peter's shared items in Google Reader

The dangers of opera

2009-11-19T21:32:00Z

So, is it that folks who prefer death to dishonour are more likely to attend opera in the first place, that opera encourages folks to think suicide a reasonable option in case of dishonour, or some kind of augmentative thing where the former kind of folks have their initial preferences built-upon by opera?

Clearly the healthists need to keep a close eye on opera. Caplan's Amore Infernale ought to be banned immediately, before it can ever be staged. We could commission a study on the social costs of opera, declaring some level of opera consumption irrational by definition and then measuring the proportion of opera watched by such harmful opera fans. There could be mandatory counselling sessions for folks attending the whole Ring Cycle.

From Death Studies, 2002:

The influence of music-based subcultures on suicidality has been the subject of much debate but little scholarly research. While previous work has documented that suicide is a remarkably frequent cause of death in opera, it has not explored the related consequences on opera's audience. In particular, the possible influence of the opera subculture on suicide acceptability has been largely unexplored. Suicide in the case of life without honor, the "Madame Butterfly Effect," is a theme in opera. Persons who are drawn into and/or influenced by the opera subculture of honor are hypothesized to be more accepting of suicide in the case of dishonor to one's family. Data are from the national general social surveys (N = 845). A multivariate logistic regression analysis finds that opera fans are 2.37 times more accepting of suicide because of dishonor than nonfans. Only two variables, religiosity and education, are more closely related to suicide acceptability than opera fanship. These are the first empirical results on the subject of opera and suicide acceptability.

HT: NCBI ROFL

Myths about Obesity

2009-11-19T01:16:12Z

Fairfax has a piece on myths about obesity that is sensible and properly science-based, and which they are promoting in the banner area of the front page? Maybe there’s something to all this approaching-2012-apocalypso after all.

The layout is better in the dead-tree edition, where the SMH felt no need to illustrate it with a headless torso as they have done in the web version (at least it’s not an OMGDeathFatz headless torso this time).

Gary Egger and Sam Egger originally published a version of this article in Australian Family Physician, and the gist is this:

We assessed the best available evidence on weight loss and maintenance and used this to compile a 20-statement survey – with true or false responses – which we then gave to two groups of people: 173 GPs and 129 truck drivers and tradesmen.

We found doctors were almost as confused as truckies and tradies. The doctors disagreed with most of the supporting evidence on 40 per cent of our questions, the others on 49 per cent.

Another failing of the web edition is that it does not reproduce the table of results for the survey which is shown in the dead-tree edition. Here’s the data in the table seen in the dead-tree version reproduced manually using a spreadsheet:

Tradesmen	Big Fat Lies	True/False	Doctors
%incorrect	SMH 2009/11/19 page 21		%incorrect
	NUTRITION
38	Fruit juice is about as fattening as beer	TRUE	20
80	Humans need 8 glasses of water a day	FALSE	79
43	Peanuts are a healthy food	TRUE	42
74	Dairy products can help weight loss	TRUE	73
33	A low protein diet is best for weight loss	FALSE	10
55	Fat people don’t get more hungry than lean people	TRUE	62
76	Chocolate is healthy provided it is ‘dark’	FALSE	45
27	Spicy foods make you eat more	FALSE	32
27	Vegetable juice is healthier than fruit juice	TRUE	34
34	Coffee causes cancer	FALSE	28


	EXERCISE
49	Sit ups will not help reduce fat off the waist	TRUE	49
77	Exercise is better than dieting for weight loss	FALSE	60
52	Swimming is better than walking for weight loss	FALSE	27
69	Weight lifting is good for fat loss	TRUE	62
77	The best measure of body fat is body mass index	FALSE	23
39	You lose more weight doing exercise you are good at	FALSE	56
68	An obese person can be fit and healthy	TRUE	47
34	You have to ‘bust a gut’ to lose a gut	FALSE	33
25	Sauna baths are good for fat loss	FALSE	10
8	Exercise can increase depression	FALSE	2

It’s depressing to think that nearly 3 out of 4 in both groups believe incorrectly that dairy products do not help weight loss, that more than 1 in 2 in both groups believe incorrectly that fat people get more hungry than lean people, that roughly 2 in 3 in both groups do not know that weight lifting is good for burning fat while nearly 1 in 2 believe incorrectly that sit-ups will burn abdominal fat. On the other hand, at least 3 out of 4 doctors agreed that BMI is not a good measure of body fat, which seems to represent some sort of progress with the medical education on that even if it hasn’t trickled down to Joe Tradesman.

On the gripping hand, doctors don’t seem to have absorbed much in the way of basic biomechanics, believing falsely that one loses more weight doing exercise that you are good at, while the truckies/tradies seem to know the truth – the better you are at something the more efficient you are, therefore the less energy you will burn while doing it. (This effect is possibly/probably confounded somewhat by the aspect that if you are good at something you are more likely to enjoy doing it, and are therefore more likely to do it for longer and thus burn more energy than doing something else for a shorter interval, so this question is not as clear-cut as perhaps the authors intended).

This article is cross-posted from Hoyden About Town.

What they said as it all came tumbling down

2009-11-18T13:00:01Z

''What the f--k is going on ...?'' Kerry Packer from his hospital bed in February 2001, according to the evidence of Jodee Rich.

The link between the quality of rock music and US oil production ;)

2009-11-18T20:02:26Z

Courtesy of Barry Ritholz:

Question: Is the decline in good rock music driving the decline in oil production, or is it vice versa? Economists and aesthetes will debate this for decades, I'm afraid.

(With apologies to Felix Salmon for ripping off his "correlation of the day" franchise--all proceeds go to him.)

P.S. Another question: It says on this wiki page that the "Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list was chosen "based on votes by 172 musicians, critics, and music industry figures." If that's the case, then it occurs to me that the distribution of songs across years might always look something like this, regardless of when you plot it. That is, it may be that people--particularly insiders and elites--have a bias toward thinking the best music was made 50 years ago. So if you did another 500 greatest songs list in 2054 rather than 2004 (when this one came out), the peak might come some time this decade. (Hard to believe, I know, but just wait till you hear the schlock the kids are listening to in the 2050s...) Meanwhile, I'm guessing that peak oil production is going to stay put right where it is.

Just thought I'd highlight another layer of spuriousness in our analysis...

Economic troubles mean more prostitution, more smoking, less gambling

2009-11-18T00:44:16Z

A new study says that unemployment increases the likelihood that someone will resume or continue to smoke.

Competition for the National Times and Punch

2009-11-18T00:33:56Z

In a move that will put the ABC directly up against News Ltd and Fairfax’s online comment sites, the broadcaster is relaunching ABC Unleashed to form part of a new commentary and analysis site that will for the first time aggregate the public broadcaster’s commentry content as well as feature original material.

The move will see the public broadcaster provide a direct challenge to newly launched opinion and aggregation sites from commercial media like News Limited’s The Punch and Fairfax’s National Times, both of which launched earlier this year, and Crikey which refocused its website onto aggregated opinion this year too.

As part of the changes, Unleashed editor Catherine Taylor will report to the new editor of the still-to-be-named opinion site, Jonathan Green, the outgoing Crikey editor. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Annabel Crabb will also join Green’s team. There are currently three commissioning staff – including Taylor – on Unleased, which primarily features content from external contributors.

ABC.net.au editor Bruce Belsham told Mumbrella the launch of the new site is part of its efforts to provide analysis and commentary that its broadcast equivalent has long offered, with programmes such as Four Corners and Background Briefing.

However, the comment is likely to be less free-ranging than its rivals as ABC staff views will still be subject to the organisation’s editorial policies.

The site, which will be launched early next month, will also aggregate all the analysis and commentary currently found across the ABC.net.au website, while featuring original analysis pieces from Green and Crab.

Asked if the site would be a competitor to the Punch, National Times and Crikey, he said: ”Unleashed already sits in that space and with the exception of Crikey, it predates those sites. Clearly it’s an area a number of people have invested in. But we’re not beginners in this area, we’ve simply stepped up our efforts.”

Belsham said Unleashed, which launched in 2007, currently attracts 175,000 unique browsers a month and it is hoping to grow this figure, with its beefed up new site.

By comparison, according to latest Nielsen figures The Punch had 209,201 unique browsers during October, Crikey attracted 192,902. Despite Fairfax previously saying it would offer an audited figure for the National Times, it is still not listed on Nielsen.

Alexa figures (which tend to be cruder than Nielsen’s) suggest that the National Times has struggled to find a direct audience, although it will also get traffic via Fairfax’s masthead sites such as theage.com.au and smh.com.au.

Meanwhile, Crikey’s co-owner Eric Beecher told Mumbrella that a successor for Green is yet to be decided.

While some observers believe that Green’s deputy Sophie Black is a strong candidate, it is understood that a number of external candidates have already signalled their interests to Beecher.

“Jonathan’s still here, it only happened last Friday, so were looking at how were going to approach this,” Beecher said.

The merger of Smartcompany and Crikey’s owner Private Media Partners, is also underway. The new entity will be headed by Smartcompany CEO Amanda Gome.

Beecher maintained that there would be no major changes to Crikey as a result, which will continue to “evolve”.

Prior to joining Crikey in 2007, Green worked as senior editor and columnist at The Age.

The Dutch Try a Kilometer Tax

2009-11-17T00:43:23Z

The Dutch have done something innovative. They’re replacing the sales and ownership taxes on cars with a tax based on the amount people drive.

“Each vehicle will be equipped with a GPS device that tracks how many kilometres are driven and when and where. This data will be then be sent to a collection agency that will send out the bill,” the transport ministry said in a statement.

…Dutch motorists driving a standard family saloon will be charged 3 euro cents per kilometre (seven US cents per mile) in 2012. That would increase to 6.7 cents (16 US cents per mile) in 2018, according to the proposed law.

Here’s some quick math to translate. As recently as 2005, the average American had a commute of 33 miles. That’s about 53 kilometers. That would translate to a daily tax of 1.53 Euros, or $2.28. That adds up quickly. If this kind of tax were instituted in America, the average commuter would be paying an extra $11 each week. That’s more than $500 each year.

This kind of plan has been proposed here, too. It’s been talked about in Oregon and considered by Secretary LaHood. The nice thing about a mileage (or kilometer) tax is that it internalizes the some of the external costs of driving thereby encouraging people to drive less. It also links the money we use for infrastructure upkeep with the actual use of our roads and highways.

But a mileage tax, unlike a gas tax, doesn’t encourage people to drive cleaner cars. It adds a cost to driving based on the distance, not the carbon. A Tesla and a Hummer are taxed the same. The smarter plan—especially given the cost and privacy concerns associated with all of those GPS devices—might be to raise the gas tax or design a new one that’s a little more innovative than the current flat gas tax.

Whether that’s politically possible, of course, is another question. At any rate, it will be interesting to see how this plan goes over in the Netherlands.

Give “Experience” Gifts This Christmas If You’re Low On Cash

2009-11-16T23:30:00Z

With excess cash in short supply these days, no-one wants to feel like a gift given is unappreciated. Ensure the people on your gift-giving list enjoy themselves by giving an experience instead of stuff. (more…)

Edward Woodward, dead at 79

2009-11-16T20:53:11Z

The British actor Edward Woodward, who started his career treading the boards in Shakespearean rep but went on to become an iconic television hard man, has died at the age of 79.

Does Rudd have the authority to apologise?

2009-11-16T08:12:46Z

At lunchtime today I heard a part of Prime Minister Rudd’s public apology to people who were abused whilst wards of the state. The so-called “forgotten Australians”. Previously, Mr Rudd apologised to the “stolen generation”, again for their mistreatment by the state.

There is something that these apologies say about Mr Rudd himself — he believes that he has the authority to apologise on behalf of all Australians. There are two problems with this belief. First, the “forgotten Australians” and the “stolen generation” have suffered at the hands of the State. For the egregious actions of its representatives, the State should apologise to the victims, and the apology should come from the head of the State. But Mr Rudd is not the head of state in Australia. He obviously thinks of himself as being first citizen of the nation; however, in the our “Washminster” system the Prime Minister can only give advice to the head of state and cannot assume that role. Rudd should have asked the Governor General to give the apology.

Second, quite apart from technical authority, Mr Rudd does not have the moral authority to apologise on behalf of the nation. We have a representative democracy in which a parliament is elected to pass laws and provide government. The parliament elects a prime minister to form and lead a government. Nothing in this social contract gives the prime minister a moral, ethical or spiritual leadership over the people of Australia. It is true that the prime minister speaks for our country in international forums. But in a purely domestic conversation between one group of Australians, the victims, and the rest of Australia, in what sense does the PM speak for you or me? He does not have the authority to apologise to anyone on my behalf.

I also find Mr Rudd’s apologies somewhat hollow because of the absence of action to go with them. The apology to the “stolen generation” was made nearly two years ago now. What has the PM done to improve the conditions of indigenous Australians, especially those who live in remote communities? — very little. Apologies are important, but what could the PM point to as follow up action? Where is the improvement in education, health, domestic violence and social capital. This is not an easy problem, so huge leaps forward cannot be expected, but I feel as though Mr Rudd got up on his moral pedestal to make his apology and then forgot about those victims.

The apology to Aboriginal Australians was a bit unsatisfactory in another way — it seemed to deliberately fudge the question of whether the PM was apologising for the treatment of the ”stolen generation” or whether the apology was for all the mistreatment of indigenous Australians since 1788. As bad as the “stolen generation” episode was it is only one chapter in the full story of our mistreatment of our indigenous population.

Best Blogs of 2009

2009-11-16T03:04:00Z

A reader has brought to my attention that Online Opinion is calling for the best blogs of 2009. This kind individual nominated me for my two part explanation of the origins of the GFC and some policy solutions to these problems, which I presented to the Obama Administration alongside Robert Shiller and others in February 2009. Part of this post was republished by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times. For what it is worth, one of my personal favourites is this missive on Joshua and my efforts to establish greater competitive neutrality in Australia's banking and finance markets. I keep an eye on a few blogs, including Club Troppo, Core Economics, John Quiggin, Stephen Kirchner, and the always interesting Peter Martin.

Laziest social media campaign yet?

2009-11-15T08:19:28Z

I used to work in Dubai.

Among the many corrupt things about the media there were the government-funded “awards” that incentivised journalists to write positive things about the emirate. You can read more about that at Fake Plastic Souks.

So I’m just delighted to see that Sydney agency Robot Meets Alien is adopting a similar approach by attempting to bribe incentivise bloggers with the chance of winning a grand if they write something nice about the video camera they’re promoting.

They’ve been writing to bloggers with the following message:

Hi,

I’m from Sydney based agency Robot Meets Alien. Briefly, our work here is about activating offline conversations via our online relationships. Right now we’re reaching out to the online media and marketing community for inspiration. We’re starting a conversation with Australian bloggers in the search of the most innovative social media campaign for the new Samsung U10 camcorder <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grHz0F7QaVk>.

The blogger with the best idea receives $1000 to spend on their blog to run the campaign. You’ll also gain exposure to our Facebook fans (5300+) and Twitter following (1200+).

How to enter:

1. Write a blog post about the U10 Camcorder <http://tinyurl.com/yk3qzks>.

2. Email us with your response to the question: “How would you market the U10 through your blog and social media network?” Your pitch could be made through a video, a text email, a blog post etc. The more creative the better!

3. Email the URL of your blog post about the U10 and your pitch to SamsungCapture@robotmeetsalien.com along with your name and contact number.

4. Wait for our confirmation email to ensure you have been entered.

Feel free to call or email anytime.

And they’ve even been including the blogs of rival agencies in that email.

Still, I think I’ll have a crack. Here’s my response to the question of how I’d market it… I’d go and find an agency with some good ideas. I’d avoid any agency with the word “robot” or “alien” in their name.

Do I win the money?

Tim Burrowes

Stamp Duty and the Housing Market

2009-11-15T05:48:35Z

I have a new paper out, looking at the impact of stamp duty on the housing market. Methodologically, the question turns out to be slightly tricky – because stamp duty is a mechanical function of house prices, a regression of turnover or prices on average stamp duty in a neighbourhood would return a positive coefficient. To get the behavioural impact, it’s necessary to form a measure of the predicted stamp duty in an area, and run this either as a reduced-form or instrumental variables regression. When you do this, the standard predictions of economic theory are borne out: places with higher predicted stamp duty rates tend to have lower housing turnover and lower house prices. Abstract below (click on the title for the full paper).

How Do Stamp Duties Affect the Housing Market?
Land transfer taxes are a substantial portion of the cost of moving house in many developed countries. However, little is known about the effect of such taxes on the housing market. Since stamp duties are endogenous with respect to the house price, I create an instrumental variable that is the stamp duty on a property, given that postcode’s starting house price and the national house price trend. In a specification with postcode and year fixed effects, this instrument effectively captures policy changes and nonlinearities in the stamp duty schedule. I find that the impact of an increase in the tax rate is to lower house prices, with the magnitude of the effect rising slightly over the medium run. I also observe impacts of stamp duty on housing turnover. A 10 percent increase in stamp duty lowers turnover by 1-2 percent in the first year, and by 4-5 percent if sustained over a 3 year period.

Of course, just because stamp duties affect the housing market, it doesn’t automatically follow that we should scrap them. My quick rundown of that issue here:

Against stamp duties:

Internationally, Australia’s current rates are pretty high (an easy way to think about it is that stamp duty on a given house is about the new price of the car in the driveway).
Higher mobility taxes mean that you get more mismatch between families and the housing stock (too little upsizing by young families, too little downsizing by empty-nesters).
Higher mobility taxes mean that people may not take a job in another city (leading to lower productivity, or lower employment). Or it could mean that they live in the ‘wrong’ part of town, and waste too much time and petrol commuting.

In favour of stamp duties:

All taxes have their distortions, and we’d want to weigh up the those imposed by stamp duty against the distortions that are a byproduct of sales, corporate or personal income taxes. Land taxes are regarded by economists as pretty efficient, and some experts argue that if large land taxes are politically infeasible, land transfer taxes are a good second-best.
Residential stability leads to higher social capital in neighbourhoods. People ignore the negative externality that moving imposes on their neighbourhood’s social fabric, and should therefore be taxed for moving.

Virgin Blue’s mistake reveals countless selfish whingers

2009-11-14T21:00:20Z

Thank you, Virgin Blue, for sending your “erroneous” email Friday night. You’ve done us a great public service. You’ve exposed a pack of greedy, selfish, shallow tools who deserve to be ridiculed publicly. Thank you.

On Friday evening, Australian airline Virgin Blue sent an email telling some Velocity Rewards members they’d been upgraded to Gold status. But as documented at mUmBRELLA, the email went not just to those entitled to the upgrade but their entire database — including people who’d opted out of email marketing.

Including me because, yes, I’m a Velocity Rewards member.

“That can’t be right,” I thought. “I haven’t flown with Virgin Blue this year.” Then I saw others saying similar things online and I figured the mistake was more widespread. I chuckled, knowing that someone had a bit of a mess to clear up.

Sure enough, three hours later a second email arrived.

Oops! Due to an error you’ve received our previous email by mistake. Please disregard the free upgrade communication as unfortunately you do not qualify for that upgrade.

We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Mistake. Correction. Apology. That’s the end of the story, yes? Alas no.

Suddenly a whole bunch of people are demanding their Gold status should stay even though, like, they’re not actually entitled to it. People are “upset”. They’re demanding compensation, some even saying they should be compensated with a free flight voucher.

Compensated? Compensated for fucking what, exactly?

Compensated for being too stupid to realise the email was obviously a mistake? Compensated for having a vastly over-inflated sense of entitlement? Compensated for being so much of a consumer-puppet that you validate yourself by bragging about some confected faux-status symbolised by which colour plastic card sits in your wallet and then being embarrassed because, oh sorry, you’re actually still just another cheap-arsed prole after all?

I don’t think that’s Virgin Blue’s fault.

Losers.

Now of course there’s a metric bazillion blog posts and comments banging on about how this is “epic fail” on Virgin Blue’s part and how they’d have handled it so much better and faster. I won’t link to them because it’s too depressing to realise how many instant fucking experts appear after every little glitch is made public.

However I will link to Darryl King’s excellent piece about what he calls Crowd Spanking.

Why is it that the tools of Social Media make tools out of people?

Yes, companies, people and organisations of any sort can and should be open to criticism and correction of poor behaviour. I agree totally. However I don’t agree that Crowd Spanking of everyone that does something wrong is effective nor necessary …

Add some perspective. This is not a corporation that has exposed their staff and customer to asbestos and are denying compensation. It is an upgrade people! …

Before all the Social Media Gurus come up with the 10 things that Virgin Blue could have done better blog posts think through how businesses and people at work live.

Ex-fucking-zactly.

“Epic fail” on Virgin Blue’s part? Bah! Step back a little and think about the full gamut of things which an airline can get wrong and the potential consequences. Up one end, you’ve got mistakes where hundreds of people die in a ball of flame, traumatising their loved ones. Down the other end you’ve got… gosh! A marketing email that was sent to people by mistake.

To the folks who reckon they’d have handled it better and quicker, well, are you really set up to handle such an unusual situation on a Friday night when people have gone to the pub or gone home for the weekend? Personally, I reckon identifying the problem and getting the second email out in three hours isn’t a bad effort — especially when in the meantime there’s, you know, a fucking airline to run!

Well done, Virgin Blue. Well done.

I reckon — and this is just my opinion here — but I reckon we save the Really Big Stick for mistakes which actually matter. Also, stop being such selfish, judgemental little pricks.

[Update 16 October 2009: To illustrate some points I'll be making in the comments, here's a screenshot of the erroneous Velocity Rewards email.]

5 Random Semi-Related Posts

Media140: How I’ll be responding (2 comments)
At PubCamp Sydney today (3 comments)
How can Microsoft stop us hating them? (8 comments)
iYomu: too late to beat Facebook? (2 comments)
Links for 28 August 2009 through 09 September 2009 (2 comments)

Krugman gives the lie to the claim that unfair dismissal laws are job-destroying

2009-11-14T07:10:44Z

ermany came into the Great Recession with strong employment protection legislation. This has been supplemented with a “short-time work scheme,” which provides subsidies to employers who reduce workers’ hours rather than laying them off. These measures didn’t prevent a nasty recession, but Germany got through the recession with remarkably few job

We Are No Longer as Ashamed of NPR as We Used to Be...

2009-11-13T20:56:32Z

Heebee-Geebie reports:

Unfogged: I don't know when exactly it started, but NPR now uses the word "torture" without qualifications to describe the activities at Guantanamo. That is critically important in shaping the narrative we tell, as a society, about our actions post-9/11.

Crowd-funded Journalism - is happening

2009-11-13T05:10:16Z

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am the Chair of the Foundation for Public Interest Journalism at Swinburne University, which is exploring a number of new models and initiatives for taking journalism forward in the new media age.

These include a community driven commissioning mechanism, similar in some ways to the San Francisco based www.spot.us.

So I was pleased to see this week that The New York Times has just published the result of its first collaboration with Spot.Us – a multi-media story on the Pacific Ocean garbage patch. As reported here, Spot.Us raised more than US$6000 from around 100 people, which paid for the reporter’s travel expenses. Without the money, the journalism would not have been done.

Expect more announcements about our Australian community driven commissioning initiative soon.

SMH breaks silly law and risks $55,000 fine

2009-11-11T23:28:19Z

The Sydney Morning Herald has risked being slapped with a $55,000 fine by today publishing and comparing test results of three schools.

It has published numeracy and literacy results for Sydney Girls High, Hornsby Girls High and Macarthur Girls High.

But NSW law states that publishing exam results of just two schools could result in a fine. This is in spite of the federal Education Minister Julia Gillard announcing that it plans to publish test results from around the country on a new website to be launched in January.

SMH editor Peter Fray has backed the paper’s decision to publish the results saying it is in the interests of parents to know what schools they are enrolling their children in.

He adds: “I do not believe it is in the interests of a functioning democracy to fine a newspaper for publishing such information.

“We wanted to point out the absurdity of the law – having the same information published on the internet and for that same information to be published by a newspaper and risk a fine, could someone please explain the logic in that if there is any? It’s a repressive and stupid law.”

Fray said he had not received any complaints about the story at the time Mumbrella contacted him this morning.

Donate to cut the debt - people do

2009-11-11T11:15:33Z

A little-known program allows Americans to make tax-deductible contributions to pay down what the country owes. It's raised tens of millions of dollars over the years but that hasn't really made a dent in the debt.

Books to remain expensive

2009-11-11T07:19:06Z

My guess that the Government would buckle under local interest group pressure to reject the parallel import of books has proven correct. Mark at LP is pleased to learn that the moves to allow free trade in books suggested by the Productivity Commission have been stopped by the Rudd Government. In fact he asks why have a Productivity Commission at all? It is difficult to argue with this level of prejudiced ignorance – particularly as it was backed by that much-lauded ANU-trained economic guru Craig Emerson. I make two comments:

1. That part of the reason for retaining the law on parallel importing was that local book providers already face competition from imported books. If this is the case there must indeed be significant cost savings in buying books in global markets rather than purchasing them locally. This runs counter to claims that the price savings in allowing parallel imports are low. If they were low local publishers would have little to fear anyway.

2. If Australia seeks to support local authors – I don’t reject this – then give them a subsidy not penalise all consumers with higher prices. Local authors don’t like this because their dependence on goverrnment handouts becomes explicit but such subsidies are less restrictive than partial prohibitive tariffs on trade and provide comprehensive protection for Australian authors even in the face of online purchases.

It is just so important for people to learn some basic economics. Governments can get away with this interest group-driven stupidity that inflicts net costs on society as a whole only because not enough people understand some basic logic about markets.

Update: Useful comments by Joshua Gans and a critique by Sinclair Davidson.