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Party discipline in the Republican Party

Inspired by this post by Cam Riley … Any observer of U.S. politics could not have failed to notice the incredible level of party discipline that the Republicans, particularly in the Senate, have achieved over the last year or six.  This may be something new to Americans, but it’s rather common to Britons and Australians, who generally get more excited when somebody — anybody! — breaks the party line.  The party discipline of the Australian Labor Party, in particular, is phenomenal.

I understand that the generally accepted explanation for the differences between the USA and Australia in this regard focuses on the sources of funding for campaigns.  In Australia, all campaign funds come from the party — individual candidates cannot raise money directly — where as in the US, there’s a combination of party-supplied and individually-raised funding.

That then suggests two possible reasons for the new-found Republican discipline:

  • Republican congressional candidates have started to take a larger fraction of their total campaign funding from the party itself; and/or
  • Advocacy groups that support policies we stereotypically associate with the Democratic Party have not been giving any money to Republicans.

If it is the second reason, then that is a tactical error, and a foolish one, on the part of those advocacy groups.

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The dude at Macquarie …

The Reserve Bank of Australia just decided, somewhat unexpectedly, to keep interest rates on hold.  Channel 7 news needed to spin it into a story, though, so they did the usual thing of getting a talking head from the mythical (in Australia, at least) Macquarie Bank to say something.  Unfortunately, there was a guy in the background who chose that moment to look at topless pictures of Miranda Kerr.  Here’s the clip.  The guy starts looking at them at the 1:00 mark.

I don’t think he’ll be fired.

It looks like he was opening images from an email and that gives him a little cover.  If the sender was a Macquarie employee then they will have some serious problems, it being considered worse to send “offensive” material than to receive it.

The dude will probably get an official reprimand and he might not get the same pay rise as others in his team next time ’round (at the least, he was just demonstrably slacking off from work), but I think that’ll be about it for him.

I think that Macquarie will look at their email and web-browsing policy again and consider increasing the paranoid parameter of their filters.  There are plenty of algorithms for detecting skin tones in images and I’m 99% sure that they’ve been incorporated into email filters. It’s just a question of turning them on.

I think they’ll also reconsider their policy on having their talking heads stand in front of an office like that. I know they do it to look more important — I’ve taken 3 minutes out from my dazzlingly busy schedule to explain that your mortgage payments won’t change today, but will probably go up in a month or two. Gosh, don’t I look impressive? — but exactly this sort of stuff is the risk with which it comes.  I’ve seen other stupid things going on behind US presenters, so I don’t think they’ll stop the practice, but they might consider staging the background a little more than just sticking a big cardboard Macquarie sign in there.

In the end, it just shows what everybody working in an open-plan office already knows: the exact position and alignment of your desk is of crucial value.

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One in 20 Australians play the pokies WEEKLY

Stephen Lunn, writing at The Australian, channels the Productivity Commission’s recent report:

[The Productivity Commission] finds the legal ban in Australia on online gaming is a failure, with betting traffic heading to overseas sites that offer little in the way of consumer protection.

In its draft report on gambling, the first in-depth national look at Australia’s gambling industry in a decade, the commission finds that gamblers are losing $18 billion a year, of which $12 billion is lost on gaming machines.

It estimates that around 5 per cent of adults play weekly or more on gaming machines, and 15 per cent of those, or around 125,000 people, are problem gamblers.

Productivity commissioner Gary Banks says “a large number of people have problems with their gambling (and) it is vital that they are given a tool to achieve greater control”.

The commission recommends the reduction in the amount that can be lost on a gaming machine from its current upper limit of $1200 an hour to $120 per hour, and giving people a choice when they sit down on how much they spend, using the latest technologies.

[Emphasis added by John Barrdear]

If we assume that state governments and pubs don’t want to get rid of pokies because they’re so dependent on the revenues, then surely the only serious hope for enacting this would be for it to be a federal law.

Lifting the ban on online gambling and permitting pokies but limiting the loss rate seem sensible ideas to me – they leave people with the freedom to gamble if they wish, but limit the loss to largely one of time rather than having the option of putting the house down.

Of course, the softest still-ultimately-effective policy would be to simply hold the upper limit on loss rates constant while letting the minimum wage and welfare benefits rise with inflation so that the limit falls both in real terms (relative to the cost of living) and relative to household income.

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On being a reporter for a News Corp paper …

Anonymously faxed (!) to Crikey and from there replicated by Peter Martin, here is an internal memo from staff to management at The (Adelaide) Advertiser [Main Site, Wikipedia]:

[…]
There are many conflicting instructions, blanket bans on certain words and subjects, and a lack of trust in the reporter to choose what to focus on.
[…]
We need clearer communication about what management wants. We need early, clear direction that also incorporates flexibility when stories change throughout the day. We need to feel confident that when circumstances beyond our control change the direction of a story, we will not be verbally abused or blamed for that. Management often dictates an editorial line it wants reporters to take that is in conflict with what our contacts say. Much of a day can be wasted trying to find one person to say what management wants them to say. This is not reporting, it is fabricating news.
[…]

Here is the memo as a pdf. The document in scribd is below …

Advertiser Memo

(Brad DeLong, are you reading this?  This, if not already there, is coming to America …)

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A description of Australia’s healthcare system

John Hempton has gotten to it before I did and written it far better than I would have anyway.  Have a read.  Although I agree that Australia’s system is much, much better than America’s current system or any of their proposed frameworks, I would add three negative comments about Australia’s system:

  • Medicare payments to GPs for a consultation by a patient are determined centrally (at the federal level) and have not increased with inflation.  At first that meant that GPs shortened each consultation to fit more people in per day, but in the long run served, I believe, to reduce the supply of GPs and as a result pushed people with minor ailments to hospital emergency rooms.
  • I don’t know if it is better or worse than other countries, but the administrative overhead in the state government health departments is surprisingly large, even to me.  I am led to believe that adminstrators and middle-managers exceed more than 50% of the staff of Queensland Health (and that does not include admin staff on the wards).
  • The federal-state funding arrangement in Australia is a real problem.  I don’t know whether the best policy is to put all health care in federal hands or to grant the states more revenue-raising posibilities, but something does need to happen.
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Whither baseload demand?

John Quiggin has a post in which he argues that, if baseload demand exists in any meaningful sense, it is much lower than current offpeak demand.  I want to paraphrase and expand on what he said.

There is no such thing as a “natural” or baseload level of demand.  There is a demand curve that plots quantity demanded as a function of price (or if you’re trained as an economist, the other way around).  There is a 3rd dimension of “time of day” (or more strictly, time of week, if I can say that): the curve of quantity-versus-price shifts in and out over the day.  The entire thing then shifts out slowly over time as population and the economy increase.

At most, we might say that there is a region of the demand curve for the offpeak period that is highly inelastic with respect to price.  Quiggin is arguing that that region would only be for quite small amounts of power, distinctly less than we currently see in offpeak load figures.

The reason lies in the economics of our current electricity supply through coal-fired power stations. (Side note:  I’m not 100% certain of these points – if anyone can confirm or deny them, I’d be glad to hear from you):

  • There is some range in the thermal output of a single furnace (it’s not simply all or nothing), but real variation comes from switching entire furnaces off and on.
  • The cost of moving within the output range of a given furnace is essentially just the fuel cost; the concurrent manpower required and the maintenance needs accrued are unchanged.
  • There are economies of scale in concurrent manpower when increasing the number of furnaces.  Moving from one furnace to two does increase the staff requirement, but it does not double it.
  • There are significant one-time costs associated with starting (and possibly also with shutting down) a furnace, largely due to accruing future maintenance costs.  This means that once you start a furnace, you want to keep it running as long as possible so as to amortise that cost over the greatest amount of output.

The upshot of these points (and all of them point in the same direction) is that a cost-minimising coal-fired power station is one with many furnaces that are shut down as rarely as possible.  In other words, they ideally want to supply a large and constant amount of power to the grid.

But the demand curve at 3pm is a lot further out than at 3am.  The coal powered stations can handle this a little bit by scheduling all non-emergency maintenance overnight, but ultimately, they face a conundrum:  the demand simply doesn’t exist — at any price — to meet their cost-minimising supply in the dead of night.  So they compromise by shutting down some furnaces (which raises the average cost of the remaining power generated) and lowering the offpeak price by half (which lowers the average revenue they receive for that power) in order to raise the quantity demanded.

Quiggin is contesting that the increase in quantity demanded during offpeak is significant compared to the “true baseload” demand, the quantity that would be demanded at 3am at just about any price.

In contrast, solar power, in particular, would have supply shifting in and out over the day along with demand.

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Howard and Costello

With the news that Peter Costello will not be seeking reelection, Peter Martin gives us two stories of Costello’s way of dealing with people.  The first, with Saul Eslake, the chief economist of ANZ, is interesting enough, I guess.  The second one really caught my eye:

Richard Denniss is these days the chief of staff for the Greens’ leader Bob Brown. In 2002 he was the chief of staff to the then Democrats’ leader Natasha Stott Despoja. In Mr Costello’s budget speech that year he had announced that pensioners and other concession card holders would have to pay more for their medicines. Their co-payment would climb from $3.60 to $4.60 per prescription.

The Democrats said they would oppose the measure in the Senate. Some weeks later Senator Stott Despoja and Dr Denniss were summoned to the Peter Costello’s office.

Denniss says Costello took them through page after page of laminated graphs, talking at them for the best part of an hour. The Treasurer seemed surprised to discover that they hadn’t been won over.

“At one point Costello said: Natasha, you don’t appear to understand the numbers. To which she replied: I do understand the numbers Peter, you don’t have them in the Senate and you won’t be passing this bill”.

A few days later the two were summoned to the Prime Minister’s office. Denniss says he had expected Mr Howard to be even worse.

Instead they found Howard “effusive in apologising for being late, come in sit down, can I get you a cup of tea – lots of chit chat, lots of actual conversation”.

The Prime Minister said “I know you spoke to the Treasurer last week and I’m sure he showed you all his graphs” and I understand your position: “we are trying to drive up the price of medicine for sick people, of course the Democrats are going to oppose it”.

And then he said: “How about ten cents? That wouldn’t hurt anyone.” “It absolutely floored us.”

Howard said: “Natasha, you’re the leader, I’m the leader, can’t we just settle this right now?”

Denniss says he found the Prime Minister almost impossible to resist. “His genius was to make us feel powerful.”

Costello by contrast “wanted to wield the power that had been bestowed upon him.”

I find this entirely compelling.  Costello always struck me as a technocrat.  I may not have liked Howard much (and not at all for the latter half of his time as PM), but he knew better than most what any specific audience wanted to hear.

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Westminster democracy and illiberalism

Cam Riley doesn’t like the new “Bikie Laws” in South Australia.  He quotes Gary Sauer-Thompson, who says:

My understanding is that under the legislation … the Attorney-General has right to call an organisation, which could be anything from an informal group of people who meet at the local pub for a weekly drink through to a football club or a business, a Declared Organisation. The Attorney-General can use secret and untested evidence in making that declaration, and his decision can’t be challenged in the courts.

… Severe penalties are then visited upon controlled members who continue some form of contact, even remote contact by post, fax, phone or e-mail – two years imprisonment for a first offence, five years for a second or subsequent offence.

I agree with Cam and Gary.  This is illiberal and unnecessary.  The law is ostensibly to combat criminality in gangs of bikies, but every element of that criminality is already illegal.  It’s already illegal to conspire to commit violence, or to trade drugs.  So the net effect of this legislation is simply to grant the Attorney-General the power to disallow any organisation that (s)he doesn’t like.  Cam points out that the “emergency” laws enacted in NSW following the Cronulla riots are still on the books.

My question is this:

Why do these laws get passed now when they (probably) wouldn’t have been passed following equivalent crises 100 years ago?

It seems obvious that the legislature has a political incentive to be seen doing something, as time in the media’s spotlight is currency to a politician.  It’s common to suggest, although not universally accepted, that the sharp end of the executive (i.e. those charged with enforcing the law) generally wish for more options in carrying out that enforcement.  In a Westminster system of the executive having a controlling influence in the legislature, that would imply inexorable movement towards illiberalism over time as exogenously-sourced crises occur.

So how has liberalism survived for so long in the Westminster tradition?  What, if you’ll excuse the pun, arrests the movement to a sort of democratic dictatorship?

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More people have jobs AND the unemployment rate is higher

This is another one for my students in EC102.

Via the always-worth-reading Peter Martin, I notice that the Australian Bureau of Statistics February release of Labour Force figures contains something interesting:  The number of people with jobs increased, but the unemployment rate still went up.  Here’s the release from the ABS:

Employed Persons Unemployment Rate
Australia Feb 2009 Employment Australia Feb 2009 Unemployment Rate

FEBRUARY KEY POINTS

TREND ESTIMATES (MONTHLY CHANGE)

  • EMPLOYMENT increased to 10,811,700
  • UNEMPLOYMENT increased to 561,100
  • UNEMPLOYMENT RATE increased to 4.9%
  • PARTICIPATION RATE increased to 65.4%

SEASONALLY ADJUSTED ESTIMATES (MONTHLY CHANGE)

EMPLOYMENT

  • increased by 1,800 to 10,810,400. Full-time employment decreased by 53,800 to 7,664,200 and part-time employment increased by 55,600 to 3,146,200.

UNEMPLOYMENT

  • increased by 47,100 to 590,500. The number of persons looking for full-time work increased by 44,400 to 426,000 and the number of persons looking for part-time work increased by 2,600 to 164,500.

UNEMPLOYMENT RATE

  • increased by 0.4 percentage points to 5.2%. The male unemployment rate increased by 0.3 percentage points to 5.1%, and the female unemployment rate increased by 0.5 percentage points to 5.3%.

PARTICIPATION RATE

  • increased by 0.2 percentage points to 65.5%.

The proximate reason is that more people want a job now than did in January.  The unemployment rate isn’t calculated using the total population, but instead uses the Labour Force, which is everybody who has a job (Employed) plus everybody who wants a job and is looking for one (Unemployed).

$$!u=\frac{U}{E+U}$$

Employment increased by 1,800, but unemployment increased by 47,100, so the unemployment rate ($$u$$) still went up.

Peter Martin also offered a suggestion on why this happened:

We’ve lost a lot of wealth and we’re worried. So those of us who weren’t looking for work are piling in.

I generally agree, but my guess would go further. Notice two things:

  • Part-time jobs went up by 55,600 and full-time jobs fell by 53,800 (the difference is the 1,800 increase in total employment).
  • The number of people looking for part-time jobs went up by only 2,600 and the number of people looking for full-time jobs rose by 44,400 (yes, I realise that there’s 100 missing – I guess the ABS has a typo somewhere).

There are plenty of other explanations, but I think that by and large, the new entrants to the Labour Force only wanted part-time work and found it pretty-much straight away – these are households that were single-income, but have moved to two-incomes out of the concern that Peter highlights.  On the other hand, I suspect that the people that lost full-time jobs have generally remained in the unemployment pool (some will have given up entirely, perhaps calling it retirement).

The aggregate result is that the economy had a shift away from full-time and towards part-time work, although the people losing the full-time jobs are not the ones getting the new part-time work.

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On the topic of US politics …

There’s a perennial question thrown around by Australian and British politics-watchers (and, no-doubt, by people in lots of other countries too, but I’ve only lived in Australia and Britain):  Why do American elections focus so much on the individual and so little on the proposed policies of the individual?  Why do the American people seem to choose a president on the basis of their leadership skills or their membership of some racial, sexual, social or economic group, while in other Western nations, although the parties are divided to varying degrees by class, the debate and the talking points picked up by the media are mostly matters of policy?

An easy response is to focus on the American executive/legislative divide, but that carries no water for me.  Americans seem to also pick their federal representatives and senators in the same way as they do their president.

The best that I can come up with is to look at differences in political engagement brought about by differences in scale and political integration.  The USA is much bigger (by population) and much less centralised than Australia or Britain.  As a result, the average US citizen is more removed from Washington D.C. than the average Briton is from Whitehall or the average Australian from Canberra.  The greater population hurts engagement by making the individual that much less significant on the national stage – a scaled-up equivalent of Dunbar’s number, if you will.  The decentralisation (greater federalism) serves to focus attention more on the lower levels of government.  The two effects, I believe, reinforce each other.

Americans are great lovers of democracy at levels that we in Australia and Britain might consider ludicrously minuscule and at that level there is real fire in the debates over specific policies.  Individual counties vote on whether to raise local sales tax by 1% in order to increase funding to local public schools.  Elections to school boards decide what gets taught in those schools.

That decentralisation is a deliberate feature of the US political system, explicitly enshrined in the tenth amendment to their constitution.  But when so many matters of policy are decided at the county or state level, all that is left at the federal level are matters of foreign policy and national identity.  It seems no surprise, then, that Americans see the ideal qualities of a president being strength and an ability to “unite the country.”