tcpip | Lectures and Tests, Games and Magyar Pagans, Intelligent Design, Hidden Agendas and Vested Interests

Second workshop on market segmentation and geodemographics for Prosper Australia was a success. Tomorrow is marketing for the media. After that organisational planning. Then comes the big test of implementation. Cisco classes went well last week. For the two module tests my results were 96% (WAN technologies) and 83% (router commands). I confess to not paying much attention to the latter.

Have been hard at work with the Mimesis RPG and will have a lengthy new draft on said work in progress at the end of today. Sunday (after a dull Unitarian Committee of Management Meeting) was Outbreak of Heresy where the noble troupe discovered a surviving Magyar pagan village and discovered the fiendish plan of the pagans to smash the neighbouring Christian counties through the Sword of God. It's all getting quite exciting.

Ahh, I'm giving the service for next Sunday's extended service:

Theories of Evolution: Intelligent Design versus Natural Selection

A special extended service to discuss this issue to be held at the Melbourne Unitarian Peace Memorial Church, 110 Grey Street, East Melbourne at 11 am on Sunday October 23.

Dr. Bill Hall, PhD in Evolutionary Biology, Knowledge Management Systems Analyst for Tenix Defence Engineering Pty Ltd and Nigel Sinnot, Rationalist and former editor of the British journal "Freethinker" (world's oldest freethought journal).

Plus speakers from ICAST (Institute for the Study of Christianity in an Age of Science and Technology) and the University of Melbourne (Department of History and Philosophy of Science).

Special thanks to the Livejournal community convert_me for their contribution to this debate.

Why are business and economic spokespeople so ignorant of basic economic matters? Here's an example of the Executive Director of the Business Roundtable who doesn't know what GDP is or how it is calculated. Here is an example (courtesy of

zey) of the spokesperson for the Australian Industry Group who doesn't know what productivity is. Are we supposed to have confidence is this people? Anyone with even high school economics would be rolling in the aisles at the sheer stupidity of these claims. Perhaps, (he asks rhetorically in the third person), they have another agenda?

Speaking of other agendas and vested interests Dr. Major Fernandes has gotten himself into the news again. Seems that the senior figures of the Australian military are less interested in intelligence and security but more interested in protecting the reputation of the Howard government. Want the evidence? Read the book, Reluctant Saviour.

Oh, and

the_siobhan? Thank you. This game rocks.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

GDP may increase, or decrease, due to Katrina. GDP came from the production that occurred in New Orleans; its destruction has caused that to be lost. If they abandon NO, GDP will drop. If they rebuild it with streets paved in gold, marbled halls, and $100k p.a. government jobs for every citizen, GDP will rise.

Yes. You know what GDP is ;-)

Speaking as the former National Accounts expert for the Parliamentary Library, Roger K is not saying something as silly as folk in this thread seem to think.

GDP is a measure of final production. So, if the US produces more as a result of spending on Katrina repair than it otherwise would if Katrina had not occurred, then Katrina will indeed increase GDP.

Now, expenditure on Katrina repair will be highly visible. What will not be visible is the production that does not occur as a result of Katrina. Nor the production which would have occurred if the resources spent on repair had been spent elsewhere. If the value of lost production plus displaced production is greater than production for repair (including any quality improvement effects), the net effect of Katrina on US GDP will be negative. Which is quite likely. Either way one certainly cannot claim that US GDP will be automatically higher as a result of Katrina. It is more likely to be below what it otherwise would be.

Of course, Katrina repair production is production, so contributes to GDP. In that (rather pointless) sense one can say that Katrina repair will raise US GDP.

Of course, if one goes directly to economic well-being, then Roger K is clearly correct, which would have been perhaps the more lay-down-misere way to put his argument.

But bright folk can say silly things, even in their area of expertise. I once heard Bernie Fraser, when Reserve Bank Governor, give a speech where he clearly confused a one-off increase in price level with inflation.

Quite so. The critical question of course (to summise) is whether expenditure on rebuilding the devastation caused by Katrina is greater than the production lost by its destruction.

I suspect it would be, and significantly so.

Um, no actually, the question of displaced production is very important. Katrina repair production is not 'manna from heaven', the resources have other potential uses -- i.e. their opportunity cost. Which Roger K specifically argues will be higher than the value of the repair production.

A classic formulation of the recovery-is-good-for-GDP fallacy has been to point to postwar German and Japanese growth rates and say that war-repair was good for their economies. Below is the % advantage in USA GDP per capita compared to the average of 12 Western European economies according to Angus Maddison's figures:

1913 44%
1950 91%
1973 37%
1998 46%

Basically, it took until the late 1960s for the West European economies to catch up to their relative GDP per capita level they had with the USA in 1913. Given that technological transfer, the liberalising effects of the EU and the GATT and the break-up (particularly in Germany and Japan in the immediate post-war period) of Mancur Olson's collusive networks counteracted the damage of WWII, the point is even stronger.

Also according to Maddison's figures, Japan (which had a very benign WWI) did not pass its 1941 level of per capita GDP until 1956. Which was, given the extent to which they were bombed flat (1941 per capita GDP was 86% higher than its 1946 low), a remarkable performance.

Um, no actually, the question of displaced production is very important.

Assuming of course that highest possible utilisation of the nation's production possibility frontier. If this is not the case (which it hasn't been for some time, iirc) then the disaster recovery programme will push actual production towards the potential.

Explain why comparative GDP per capita is the appropriate measure in this case. It's not coming to me intuitively.

I used per capita because it gets away from population change.

Actually, the question of the productivity possibility is not the relevant thing. Whether or not repair production is a more productive use of resources than displaced production depends on the characteristics of both. If the society is already at its frontier, then the repair production cannot be more productive than the displaced production. But if the society is not at its frontier, it can be as, more or less productive.

I suspect you are thinking more of the shift between consumption and investment.

Lectures and Tests, Games and Magyar Pagans, Intelligent Design, Hidden Agendas and Vested Interests

Theories of Evolution: Intelligent Design versus Natural Selection

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