Yeah, yeah, I’m here. Sorry for the silence.
We’ve been down south, mainly offline for a couple of weeks, fencing, scrub cutting and chasing animals. Back to work now though and back to blogging too.
Upcoming topics:
While the government tries to get the ETS legislation completed in time for Copenhagen the spin cycle has been working overtime, trying to get the lipstick to stay on this pig.
The Greenhouse Policy Coalition and Business NZ have both managed to make crucial errors in their attempts to play down the massive subsidy from taxpayers to large emitters that is embodied in the National/Maori version of the ETS. And the NZ Business Council for Sustainable Development has said nothing since reporting on 2 November that most Kiwis oppose the plan.
Fortunately, there are a few sane voices out there. Here are four:
Labour members of the Select Committee Considering the Bill:
The process adopted in respect of this bill is the worst that any of us have experienced in our time in Parliament.
…
The Treasury, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, our independent expert adviser, and the vast majority of submitters are critical of the bill. We uphold their criticisms. The bill significantly dilutes the effectiveness of the ETS, and will have a significant negative impact on the New Zealand economy and environment for many years to come. The bill ought not to proceed.
Simon Terry & Geoff Bertram: Taxpayers 84% Emitters 16%
Rod Oram: A costly exercise in hypocrisy
Brian Fallow: the ETS will cost our children
There has been a view that NZ should not seek to lead on climate change policy, but instead aim at being a “fast follower” so we don’t compromise our economy. I think this is poor economics. Apart from the deniers, we all expect relative prices to change in ways that reflect carbon (and other emission) constraints. The opportunity is to react now, so we have more time to get good at operating in that world.
Paul Holmes is a business comentator now?
$3 grand to send 100grams on a 45min round trip in a rocket.
Not a good look, Griffins is getting biscuits made in Fiji.
This is an interesting idea, though somewhat utopian…
I suppose its others that should be embarrassed, but the feeling has crept over me this week as more signs of madness emerge from my fellow Kiwis.
First, iconic author Witi Ihimaera admits plagiarism, then a few days later he gets a $50,000 award, and now it seems that he’s done it before. As if recidivist plagiarism is not bad enough, the University of Auckland is downplaying the whole thing. At least I don’t work there anymore.
Then there are those orange billboards with the jack-bootprints that have been around town for a while. What a cringe this is: a crowd of people demanding stronger legal rights to smack their kids.
I’ll certainly be voting with my feet tomorrow, by staying well away from these twits.
And for once I’ll forgive the Royal NZ Herald for constantly front-paging violent court news. This story, about the woman jailed for thrashing her son with a hosepipe is directly relevant to anyone considering joining tomorrow’s twits. The sentencing judge said that brutal beatings of children under the guise of chastisement are almost a daily occurrence in South Auckland.
I could go on, about the financial sector and guidelines for reporters, but I gotta get to work.
But first I must congratulate the Feds for finally saying something sensible about climate change. After all these years, they’ve decided that a fart tax might actually be a good idea. Still leaves them free to rail against ETS, but at least its a nice change from the trend of the week.
Its amazing how mobile phone use differs across countries. Four examples:
The photo is a typical street transaction in Cusco, Peru where vendors rent phones by the call, though the ones I saw had their handsets chained to themselves to make theft more difficult.
Meanwhile, the Economist suggests that Iraqis may love mobile more than “freedom”. It seems that people are paying bills by texting the serial numbers of phone cards to each other, turning phone credit into a form of currency and avoiding those risky trips to the bank.
Next up, an oldie but a goodie. When mobile phones were introduced in Kerala, India,
the adoption of mobile phones by fishermen and wholesalers was associated with a dramatic reduction in price dispersion, the complete elimination of waste, and near-perfect adherence to the Law of One Price. Both consumer and producer welfare increased.
And thanks to the nice people at QJE, there is a rare ungated complete paper here.
So what would you expect in the USA? A supersized multichoice combo according to this piece from the NY Times.
But for all the complexity, cellphones American-style do have a certain supersized logic. Americans spend more money each month on their wireless bills than people in any other country. But the money we spend buys a whole lot more talk time and text messages than it does elsewhere. On average, we effectively spend about 5 cents per minute of talk time and about a penny a text message, lower than anywhere else in the developed world.
A great read, this book is a damning indictment of the way patent law has evolved in the USA. The message for innovators is that unless you are in chemicals or pharmaceuticals, the patent system is a net negative, not just for you but for the whole industry. The authors calculate the net contribution patents make to profit, as a fraction of R&D spending, for several industries. The returns are great for chemicals and pharma, close to 60%. But for all others its -7%.
Why? Well the courts seem to have screwed up badly in dealing with situations where notice was poor. In the case of physical property, ownership rights are clear and well signalled: even if we’re neighbours, the chances of me building my shed/house on your property are very low because the boundaries are very clear and/or quite easy/cheap to ascertain. But if you get a patent registered, and its claims are worded vaguely enough, then I might well infringe inadvertently.
It works OK for chem and pharma because there are formulas that limit the scope of the claim. But its a minefield for patents on software and business methods. Which of course encourages some to craft patent applications in ways that allow them to ambush innovators after they become successful. After the book was published, the Rambus case was finally killed off by the US Supreme Court, so the outlook remains bleak.
Lynne and I have been in the ‘tron for the weekend at the organics sector conference. The conference theme “Innovate: Go Organic”, aligned well with our motives; we were looking for clues that might help us down on the farm.
There was an impressive line-up of speakers: lots of senior bureaucrats and academics from Europe, and Sir Colin (Pine Tree) Meads (left) as after-dinner speaker. Col said his son had converted to organics a while back and while initially sceptical he’d been very impressed with the results.
Its true that locks are not usually selected for their brains, but neither are NZ sheep farmers noted for their gullibility or willingness to break ranks. So it is surely significant that Colin Meads fronted up to speak at an organic sector conference.
Other bits from the event:
It is commonly believed that NZ is a low wage economy compared with Australia. Lets assume that’s true, even when adjustments are made for the cost of living. How do we close the gap? The last government said we needed economic “transformation”; this government says its all about “productivity”. But neither of these terms mean much to ordinary voting folk unless some of the benefits flow through into wages.
The size of the pie matters of course, when thinking about how it is shared. So thanks should go to the nice people at Grant Thornton who have compared (pdf) the market performance of groups of companies in NZ and Australia. The sample is biased by being bourse-bound (listed firms) but is still interesting.
Here are the rates of return on assets over the 5 years to September:
Notice that for industries supplying many of the essentials of life in NZ, the rates of return are much higher in NZ than Australia: food, building products, telecommunications, construction materials, airfreight & logistics. Further digging required.
If I’m religious at all, I’d put myself in the polytheist camp – why shouldn’t deities compete? So this one (church wall, southern George St, Sydney) tickled me for its recognition that (a) religions compete and (b) your fellow travellers can be an issue…
