re trying to answer in this particular case. So if I were asked, “How do you think about the economic system as a whole over time?” then clearly the evolutionary paradigm is the useful way of thinking about that. And for certain purposes, that’s ideal and gets to a lot of questions. There are certain other questions that I have been interested in for which much simpler models like balance of payments theory, for example, very precisely, and the link between balance of payments theory and the financial crisis which I wrote about in my last book: Where I think that you have fairly standard Mundell-Fleming type balance of payments models actually throw a lot of light on what is going on. So the way I think about this, which I think is what those physicists who still use Newtonian mechanics for certain problems do in working out how to send and I’m not an expert on this, spaceships to the moon. I don’t know how much, I mean, relativity they need. I think it’s pretty Newtonian given the speed.

  So you need to be, particularly in social science, to be a heroic simplifier but you mustn’t simplify more than you can get away with. And how do you know the answer to that? One, you never do. And two, probably thinking about things for half a century else. So I feel when I think about problems, great science problems and how to approach them as an economist, I think now everything I thought with the first 30 years of my life as a freshman economist was worthless because I didn’t understand any of that. So I think I’m just rephrasing what Nicholas said in a slightly different way. So for certain purposes, very important purposes, I’m completely with you and for other purposes, fairly good old-fashioned theory can get you there. And the trick is knowing which one is which and often you’ll be wrong.

  Nicholas: Marshall is good, I think. Marshall thinks of the economy as a biological organism and he’s trying to sort of find analytic hacks through the undergrowth that give him good perspectives on things.

  Henry: I think that’s our take on pluralism. Tim?

  Tim: Yeah. Thanks. That was a very good talk but the big thing that was missing was the natural environment as an activity [01:22:43] and of course, the standard economic…

  Nicholas: [01:22:45] Australia? Silly comment. Sorry. Go on.

  Tim: The standard economic description is emissions tradings, property rights. But what we found is that that’s very difficult to do in a way that is effective and equitable.

  Nicholas: Well, politically I don’t know how inequitable it is but we found that we’re not up to it. We’re not up to snuff.

  Tim: Yeah. Right. I guess my question was how would that fit into your scheme? It seems that it should fit well with your scheme of this combination of the public and private. We’re looking 55 years to actually get on with this.

  Nicholas: No. I can’t offer much. I’m terrified it might already be too late. I mean, this is a tragedy. I remember watching somebody talking to the UN or something and she burst into tears. That’s the appropriate thing. This is madness. It’s going to cost the world 1% to 3% of GDP. That’s getting as rich as you were going to get but three months, no, nine months later. That’s what we’re talking about. Over the next 50 years.

  Tim: It’s nothing to…

  Nicholas: And there are apparently underpasses in Alaska that stink like rubbish tips and that’s the permafrost melting, you know? What the hell are we doing? Okay? But there’s nothing much I can do. I can’t conjure up a rational world. I’ll make a somewhat critical comment about mainstream economics here which you might have heard once before, which is that economists went off and they turned it into a nice little set piece about what the right discount rate should be.  Now the point is that ask yourself what was the right discount rate for D-Day. The sunlit uplands if we win and darkness if we lose. So the idea of a discount rate is actually in its own terms a simple equation for discounting. It’s got three terms in it and if you are going to be in a poorer world then the discount rate goes positive. Okay? So don’t picnic. Don’t sort of have a big smorgasbord about this little set piece out of the textbook and just show, and now I’m being ruder than I should be about people who are cleverer than me but show that you didn’t really even understand the textbook. That you didn’t take the discipline and use it on its merits.

  Another very simple way to think about my message is that we get taught that economics is sort of like a rectangle box and this much is theory and that much is applying it. And I put it around the other way. There’s theory up here and there’s always resources. And I hope I’ve shown you that all the ways in which various simple ideas can be just used in slightly different ways to give you an insight into a situation. But you have to be a craftsman at that. You have to be imaginative in the way you try these things out. But that’s not going to save the planet, I’m afraid. We just have to decide whether we want it or not. We want them for our kids. We’re going to be, I’m going to be okay, by which I mean dead.

  Henry: Right. I think we may have one last question.

  Martin: It’s one sentence because it’s something I’ve thought about quite a bit. Again, this is the extreme example of this, which is that it is astonishingly difficult to persuade us, and I include myself in this, to pay for something that one is used to having free. It feels like our natural right if it’s being free. Just getting people to pay for parking in front of their houses or driving in London or, of course, using up the entire atmosphere for our purposes, it just seems wrong. And that seems to be a very profound human conservative emotion.

  Henry: And maybe that’s why a carbon tax would never work but maybe other things would. Anyway, I’d like to now thank Nicholas and Martin enormously for a fascinating evening. And thank you.

February 05, 2019

• Club Troppo How Social Science could be taught. A vision for the future.

  [note to self]

  Economics, sociology, anthropology, history, psychology, and the other social sciences are currently taught in an unorganised manner. The undergraduate degree in any of these disciplines consists of about 20 separate courses that each differ markedly from the other 19 and that are unrecogniseable of those of the other disciplines. The language used in each course is different, the perspective on the same events differs, and there are deep contradictions in any course with what is said in the other courses.

  The ways things are taught are usually also very old-fashioned and dull, with little use made of the possibilities of virtual reality and field trips. Pontificating teachers dominate the courses, with little of the knowledge truly reaching the students.

  It can be done much better. I think it is possible to teach students the actual content of all the regular social science undergrad courses in one curriculum in a manner that they understand the material and see the interconnections. It can certainly be done for the relatively bright students, say the top 30% of the usual students found in the West.

  The biggest change needed is to teach the material in terms of basic patterns, with more complex arguments taught later as combinations of basic patterns. Another change needed is to enforce a single language on the entire curriculum. Finally, what is needed is far more use of virtual reality-teaching and field trips so that students experience the phenomena they are meant to understand, unlocking their visual acuity and emotional skills as learning tools. Students should learn with their whole being, not merely with their abstractive capacities.

  What do I mean by basic patterns and how would one mobilise more of the mental faculties of students? Let me give three examples from different disciplines to illustrate the immense similarities between them and how it can be presented.

  A basic sociological pattern (eg Durkheim) is that of comparative advantage: a group of individuals can produce more if they each specialise in what they are relatively best at. One does not need to introduce exchange or prices to make that point, because those are other patterns. The basic pattern of comparative advantage is that there exist different productivities across entities.

  This pattern should be taught in a layered manner, from exceptionally simple to incredibly complex. In the simplest form, one would have two people with comparative advantages. Students can learn to recognise it in a game, where the only object is to maximise some notion of joint production via the allocation of time. Once students have experienced this possibility, one can expand the pattern to talk about comparative advantages between countries, between the countryside and the city, between rulers and the ruled, between parents and their children, between partners in a marriage. The various forms of comparative advantage in various realms can be experienced in a virtual reality game, as well as by students re-interpreting their experiences as social beings.

  Once students ‘get’ the point, both at a cognitive and emotional level, one can then put this into maths and statistics (which can become incredibly complex very quickly). By doing it this way round, mathematics is put in its proper place in social science: as a codification of what one knows by more basic means, not as the original source of the knowledge. The next step is to then combine the comparative advantage pattern with other patterns, like exchange and prices, or the notion of prior investments that create comparative advantages over time.

  A different pattern is that of abstract ideation wherein the approach to any social problem is to imagine some possible solution that comes with causal pathways as to how to get there. This act of the imagination has a huge number of examples, but the key thing is that a problem is encountered that requires a leap from where one is to where one thinks one could be. This pattern too can be taught in an experiential and layered manner.

  A simple version of this is literally that of a journey with an obstacle (a tree over the road, a stream) where an act of the imagination causes one to jump over or go around the obstacle, using implicit knowledge of both the road and the obstacle. A less simple example is of imagining a paddle to get a boat to move from one end to the other. Another example is to imagine redistribution to solve poverty. A less simple example again is to imagine a god to which one can appeal to get it to rain (imagined solutions need not be right!). All these examples can be made experiential, enforced by field trips and actual conversations with people experiencing problems and telling stories of supposed solutions. By going over selected examples one is effectively re-imagining social science as a whole, breaking it all down into quite simple patterns.

  Note that for this pattern one does not engage with the supposed solutions or even the supposed problems: it is the act of imagination that is itself put under the microscope, put into stylised and personal experiences, and eventually mathematised. For instance, the idea of a perfect market or a productivity possibilities frontier are classic examples of imaginative thinking in economics, but one need not look at either in any detail to ‘get’ the idea of a leap of the imagination from what is to what could be.

  A third example of a pattern is increasing returns to scale, ie that more can be produced if resources are bundled towards the same end. This too can go from very trite (cooperation begets more output) to more poignant (a unified band of warriors can subdue a much larger population and get all the benefits). By drawing out how very complex historical and societal processes involve very simple basic patterns, such as that the state at heart can be seen as a monopoly of violence, unifying themes between the social sciences are brought out that are currently known by insiders but that students will generically never see.

  To learn to see basic patterns in history, current institutions, and in different social situations can be practised both via virtual reality games, as well as via field trips wherein students get to experience what it is like to be swept away by the crowd, to feel powerful, to be bewildered by hyper-inflation, and to be afraid of the unknown.

  More complex phenomena and ideas can then be gradually built up as combinations of basic patterns. A well-functioning market for instance is a combination of various things: prior production by many sellers, planned consumption by many buyers, mediated exchange, visible price formation and implicit formation of knowledge about quality and trustworthiness. Each of these is a different pattern that can be seen in all the social sciences and that first should be studied and experienced on its own before adding them all together in an actual market. By letting students see the complexity of something like a market, they would also understand why it has proven too difficult to actually mathematise markets and that yet the discipline of economics relies heavily on market-derived thinking by simply presuming properties associated with markets in various situations (i.e. law of one price, zero-profits, etc.). Students would thus also start to see the quasi-religious elements in the various social sciences, not as a failing but as the optimal approach to complexity. Rather than present quasi-religious elements as a critique they would learn to see such elements are normal and present in all social sciences. There would thus be a liberation from false pretenses.

  The teaching of mathematics at primary schools, particularly the Singapore model, now follows exactly this line of thinking: from simple to complex where one first really gets familiar with each basic pattern before combining the patterns. Children are for instance drilled into a lot of multiplications to ‘get’ what multiplication means. When they are then taught about exponentials they first extrapolate from their prior experience of multiplication to recognise that exponentials look a lot like a sequence of multiplications, though over time they learn it truly is a new pattern that then itself becomes the basis of further explorations.

  Also, the Singapore model of teaching mathematics coopts the visual memory of students by using pictures, as-if situations, and natural-looking objects to teach the basic patterns. Many of the basic patterns of mathematics can be experienced, which makes it far easier for students to ‘get’ them and then to hold onto them. In the case of addition, multiplication and division this is trivial. But it is now also done for the normal distribution (which emerges for instance when one looks at the dispersion patterns of kicking a ball) and for logarithms (which emerges when one looks at increments in perception).

  We should teach social science in the same way but coopting even more of the mental faculties of students, which would make seemingly complex and mysterious phenomena like love and religion look almost trivial once properly dissected.

  Why don’t we do this already and what are hence the barriers? The biggest problem is the prior teaching and career incentives of the social scientists currently doing the teaching.

  Social science has become increasingly specialised such that there are now thousands of little territories dominated by small groups of scientists who each write their own textbook about their supposedly unique subject area. This territorial game comes with the incentive for each little group to invent their own language or else to invent a very different meaning to the same words used by others. In the language of first-year economics, what each group does is to erect entry barriers to their basic knowledge so as to increase the monopoly rents they can then extract.

  The current social scientists are not going to let go of their monopoly rents easily. In the development of an integrative curriculum they will complain and obstruct. They will resist the unification of language; they will resist having to re-think their subject in terms of simpler patterns; and they will only engage with more modern and immersive forms of teaching if they feel they have to.

  The more famous the social scientist, the more of a problem they can be expected to be because the more they would have to lose from the de-mystification of their subject areas. The less famous social scientists have less to lose, but of course are usually less able to do the work of dissecting what is known across many areas into much simpler patterns.

  A unifying approach to social science is potentially a huge boon to the university that gets it right, and as such something that interests the hierarchy. University administrators are used to having to deal with the egos of scientists and will thus easily recognise their inevitable whinging. Yet, on the other hand the administrations can fear the risks involved in field trips and immersive experiences needed to have students experience high-emotive phenomenon, such as the power of a crowd or the lure of religion. Scientists will on the other hand fear this much less and be rather intrigued by the challenge of creating the right environment in which such phenomena can be made experiential.

  So one should expect both scientists and administrators to have problems with the approach sketched above, with the scientists fearing additional work and the loss of mystique whilst the administrators fearing the potential results of actual learning, i.e. students who have truly been challenged and changed.

  What would it take to organise this? The virtual reality challenge is quite difficult. I happen to know that one attempt in this direction (Playconomics) took the creators 2 years of their life to program just one course. To put 10 courses into this kind of format would thus easily cost 20 work-years of high-end programming, i.e. it would easily take a team of 5 good programmers 4 years.

  One should also not underestimate the task of dissecting current social science into more basic patterns. Based on my own experimentation in this direction over the years, I estimate it would need a team of about 5 good social scientists from the different disciplines incrementally going over the material together and agreeing on a common language and a common view of how the more complex phenomenon can be broken down into shared simpler patterns. They should be able to crack it in 2 years and then optimise the teaching in 5.

  Then there is the experimentation with formats and field trips and whatnot. It will take a few years to get that right, costing a lot of effort in terms of organisation.

  So I think it would take a team of roughly 15 people some 5 years to develop this and set it up as a 3.5 year set of 20 courses. If one adds material and facilities to this, one is hence talking in the range of 10-20 million dollars in terms of developmental costs. To do the experimentation one would furthermore need the active cooperation of an existing education institution with reasonable students being taught the initial courses.

  Once there is an integrated curriculum, it is easy to see how it can evolve and spread: it would become like a commercially-owned internet platform for which any team in the world could build additional ‘apps’, where new developers would use the same language and the same set of basic patterns. Innovation would happen in terms of new areas, new complex patterns, and new teaching methods.

  The commercial package as a whole could then be marketed and managed to reach millions of students each year who would all do the same exams, replacing the ridiculous situation we have now where each university maintains its own virtually identical curriculum in terms of content. The university system as a whole would thus be made much more efficient and profitable by getting rid of the immense and pointless duplication currently in the system.

  A professionalisation of social science can also be expected to transform universities and the academy.

  In terms of universities, we would go to the situation where there are a few universities that develop whole integrated curricula like the one I sketched above, whilst the rest become franchises in terms of content. As with car-manufacturers, we should get a few highly experimental top-end universities that compete with new designs and philosophies, ruthlessly experimenting on their own students and offering suites of products for external local tastes. The rest should specialise in providing feed-back to individual students, organising their own field trips, and adding a bit of local content, but otherwise simply teach the content of the leaders, branded as such.

  The academy would also be transformed because a unified teaching approach would go a long way to break down the unnecessary silos between the many sub-disciplines. The students who are taught the unifying language and set of ideas would simply no longer respect the barriers to entry between groups. This should make it far easier to communicate and learn from each other. It would then become visible how little real innovation there has been to the basic curriculum in some areas and how much duplication there is in terms of research and ideas between areas. In turn, this should down the line lead to far fewer social scientists in academia, with perchance a growth of them elsewhere, such as in policy institutes and for-profit enterprises.

  It can be done and embryonic steps in this direction can be seen across the world by different teams and individuals. The CoreEconomics project for instance enforces a single language and the Playconomics project uses virtual reality to great effect. Yet there is no attempt anywhere to truly scale all this up and to destroy the silos that constrain social science. The key problem is not so much the intellectual challenge or even the costs, but the current incentives of both scientists and administrators.

February 04, 2019

• Daniel Bowen The Myki mobile trial is progressing

  Last year the government announced that Myki would be coming to mobile phones. Early testing happened late last year, and last week PTV opened up the trial to up to 4000 participants.

  The technology allows you to load a “virtual” Myki card onto your Android phone within Google Pay, and use it for travelling on public transport.

  Apparently there are people out there for whom the holy grail of everyday life is being able to carry their phone but leave their wallet at home. I’m not one of those people, but this could help them meet that goal.

  What you need to join in

  The basic requirements are:

  • Android 5+, supporting Google Pay
  • NFC (Near-Field Communication) on your phone
  • Gmail account – this seems to be used to whitelist your account for the trial
  • Credit card – this is added to Google Pay to load up the virtual Myki card

  You can apply on the PTV web site.

  

  How it works

  Once you’re accepted, your Google Pay account is whitelisted. You can then go into Google Pay, then to Passes, Travel cards, and you should be able see a Myki option.

  If that works, from there you can create a new Myki card on your phone. It simulates a real card, though unlike a real card, it’s free – at least during the trial.

  Just like a real card it can be loaded with Myki Money or Myki Pass. (The latter is limited to 60 days, the length of the trial, but this limit will be removed when Mobile Myki publicly available.)

  Curiously, the virtual card expires in two years. Not sure why.

  It looks like, as with other Google Pay functionality, the phone just has to be awake and unlocked when you touch it to a reader. The phone and the reader talk to each other and Google Pay figures out that it wants the Myki card, and applies the touch.

  (Someone on one of the forums reckoned it doesn’t even have to be awake. I couldn’t get that to work.)

  What’s impressive here is that it works with most of the existing Myki hardware:

  • Fare readers (old and new);
  • Myki Checks;
  • handheld devices used by Authorised Officers and V/Line conductors.

  This is important, as it means a full rollout can occur without expensive and time-consuming replacement of the tens of thousands of devices out there. Given the older fare readers are 10+ years old, this is almost miraculous.

  PTV tells me that it doesn’t work with:

  • Card vending machines;
  • Myki Quick Top-up machines;
  • Station booking office equipment.

  Thankfully none of these are essential to allow people to travel around the network.

  

  Using Myki mobile

  I already have a Myki card with a brand new Yearly fare on it, so I’m unlikely to use it for everyday travel at the moment.

  But I’ve tried it a few times with Myki Money loaded.

  As you’d expect, the fare charging is identical to a real Myki card.

  Response times: initially I found it very patchy. But for I also tried (for the first time) Google Pay at the supermarket, and found the same issue.

  Eventually I figured it out: it helped a lot to discover that for my Motorola phone, the NFC antenna is right at the top.

  So you don’t hold the phone to the reader in the middle, and flat like a Myki card. In the case of my phone, you point the top to the reader – then it works much better.

  So it’s definitely worth checking where the NFC antenna is on your phone.

  Once you’ve mastered your touch technique, it seems about the same speed as a physical card: pretty fast on the new readers; somewhere between fast and slow on the old ones.

  The virtual card can be registered to a Myki account, so you can then use it to top-up online, or even set up Auto Topup (which for Myki Money users is great).

  Important: if you can’t be sure that your phone battery will last while you’re travelling, you may want to stay away from this. PTV tells me it’s the passenger’s responsibility to ensure that if ticket checked, their phone has enough juice.

  Things that they could improve

  You can top up instantly within Google Pay, which is a big plus over a normal Myki card.

  But you can’t set up Auto Top-up, which would be helpful.

  I’d personally love to see Auto Top-up combined with weekly and/or monthly fare capping. That would completely remove the requirement for regular passengers to ever buy Passes or top-up again, while knowing they aren’t paying more than necessary if they travel every day including weekends.

  

  The travel history within the app isn’t perfect – sometimes it just says “Public transport”, though usually it figures out the mode.

  The mode icons are apparently Google’s, not PTVs – because it’s within Google Pay, there are limitations.

  Transferring existing funds and Passes from a physical card to the phone app’s virtual card does not appear to be straightforward – this is a hangover from Myki’s existing policies and procedures. It’d be good if this was resolved in some way.

  And ideally the mobile Myki could be used with any of the existing devices, opening up more top-up options such as cash or EFT/ATM cards using a station vending machine. (I’m sure I’m not the only one who periodically takes all my change to the railway station to load up onto my Myki card.)

  And of course the additional payment option of using a phone doesn’t abrogate them from fixing issues with the physical Myki cards.

  Why doesn’t it work on iPhone?

  It’s all a bit technical, but it seems to be an issue with the different approaches from Google and Apple.

  From what I can gather:

  Google is happy to let developers make full use of the NFC functionality in phones to do whatever, including doing things outside Google Pay.

  Specifically, PTV and others use a feature called “Host Card Emulation“, so the phone can impersonate a Myki card.

  In contrast, Apple provides only limited access to NFC functionality in phones, because they want all transactions to be within Apple Pay, from which they take a cut (something like 0.15%). They won’t allow Host Card Emulation.

  Here’s some technical discussion on Whirlpool about it. Don’t take it all as gospel, of course.

  Elsewhere…

  In some places like London (which uses the Oyster system) and Sydney (which uses Opal, which is Oyster technology), iPhones/Apple Pay can be used because they are actually impersonating a credit card, not a transport card.

  This is apparently impossible in Melbourne because the readers can’t read credit cards, though I’m not sure if that’s all readers or just the older ones. You would hope the newer ones are capable, and gradually they would replace the old ones.

  Simply using a credit card which charges the appropriate fare is obviously a lot easier for tourists: no mucking about to set it up; no trying to calculate how much money to load so you don’t end up over-paying with little hope of easily getting a refund.

  In other places like Shanghai and Beijing, the local transport authorities are beta testing with Apple, and have presumably found a way to work with Apple’s technology and conditions.
  

  

  Leading the world?

  What’s interesting is that there are actually very few jurisdictions using Google Pay for their public transport — Google only introduced it last year. Las Vegas (which shows up as an option), Birmingham (UK), and a few Asian cities apparently. And us.

  So if it goes well and gets a wider rollout, we might be one of the first big systems using it.

  That’s might be something you didn’t expect from Myki!

  Public transport needs to be simple to use, so services need to improve, but opening up easier payment options is also important. So it’s good to see this progressing.

February 03, 2019

• Club Troppo Paul Krugman’s incredible invisibility trick

  It’s impossible to avoid misjudgements in life or to get all one’s predictions right. But should economists get caught out quite so often?

  Paul Krugman is honest and self-critical. So he’s up for identifying what economists missed about globalisation – including himself.

  Of course, everyone’s wise in hindsight. Still, Krugman keeps reporting that economists ignored things that were … kind of obvious.

  For one person to miss something is a misfortune.

  But a whole profession doing it, again and again, seems like carelessness.

  I’ve previously locked horns with Krugman regarding his own tolerance of economists ignoring things that were staring them in the face — about which more shortly.

  In any event, Krugman was in Melbourne recently to give an informative and enjoyable lecture in Max Corden’s honour (watch below).

  One of his central points was to defend trade theory against ignorant critics.

  As he pointed out, although some critics accuse economists of arguing that free trade is good for everyone, that’s not economics speaking, but certain economic zealots pushing a barrow.

  Standard trade theory suggests that freer trade will generate winners and losers. If imports decimate an industry, investors and workers in that industry will suffer harm. This is inter-industry trade expansion such as we’ve seen in Australia recently with increased imports of cars wiping out Australian car manufacturing, paid for by increased exports — mostly of iron ore and other primary commodities.

  This was the trade that was implicit in economists’ models. But as Krugman points out, economists started realising that something else was going on from around the 1960s on.

  The fog of clear thinking

  Turns out Krugman blames clear thinking.

  If you think clearly — well you kind of just miss stuff. And it turns out that this clear thinking — which, of course, all your best colleagues are doing — leads them to miss stuff too. Even more worrying, they miss exactly the same stuff.

  Here’s Krugman explaining how economists twigged to new realities of trade from the 1960s on:

  “If you look at where trade was growing, it was growing within Europe at the time and between countries that look quite similar. It was intra-industry trade among similar countries.¹ What was that about? Actually, that was an interesting thing because it was really very hard for people to … It was very hard for economists with formal models to even talk about that. For a while there, there was an advantage to not being, not thinking too clearly because if you didn’t think too clearly you could say, “Oh yes, obviously there’s advantages of large-scale production and you can produce a smaller number of products at large scale, export those, import other stuff.” But then economists would say, have you modelled that in general equilibrium? How do I handle the market structure? I can’t do that so it must not exist. Well, actually, we managed to pull that together.” (Emphasis added).

  I’ll expand on the invisibility of intra-industry trade shortly, but Krugman is on his way to explaining another disappearing trick.

  As he argues, just after his own ‘new’ economic theory of trade and geography made it possible to ‘see’ intra-industry trade, a kind of intellectual Murphy’s Law intervened. Just as the discipline was coming to understand what was really going on … what was really going on changed.²

  The 1990s saw the transition from Pax Americana to Pax Sinica, with the most populous and fastest growing country in the world, China, exporting its way to prosperity. And this intensified inter-industry trade with all its disruptive potential.

  But isn’t it kind of obvious that, once China gets in on the act in a big way, the magnitude of things is going to change and that, with China’s very different labour costs, a lot of the trade expansion will be inter rather than intra-industry trade?

  There was a further problem.

  As we’ve known since at least the early 1900s, when Alfred Marshall documented it, manufacturing industry is very regionally specialised. So that means that, even where impacts are small at the national level, they can be very damaging for specific towns and regions — as it was for Hickory, North Carolina faced with a surge of Chinese furniture imports.

   

  

   

  Krugman acknowledges his own failure to anticipate this.

  “Having been a participant in a lot of the debates about trade and wages in the 90s I can say … I certainly missed … I wasn’t thinking at all about the dynamics of rapid change.”

  So good on him. And I’m not particularly critical of him for not foreseeing it. He’s a busy guy writing two op-eds a week — #Srsly! — but he only does that in his spare time. His main job is thinking about stuff, and he happened to be thinking about other stuff. No-one can think about everything.

  One can’t ignore the dynamics

  But I am critical of him for is for his continuing complacency about his profession.

  Note how he says he and his fellow economists weren’t focusing on dynamics. Well, it was those dynamics that the community was anxious about — they’re really everything in the political discussion of trade.

  Krugman wasn’t thinking about dynamics because he was doing ‘comparative statics’ or comparing one long-run state with a counterfactual long-run state. And that was because that’s how trade theory has been built.

  That great prize of modelling imperfect competition in ‘general equilibrium’, for which Krugman got another Great Prize, wasn’t the most important thing we needed to know about trade. Indeed great economists of the past had warned us it was unlikely to tell us much — warnings which were vindicated in hindsight. But that was what floated the discipline’s boat.

  As Keynes famously said regarding similar problems in macro-economics (and some readers may not be familiar with the whole quote):

  “The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run, we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if, in tempestuous seasons, they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again.”

  It seems to me all this is entirely forgivable for any one person. That’s why we have professions. And if a profession is too myopic, that’s why we have other professions. And if those professions are too myopic, that’s why we live in an open society. If it’s commonsensical, someone will point it out. But here it turns out that, for Krugman none of these resources were available.

  Reflecting on whether or not economists should have considered the dynamics of change Krugman says this:

  “I think I can say with a fair degree of confidence that basically, nobody was, that this was just not the way that economists were thinking about the issue. We were thinking … in terms of long-run equilibrium models, which seemed reasonable but was actually missing a lot of what was going on.”

  So, things that were both obvious when you thought about them even informally, and obviously important were invisible. They were invisible to a whole profession and … well, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. I guess that’s clear thinking for you.

  To show you this invisibility trick in all its glory, here’s Krugman’s Nobel acceptance speech commenting on his theorising about intra-industry trade and the importance of industry-specific economies and scale and specialisation in driving trade:

  “You may think all this is obvious, and it is — now. But it was totally not obvious before 1980 or so — except for some prescient quotes from Paul Samuelson, you really can’t find anyone describing trade this way until after the theory had been laid out in mathematical models.”

  The plain English version came later:

  “And you should bear in mind that economists have been thinking and writing about international trade for a couple of centuries; to come along and say, “Hey, we’ve been missing half the story” was a pretty big thing.”

  As I wrote in my article on Krugman’s reaction to my speech launching Max Corden’s memoirs:

  “For all his brilliance, I’m repeatedly shocked at Krugman’s complacency regarding his own discipline”.

  What could Krugman possibly mean when he tells his Stockholm audience that “the plain English version” came after his theory?

  What’s his response to the list I mentioned in my speech?

  • Hicks (1959)
  • Linder (1961)
  • Elkan (1965)
  • Vernon (1966)
  • Balassa (1966)
  • Drysdale (1969)
  • Grubel (1967)
  • Gorden (1970)
  • Lloyd (1975)
  • Bhagwati (1973)
  • Gray (1976)
  • Krueger (1978)

  I’m genuinely baffled, given Krugman would be familiar with most if not all these authors.³

  There were plenty of canaries in the coal mine regarding the China Shock. They just weren’t giving seminars in the economics departments of the Ivy League.

  All of this reminds me of Robert Solow’s devastating observation, “Sometimes I think it is only my weakness of character that keeps me from making obvious errors”.

  Solow was a passionate believer in an older style of economic thinking, in which formal analysis developed in close dialogue with — and ideally was enveloped by — close discursive reasoning, though in the passage just quoted he was speaking about the pull of left and right wing ideology.

  Still, sometimes I think it’s Paul Krugman’s and his professions ‘clear thinking’ that leads them to make obvious errors — at least until after the event.

  References

  1. As he pointed out, economists have always argued that even though freer trade can be expected to lead to aggregate gains, it comes with substantial adjustment costs. This is because the standard understanding of trade was that it was driven by comparative costs. And this was always understood to involve expanding inter-industry trade. Thus Australia would export more coal, wool and iron ore and import more cameras clothes and cars. That’s obviously disruptive for the poor souls employed making clothes and cars (I’m not sure how many cameras we ever made but we probably made Box Brownies at least.) But if Australia exports Commodores and imports Mercedes it’s a very different story.
  2. As an aside my favourite example of this law is Malthus’s Principle of Population — perhaps we should call it Malthus’s law in his honour. It took until 1798 for someone to come up with an explanation for why human beings stayed close to substance despite considerable growth in economies and in technology — which was that population grew geometrically and would eventually absorb any additional production — which Malthus assumed would grow linearly. This was a very powerful explanation for a stylised fact which applied more or less to the whole of human history. But it was changing just as Malthus cooked up his theory. Today our living standards are around 25 times subsistence — smashed avocado brunch, anyone?
  3. The only way I can think of to rescue some semblance of sense in Krugman’s assertion is to say that by ‘no-one’ he means no-one who matters. But even this is hard to square with the list. He described Max Corden as a great economist in his lecture. And John Hicks is amongst the greatest economists of the twentieth century. So it’s not even economists in the top draw. It seems like a kind of tautological statement that economists who thought about trade in a particular way didn’t see it.

January 30, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Flinders Street Station goes Technicolour

  (I’m hoping to blog about the Myki Mobile trial in the next few days, so hold those thoughts)

  Some time in the last few days, a subtle addition appeared on the platform screens at Flinders Street Station: a countdown to departure. This has been on other displays around the network for decades, but some clever maths was needed to get this working here, as suburban services originate here.

  So to provide an accurate time for an outbound service, they have to know whether the inbound service that forms it is on time.

  New at Flinders St: minutes to departure now shown on the platform screens, just like at many other stations. It requires extra smarts because services originate here. #MetroTrains pic.twitter.com/sJPwARHMsq

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) January 28, 2019

  Then on Tuesday night, a far more obvious makeover: colour!

  On the concourse and in the connecting subways, the sequence of the lines is now more logical – by group rather than platform – with the colours from the network map used to help find your line.

  

  The sequencing is by group, then by departure time. I do wonder if this may cause issues when some infrequent lines may not display because the allotted space is all taken by more frequent services. Also note Alamein is missing below – the general advice outside peak hours is to take Belgrave/Lilydale to Camberwell and change there. (This is not very clear on the network map – it’s in a footnote only.)

  

  At the escalators from the concourse to the platforms, these screens show the next departure on each platform

  

  On the platforms they have the landscape version. Note the inconsistency in how skipped stations are shown. That seems odd.

  

  One thorny issue: if all Sunbury/Watergardens skip South Kensington, then is South Kensington really even on that line? And should those trains be summarised as a Limited Express? (Some trains on the line are actual expresses, skipping stations between Sunshine and Footscray, so this is important to passengers.)

  

  Also on the platforms are displays showing which platform to use for the next train to the other inner-city stations. This includes an animation of the City Loop, whose operations regularly confuse just about everyone.

  

  Curiously this screen declared the next arrival (presumably V/Line) was 102 minutes away… despite a V/Line train already being present.

  

  You might expect some teething issues. There have been some reports that the new software doesn’t cope well with cancelled services.

  Quite the muck around at FSS tonight not helped by the whiz bang new screens displaying cancelled services eh @metrotrains?
  The @vline_gippsland 2039 TRL service is displayed (despite being cancelled), with advice to board the 2033 PKM (also cancelled). Uh oh!@ptua @danielbowen pic.twitter.com/wyYDUM2aoF

  — Phillip Tyson (@PhillipTyson) January 30, 2019

  New #FlindersSt displays & departure countdowns quickly get confused with the usual #GreenLine delays at #FlindersSt
  
  7:26pm #Cheltenham ultimately cancelled with 7:36pm #FrankstonLine leaving ontime off platform 8 with sporadic announcements to advise@metrotrains @aussiewongm pic.twitter.com/5fOjOik2pO

  — Craig (@craig_halsall) January 30, 2019

  But overall these changes seem like a big improvement, and no doubt they’ll keep tweaking the design and fixing issues.

  I should note that my photos from the small camera I had with me at the time may not do the new colours justice; go see them for yourself before judging the readability. Apparently they did do quite a bit of usability testing beforehand.

  Hopefully we’ll see more of this – in particular more use of the line colours – and indeed more screens – spread across the network from here.

  What will also help legibility around the train network is more consistent stopping patterns and Loop operation, in line with the train network map.

  • Herald Sun: Are the new screens at Flinders St Station confusing or helpful? (Paywall)
  • Peter Stevens (PTV): Designing a network map
  • Alexandra Almond (Meld Studios, designers): Improving wayfinding at Melbourne’s busiest train station

January 28, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Armadale bad boys

  In the past year or two, the Cranbourne/Pakenham rail line has seen numerous upgrades to prepare for the High Capacity Metro Trains to start this year.

  Some of the upgrades are to power systems.

  I’m not normally one to write blog posts about new items of infrastructure, but have you seen these bad boys installed near Armadale station?

  

  Not your average overhead wire stanchions.

  There are two of them. It appears they’ve been used because there’s a lack of space on the north side of the rail lines just east of Kooyong Road.

  EDIT: I’m told there’s a third near Chapel Street in South Yarra.

  

  Apparently the distinctive spiral design is to keep the structure stable in the wind.

  

  They’re quite impressive. Keep a lookout if you’re going past.

  And expect to see similar power upgrades on the Sunbury line in the coming years to prepare for trains to be through-routed from Cranbourne/Pakenham via the metro tunnel out to Sunbury.

  • There’s a whole Reddit thread about these.

January 27, 2019

• Club Troppo What is a ‘policy hack’?

  Cross-posted from The Mandarin.

  I

  Since I used the term ‘policy hack’ in my presentation “What economic reform thinking might look like if we’d bothered to do it”, I’ve had a number of exchanges with Martin Wolf, my discussant that evening, about what I mean. Here’s how I defined the term when I first used it in the essay I ran up to support the presentation:

  I use the term ‘hack’ here to mean “a tip, trick, or efficient method for doing or managing something” (Dictionary.com). Though the term is sometimes taken to imply inelegant effectiveness, the policy ‘hacks’ covered here are often simple, but, because they typically work by some clear distinction being made (for instance between funding and provision or property rights and externalities) they are often also elegant.

  The point is best made by example. Speaking of the wave of economic reform from the 1970s on I suggested that, while its political impetus was declining economic performance in the wake of the 1970s oil shocks, its intellectual underpinnings went back to a cluster of ideas originating from the 1950s on. Moreover, I distinguished between ‘ideas’ and ‘hacks’. Friedman’s ‘idea’ was unbundling delivery from funding leading to the ‘hacks’ of vouchers and income-contingent loans, for instance. Coase’s ‘idea’ was to think about externalities as an artefact of the definition and assignment of property rights, the corresponding ‘hacks’ being such things as pollution permits and spectrum auctions.

  By contrast, I pointed to George Stigler’s research into utility regulation in the 1950s which documented the results of ‘regulatory capture’. This provides us with an ‘idea’ (price regulation isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.) It also leads us to ask if we could change things to improve this – change regulatory governance or whatever. But where, in the cases above, the hacks arise as ‘aha’ moments from the analysis (even if such aha moments turn out to be a dead end or require lots more development), Stigler’s critique, his ‘idea’ tells us something’s wrong but doesn’t lead directly to any ‘aha’ moment as to how to fix it.¹

  II

  My point in all this was to put the ideas leading to policy hacks high in the hierarchy of contributions economists can make to their species. The things I’ve done in economics that have been most useful, conform to my definition of ‘hack’. In each of these cases, some new way of looking at things produces an array of policy tricks or hacks. And there’s preferably some elegance to the way the ‘hack’ flows from some idea.²

  Robert Shiller’s ideas for new markets in risk are all hacks, all stemming from the ‘idea’ that the way the financial products that do exist are defined is some relatively arbitrary product of history. That means numerous potentially very useful markets don’t exist. Or, since all the suggestions are ‘why don’t we create a market in that’, perhaps one could say they’re a single hack in a litany of guises.

  Peter Martin’s recent list of a Magnificent Seven new policy ideas forces me to further distinctions. Are they all hacks? Well if I make them all hacks, then my new term ‘hack’ doesn’t say anything distinctive. It seems to me that most of the proposals could be described as hacks, though not surprisingly, some of the best proposals are not original. Another, proposing that we tax super to fund aged care is a hack in the sense that it’s coupled with a reasonable idea (taxes on super earnings are both progressive and fall more heavily on those closer to needing aged care because older super beneficiaries have larger portfolios), but I don’t think the match between the idea and the hack is particularly elegant or pleasing.

  I think one of the best policy ideas which is better targeting of welfare isn’t really a hack. It’s the solution of an optimisation problem that the researchers gave themselves – with some fancy new modelling they’ve managed to do. Good on them. Still, I could find ways to disagree with this conclusion. One could argue that the ‘idea’ from which the hack arises is that of ‘optimising’ welfare payments to minimise poverty.

  III

  Is a policy hack just what philosopher Karl Popper called “piecemeal reform”? Well yes. But no.

  I’m happy for ‘hacks’ to be regarded as a subset of piecemeal reform. How could they be anything else? But Popper’s injunction to limit oneself to piecemeal reform doesn’t seem to rule out much. His wider mission was seeking to develop criteria of demarcation by which one could identify the One True Path – towards good science, good social science and so, good policy. In each case he saw himself as advocating modest, open, empirically informed, humble and corrigible approaches against hubristic, closed, rationalistic, self-justifying and incorrigible folly and megalomania (of both the intellectual and political kind).

  As part of a swingeing attack on what he called ‘historicism’ which represented the totalitarian urge (most particularly Marxism) Popper juxtaposed ‘piecemeal’ and ‘utopian’ social engineering. The latter involves a comprehensive reordering of life in pursuit of utopian ends. But ruling this out as a policy objective doesn’t tell us much. If it rules out any actual policymaking in history, it rules out the chaos of some revolutions particularly the French one with its resetting of the calendar, (but probably not the American one) and the wilder more homicidal or suicidal cults of history. But nothing much else.³

  His point seems to be the pretty unarguable one that we’re terribly ignorant and the social world massively complex, so it’s important that the change we make is corrigible – and corrected for apparent mistakes as we go.⁴ Still, he also concedes that there’s an inevitable “piecemeal haphazardness” to ‘utopian reform’ to address endless unintended consequences (p. 68). Popper’s enemy really seems to be a kind of ‘spirit’ of what he calls “activism” not unlike Adam Smith’s objection to the ‘Man of System’ and Burke’s concern about the utopianism of the French Revolution.⁵

  IV

  Nevertheless it seems to me that Popper’s idea of utopianism does provide a way into something important that my idea of a hack seeks to get at. A hack is a specific policy arising from a specific insight and it’s in pursuit of clear and easily identifiable benefits. A lot of economic reform was not pursued in this way. It was utopian in this sense outlined by Popper (note however that Popper still admits it as acceptable piecemeal reform):

  The politician who adopts this [piecemeal] method may or may not have a blueprint of society before his mind, he may or may not hope that mankind will one day realize an ideal state, and achieve happiness and perfection on earth. But he will be aware that perfection, if at all attainable, is far distant and that every generation of men, and therefore also the living, have a claim.⁶

  A lot of the policymaking of the reform period was precisely this kind of reform. Reformers might not have described themselves as in pursuit of perfection on earth, but they had a comprehensive vision of transformation in which liberalisation was somehow to be pursued if not quite for its own sake (it was for the sake of higher GDP) – then as an article of faith that such action would achieve that objective.⁷

  Hacks will generally be much more specific in their practical motivation. Generalising from the ones I can think of, they will mostly also involve impacts which are localised to the systems in which they arise with impacts outside their immediate sphere being second order. Some, like public-private digital partnerships, would radiate impacts more widely, but this is primarily because they are more ‘connected’. And other hacks might sound attractive but involve daunting complexities which could count against them. Thus, my proposals for competitive neutrality would have straightforward impacts in most areas in which they were tried, including superannuation, but in central banking they change the nature of the institution to which they’re applied with consequences which are potentially much more wide-ranging and difficult to comprehend in advance.

  Footnotes

  1. I wonder whether things might be improved if a regulatory body were governed by some board chosen by random selection from a cadre with domain expertise but without conflicts of interest. But not only do I have no great confidence that this would make things much better, there’s no direct sense in which it follows from Stigler’s analysis. In that sense, there’s no ‘hack’ there.
  2. • “Central Banking for All” and “Commonwealth Super for All” are policy hacks with the conceptual innovation behind both being competitive neutrality as a competitive sword in addition to competitive neutrality as a shield for business.
     • Public-private digital partnerships. This is a policy hack arising from the characterisation of Google and Facebook as ‘public goods by choice’. The entrepreneurs building them realised that the value of the services they’d deliver as free public goods would dwarf their value as private goods delivered for a fee behind a paywall. Because the cost of delivering the service was so low compared with the value it created they could become as rich as Croesus by giving it away and monetising through ads. This suggests the existence of other potential digital public goods that cost more to deliver than can be recovered without charging a fee. Public-private digital partnerships can accordingly unlock such possibilities and many exciting ones can be envisaged with additional benefits from the state ensuring that the public interest predominates in system design and pricing.
     • Convening the emergence of standards: Market leaders of various kinds have an interest in releasing their own data demonstrating their relative prowess. But there’s little incentive to do so because, there being no standard against which to report, they would gain nothing from it. Therefore convening groups to define such standards could unleash a torrent of useful data which could improve information flows in important markets. “Windows on Workplaces” is one hack to which these ideas led though there would be many more.
     • Digital access regimes: Given its market power in the sector and its being the result of network externalities, not product superiority, we should impose an access regime on Microsoft Office products whereby its file formats should be fully documented publicly to permit anyone to write to them without the bugs that occur now and other producers of word processing software should be able to copy the look and feel of the Microsoft’s products. This neatly interdicts the source of Microsoft’s market power – network externalities. Similar targeted access regimes could be imposed on dominant platforms cleaving off the benefits of network externalities from the services the platforms provide, though I can’t see it solving all problems – for instance the advertising monopoly on Google search.
     • Rights to alternative regulatory compliance. Those who are regulated would have the right to demand some statement of objectives from regulators and if they could meet those objectives in some other auditable way, they would have a right to do so.For instance:
  3. Indeed Popper pretty much concedes this and the difficulty in actually drawing the distinction he has made between piecemeal and utopian engineering, retreating back into the ‘motivations’ of the engineers.
  4. In fact, as one proceeds through Popper’s quite scrupulous consideration of exceptions, things become quite murky:”It may be questioned, perhaps, whether the piecemeal and the holistic approaches here described are fundamentally different, considering that we have put no limits to the scope of a piecemeal approach. … [C]onstitutional reform, for example, falls well within its scope; nor shall I exclude the possibility that a series of piecemeal reforms might be inspired by one general tendency, for example, a tendency towards a greater equalization of incomes.”In this way, piecemeal methods may lead to changes in what is usually called the ‘class structure of society’. Is there any difference, it may be asked, between these more ambitious kinds of piecemeal engineering and the holistic or Utopian approach? And this question may become even more pertinent if we consider that, when trying to assess the likely consequences of some proposed reform, the piecemeal technologist must do his best to estimate the effects of any measure upon the ‘whole’ of society.” (Popper, K. R. 1957. The Poverty of Historicism, The Beacon Press, p. 68)
  5. Thus the difference between Utopian and piecemeal engineering turns out, in practice, to be a difference not so much in scale and scope as in caution and in preparedness for unavoidable surprises. (Popper, Historicism, p. 69).
  6. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, p. 158.
  7. I’d say the same about the framing of the PC report into competition policy in human services (implicit in the terms of reference it received from the Government) in which the aim was always to contract services out and increase competition, rather than to achieve specific goals in human services or efficiency.

January 25, 2019

• Club Troppo We’re giving people Australia Day honours for doing their jobs
  

  Verily this is a very nice looking AC. Made of gold I believe and sitting on maroon velvet. It’s got wattle on the ribbon, is inlaid with semi-precious stones with the crown sitting at the top. Lucky we got rid of calling people Sir so and so and brought in something much more sensible. Lapel pins that people can wear in business class departure lounges.

  The column below generated more engagement than any column I’ve written before – in Australia at least. Thanks to Peter Martin for chasing me up on writing the piece and suggesting major improvements to it. The research was done months ago and it was quite likely I’d have forgotten to wheel it out for this year’s Australia Day which was the obvious day to publish.

  It was published in The Conversation and Peter got the Age, the SMH and the ABC website to run it all with Conversation credits. At the time of sending this out it had garnered over 150 comments on the Conversation almost all supportive and was being picked up on various other sites.

  We’re awarding the Order of Australia to the wrong people

  More than 800 of us are in line for an Order of Australia on Australia Day.

  Sadly, as Lateral Economics research reveals, many will get it for little more than doing their job. And the higher the job’s status, the higher the award.

  Governors General, High Court Justices and Vice Chancellors of major universities would hope for the highest Companion of the Order (AC). Professors, public service departmental heads, senior business people should hope for the next one down – an Officer of the Order (AO). School Principals would generally slot in next for Members of the Order (AM).

  If you’re lucky, or you’ve done your job extraordinarily well, you’ll be promoted one rank, but that’s pretty much it.

  We reward most the already rewarded

  Meanwhile, those who succeed in some achievement principally in and for their community usually qualify for the lowest award if that; the Medal of the Order (OAM). And usually only if they’ve become conspicuous.

  The level of gratitude amongst recipients seems to follow an equal and opposite arc. Those at the bottom seem the most thrilled for being recognised the least.

  Distinction in putting others first gets short shrift. As Anne Summers lamented in 2013:

  Seven years ago I nominated a woman I admire for an Australian honour. It took two years but it came through and she was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for a lifetime of work with victims of domestic violence. I was disappointed she had not been given a higher award – I had hoped for an AM (Member of the Order of Australia) at the very least – but she was thrilled and so was her family.

  Money, fame and status are nothing to be sneezed at if they are honestly earned. But they are their own reward. Why should they beget other rewards?

  We could be putting awards to use

  Here’s an idea. Why don’t we award honours to encourage people to do more than their job? In a world which is lavishing increasing rewards on the ‘haves’, the worldly rewards for ‘getting on’ need little bolstering.

  Knowing that awards are reserved for people who do more than their jobs might encourage us to choose more selfless and socially committed lives at the outset of our careers.

  There’s a hunger among the young to do just that – to combine good, privately rewarding careers with serving their community and tackling social ills.

  If honours are “the principal means by which the nation officially recognises the merit of its citizens” as the 2011 Government House review put it, I’d like to use it to encourage those people the most.

  Wouldn’t it be more consistent with Australian values?

  It’d make them more Australian

  Government House provides online biographies of all those awarded honours. Lateral Economics sampled around half of them back to 2013 looking specifically at the gender division of honours and the extent to which those biographies included descriptions of work done without personal gain.

  Barely more than a quarter of Order of Australia recipients recorded voluntary work in their biographies.

  And those that did were more likely to be near the bottom of the awards ladder.

  Over a third of those receiving the very bottom award, the OAM, were engaged in obviously selfless work, compared with a fifth at the top with just two out of ten ACs.

  Still we may be making a little progress. Perhaps spurred by sentiments such as those expressed by Anne Summers, last year saw a higher percentage of women than in any previous year. Unusually, six women got the top honour, the AC, compared with four men, and the proportion with voluntary service broke through the 30 percent barrier for the first time.

  I wonder what Australia Day will bring. I’m thinking that whatever it is, we can do a lot better, for our community, and our country.

  Postscript: one of the interviews of the article.

January 23, 2019

• Daniel Bowen Old photos from January 2009

  Social media has been swept with the #10YearChallenge – people posting photos from ten years ago. I’ve been doing this for a while now, though this tends to be of spots around Melbourne, rather than personal photos.

  I suspect the challenge for some is even finding the photos.

  Anyway, here’s January 2009…

  Bentleigh station #10YearChallenge pic.twitter.com/PNSOPbKxIp

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) January 23, 2019

  Flinders Street Station tower, snapped from across the road at Victoria University, which was the venue for Lego Brickvention that year.

  

  Back then, Brickvention was not the huge massive crowded event it is these days. (More pics and video)

  

  View of Melbourne from the deck of the replica Enterprize sailing ship, from a short sail we did from Williamstown.

  

  On the way home from the Enterprize, at Newport station. Even back then it was busy on a Sunday afternoon.

  

  Remember when there were milk crate men everywhere? This is near South Kensington. My little camera couldn’t handle the speed of a photo from a moving train.

  

  Chess in Swanston Street.

  

  Trams (and not much else) in Docklands.

  

  Remember the Hitachi trains? Here’s one arriving at Richmond.

  

  …and inside. I assume it was a warm day, as all the windows are open. This only did so much, of course… on a very hot day, hot air blowing through the carriage helped a bit, but wasn’t actually all that pleasant. These days the entire train fleet is air-conditioned, but the tram fleet isn’t there yet.

  

  At Southbank, looking southwest at the Sandridge rail bridge. I can’t see the sculptures, but presumably they are there in the background, as apparently they have been present since 2006.

  

  A Connex-liveried Siemens train arrives at Malvern

  

  One of the benefits of public transport is you can use the time to play with your phone. Back in 2009, the phone companies seemed to think this involved – wait for it – making telephone calls.

  

January 22, 2019

• Club Troppo The logic of the inevitable (nuclear) apocalypse. Can the Gods save us?

  The probability of a massive nuclear war the next 10 years between any of the 8 current nuclear powers (US, UK, France, Russia, India, Pakistan, NK, Israel) seems low. The bluster of the leaders is supposed to make the threat look a bit bigger than it is in order to get negotiation advantages, but bluster is usually just bluster without consequences because no elite wants to destroy itself or the population it feeds off.

  Yet, whilst the threat may be minimal in a 10 year period, it is bigger if we consider a 100 year period. And what about the next 10,000 years, a mere blip when you consider the age of the world? I would guess the odds are about 50-50% that there is no major nuclear war the next 100 years, but I have to say that with our current technology, the odds of a major nuclear conflict the next 10,000 years is close to 100%. Somewhere, somehow, at current trajectory there will be a major f-up leading to a huge conflict that kills the vast majority of us.

  Just think of how close humanity has already been the last century. Starting from 1900 AD, we have had 2 world wars, a near-nuclear war (the Cuban missile crisis), several periods of heightened nuclear-threats between two nuclear powers (India/Pakistan, Israel/Iran, NK/US), and rapid further arms development such that more nuclear destruction can be delivered quicker and further than before.

  Other devastating technology has also emerged, including biological weapons and automated systems. In the near future we can expect automated weapons systems run by artificial intelligence that will make moves faster than humans can think in order to counter threats by artificial systems that move faster than humans can think. Most of us might be killed in a second for reasons only known to AI systems that perish themselves in the conflicts they start. Not a happy thought.

  The odds that human conflict will go seriously wrong seem near-certain in the long run and there doesn’t seem all that much we can do about this either: if the current enemy builds something that can destroy us in 0.0001 seconds, we too must have something that can destroy them in 0.0001 seconds, complete with detection systems that can be fooled faster than any human can correct them.

  Also, if we can get a small benefit from appearing truly ready and capable of destroying them unless we get our way, we are certain to do so time and time again. Leaders who gain from playing chicken with our mutual destruction get kudos (just think of JFK!). That is the nature of humanity and of human conflict: we look for small advantages in the here and now, and we reward our leaders for it. We simply do not live only to serve the long-run health of our species. Enough of us live to get the most out of our own short lives to ensure that at least some countries will sometimes have rulers ready to play nuclear-chicken with other.

  Humanity as a whole can only live on the edge so long though. Our luck will run out. Or not?

  From the point of view of the species, 10,000 years is a mere blip in our evolution, less than 5% of the time it is now believed we humans have been around. It is odd to think that we spent the first 99% of our time on the planet in near perpetual war with other hunter-gatherers, and that the brief period of relative peace we are currently enjoying is likely to end with massive wars that wipe out most of us.

  A massive war is not necessarily the end of humanity though, and we must ponder the question where the hope lies in avoiding such an apocalypse, if not this time then a next time.

  We are now with so many and are so spread around the world, with so many well-stocked mountain bunkers and so many ocean-going ships that carry enough canned-food to last its crews for centuries, that it is actually hard to envisage a nuclear war massive enough to wipe us out as a species. The same would go for biological wars or wars fought by robots and the like: very likely, in several places pockets of us will survive with enough food to weather the aftermaths of any massive war, even if it is just a small groups of us living on Antarctica, in nuclear submarines, or on the moon.

  We humans are pretty fast breeders so even if no more than 1,000 of us survive, at a 2% yearly rate of increase, we’d be back to a billion within about 700 years (give or take a century: this is without using a calculator). At a 1% rate, it would take us 1,400 years to return to a billion. If we’d restart with just 2 humans and have only a 1% rate of increase per year, we would still be back to a billion in about 2,000 years. So in the time-scales we are thinking of, a massive devastation that wipes out 99.999999% of us would be no more than a temporary blip in human evolution.

  The surviving humans would have the same key traits that make an apocalypse seem inevitable now: the basic intelligence to come up with devastating weapons, a relentless drive towards control over our environment, and other humans just as smart who compete in the here and now for dominance by willingly running risks of massive conflicts.

  Is the species destined for a cycle of near-destruction, followed by a recovery of our numbers, followed by a new arms race that eventually leads to near-destruction? Is this the pattern we’re looking at for the next million years or so, with only small differences from one cycle to the next (such as in the other species that make it to the next cycle alongside us, or the climate that the survivors live in)? Is there an alternative scenario in which a cycle ends not with near-destruction but with something else wherein the odds of near-destruction are truly zero?

  It is hard to envisage an escape from the cycle because the three ingredients (intelligence, dominance drive, short-run incentives) seem innate to biological evolution. Any biological species as smart as us would have the same problem because both the dominance drive and the short-run incentives are a consequence of evolutionary pressures and our biology: a species without the relentless dominance drive is an evolutionary dead-end that would quickly be killed off by the more aggressive specimens. So the dominance drive is truly a given.

  The short-term incentives are given too because the nature of our neural intelligence is adaptive, meaning that we constantly change our mental make-up in order to do well in the evolving environment. This precludes the very possibility that we could live for the long-term, even if our bodies could keep going for millennia: our very nature is to constantly change and hence our current selves slowly die, replaced by different selves that care about something different. Human minds that don’t change and that care for the millennia ahead rather than the next few generations are not human minds at all.

  Is there hope in non-human intelligence then? Or the possibility that some group wins and establishes a world empire that subdues everyone into a peaceful society? Let’s take the two in turn, starting with the idea of the world empire, a staple of many philosophies.

  Humanity has had enough experience with empires to know they are not a solution to the problem of conflict between technologically advanced humans. The dominance drive simply gets played out within the empire’s higher echelons. This was true for the Chinese empires, the Egyptian empires, the Ottoman empire, the Roman empire, the Japanese empire, the British empire, the Soviet Union, the EU, etc.: now and then their elites split up so that you got massive civil wars or break-ups of the empire into smaller regions that then started to fight each other. In each empire, there were enormous conflicts within the elites. Palace guards, eunuchs, the various sons of the emperor, competing democratic parties, the noble families, competing ministries, Pretorian guards, religious leaders, etc.: they were all constantly conniving and scheming against each other, using all means at their disposal, including assassination and the use of the latest technology.

  So we should not believe that human conflict will be over if the world ‘comes together as one’. It is a fantasy that hides megalomania. An empire is even more dangerous than competing nation states, because with an empire the whole world would be involved in an internal conflict whereas with competing nation states there might be a few countries left out of the firing line. There is thus no real hope in a human-lead empire to avoid an apocalypse, though there is no shortage of humans shouting loudly that all will be well if they are in charge of everything. Such humans are normal and that’s the problem.

  How about the idea that we humans stop being in charge altogether and that machines truly take over, such that we follow their orders? How could that help prevent the seemingly inevitable cycle of near-destruction when any machine that would lord it over us will be designed on the instructions of humans? Is it conceivable that groups of humans will band together to consciously design artificial intelligence systems to truly enslave us to the will of those AI systems, for our own benefit? Wouldn’t we just rise up against such slavery, leading to either a new cycle (if we win or if we lose to a benevolent AI) or our complete destruction (if we lose to a not-so-benevolent AI)?

  I can see a scenario, but it is an odd one. It is the scenario in which AI-style machines are the gods we consciously create and then willingly worship. I can imagine whole populations actively building and maintaining a Jesus Christ, a Zeus, a Buddha, and a Horus. Indeed, if one powerful group of humans does this for their god, I can see lots of other populations building their own Gods to keep up.

  How would this go, given the immense current limitations of AI and machines? I am not a programmer who is completely up to date about the current possibilities and bottlenecks, but I do know that we are still decades away from human-type intelligence and that AI systems are now so complex that no human knows all about this vast area either.

  Individual humans and even teams of humans working on new AI see but a small part of the technology. So if we do create our own gods, it will be without any team of humans truly understanding what they are building, which means the results will be unexpected: it will be trial and error on a massive scale. Building our gods might take centuries and involve the active participation of simpler AI systems.

  We have done this type of thing before. Just think of the cathedrals of Europe, like the Notre Dame or the Sagrada Familia. They took centuries to build, involving many generations. There were many changes along the way to the original design of the cathedrals, and all the old cathedrals have had major repairs and additions. What fueled their construction and maintenance was the belief of the local population that they were involved in a holy enterprise. The population that built them were competing with other populations to have more magnificent cathedrals.

  I can see how populations could start to regard AI and robotics as the new cathedrals. Once the idea takes hold that we can build our own gods, I can see enormous enthousiasm emerging for such projects. AI will stop being something that is feared and will start to be something we crave.

  Humanity as a whole would get different gods built by different populations. The natures of these gods would vary just as religions currently vary: the gods would reflect the religiosity of the populations that built them. Some would have a thirst for knowledge, others for conquest, yet others for beauty, perhaps even a few for sex or humour.

  Would these gods help humanity escape the cycle though or would the devastation just be inflicted by competing gods rather than competing humans?

  Though it is entirely possible that the gods we create in this scenario fight each other, or that at least a few of them start massive wars, there is hope in these gods precisely because some will differ from humans. When humans envisage gods, they usually do not truly think of their own actual natures, but envisage something they think is better than them. They will thus build gods in the image of what they hope for and aspire to.

  There is thus the possibility that humanity would get a ruling religious pantheon where the gods have made a deal with each other to keep the peace. The gods would have different groups of humans worshipping different gods, adding to them. If we are lucky, gods might emerge that do not have short-lived incentives or innate competing dominance drives. Then we might survive without cycles of devastation.

  Who knows, maybe we will get lucky and do this first-time round?

  So there you have it: my odd hope that the seeming inevitability of human self-destruction in the coming millennia might be overcome by our religiosity. We just might at some point create the gods that will save us from ourselves by enslaving us. What a thing to hope for!

January 21, 2019

• The Northern Myth #MyPills – Nick Bowditch on two little pills that help him make a better version of himself

  

  The following is a short piece that caught my eye at Nick Bowditch’s Facebook page earlier today. A surprising number of us have been in the same place as Nick so he has kindly allowed me to share his thoughts. You can see more of Nick’s thoughts at his website.

  See these two little things? Every day I swallow them and every day they help me be a better version of myself. Maybe I will have to take them everyday, forever, and that’s OK with me.

  Because I know how I feel and how I live my life without them, and I don’t like that guy.

  This morning, I told someone that I know that I take medication everyday for my ‘mental uniqueness’ and he looked like at me with a look that was half pity, and half like I’d just told him a really dark and shameful secret.

  I don’t want either of those reactions.

  If I had chronic asthma, or diabetes, or rheumatoid arthritis, and I took medication to minimise the symptoms of them in my life, I wouldn’t be ashamed of that.

  It wouldn’t be something I had to hide or be embarrassed about. It just so happens that the chronic difference I live with affects my mind, and not my lungs or my pancreas or my bones and joints.

  I didn’t choose it. It chose me. It’s not a source of shame for me, its just something which is part of me.

  And I’m not looking for another treatment or potion or natural remedy (so thankyou before you offer), these two pills are the result of many, many years trying to get it right, which I finally have, and I’m very happy with them.

  I have lost a couple of friends – and the world has lost a couple of really great people – because they were too ashamed of their own mental uniqueness to get help, or take their medication.

  And that’s too many.

  So fuck your judgement, and fuck the stigma. I’m proud of every part of me, even the bits that I need a bit of help from these pills with.

  This is me.

  Use the hashtag #mypills if you want to help break the stigma too.

  #depression #anxiety #ptsd #recovery

  The post #MyPills – Nick Bowditch on two little pills that help him make a better version of himself appeared first on The Northern Myth.

January 20, 2019

• Daniel Bowen How long is a railway station platform?

  Last Monday’s meltdown soured the return of trains after upgrades on the Dandenong and Frankston lines – which included works for the Metro tunnel, and also power upgrades extensions to some platforms.

  So, how long is a railway station platform?

  Generally, as long as the trains that serve it, plus a bit for spare.

  There are exceptions, especially in regional areas of some countries, though this is rare in Victoria.

  In Melbourne, suburban trains are currently standardised to 6 cars*:

  • Comeng 6 x 24 metres = 144 metres
  • Siemens 4 x 24.1 metres + 2 x 23.8 metres = 144 metres
  • X’Trapolis 4 x 24.46 metres + 2 x 22.76 metres = 143.36 metres

  What about older trains?

  

  As early as 1908, and probably taking into account existing platform lengths, planning work for electrification determined that trains would be up to 6 carriages x 17.4 metres — the Tait (red) trains were built to this about length too.

  Some then-existing shorter swing-door carriages were extended to that length, with trains being steam-hauled until each line was electrified. Information I’ve found is a little vague, but I believe with buffers/couplings the total carriage length was 18.81 metres, making a 6-car (electric) train 112.86 metres long.

  Prior to that, trains had been various lengths, and the standardisation of lengths led to some lines getting more powerful steam locos, to cope with the additional weight, particularly on the hillier lines such as Ringwood and Hurstbridge.

  In the 1920s, after electrification was completed, crowding resulted in extra carriages being added, making 7-car trains = 131.67 metres, requiring some platform extensions.

  In the 1950s, Harris (blue trains) were introduced as 7-cars, with carriage lengths varying from 19.2 to 22.86 metres each. (Some of these still exist as V/Line’s aging “H” sets)

  From 1967, some of the busiest lines ran as 8-cars during peak, to relieve crowding. I’m unclear of the precise carriages used in 8-car formations, but it would have meant trains at least around 154 metres long. This necessitated some platform extensions.

  

  From the 1970s, Hitachi trains were introduced, with longer carriages 23.41 metres long, of up to 6 cars = 140.46 metres, just slightly shorter than the current fleet.

  The 1980s saw the 4D (double-deck) train trial. This was 4 x 20.32 metres = 81.28 metres, but if they’d ever got expanded to 8 cars, that would have been 162.56 metres. But in actual fact only 4 cars were ever built, and in peak they were connected to a 3-car Comeng set = 153.28 metres. It was decided they were unsuitable for Melbourne, and the cars were scrapped.

  Still, the City Loop had been built to cater for a possible future roll-out of double-deck trains – both tunnel sizes, and platform lengths of about 160 metres. It wouldn’t surprise me if this was based on the standard Sydney double-deck train lengths of the 1960s, when the Loop was being designed.

  Platform lengths grew with the train lengths, and at some stations it’s not hard to see how they’ve been extended over the years.

  Today, new platforms are built as 160 metres, with the older existing platforms measuring around 150-160 metres, while most current trains are about 144 metres long.

  In some spots, you can see where they’ve been measuring platforms to verify the length.

  

  The future?

  And what about the future “High Capacity Metro Trains” (known as HCMTs for short – I think perhaps they need a snappier name). These are expected in service in 2019?

  In their initial 7-car formation, these will be about 160 metres long.

  IT’S HAUL GOOD: The first High Capacity Metro Train was successfully hauled from Newport to Pakenham East for further testing.
  
  Train enthusiasts excitedly gathered to glimpse the 160-metre, seven-carriage train as it made its inaugural appearance. https://t.co/TQbS0MkUg5 pic.twitter.com/tCVmBAwl7e

  — Transport for Victoria (@TransportforVIC) December 7, 2018

  With that length, they will just fit into the City Loop platforms, possibly with the rear cab out in the tunnel.

  Part of the upgrade works underway to accommodate the new trains is improved power supply, facilitating not just the longer trains, but also more of them, with good reliability and enough juice that they can accelerate quickly. It was part of this that failed so spectacularly last Monday afternoon.

  Now that I look again at a pic from Malvern, it looks like a few bits of damage to the overhead wiring. The stuck train near Caulfield also had a damaged panto. Messy all round. #MetroTrains pic.twitter.com/y76yFgz83E

  — Daniel Bowen (@danielbowen) January 14, 2019

  Extensions to some platforms have been needed.

  • South Yarra platform 6 and Caulfield platform 4 occurred last year.
  • During the early January works, South Yarra 5 and Caulfield 3 were also extended, though these don’t appear to be complete yet – at Caulfield there are still poles and signals in the way.
  • I haven’t gone looking recently, but presumably extensions are also underway at other older stations that need them between Caulfield and Cranbourne/Pakenham.

  

  10-car trains

  In the future, the plan is to later go to 10-car HCMTs – about 230m long – on the Cranbourne/Pakenham to Sunbury line, via the new metro tunnel post-2025. Because underground platforms are very difficult to alter later, the tunnel stations are being designed with this in mind.

  The newest skyrail stations have been built to 160m, but the LXRA tells me they have provision for 230m later, with straight sections beyond the current platforms, signal placements chosen carefully, and piers and foundations built so the new sections of platform can be slotted in with minimal disruption.

  Older stations will no doubt be a lot trickier.

  

  7-cars with the existing fleet?

  I saw an idea proposed on Twitter: could they re-marshall the existing Comeng, X’Trapolis or Siemens fleet into 7-car trains?

  It’s an interesting idea. But even assuming they’d have enough power (6-car Comeng trains for instance have four motor cars), they’d be at least 168 metres – too long for the City Loop platforms, which would be near-impossible to extend.

  It would also cause problems in stabling yards, which would need re-design or alteration to cope with longer trains. This is why the HCMTs are getting a new maintenance and stabling facility near Pakenham.

  What about other lines?

  Lots of lines have crowding, and it appears all new station construction (such as the Mernda extension and other level crossing projects) has sensibly planned for 160 metres. So perhaps we can expect 7-car HCMTs eventually across the network. But it involves some big changes, so don’t hold your breath.

  And longer trains aren’t the only answer. More trains is the other obvious solution to crowding, which includes:

  • more separation of lines to maximise track capacity and reduce flow-on effects of delays
  • smarter timetabling (consistent stopping patterns)
  • level crossing removals (to cut the impact on the road network as train services increase)
  • better signalling (such as in-cab high capacity signalling)
  • higher frequencies in shoulder-peak and off-peak, to help spread travel demand

  Melbourne’s got busier, and is continuing to grow. We need all of this. Bring it on.

  *Note that lengths for some models of train have varied, and the information I’ve found can be a little unclear as to whether measurements are rounded, and whether they include buffers/couplings and so on which would contribute to the total length of a train. So treat the above figures as a rough guide. Any corrections? Please let me know!

  • More history from Marcus Wong on past extensions of platforms in Melbourne