The Young Duck

Once there was a little town of ducks, called Splashville.

It was a little town in the countryside, filled with lots of ponds. It had a park, and the roads were made of cobblestone, which were hard and apt to hurt a young duck’s feet if she wasn’t careful.

‘Mummy, mummy,’ a young duck cried, as she tripped over a particularly hard cobblestone. ‘Can’t there be a better way to walk across town? The cobble stones are painful, and my feet are always bruised and battered.’

But the mother knew there wasn’t anything to be done, and so life continued as it always had: safe and happy, as long as you knew where to place your feet.

However the young duck was a clumsy one, and it seemed that no matter how hard she looked, or how carefully she stepped out on the stones there would always be a cobble there to find its way under her foot. 

And so, she spent most of her time swimming around in the pond, where there weren’t any nasty cobblestones, and where there was hardly any chance of running into them.

But her friends would all play featherball in the afternoon (which is a played lot like soccer with feathers, and is a duck’s favourite sport). It was played on the cobblestones, and so the young duck could only watch from the sidelines, or risk bumping or scratching or bruising her toes, which always made her sore in the evenings. She was very lonely, and wished that she could play like the other ducks.

One day, while swimming around in the pond (the other ducks had waddled off to play featherball some time ago), she came across a piece of rubber which had floated downstream, along with a piece of ribbon which lay beside it. The young duck was curious, and nuzzled the two inquisitively. The rubber was thick, but soft, and gave away under her touch. The ribbon was a bright red, and had no doubt adorned the hat of some sonsy lass. At last the duck gave a happy ‘quack’. She’d had an idea.

All through the night the young duck worked on her project: pulling and prodding, fashioning and fastening, until finally it began to take shape. Her mother hovered behind her, worried and curious, but the young duck continued her work unheeded, her crest puffed up in concentration.

In the morning a curious sight came into Splashville, and a crowd gathered all along Feather Way. What was in the middle of the crowd? Was it a horrific traffic accident? A fowl crime that would ruffle the feathers of all who saw it, and leave no duck unflappable? No. It was the young duck proudly waddling down the cobbled way. On her feet were two wellies fashioned from the rubber she had found. A piece of leftover ribbon had been tied around her neck and caught the wind and sun as she walked.

The young duck quacked happily as she waddled, giving no notice of the cobbles as she passed, much as you or I would give no notice of a pebble under our boots. The little duck was happy, and went on to have a semi-professional career in featherball, until she was indicted for her part in a match-fixing scandal which saw her banned professionally for life.

Picture credit: Stephen G. Johnson

The Problem of Externalities

Happy New Year! Or Happy Financial New Year at the very least.

It’s been a month since I’ve last written a blog, and while I’d like to say that I’ve been fighting Samoan pirates on the high seas, or staging a daring coup d’état that now sees me placed as the new King of Sweden, the fact of the matter is that I’ve been busy with final assignments and exams. That and I haven’t had a clue of what to write about.

I’ve been on holiday for the last week now, and my stubble has gone beyond the level of ‘acceptably shaggy’ and is well on the way to ‘unemployably scrubby’. I’m letting it go if only to see what grows, like an experimental Petri dish more likely to result in anthrax than penicillin.

As many of you should know, today also marks the introduction of the Gillard government’s new Carbon Tax, which is set to put a price on carbon emissions and give Tony Abbott supporters plenty of chances to wave their fingers and say: “See! See! She lied!” as if it were the first time they had ever watched a political campaign. It also marks the start of a set of offsetting reforms, which include the tax-free bracket increasing from $6,000 to $18,200. I’m a strong supporter of the Carbon Tax, so while I’m as unqualified as an elk to even discuss it, and at the risk of bush-lawyering, I thought I’d write a few words on the basic theory that underpins these kinds of actions.

Left entirely to its own devices the private sector is remarkably efficient in the allocation of resources. Inefficient practices have the effect of increasing a firm’s overall production costs. Over time, this provides an incentive to move to more efficient production methods, increasing overall profit.

 Similarly a free and competitive market provides an efficient allocation of resources as firms bid up the price of goods depending on their individual assessment of their value (two people value a piece of cake, they will continue to bid up the price until it’s just higher than what the other would otherwise be willing to pay). Where individuals can trade according to their individual preferences, the market will theoretically result in an efficient allocation.

The issue comes in when we’re dealing with a common resource (air quality, the environment, fishing stocks, etc). In this situation, individuals are not able to trade according to their own individual costs and benefits, and the resulting market allocation may not be socially efficient.

For example: a washing company may be remarkably effective in washing old socks and underwear in a nearby river, but has the unfortunate effect of poisoning it for everyone down-stream. This is known as an externality – a cost not included in the normal price allocation of supply and demand.

Externalities can be either positive or negative. A beekeeper provides a positive externality in the pollination of local fruits and flowers (and a negative in the increase of beestings). Positive externalities are benefits that can’t be captured by the profit system, and so too little will be produced. Negative externalities are costs that aren’t incurred by the producing firm and so too much will. In either case a market failure occurs, and there is potential scope for the government to intervene. Carbon emissions are a classic example of a negative externality.

The Carbon Tax introduces a base cost to the production of carbon. While the extent that this cost is passed onto consumers largely depends on the degree of market control a firm is able to exert, the effect is an overall reduction in carbon pollution. Over time it provides an economic incentive to innovate and switch to less carbon intensive forms of production.

It must be noted that the current fixed price is only a temporary measure. Eventually an Emissions Trading Scheme is to be implemented, where a number of free credits for the production of carbon are allocated, and the free market determines the price of these credits in the free market. This is generally seen as a more economically efficient model for reducing carbon emissions.

The potential effectiveness of the tax is a divisive issue. The effects of carbon emissions are distributed globally, as opposed to locally or nationally such as in acid rain (a similar example of a national ETS implemented in America) or chemical pollutants, and has led some commentators to declare it a Tragedy of the Commons rather than a matter of externalities.  However I remain personally optimistic in the overall effectiveness of the scheme, and that it will coincide with similar measures being enacted internationally.

Ashmeko

A couple of days ago the door to my bathroom silently and irrevocably decided to become a wall. There was no warning, no creaky or groaning indication – in the night it was a welcoming portal to showery goodness, and in the morning it had seized up completely as if to say, “Hey, remember those communal bathrooms you’ve been assiduously avoiding since first year? Guess where you’ll be going for a while.” In the end, there was no fixing it – maintenance cut through the lock with a circular saw, covering the room with a fine layer of metallic dust, and turning my towel into a steel-shard encrusted piece of sandpaper. I’ve been drying myself with toilet paper.

I’ve decided to post a few of my writings from high school: partly because I was far better at writing back then, and partly because I am a very unproductive uni student and it allows me to procrastinate on what is already an ostensibly procrastinative blog. This will allow me to do all those things I don’t have time for and will never do anyway, like actually giving a textbook more than a precursory glance towards the shelf where it sits alone, dusty and dejected.

In this picture: books I never read 

and textbooks I'll never open again.

To the few that might be interested I hope you enjoy it. To the others that won’t, and who are currently wondering why they made that fatal error of clicking on this blog in the first place: my sincere condolences, may it fill you with the same feeling of joy and satisfaction that kicking a toe on the bedstead does early in the morning.

I’ll end this short entry by mentioning that a friend of mine has recently released a pop single on iTunes. As someone whose usual listening falls closer to progressive death metal and Finnish cello metal, I’ve listened to it several times already since downloading it yesterday: it’s an upbeat, catchy, and genuinely enjoyable release from a pair of ridiculously talented singers.

For the few that read this, and the infinitely rarer breed actually willing to take my music advice I recommend that you give it a listen: 'You and Me' by Ashmeko. 

Kitten Kong

I’ve been down with a cold for the last couple of days. The sounds and things emitting from my mouth would be enough to make Ridley Scott squeal with terror, curl into bed with a stuffed xenomorph plushie and refuse to come out until the lights have been switched back on again. My voice has taken on the gravelly, straight-edged sound of a partial laryngectomy. I’ve been mistaken for Bruce Wayne several times in the street, and it’s becoming more difficult to keep my midnight vigilantism a secret.

Leaping laryngitis, Batman! 

I’ve taken a short break for coffee, which is as close as I’ll get to a ‘three day cleansing binge’ without first strapping my arteries to a vat of cucumber juice and taking all fluids intravenously. One day of caffeine withdrawal later and my voice has disappeared completely. I refuse to consider that the two events are not related, and will never, under any circumstance try to stop drinking coffee again. I’ve been surviving the withdrawal by listening to Meshuggah, which is aural heroin already; and Ministry, which is perfectly suited for a Junkie.

(If you get the Burroughs reference, well done – you’ve earned yourself a naked lunch at your favourite restaurant).

I’ll be honest here and say that this post is a little bit of an experiment. The previous blog post went a little crazy by any definition of the word which does not include asylums and dictionary writing surgeons. While I’m more than convinced that this will only be seen by the usual collection of aunts, incredulous friends and those few tragically misdirected individuals looking up ‘hoes’ in Google Images and receiving gardening implements instead, I’d like to say hi to any Redditors that may come by for a second look after running out of cats pictures in /r/Aww.

The biggest favour you can do yourself today is to
go home and watch all 9 seasons of The Goodies.

Tamám Shud

It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve last written a blog, which I’ll blame on a series of exams and assignments, insomnia and caffeine induced hallucinations. Now that they’ve gone, I almost miss it, as the vacuum left in its absence has left me scaling walls in the hope that I’ll find something vaguely interesting stapled into the ceiling to save me from this well of boredom.

Which is where this blog comes in.

The thing I miss most from my childhood is the ability to read. By this I don’t mean being able to make sense of a series of orthographic glyphs thrown up on my screen and rendered unattractively in Comic Sans. I mean being able to sit down and consume, devour a narrative in a single sitting; to become so utterly absorbed in a fictional world of swirling type that your family begins to treat the purchase of a new novel with trepidation. This is an ability I have lost, or at least misplaced haphazardly in adulthood.

Today, the places I find time to read seem concentrated solely on public transport – on trains, on planes, at airports, and in cars. Places that are so utterly devoid of stimulation that cracking open a text of P.G. Wodehouse or H.P. Lovecraft (or anyone else that starts with a couple of initials, and ends with a portmanteau) feels like a complete liberation. For a few short hours, I seem able to dive into a story, and when I arrive home it dissolves into a mush of crushed up memes and amusing cat pictures.

This is all laziness, of course - there’s nothing stopping me from picking a book off the shelf and working my way through a Douglas Adams novel except my own lack of will and motivation. But I still miss the feeling of discovering a new book at the library, and finishing it a couple of hours or days later. I remember being denied a book at the library once in grade 8 – it was a Jeffrey Archer novel. The librarian refused to let me borrow it out, saying all of his other novels were fine, but this one she’d feel uncomfortable letting a 12 year old read (it had a graphic sex scene, I found a copy at home just a couple of weeks later ;).

A year later I wandered through the senior fiction section again, Jeffrey Archer consumed and finished. I came across my first novel by Stephen King, ‘Misery’, and wandered over to the check-out, fully expecting to be denied once more. He took one look at it, and asked me if I’d seen the movie, then recommended that I check it out. (“Blood, everywhere.”)

I’ll end this blog by giving a story about the last time I visited bookstore in Brisbane, Archive Fine Books. I was there with a friend from French, and we were browsing (she ended up going home with a steamy, Harlequin French romance - “If you don’t buy it, I will”). I chanced upon a hard-cover copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which is famous for the stanza “The Moving Finger writes: and, having writ/ Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit/ Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line/ Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it." The spine was damaged, so the shopkeeper offered to fix it. As the glue was drying, she asked us if we had heard of the Tamám Shud Mystery.

The Tamám Shud Mystery takes its name from the final line of the Rubaiyat and roughly translates to ‘It is ended’. On the first of December 1948, a man was found dead on Somerton Beach in Adelaide. He was in top physical condition, dressed well - however, he carried no identification, and the tags to his clothes had all been torn off. The man carried no papers on him except for a tiny piece of paper which had been rolled and placed in a fob pocket in his trousers. It had been torn from a rare first edition copy of the Rubaiyat, and simply bore the words ‘Tamám Shud’. Despite intense media scrutiny and police investigation the mystery remains unsolved to this day.

TAMÁM SHUD.

Comedy

The comedian was unfunny, the chair uncomfortable, and I had a sneaking suspicion that my dinner was attempting to make a run for it.

Despite being proclaimed as ‘A Side-Splitting Barrel of Laughter for the Whole Family’ I wasn’t overly convinced. The only thing I could see close to splitting was the dress of the woman sitting next to me, whose heaving gouts of laughter placed a tone of wonder on the miracles of modern fabric design. A family sitting further along seemed divided in opinion: the parents looked on with undisguised mirth; the children seemed to share my distain and sat around listlessly, kicking the chair in front of them. I considered doing the same, but the ex-naval tattoo on the man in front of me suggested, quite politely, that this might not be such an excellent idea.

I allowed my eyes to wander. The bar was one of those derelict places (but almost intentionally so, as if to save on cleaning) which appear cheap, but are simply dingy and populated entirely by college students who don’t know any better. A dartboard hung packed away in the corner, in prescience of the comedian’s performance. A single family populated the table to the right; the remainder were filled with the usual assortment of dull-comics and habitual barflies. A few spiels of laughter rang out occasionally like the dying calls of a moribund bird indigenous to Australia.

I played with the napkin in front of me, and attempted unsuccessfully to shepherd a piece of lettuce to the centre of the plate, where something dark was hiding embarrassedly. I placed down my knife, edged the plate determinedly away and perfected the wings of my origami swan.

“You’re not really listening to this, are you?” a voice from my left asked. The comedian had just descended into a Republican parody which had been lifted clumsily from last week’s Saturday Night Live.

The voice belonged to a woman at my side who look positively enraptured in the performance. I said something to the effect of ‘If I could tear my ears off without making a scene – I would’ and she laughed.

“It’s genuinely awful. Which also means that it’s the best performance I’ve seen in months.”

I looked at her quizzically. She was blonde in a way which spoke more of sunshine than hydrogen peroxide, and had a figure that was svelte instead of ginormously rotund.

“There are few things in life more liberating than seeing something that is a complete and utter disaster. You give up the idea that comedy needs to be structured and controlled - that seriousness needs to be something moody and austere. Instead, you’re left with something that has so left the mark, which has departed so far beyond either the serious or comic that it becomes farce. It becomes wonderful for that. I love it.”

 I stared at her in a way which I hoped displayed befuddlement and bemusement without appearing creepy. She laughed.

“Look at this place – have you honestly ever seen a place as hole-in-the-wall, as awful and dingy and just plain dirty as this is?” Something scurried out from behind her plate, did a circuit around the table and returned slightly abashed, as if that was all the exercise it was willing to do today. She ignored it, and continued. “It’s wonderful. It makes me happy to see that there are still places like this – places where they are so far removed from what should be in society that it becomes beautiful instead. You feel a part of it, the grime, the dirt, the unwashed glass and infested beer. But at the same time you feel apart from it, able to recognise the farce with amusement and incredulity.”

I looked from her to the failing comedian, who had started on an unconvincing impression of the former president.

“Part of you realises this, doesn’t it? You didn’t walk in from the street to see an unsigned comic with the expectation that they would actually be good.” She peered at my clothes. “You certainly didn’t arrive here to meet with someone. No, part of you realises that there is something magical about seeing the terrible in life occasionally. This kid might actually be good one day; he may put all evidence aside and actually make a name for himself. But until then he only retains the potential for that. Now, he is simply awful – determinedly, enthusiastically but above all genuinely awful, and for that it is a gripping performance.”

I spent the remainder of the performance in relative silence, digesting everything that she had said. Eventually, I asked her if she would like to get a drink afterwards.

She laughed. “I like things that are awful, but that would be pushing it.”

I left alone, uncomfortably.

I hate comedians.

Unapologetically Dismal Science

A few days ago I was asked about the title for my blog by a group of inquisitive aunts. Admittedly they were more concerned with the fact that I may have described them all as hiding their ‘cloven hooves’. Just for them, here’s another Wodehouse quote:

“If I had my life to live again, Jeeves, I would start it as an orphan without any aunts. Don’t they put aunts in Turkey in sacks and drop them in the Bosphorus?”
“Odalisques, sir, I understand. Not aunts.”

The name Dismal Science refers to the dark, slightly tongue-in-cheek alternate name for Economics; Unapologetically is simply a word with far too many syllables crammed into a small area, which allowed me to take a bizarrely vacant url. While the term ‘dismal science’ is properly attributed to Thomas Carlyle, it’s frequently used to describe the work of Reverend Thomas Malthus, which is where I first came across it a couple of weeks into first year economics. The dark, pessimistic theory it described was one of the first indicators that I might genuinely love economics, and that the decision to change out of Law was a completely justified one.

Considering this is my first post actually dealing with economics, it’s a little more technical than I usually write, however the concepts are interesting and generally simple, so I hope that you’ll bear with me.

As described in the textbook, Malthus’s theory was constructed in two parts: the amount of food each person requires, and the amount of food that each person can produce. The first part increases linearly – each individual person requires the same bare minimum amount of food, on average, to avoid starvation and survive. It can be described with a simple formula Y=NF where N is the population size, F is the necessary food for each person, and Y is the total amount of food required (because Y not?). 

The second part is a little more complicated, taking into consideration the idea of Diminishing Marginal Returns, which basically means that each successive unit of input produces less than the one which preceded it. The idea for this is pretty simple to follow: Malthus believed that the total area of farmable land was fixed, or limited. A farm which only has a few people working on it can produce far more if another person starts working on it; when you have an additional 50 or 100 people however, they will start getting in each other’s way and produce less individually than that first person’s contribution to the farm. Labour for the farm has diminishing marginal returns. 

The same applies for machinery. A single hoe or tractor can make a massive difference in productivity for a farm. When there are a hundred, the workers will be too busy fighting over who gets to use the shiniest one than actually doing any work. The thing to take away from this is that production does not increase linearly – each individual worker does not produce the same amount whether you have 10 or 50. Individual production decreases as the amount of workers increases.

If you've got gardening problems, I feel bad for you son.
I've got 99 problems, and a hoe for every one.

When the amount of food being produced is more than what’s required by the population, there’s a surplus. People eat more, are happier – live longer, and breed like rabbits. The population increases.

When the amount of food being produced is less than what’s required, there’s a shortage. People starve, and aren’t very happy; the mortality rates increase, and while people might still be breeding like rabbits, the overall population decreases.

The effect of this is that the population approaches an equilibrium, where food being produced is the bare minimum to avoid starvation. At this point there is no tendency for population to increase or decrease - it’s a point of stability in misery. It’s a dismal place to be. 

It must be noted that Malthus’s theories were developed before the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and before the extent of globalisation that we see today. You can produce a lot with a hoe or tractor, but you can produce much more using a combine harvester. Technological progress is one of the defining reasons why we don’t simply subsist in a Malthusian equilibrium.

The theory still has some relevance in today’s society: large parts of the world still live in abject poverty and famine, and certain aspects of subsistence agriculture can still be examined using Malthusian theory. Neoclassical Growth Models in particular bear more than a passing resemblance to the Reverend's work.

More importantly, I can finally explain the name of this unfortunately titled blog.