November 20th, 2009
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.
Posted in Character | No Comments »
November 17th, 2009
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.
Posted in Telecoms | No Comments »
November 16th, 2009
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.
Posted in Books/Research, Innovation, Intellectual Property | No Comments »
November 15th, 2009
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:
- The organic market in the USA has been experiencing double digit growth (18% in 2008) but it looks like 2009 will break this trend and come in at around 7 – 9%. Still damn good in a market where “flat is the new growth“.
- Compared with conventional methods, organic agriculture sequesters much more carbon in the soil, but the science for measuring it is still deficient
- On average, Swiss farmers get 43,000 Euros/year from the state to provide public goods such as a nice landscape, soil conservation, animal welfare etc
- NZ’s organics industry organisation OANZ was lucky to score 3 years of government funding, which has now been cut.
Posted in Dairy, Innovation, Productivity | No Comments »
November 12th, 2009
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.
Posted in NZ Inc | No Comments »
November 11th, 2009
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…
Posted in Advertising | No Comments »
November 11th, 2009
Do politicians pander more to older voters than younger ones? Some say yes, and their arguments make a bit of sense. They argue that young people are less engaged in the political process than older folks. One reason might be that older voters can see very clearly what is in store for them (superannuation) whereas the trade-offs are less apparent for the young.
In this light, its interesting that John Key is ignoring Treasury advice over changes to superannuation. Contrast this with the fact that “full funding” is now clearly the policy for ACC, the levies for which are not paid by the retired.
Posted in Inequality | No Comments »
November 9th, 2009
Like it or not, labour mobility means that we do compete directly against the Aussies in the markets for skilled people, where we obviously need to do better. But how? I got a couple of clues while across the ditch last week.
I was intrigued to read the Aussies complaining about lack of policy attention on innovation. Most of it was printed or is gated, but basically, they’re saying that the Rudd government seems to not really care. There was a major review of the innovation system last year but it seems to have dropped off the agenda for this government. This should be good for us.
I also read commentary trying to debunk the view that Australia has done well simply by having the dumb luck to have a mineral-rich and incredibly large and empty country. The argument was that there was heaps of innovation in the minerals sector, so it wasn’t all dumb luck. True enough, but neither is it rocket science. They are optimising the production, management, distribution, marketing etc of the stuff in which they already have an enormous comparative advantage.
Like the criminals, we also have a land-based comparative advantage: agriculture. We’re doing OK with ours I suppose. Certainly dairy is being well supported by governments: the latest rush of free-trade agreements has been very good for Fonterra. But we probably need to think more creatively about innovation more in this sector. An obvious boost would be to allow farming of native species like Weka and Kereru. But the big problems are surely in meat & wool and at this point I am bereft of ideas for those guys, except that I think they should consider the merits of switching to vegetarians as customers (ie fewer animals, more plants).
More generally, I liked Rick Boven’s recent thoughts. I also agree with Doug that the CRIs need to be reformed dramatically. And with WH that we could do more with competitions, though the recent Queens Wharf debacle shows that such things need to be well conceived from the outset.
Posted in Innovation | No Comments »
November 8th, 2009
Rodney Hide, Hone Harawira and this bastard really lowered the tone of the week didn’t they? The common link is not just that each of them screwed up ethically. Temptation got the better of them, as it gets many of us in different ways etc. But these three didn’t just fess up when caught. They ducked and dived, deflected and dissembled. And in so doing, they magnified the original pain and spread it around over their colleagues. Nasty.
Hide’s hypocrisy is almost Capill grade. But while it may seem a long journey from perk-buster to pork-barreller, isn’t there a common anti-social attitude underlying both? There are differences in method (publically bagging vs secretly milking), motive (political points vs private pleasure) and victim group (work colleagues vs the general public), but both show scorn for Hide’s own social groups. Perhaps consistent with that, he reacted to queries by invoking the concept of martyrdom. He thought the system was wrong, but others were exploiting it, so he was not going to be a martyr by foregoing the benefits”. Ouch. I guess the lesson is that even high-horse riders can slip off and land in the gutter.
Harawira also got caught cheating on what we all thought was the deal, slinking off to Paris instead of attending some boring meeting. Then instead of fessing up, he acted like we had some damn cheek expecting him to play by our bourgeois rules. Not a good look for a party whose main reason for being revolves around concepts of honour and commitment. Again, the reaction made everything worse and dumped on his mates.
As for the un-named entertainer, while he projects a tough and cool persona, he has now shown himself to be an utter coward. By not fessing up he has cast doubt over all his peers. Shame also that the judge screwed up so badly in agreeing to name suppression. Yes, naming would be costly to the guilty man, but this isn’t just about what’s fair for him. What about his fans the judge has helped him to deceive? What about the damage that not naming him has done to the reputations of his peers? The only bright side is that NZ is such a small place that most of us already know the name of this coward.
So there you go – a rather smelly week all round. Now, to help get rid of the stench so we can move onto nicer subjects, the final word goes to former Crusaders coach Steve Hansen: its time to flush the dunny.
Posted in Character | No Comments »
November 6th, 2009
Congratulations to the Consumers Institute for further highlighting shonky (“scandalously poor”) practices in the financial advisory industry. The solutions are pretty obvious but still ages away it seems. I liked this quote from one of Consumers’ expert reviewers about what is needed
It could be done tomorrow. They should have to provide a disclosure document of one or two pages, standardised across the industry, which allows customers to compare apples with apples. It’s not hard, but this industry makes it damn near impossible.
Not much point in blaming people, but if one was in such a mood prime candidates would be the Securities Commission and the last government.
Also this morning, the RNZ Herald gets it wrong in an editorial on credit card surcharging. Surcharging was the Commerce Commission’s only victory in the hideously expensive “interchange” litigation I’ve discussed before. Retailers are now allowed to add any amount they like if you pay by credit card. The Herald says
If being confronted at the point of sale with the cost of credit causes shoppers to pause, it may be no bad thing. If it promotes competition between card companies that will be good for everyone – except banks. And they may be surprised to find how little public sympathy they command.
The banks are not to blame. It is the international card schemes (Visa and MasterCard) that have been insisting on rules to prevent surcharging, overuling local bank opposition in some instances. And neither should the banks really care too much – they run the EFTPOS system after all.
Posted in Financial Markets | No Comments »