TVHE

Some of the writers from TVHE have grouped together with other football fans to write a football blog.  The current focus of this blog is on the 2010 Fifa World Cup.  It can be found here:

http://vuvuzelaventing.wordpress.com/

On the blog they go through their views on the different World Cup groups, and who they think will end up taking out the cup.  All very interesting.  I suggest you go along and have a look – they currently have posts up for groups A, B, and C.

Go the All Whites

Tonight at 9.30pm (NZ time) the All Whites will take on Australia over in Melbourne.  The squad is named here (expected Aussie squad here).

Everyone at TVHE is very excited that the All Whites have qualified for the World Cup, and also pumped for the match against the Aussies tonight.  So pumped that Nolan put down $5 on NZ to win (at 10:1).

So good luck boys, we are looking forward to watching you get amongst.

Update:  Feel free to go into comments and discuss your fantasy squad for today .  Also Yellow Fever discussion is here (pg 21 is where we get more into game day).

Update:  All Whites lost 2-1.  Up 1-0 at half-time.  Great performance boys.  And seriously, our first team looks pretty good – its going to be a great World Cup

As recently reported, Avatar now holds the title of highest grossing film of all time.

Furthermore, the film has grossed over $800 million more than Hollywood’s previous blockbuster, 2008’s The Dark Knight.

Given that the themes and story quality of both films was equally awful, the only explanation (in my opinion at least) is that the piracy level of Avatar must be significantly lower than that of The Dark Night. The explanation for this I believe lies in that fact that one film was presented in 3D, while the other was not.

Thus, as the lay pirater is without 3D technology, has Hollywood inadvertently found a (short-term) solution to it’s declining revenue problem: making films in 3D?

We are sadly too busy to really post anything at the moment.

As a result, to fill in time we will put up a recent discussion between TVHE writers.  The one thing this conversation shows:  we all agree that arbitrary policies that are introduced to indirectly target a problem (eg changing the minimum wage to target inflation) tend to do more harm than good.

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As speculated by some over the weekend, and confirmed today by the Economist, Copenhagen currently appears to be nothing more than a venue for which policy makers will agree to consider a future agreement on Carbon Emissions.

Undoubtedly there exist links between the U.S.’ relaxed approach to the summit and the Obama administrations efforts to pass universal healthcare; for the latter to pass the support of those contributing to the former is required. This is nothing new. What is interesting to note, however, is that such an attitude to favor health over emissions has been indirectly present within the U.S. for some time.

Earlier this year Boston became the second city (following San Francisco) to pass legislation banning the sale of cigarettes in ‘drug’ stores.  Within this legislation there exists a further directive restricting the sale of cigarettes on college campuses. This is where things become interesting. Consider a representative smoker. The impact upon this agent from said legislation results in further effort (i.e.; distance traveled) to obtain cigarettes. As such, the ‘carbon footprint’ of each cigarette has increased within the city of Boston; not too mention the shadow price of the cigarettes themselves.

The question is now posed; are carbon emissions an indirect consequence of health legislation?

This is a Hand post, but it is actually just the normal authors of the blog.  We all had the same idea at the same time

Over at Anti-Dismal, Paul Walker reaches the conclusion that

The moral of the story, markets can deal with asymmetric information

In the case of bad and good banks.  He states that banks are able to signal whether they are strong or not, and so government intervention is unnecessary.

However, this doesn’t seem to weigh up properly with the vast amount of literature that points out that bank runs are a concern resulting from asymmetric information (and multiple equilibrium – for economists this is because withdrawal decisions are strategic complements) and that a small amount of government intervention can help prevent said negative outcomes (here and here are seminal pieces).

Now there is a way that we can put both points of view together. Lets look at how the market is overcoming the asymmetric information problem:

At least one major US bank is advertising the fact that it refused TARP funds.

So the market was only able deal with asymmetric information in this case because the government created a mechanism that allowed banks to credibly signal (the TARP program).  It is ONLY because the government created this mechanism that the individual banks could signal their “strength” credibly, thereby preventing an inefficient bank run equilibrium.

So I would change the moral of the story slightly to

markets can deal with asymmetric information, when the institutions are in place that allow them to credibly signal quality – an issue government can sometimes help with

So NZIER thinks it doesn’t matter whether we reduce local emissions or just pay off third-world countries to reduce them for us. Apparently the only important issue is whether we satisfy our responsibilities that we’ve committed to. The money quote is:

It allows emissions reductions to take place in the country where it is cheapest to do so. The climate doesn’t care where the emissions reductions occur, so nor should we.

Economists just love to assume the world’s a perfect place but, so often, reality bites them on the ass. Yeah, I’d like to THINK that when I bought a credit from Somalia they were implementing a project to reduce their forecast emissions. In reality they probably spent the cash on guns and powerboats, and forged the certificate of additionality. The fact is that a lot of credits available on the international market either have dubious additionality value, or cheaply reduce GHG emissions by destroying the environment in other ways. When you buy on the international market instead of reducing your emissions domestically that’s the sort of thing you’re buying into. If you don’t believe me then ask the gospel

Ultimately, the environment doesn’t care if NZ satisfies its international obligations, it only cares how damaged it gets. When you buy on the international market you just have to accept that you’re not doing it to help the planet, you’re doing it to meet the letter of the law. If that’s the way you want to play international diplomacy then fine, but don’t pretend it’s because you’re a greenie at heart!

Following the incessant blather on the BERL report into the cost of alcohol Ganesh Nana has come out to defend the report (Hat Tip this guy).

Why bother? After all we all know that any report on costs will be filled with wild conjecture and pointlessly misrepresented by the public.

Well it turns out the Dr Nana felt the report has been too heavily misrepresented and wanted to clear some things up, so I guess that’s fine.

Except that there are two significant ways that his reply leaves me wanting:

1. His criticism of rational choice is nonsensical,
2. He refuses to admit that BERLs own work was the result of wild value judgments in the same way as the Crampton-Burgess reply.

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