Deltoid

The New Zealand Government has backed down on its emissions trading scheme, in the face of extensive lobbying. http://weblog.greenpeace.org.nz/climate-change/something-is-rotten-in-the-state-of-godzone/

This comes days after Prime Minister Helen Clark was given an award by the United Nations for this and other legislation.

As is so often the case, reality imitates satire http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0805/S00101.htm

Posted by: George Darroch | May 8, 2008 11:29 PM

I'll pollute this thread with a query for you non-US folks - are people overseas interested in our current political squabble between Obama/Clinton?

Posted by: saurabh | May 9, 2008 12:41 AM

Craig Allen:

The research costs are what I'm talking about. The scholarship page says the stipend's AUD 35,000 per annum, which means with 7 researchers the amount of money left for other stuff will be AUD (350,000 - 35 * 7) = AUD 105,000, and that's across all the projects.

I'm just not sure if this remaining amount of money is enough for doing any serious work with trees and stuff -- I'm not familiar enough with this area to have a ballpark estimate, which is why I'm asking.

I don't think that PhD students will consciously try to skew their findings towards what Marohasy et al. like, but if they're not given enough resources to do proper studies, they may be forced to conclude their research with an "I don't know" answer, which is what the inactivists want.

Posted by: bi -- Intl. J. Inact. | May 9, 2008 2:51 AM

A short lesson in University economics, besides salary you have to account for fringe benefits (retirement, etc) another ~20%. Overhead, facilities and administrative costs, UQ, whatever tends to be fixed for government grants and variable for private donations. Different places charge it differently. For example, there could be a charge on only salaries, on all direct costs except equipment, etc. Local rules determine.

Posted by: Eli Rabett | May 9, 2008 11:22 AM

Yikes. You're not going to argue that there is some sort of consensus on minimum wage, are you?

Posted by: Boris | May 9, 2008 1:17 PM

What's your opinion regarding minimum wage laws?

Depends on how they're implemented, as is true of so many things.

Here in Oregon, some years back restaurants were forced to pay servers minimum wage - voters rejected the argument that paying them a couple of bucks an hour was fine because tips would give them a livable wage.

Restaurants predicted they'd be forced out of business, etc. Usual gloom-and-doom bullshit from right-wing business interests. Restaurants are booming, people are still tipping 15%+, servers are making more money, etc. No evidence at all that applying minimum wage laws to servers have hurt the business, nor servers (that's always the argument - "business only opposes minimum wage laws because it will put those the law claims to help out of work!!!!").

Also our minimum wage was raised quite a bit over the federal level. "fast food outlets will no longer hire people!" was the hue-and-cry from the Right. Yet they still seem to be in business ... hmmmm ... strange, that.

Posted by: dhogaza | May 9, 2008 2:00 PM

per Wiki (which knows all)

A strong majority of American economists believes the minimum wage increases unemployment, though there is disagreement as to the magnitude

They reference: Fuller, Dan und Doris Geide-Stevenson (2003): Consensus Among Economists: Revisited, in: Journal of Economic Review, Vol. 34, No. 4, Seite 369-387 (PDF)

The point here isn't the particulars of minimum wage laws. The point is that I think it can be seen (with some mental gymnastics) that a debate here on the topic would result in a role reversal. Conservatives (I hate the labels, and they aren't perfect) would be talking about how minimum wage laws are known to be bad as "settled economic science". Liberals would be focusing on the paper that goes against the grain by arguing that they have no negative effect, etc.

It's also interesting that in trying to browse the internet on the topic of economic consensus regarding minimum wage, I get about the same sort of stuff that I'd get if I searched on climate science consensus about AGW. The hits are chock full of lists claiming 100's of economists are on their side.

Posted by: BillBodell | May 9, 2008 2:53 PM

Bill,

Economics is not a physical science. It's a dismal science. Or, in the case of conservatives, a happy religion.

Posted by: luminous beauty | May 9, 2008 3:34 PM

Jon,

I don't think that people take a view on AGW due to their polictical party affiliation so much as they have a worldview that leads to them seeing things such as AGW in a way that makes them Democrats or Republicans (to the extent they actually have a consistent worldview).

I used to wonder why people always seemed to end up on the same sides of seeming very different issues such as abortion, Vietnam(Iraq), welfare, the environment etc. Thomas Sowell's "Conflict of Visions" cleared it up for me.

Posted by: BillBodell | May 9, 2008 3:46 PM

Thomas Sowell's "Conflict of Visions" cleared it up for me.

Vision is the problem. The real world doesn't give a shit about vision. "belief" in climate science isn't a matter of "vision", it's a matter of accepting reality regardless of whether or not it clashes with your vision.

And Thomas Sowell - another economist, go figure - is vision-driven to the extreme. I wouldn't trust his opinion on anything that might conflict with his extreme right-wing point of view.

We've seen with Lance (assuming he does have a physics degree) just how deeply "vision" can conflict with rationality, even among those with scientific training.

Posted by: dhogaza | May 9, 2008 4:08 PM

dhogaza,

So I'm guessing that you haven't read it yet?

The book doesn't argue for one vision over the other, it just explains what they are. Aren't you curious as to what motivates those that keep disagreeing with you?

"Vision" controls initial impressions, it doesn't substitute for reality. However, one's initial impressions will generally influence what questions get asked, which may influence what answers result.

Posted by: BillBodell | May 9, 2008 4:28 PM

AGW alarmists are economics deniers!

Posted by: BillBodell | May 9, 2008 6:01 PM

The book doesn't argue for one vision over the other, it just explains what they are. Aren't you curious as to what motivates those that keep disagreeing with you?

Do you think I'm going to read a right-wing nutcase crank in order to learn what my "vision" is?

Posted by: dhogaza | May 9, 2008 7:04 PM

"are people overseas interested in our current political squabble between Obama/Clinton?"

since nobody else answered friend of mine just got back from London, says yes. horserace style.

Posted by: z | May 9, 2008 9:02 PM

Well, I took this test and it placed me as a socialist... I disagree with that, I am on the left/liberal end of the American Political spectrum, but I guess that my belief that a society should take care of it's least probably gave me the sobriquet.

Now on to minimum wage: personally, I think that minimum wage laws in this country are not strong enough. A person making minimum wage should be able to afford a small but clean apartment ($500 - $700), be able to buy food ($200 - $300), pay for basic utilities (phone, electric, heat, water, garbage: $50, $50, $50, $20, $20), medical care (single payer, anyone? I'll use what my employer is charging me: $240) and clothing ($50). Nothing extravagent, just the basics in Maslow's hierarchy. In most places in this country that is around $10-$14 an hour and that does not include transportation. Slap on another $2-$3 an hour if decent public transportation is not available. Ever wonder why you don't live like your parents if you have a $20/hr job?

Now back to the reality based world. Dhogaza, I generally (always) agree with you, but I do have a friend who is the general manager at a large and successful resturaunt here in Bozeman. He is a good liberal, but he had a similar objection to having to give raises to his front of the house people. Bear in mind that is a large busy resturaunt/bar which collects a ton of money every night of the week and the people in the front of the house make pretty damn good tips. Several of my dependents (the bartenders) are able to buy houses with their tips, and this is not a cheap housing market... Like every other business there is a raise pool which is shared amongst all of the workers, and his point was that why should he have to give a mandatory raise to the best paid workers in the house when that cuts down on the amount of money he can use to give raises to the people in the back end of the house? Now YMMV -- front of the house people in less successful resturaunts don't make as much from tips and might be able to benefit from an increase in the minimum wage, but when the servers are making more than $200 a night in tips it seems as though the reduced wage makes some sense. BTW, when this was up for a vote two years ago in Montana, he voted in favor, even though it did not have an exception for servers. I guess what I am trying to say is that if there is a server exception it needs to be predicated on the volumne of the resturaunt. Oh, and by the way, I haven't seen any joints going out of business here (well, Hardee's decided to close most of their Montana stores, but this was not related to the minimum wage...). And Captain Mac's (Mickey D's) and the others were already having to pay $10/hr because they couldn't get people to work for minimum wage, in fact, only a sucker would work for $10/hr in the fast food joints...

The executive summary here is that minimum wage laws really don't seem to affect overall employment rates and may help people who are just a bit farther up the economic ladder. The problem is that the minimum wage is not a living wage. When I was a kid earning minimum wage (at that time $2.35/hr) I was able to rent a shared house with a bunch of friends and live a relatively decent life. If I earned minimum wage today, I would be on the street.

Posted by: Rattus Norvegicus | May 9, 2008 10:04 PM

I didn't realize that liberals don't believe in economics.

I believe in results. Conservative economists (and most seem to be conservative) have a horrendous track record.

Laffer curve vs. hockey stick. Trickle-down economics vs. climate science.

Posted by: dhogaza | May 9, 2008 10:38 PM

What the study shows is that there is a trend away from the AGW theory. Like it or not the thruth is getting out...Remember a lie travels around the world before the truth gets out of bed. If a warming trend does not happen soon the trend ( too doubt) is going to increase.

The Canadian CBC for the first time showed "ice Bergs" floating off our Atlantic coast without saying anything about "caused by global warming". Old timers could not recall ever seeing so many icebergs at one time. The CBC never missed a chance to blame everything on AGW but as I said it didn't come up this time. Either, someone was asleep at the wheel, or they are starting to look a little deeper into cause and effect. We have seen more than usual amounts of sea Ice between Greenland and Canada this year and the sea temp around Atlantic Canada is below the mean.

Posted by: kent | May 10, 2008 12:31 AM

I just wrote the following on Jenifer Marahosy's blog where a bunch of denialist free marketeer types are crapping on about how immoral Al Gore is because he apparently remarked that global warming is likely to make disasters like the recent Burmese cyclone occur more frequent.

... The real lesson that should be taken from each these cyclone disasters is that the unconstrained and careless conversion of natural ecosystems to economic uses (such as in this case the clearance of mangroves for shrimp and fish farming) eliminates or compromises the ecological services that they provide, and this can have very unpleasant consequences.

In this case the storm buffer that the mangroves previously provided was not valued appropriately because it was something that everyone got for free, and the potential negative consequences were some theoretical future threat. On the other hand, the profit to be made by clearing the mangroves could be pocketed by individuals, and declining natural capital could (in the short term) be ignored by those making the profits.

Many of those profiting (the corrupt dictatorship and army) did not have to worry about potential negative consequences because they are insulated from them by their wealth and privilege.

The farmers were probably willing to ignore future consequences because they were focussed on the immediate benefits to themselves and their families, and preferred not to recognize 'inconvenient truths' about the longer term implications of their mangrove clearance practices.

So the lack of effective, far-sited regulation and planning to protect natural capital has led to a disaster, as it did in New Orleans.

Posted by: Craig Allen | May 10, 2008 1:17 AM

"Wasn't it Churchill who said, "If you put two economists in a room, you get two opinions, unless one of them is Lord Keynes, in which case you get three"?"

and yet somehow he found Keynes utterly indispensable when it cam to running the war-time economy and managing Britain's debt.

It's amusing to see people who disdain denialists' dismissal of climate science engaging in equally uninformed dismissal of economics.

Posted by: Ian Gould | May 10, 2008 2:04 AM

There is an economic consensus on minimal wage laws - in the United Atates, current minimum wages are low enough that increasing the basic wage moderately is unlikely to have a significant economic impact either positively or negatively.

Bill Bodell's hypothetical question ignores at least three of the major impacts of raising the minimum wage: - it increases the available work force by encouraging discouraged workers to re-enter the labor market; - it increases the total consumption level (since it essentially transfers money from business owners who are on average richer and more likely to save part of their income) to low-income workers who are more likely to spend all or most of the money. The resulting economic stimulus tends to increase the total employment rate; - in many industries, there is a degree of monopsomy power held by employers (briefly they can pay less than the rational market price for labor and increase their profits at the expense of consumers and workers).

Posted by: Ian Gould | May 10, 2008 2:32 AM

Ian Gould:

... equally uninformed dismissal of economics.

I'm with Rattus here. Nobody dismisses reality-based economics, and actually observing the disasters wreaked by the alternative version makes its dismissal informed.

The difference with climate science is, that there, the corresponding points of observation are mostly still in the future.

But there is also a similarity between climate science and economic science: both can successfully inform public policy even in the face of substantial uncertainty. Churchill apparently mastered that art; our disastrous latter-day wannabe churchills, not quite.

Posted by: Gavin's Pussycat | May 10, 2008 3:04 AM

Gavin's Pussycat, Rattus Norvegicus:

Actually, when there is a consensus among economists, the non-economists who disagree tend to be on The Other Side.

A case in point is Clinton's proposed "gas tax holiday", which exactly zero economists endorse.

Posted by: bi -- Intl. J. Inact. | May 10, 2008 6:54 AM

Barton,

The Whaples survey suggests that 90% is rather high. He found 48% of PhDs in the American Economic Association favored eliminating minimum wage laws while 37% wanted an increase. Do you think there's some flaw in this survey (I'll admit I haven't looked at it closely, so it could be junk)?

I'm open to the possibility that the minimum wage is counterproductive, but I don't see the consensus that you apparently do. Obviously, I'm not trusting sources like the National Center for Policy Analysis, but if you have a good source or explanation, please share.

Posted by: Boris | May 10, 2008 8:54 AM

If I may, a little humor...

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today. - Laurence J. Peter

A party of economists was climbing in the Alps . After several hours they became hopelessly lost. One of them studied the map for some time, turning it up and down, sighting on distant landmarks, consulting his compass, and finally the sun. Finally he said, ' OK see that big mountain over there?' 'Yes', answered the others eagerly. 'Well, according to the map, we're standing on top of it.'

Posted by: Betula | May 10, 2008 10:57 AM

For those who favor a higher minimum wage, what do you think would be the economic impact of raising it to $50 an hour? Just a thought experiment.

Posted by: nanny_govt_sucks | May 10, 2008 9:19 PM

52: "For those who favor a higher minimum wage, what do you think would be the economic impact of raising it to $50 an hour?"

Me at 42: "There is an economic consensus on minimal wage laws - in the United Atates, current minimum wages are low enough that increasing the basic wage moderately is unlikely to have a significant economic impact..."

Which one of the qualifiers in that statement sid you not grasp?

It's like asking a denialist if he thinks there'd be a net economic benefit from the Earth's surface temperature was increased to 80 degrees celsius.

Posted by: Ian Gould | May 11, 2008 1:29 AM

robert,

My point was that minimum wage laws are not good or bad by themselves. It's the effect they have on those that we are trying to help that matters. If the effect on the disadvantaged is positive, then I'm in favor. If the effect is negative, then I'm opposed. I believe the effect is positive for white middle class teenagers and 2nd income spouses and negative for teenage minorities and the disadvantaged. Therefore I'm opposed.

I won't bother arguing the particulars here (I don't think we'll have anything new to add to an issue debated by people that have devoted their lives to it), but here are a couple of things to think about. Very few minimum wage earners are heads of households. Almost nobody has worked steadily for 10 years and is still making minimum wage. Most minimum wage earners are teenagers, 2nd earners and entry level workers. It is entirely possible to start at McDonalds at minimum wage and end up as a manager. Workers who are reliable, show up on time and work hard are not easy to find. Entry level jobs at minimum wage are a great way for inexperienced workers to demonstrate these abilities. A young person with no experience and a questionable background might get a chance to show that he can do the job at $5 an hour. At $10 an hour, he might never get the opportunity.

It might be hard to imagine that paying workers an extra dollar an hour will lead to less demand for workers, like it's difficult to imagine that a 50 cent rise in gas prices will lead to less demand for gas. But that's how supply and demand works (and there most definitely is a consensus on that).

Posted by: BillBodell | May 11, 2008 2:18 AM

I think you'll find that 90% of economists, of almost any stripe, think the minimum wage is a bad idea. This is the only scientific issue I know where the disconnect between the public and the scientists is this huge. 90% of the general public think the minimum wage is a good idea.

Given the fact that most Western countries actually have minimum wages, this is a rather academic discussion. However, most non-American (and properly American) economists generally don't think minimum wages are a bad thing - rather the debate is about the size of it.

There are several reasons for this. One is the historical perspective. Economists are not blind to the human costs of low or non-existing minimum wages, and most economists are also aware that the job of economists are not to make political proposals (which is what a minimum wage is) - rather it's to help politicians to make proposals by trying to map the consequences of their ideas. Killing of the minimum wage might theoretically increase the national economy as a whole (a somewhat doubtful claim), but there will be major human costs (as can be observed in the US).

Another reason why economists are not opposed to minimum wage per se, is the fact that low-income wages are actually working money, as Ian explained. This is why many economists opposed the idea of trickle-down economics (aka tax breaks for the rich), as these have been shown to be ineffective. Instead they propose that the wanted effect could be reached through either increasing the pay of low-income people, or reduce their tax burden (though that is often non-existent).

Posted by: Kristjan Wager | May 11, 2008 8:50 AM

In #56, BillBodell contended:

It might be hard to imagine that paying workers an extra dollar an hour will lead to less demand for workers, like it's difficult to imagine that a 50 cent rise in gas prices will lead to less demand for gas. But that's how supply and demand works (and there most definitely is a consensus on that).

There's not as much consensus about that as you suggest. Did you notice how the proportion of surveyed AEA members who agreed with the "standard" minimum wage effect had decreased from 1990 to 2000? Wonder why? It was because of stuff like the Kreuger and Card studies on minimum wage that were published in the intervening period. Although there's consensus on the theory, there's an empirical question about elasticity of demand in low-cost labor (and, for that matter, in the price of gasoline) that sows doubt about what happens in the real world.

But it's good that you are worried about the different effects of economic policy changes on the poor and the not-poor. Kinda commie of you, don't you think?

Posted by: Robert | May 11, 2008 4:39 PM

I did not write "Bill claims that..." I wrote "Bill, claims that...".

I was addressing you , not attributing the claim to you.

Posted by: Ian Gould | May 12, 2008 2:04 AM

Crooked Timber has a discussion on minimum wage. One key point explaining why the Holy Law of Supply and Demand utterly fails when it comes to minimum wage:

More importantly, though, it's a huge mistake to view the purchase of a unit of human labor as being exactly the same as the purchase of a widget. [...] This, I believe, is fundamentally wrong-headed. [...] There are a slew of institutions, norms, and other features of labor markets that do not apply to product markets.

People aren't widgets, either morally, or empirically.

Posted by: bi -- Intl. J. Inact. | May 12, 2008 12:02 PM

BillBodell averred:

The trick is that I care about the actual results of policies, not just their initial good intentions.

It's slightly worrisome that you consider distributional effects of net welfare change to be a trick but I welcome your newly found empiricism nonetheless. This is exact