Post of the week.
The problem of power prices.
The Productivity Commission, in its usual starkly sensible way, sets out the sensible solution – give people the power to tailor consumption to their inclination, to what they will pay to run their aircon, to how much they will mind if they can’t use it in peak periods.[xi] “The price-quality trade-off is invisible to most consumers – most are unaware of the high price they pay in their electricity bills for the excessive reliability resulting from overly stringent standards.” [xii]
We know how to do this, by installing smart meters that tell people how much power they are consuming and what it costs. Ah critics caw, this is but an example of misplaced faith in markets, because meters have failed in Victoria. And so they did, but they need not fail again.
For a start, in Victoria installation was expensive and stuffed up, with consumers copping the cost. And peak market prices applied from seven in the morning to 11 at night, giving consumers no chance of switching consumption to low cost times.[xiii]
What is happening around the traps: Quadrant on line, at the IPA, Mannkal Foundation, Centre for Independent Studies and the Sydney Institute.
For the kindle bookshelf. The Popular Popper Guide to The Logic of Scientific Discovery, the most important book on the philosophy of science in the 20th century.
Amazon review by a philosophically informed biomedical researcher in New Zealand.
Popper’s writing became more and more clear as he grew older, but unfortunately his early writing can be extremely hard work; requiring multiple slow readings to understand key points. The Logic of Scientific Discovery is a great book but it is a hard book, made even more difficult by the sheer amount of technical exposition that Popper gave to aspects of his arguments that can seem obtuse to the newcomer to his work. Rafe Champion has a achieved a minor miracle in distilling the key lessons from the book in lucid and simple prose, making Popper’s ideas accessible to a wide audience. Champion does not obsessively focus on one or two elements of Popper’s thought as has been the habit of many writers who have cited Popper, but outlines the full scope of Popper’s revolutionary thought; a welcome corrective to the misrepresentation of Popper’s ideas that are endemic in contemporary thought.
Entrepreneur of the week. Andre Loiferman of Brazil.
Loiferman : Yes. We are in a boom, but we can’t say that this will remain.
Kaizen : Are you worried or are you confident that the boom will continue? You have political stability. You have good human capital and resources.
Loiferman : I am worried.
Kaizen : What is the biggest worry?
Loiferman : The size of the state, its expansion. We need fundamental reforms that are constantly postponed.
Kaizen : Reforms because of the large amount of corruption or that the state is in a growth phase?
Loiferman : The problem is not corruption, in my point of view, but the size of the government and the corruption of ideas. If you see the government budget in which social security represents an important part of the deficit and pays public servants a full pension when they retire, this deficit takes all resources from the society and strongly impacts on the smaller growth.
As an example, the federal government has around one million public employees. These one million employees cause a deficit of about US$35 billion per year in Brazil’s budget. In the private sector, there are 24 million former employees in the Social Security system. Their deficit is about US$10 billion. So, one million public employees cost twice as much as 24 million employees from the private sector for the country per year.
Gerard Henderson’s Media Watchdog. Warning, until the new one goes up this afternoon, you will see last weeks edition. As the watch dog says, “Until next time. In the meantime, keep morale high.” Or as they say in England “Keep your pecker up!”
For libertarian nerds. Jan Lester on three major errors of most libertarians. Plus my review of his book Escape from Leviathan.
The great wide world. Images of Australian rules drop kicks.
SLOW LEARNERS. Andrew Leigh finally discovers that Whitlam was a disaster. Not that he actually said that, he stumbled over the truth but quickly picked himself up and went on as if nothing had happened.
In this new book, Andrew makes a plea for an egalitarian Australia that values mateship and that frowns on displays of wealth and inequality. He analyses the historical data on inequality, arguing that the low-point of inequality was reached in the 1970 and that Australia is currently becoming more unequal such that we have ‘returned’ to the levels of inequality in the 1930s. This leads Andrew to talk about the proximate causes and consequences of inequality, where he ultimately sides with the majority of Australians who dislike inequality.
It could have led him to the problem of the welfare state, the destruction of traditional values and the erosion of personal responsibility. Equality is not promoted by big spending governments, the erosion of productivity by dysfunctional industrial relations and generating an underclass of welfare dependents. The “Great Society” reforms in the US of the 1960s demonstrated that, but what do these Fabians learn?
Source:
http://catallaxyfiles.com/2013/07/05/rafes-roundup-july-5/