inamerrata

Wow, everyone really must miss me. Ben Fowler’s hitting my hot buttons too!

Ben writes:

Australians here, amongst others might be aware that our beloved PM has recently gotten some flak over intelligence he and his conservative cronies used to gatecrash the war in Iraq.

The problem with this is that Ben’s not talking about the simplest and most valid justification for removing the Hussein regime from Iraq: humanitarian concerns. The stories now being reported about Iraqi prisons, or mass graves or genocide. I have no idea how anyone can seriously claim that the war in Iraq was unjustified given the results we’re unearthing.

And then there are the issues of intelligence failure. Why weren’t we horrified by the inhumane regime we were about to oust, irrespective of the threat to national security? The answer to that is easy — self censorship and propaganda pretending to be objective reporting by our major networks — see “The News We Kept To Ourselves”.

That’s not to say that what we got before the war was the best justification for war. It’s difficult to put someone else’s life on the line to make things better for a stranger; and that’s what going to war for humanitarian reasons means. Putting your own life on the line, sure. Putting soldiers’ lives on the line to defend their country, sure. Helping remove a vicious, murderous, tyrant from power over a country of some twenty million, without any loss of life on our own behalf? Priceless.

But it was the risk of weapons of mass destruction that Mr Howard used to justify the war, and Iraq’s potential terrorist links (either presently or in the future) that justified the risk to our soldiers. And since we’ve had freedom of movement in Iraq, we’ve found mobile labs whose only plausible purpose is apparently weapons development, buried instructions for building nuclear devices, and all sorts of interesting documents. In light of what we now know, is the claim that Iraq was likely to provide weapons of mass destruction to terrorists particularly implausible? Certainly there seems to be plenty of evidence to support such a claim, even if not enough to make it irrefutable.

Ben writes:

While I admit a decent measure of contempt for his politics, I’m in dumbstruck awe of his ability to survive and prosper despite having run out of any sort of moral or economic credibility years ago.

It’s interesting that steadfastly holding to his principles in spite of a great degree of criticism to involving Australia in a war that resulted in the liberation of more people than live in Australia, with minimal casualties on both sides of the equation, no refugee crisis, and that appears to be acting as a catalyst for good in the rest of the Middle East (you’ve heard of the protests in Iran right? and the removal of US troops from Saudi Arabia?), in response to all of that, Mr Howard has lost any sort of moral credibility. Meanwhile, in spite of weathering the dot-com burst, and worrying economic situations in the US and Europe and Asia, and managing to sustain economic growth and keep unemployment dropping, Mr Howard has also lost any sort of economic credibility.

Clearly Lady Luck must be an unabashed right-winger to continue smiling on us so, since our circumstances are obviously contrary to the skill and convictions of our parliamentary leaders.

Obviously concerned at my lack of new entries while I’m travelling, Martin’s posted an irresistable taunt. The issue at question is “Why do modern societies work so much?”

There are a few answers to this — one is simply an internalised desire to do work, ie, a work ethic. That’s a pretty trite line of thought though, and suffers the same flaws that hedonistic explanations usually do: it doesn’t explain why we find it pleasant, when we already know that different people find different things pleasurable; read up on S&M fetishes if you’re not convinced. Another is risk aversion — working less might make it hard for you to continue to exist, either because you can’t manage to eat, or because you’re going to be locked up. The former can mean either that you don’t have money to buy food, or that you live in a jungle and bigger, stronger people have already grabbed all the berries from your favourite shrub, or anything in between. In capitalist democracies the latter option is fairly rare though — it’s very rare that anyone will force you to work, although people might not be willing to give you food and board if you don’t.

An interesting perspective to look at is that of millionaires. Why does Bill Gates keep working? Why does Richard Branson bother creating new businesses in far off lands when he’s probably already got enough money to live a life of leisure for the rest of his life? It’s possible to simply argue that they’re insane, driven mad by capital acquisition, commerce and market control, but, again, that’s quite a cop-out. Why consider them insane, instead of the anarcho-Marxists rolling marbles under the hooves of Police horses?

A simpler explanation, that’s closer to home, is that they simply enjoy their work. If that explanation applies to people hacking on free software, there’s no reason it shouldn’t apply to exceptional entrepreneurs. Once you’re able to take holidays — like flying around the world in a hot air balloon — and spend weekends with your family, and are doing something you like and consider worthwhile and other people value for the rest of the week, what’s not to like? Why would you even want to work less?

The aspect that omits is why they continue doing it for money, rather than gratis. My current thesis for this is that money and profits serve as an excellent measure of how much you’re contributing to society, and in particular how much other people value what you’re offering or doing. If they don’t appreciate it, they’re not going to pay what it costs. If they do appreciate it, they’ll pay what it costs, and more. By contrast, if you do things for free, people will quite happily take your offering, say “Ooo, neat”, then throw it away; wasting your time, theirs, and possibly depriving the people who would’ve valued it much more.

Even better, continued effort in capitalist society makes leisure time continually more enjoyable. A hundred years ago, there’s no way you could row across an ocean and consider it, while not risk-free, a fairly safe endeavour nevertheless. Lifts at ski resorts, and even skis themselves, have improved by orders of magnitude, making the sport safer, more comfortable and more exhilirating. There’s no way I could take a couple of weeks and visit Norway and England. There’s no way I could reliably and instantaneously chat with people back in Australia while doing so. Just a few years ago, there’s no way I could have left finding accommodation ’til a couple of days before I left, then arranged it at around 3am localtime, and gotten an incredibly great deal, all without having any particular cause to worry that I’d be sleeping on the streets. I couldn’t arrive in Norway not speaking the language, not having any local currency, and not even knowing exactly where I was meant to be going, without having any worries at all about being able to rectify all that from the airport.

And it’s work that makes all this possible: me doing something valuable for other people who give me money, and me giving that money to other people who do various valuable things for me. If I work less, people are going to do less for me, because I can’t give them as much money; and if there’s no quantitive measure or reward for useful work, people aren’t going to be anywhere near as good at inventing useful new technologies and services.

Up until recently, I thought, mostly as an article of faith in improving technology, that the future we were heading to was a leisure society; everyone working three days a week and then having a huge weekend. Now, with a better appreciation for capitalism, I wonder what the hell I’d do on those weekends — I already spend plenty of free time hacking on free software; and there’s not much point to having four day weekends that you spend doing unpaid work, when you could do the same work all week and be paid for it. We’re working smarter, but no less hard; and in the meantime we’re playing much harder.

I find it truly amazing the agnosticism in which capitalism is held by many smart people. It’s easy to find smart people who’re completely religious, and who can differentiate their faith from science, and work out exactly where they draw their lines and what benefits they get from it. By contrast, many otherwise highly educated people either feel that capitalism is innately exploitative and has latent tendencies toward true evil, or at best a tool that can be used for good or for evil depending on who wields it. And yet simply by looking at recent history, the amount of evidence that capitalism is a force for pure, unadulterated good is simply astounding. The rich might be getting richer, but the poor in capitalist countries are astoundingly wealthy too. A few hundred years ago, malnourishment was an everyday risk; now we’re seriously worried about obesity. A hundred years ago, it was vastly difficult to travel far from your place of birth and difficult to work all that far from where you lived — daily commute distances of eight hours walk aren’t unreasonable now, and backpacking around Europe isn’t particularly difficult. A decade or two ago, computers and mobile phones were exclusively for businesses and the wealthy; now you can combine the two and sell it to teenagers.

Other interesting reading on that topic includes this Spectator article.

Martin writes that:

On the other hand, changing technology makes it hard to imagine what life will be like in 50 years. One might semi-seriously gamble on, say, sunbathing now in the hope that there will be a cure for melanoma in a decade. Perhaps people will blithely burn fossil fuels, assuming that some solution will turn up.

We have, for example, probably already solved the problem with the Ozone hole (see here, which was a problem that required fairly drastic changes across the entire planet, and was, at the time, quite worrying. We’re at the point where shrinking populations are more likely to be a concern in some areas than overpopulation. Smog has been massively reduced in major cities. We’ve done a fairly good job at stopping extinctions. We have enough food to feed everyone on the planet. We’re not bad at diverting disasters, but the only way we’re going to get any better at — and be able to cope with asteroid strikes, or nuclear waste disposal — it is continue working as hard as we have been on clever new ideas. If we can build a space elevator, we have a good chance at being able to dispose radioactive waste well away from populated areas, and potentially be able to do nifty things like asteroid mining. But it doesn’t make sense to build a space elevator until we can work out how to do it in a way that’s useful enough to justify its cost, that people value enough to justify the expense, that will make a profit.

A final thought: Martin also writes:

People do not generally have the choice of: “would I rather be a serf, or a nomad?”. They have the experience of being pushed off the map or enslaved by an expanding cultivation society.

How would you be a nomad in modern society? Would you walk from town to town along highways, baking in the sun or get soaked in the rain or freezing in the snow, begging for food at your destination, or hoping to find some food on the side of the road, or in trashcans? Or would you rather get in a plane and fly from city to city or even country to country, spending a few months or a year in each place working during the week and spending the weekend enjoying the sights and the culture, and earning enough money for your next flight into the unknown?

David Jericho, thinking about movies. Let’s hope he can keep his composure as he rejoins the blogosphere.

Introducing the travelblog! Episode One: Adelaide, Excuse One: Linux.Conf.Au organising meeting.

The trip was to help pass on any tricks and tips to this year’s organising committee, and make sure that everything’s rosy and nothing’s pear-shaped. Mmm. Pears. So I arrived Friday evening. Brrr. Cold. Southern states just have a different sort of cold, one where words like “brisk” and “nippy” have a real meaning. Got picked up by Dan Shearer, and dropped off at the City Park Motel. A little later Tony Breeds-Taurima and Mark Tearle (from the Perth organisers) showed up after being entertained for the afternoon by the Adelaide folks. We chatted for a bit, and headed out to find bars.

After skipping a yuppie bar, and overcoming our dismay at walking into a pub with no beer (and far, far too much wine), we found an excellent venue that would (a) let us in (although not “upstairs”) and (b) serve us beer. For bonus points, it managed (c) live music, and (d) an attractive mix of sketch comedy and reality television presented live for our enjoyment just out the window.

What the room looked like shortly after we arrived	What the room looked like shortly before we left

The beer wasn’t great. There might be a reason that Adelaide’s known for its wine. Saturday woke up gray and chill, and loomed ominously above us as we headed out for breakfast. Remembering this is the city of churches, we kept our eyes open and our tithes to ourselves.

Breakfast, and coffee ensued. We met up with the Adelaide folks, who joined us in the imbibification. Pia, president of Linux Australia which backs the conference, but not an ex-organiser of any l.c.a, arrived to join us, having had an unaccompanied trip due to unexpected somnolescence on Anand Kumria’s behalf (treasurer of Linux Australia, and one of the Sydney organisers). We took our leave of the coffee shop, and were guided to a secure area on the 6th floor of a building in an undisclosed location. We unpacked laptops, and began discussions. Rusty Russell, who organised CALU, the forefather of all l.c.a’s in Melbourne in ’99, arrived, and Anand showed up shortly after, letting discussions begin in earnest.

So, for the rest of the morning, we talked about stuff.

Eventually, we stopped talking about stuff, and headed off for lunch, in weather wet and miserable enough you’d think we were in Melbourne.

The tour of the venue followed. It’s a pretty sweet location: the University of Adelaide is literally just a block down from the city mall. Accommodation, restaurants, nightlife, and everything is a within spitting distance. Of course, everything in Adelaides’s within spitting distance from the heavens, as we were continually reminded throughout the tour.

We came in from Pultney Street, across North Terrace. The first building we were meant to be shown, but unfortunately weren’t due to some screw up or other was Elder Hall, which is where the keynotes will hopefully be held. After that, we wondered down towards the university club, then back up to the Napier building, which is where most of the conference will probably be held, and we were fortunate enough to get a look at the lecture halls in here. Two of them hold around 150 people, the third holds a few more. More wet trudging ensued, as we had a quick wander down towards the river, past the Union hall (where the refecs are, if walking across a road into the mall is too much hassle), and back. Just across North Terrace, on Pultney Street, and smack-bang between the university and the mall is The Mansions, which will probably be the speaker accommodation. All very pretty and convenient.

We returned to the dry warmth of indoors and continued talking about stuff ’til five, then knocked off and went out. Drinks, dinner and shiatsu massage chairs followed. Some time later, so did sleep.

A beautiful surprise woke us on Sunday — blue sky! Naturally, we made the best of this by spending most of it indoors, eating yummy bbq lunch put on by Geoffrey and Lindy. And that was about it. A few Virgin Blue boarding calls later and the interstate visitors were sent back whence they came.

Without stealing the Adelaide guys’ thunder by going into much detail about any of the “stuff”, it’s abundantly clear that the conference is going places. And going places that you’d like to visit, at that. By any measure it’s improving significantly every year — number of attendees keeps rising, interest by business and sponsors, and the amount of stuff actually happening, and Adelaide already shows every signing of extending that trend. Many of the difficulties we faced in running the conference in Brisbane (is anyone going to come? what features should we keep, and which should we change?) seem to have been solved, leading to new, grander difficulties (how should the miniconfs and the main conference be balanced? are we going to be able to cope with the number of people who’d like to go?), which is an absolutely excellent state to be in. Even with the increased size of the conference they’re planning, the Adelaide organisers seem to be much more organised than we were in Brisbane at a similar point in time, which is also a very positive indicator.

Basically, keep watching the Linux.conf.au website; there’s a whole bunch of surprises they’re yet to extract from their sleeves.

One of the tricks with paying for http requests is that you screw up the protocol. Normal http requests are a simple request/response pair, and that’s it — you ask for a page, and you get given it. Worse, the protocol is optimised for that: if you want to do more than just send a request, you usually have to open additional connections for each, which has a significant overhead.

The easiest way to work around this, is probably to make the protocol for requesting a webpage be to send a HEAD request, which will confirm the webpage exists and that you don’t have a current cached copy and can also tell you how much it costs to download, and then send a GET request with the appropriate ecoin as a header. With HTTP/1.1 you can, I believe, make persistant connections to make this possible. I think this is also optimally efficient, and involves minimal changes to the protocol. (There’s even a “Payment required” error code, how convenient)

What would be really cool, is an aggregator that can collect your various favourite RSS feeds, categorise them (by author, and by subtopic), your various favourite webcomics, and random other information (weather at least) and present it in a “newspapery” format. That’s “really cool” in the “not necessarily effective, pleasant or useful” sense, of course.

Is it just me, or is there something really unpleasant about seeing huge blocks of text in a blog, that aren’t broken up by pictures, or new headings or quotes from elsewhere? I suppose a “…read more” link would work, but I tend to find that a real nuisance. I wonder why I don’t mind Steven den Beste’s site, since it’s mostly long essays. Actually, Steven’s site is broken up — by updates in different font sizes, and cites and links to source material, and the occassional picture. And there are bits of gray on both sides of his page, and a pretty picture at the top. Maybe that’s the trick: have a picture at the top to catch your eye, then once they get into the reading, they don’t care that it’s not pretty.

(For those coming in late, “britney” is the name of the scripts that manage Debian’s testing distribution; it uses a number of criteria, including time since upload, number of open bugs, where it’s been ported to, and dependency information to maintain a set of packages that meet Debian’s release goals. I’m the Debian release manager at the moment, and britney’s my baby. See also: Debian, testing distro, RC bugs.

The biggest problem with britney at the moment seems to be that people aren’t taking the hint to fix release-critical bugs throughout the release cycle. That causes individual packages to get stuck, which then causes other packages to get stuck, and causes a huge logjam. Unfortunately “testing” itself is evidently not enough of an incentive (by letting people get their updates into a “released” distribution within 10 days) for people to fix RC bugs quickly, so we probably need to setup some new ones.

One idea is to mess with Britney’s delaying tactics some more. Really, ten days is frequently too long a period (for people like Joey Hess, who make minor updates to many of his packages every few days), and even more frequently far too short a period (we don’t really have a reliable QA group finding problems and we’ve even gotten to the point where people can tend not to bother filing bugs under the expectation they won’t be fixed anyway, with the result being that packages get into testing in spite of still having serious bugs).

Two factors thus influence the delay: we want to get packages into testing fairly quickly so that people can start working on new stuff in unstable (and so people following testing get the latest updates), but we want them to stay in unstable for a little while so that we can have some confidence the package isn’t too horrible. The idea, then, is to delay every package exactly long enough to find all its RC bugs. There are obvious problems with the knowability of that, so instead we need to make it proportional to the “riskiness” of the package, which is roughly proportional to how long it’s been since the last major changes.

So if you upload version 2.0-1 on the 1st which is a major rewrite, and 2.1-1 on the 4th with some minor changes to the documentation, you’ve got a high risk – and long delay – carried on from 2.0-1, and a small risk and a low delay beginning with 2.0-2. If you upload 2.1-2 with a couple of packaging changes a month later, your previous risks have run out, so you’ve only got a very small risk, and a small delay, left. The delays could then look like:

• 1st: 2.0-1, 14 day delay, ’til the 15th
• 4th: 2.1-1, 2 day delay (6th), carried over ’til the 15th
• 15th: 2.1-1 goes into testing
• 20th: 2.1-2, 2 day delay (22nd)

The question then is how to work out what a risky change is. One way is just to have the maintainer nominate a value in the changelog, and keep track of that in a similar way to how urgency values are already tracked. This should work mostly, but probably needs to be supplemented by something a little less discretionary. Another option would be to say that every change that fixes an RC bug is a major one. That’s probably justifiable (at the very least, it should be true that the change that caused the RC bug was major, and making the delay start at the time the fix is uploaded instead of the bug shouldn’t be too troublesome.

Another thing you could do is allow people to review changes, and having done so, mark them as less risky. So it might take 30 days of sitting in unstable for X 4.3 to be considered acceptable for testing, but the QA team, having looked over the patches, and taken into account other things might be willing to vouch for it, and get it in after only 20 or 15 days.

Hrm. While that provides some extra incentives, and I think some more sense in the time, I don’t think it’s remotely close to solving the real problem of getting packages better maintained.

Looks like today’s the day to move the old azure to the new azure! Ooo, the excitement! The terror! Will all my mail scatter to the nether regions, lost until the great cleaners reclaim the bits next April? Soon we shall find out!

David Starkoff, refusing to respond to recent allegations that his new blog is harmful to animals and small children.

(Guess who has a new digital camera! Yay me!)

So, I’m running blosxom 2.0rc5 now, which supports the plugins mentioned below. Not using any plugins yet though, and as a result the page looks exactly the same as it used to. Mmm backwards compatability!

Oh, in other news, google finds (roughly) the right URL given both “aj blog” and “indolence log”. That’s a scarily good search engine.

Plug-ins for blosxom! There actually are some and they look reasonably cute. Ha, so much for pyblosxom!

Ads on TV suck, right? Surely the point of TV is the shows, and since ads generally distract from the shows (by being loud and obnoixous and spoiling the mood, by breaking your train of thought, by shortening the shows, etc) they’re therefore bad. Aren’t they? There are some obvious wins to ads: they give you time for to go to the toilet, or to get more beer from the fridge without missing your show; and they help inform you of goods and services you might be interested in. An additional indirect benefit of ads is that they help ensure commercial television plays shows that are interesting, entertaining or useful to a lot of people, which is a better way than most of making sure that the limited spectrum we have isn’t wasted, and as a corollary provide a market dynamic for free-to-air television so that it doesn’t need to be subsidised by the government.

As far as the latter goes, though, we have an alternative to free-to-air tv these days: cable tv. Since it can limit its benefits to subscribers, there’s no need for ads from a business perspective, so the only reason to keep them (in the long term, given competition, or at least the threat or potential of competition, between cable providers) is if subscribers prefer ads to a higher cost. That’s not impossible: ads are often entertaining, and in some cases they’re the best way of finding out about useful services. You’d expect more ads to decrease the price of subscriptions (because people don’t value it as much and pay less; because the company has less need of subscribers to fund the business; and because advertisers want a larger audience), and there’s certainly a limit since the free-subscription / lots-of-ads model is a more effective business model for free-to-air television than cable television (since consumers don’t have to have decoder boxes and fancy cabling). Which should give you enough of a market dynamic to judge whether ads provide a useful service for their cost to viewers, or whether they’re just a good way of brainwashing people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t want to.

It’s interesting then to see then what’s happened on cable TV in Australia. There are no ads in the middle of movies, so they’re just as they are when you see them in theatres. Compared to Friday night movies on free-to-air tv which can add half an hour or more to the movie’s length in ads this is an utter blessing. There are ads and behind-the-scenes things and such between movies, but that’s about it. On the cartoon channel, there’s a break at 15 minutes, and another at about 20 minutes into a half hour cartoon (well, that’s the way the Powerpuff Girls works anyway). The 15 minute break is usually between episodes; the 20 minute break is usually in the middle of the episode. There seems to be a similar dynamic on Fox8, the channel that shows things like The Simpsons, Buffy, Roswell, and so on. In both cases a fair bit of the ad time is taken up in branding — having a fancy fade and some graphics reminding you what channel and show you’re watching. Given that Australian cable tends to buy shows from the US, it’s possible that the ads are put in there to get the timing predictable because there’s simply not enough content to fill up a half hour slot.

Television on demand (whether by Tivo or download) is likely to make the issue increasingly clear, since it makes it easy for individual viewers to decide whether to see individual ads or not, and make it easier to target ads to viewers who are interested in them; both of which make it far less likely you’ll see ads that don’t interest you, making the advertising you do see much more useful and effective. On the other side of the equation, it makes advertising much more targetted which probably allows the station to sell more ads (if you have two ads, each of which are of interest to 30% of your audience, with no overlap, you can show them both at the same time, rather than in series like you would have to now), which (given competition) decreases their cost; but if they’re still shown to as many potential customers as before (that is, the 70% who don’t see the ad weren’t going to buy it anyway), they’re still just as valuable, so you can spend 50% of the price of the ad on either improving the ad, or making your goods cheaper for the people who buy it.

I’d like to branch off slightly now. So that you don’t notice the slight logical disconnect, I’ll wave my hands thus: Media Watch gave a rather pointless tirade yesterday about product placement on reality television. It had been appropriately credited, wasn’t done misleadingly, and was interesting enough to attract two million viewers. But it was offensive to Media Watch’s sensibilities, so needed to be mocked. In any event, product placement is pretty immune to the considerations in the previous paragraph: you can’t watch the show without the ads, basically by defiinition. Similarly, when Willow uses a laptop in Buffy, you get to see a pretty glowy Apple logo fairly often. These are both more and less valuable than regular ads: more in that people will tend to see them and be more confident in what they see, less in that someone else will generally decide what they see; if the people in the Block had had problems with the tool, or hadn’t had a real use for it you’d be screwed.

Interesting. I wonder why the UQ philosophy department doesn’t have a course on “philosophy of capitalism”.

There’s a derivative of blosxom called pyblosxom. It’s a derivative in the sense that it shares the same on-disk structure, but it’s written in Python instead of perl, and sacrifices blosxom’s wonderful simplicity for the ability to do various extensions. One of the cool things this means is that it supports comments. It also lets you do incredibly irritating things like highlight the search term you entered into google to get to the page. I think the complexity kills it for me: dealing with multiple script files, and having so much more code (the entirety of blosxom is shorter, if more complicated, than just the code pyblosxom uses to handle comments) is more complexity than it’s worth for me.

Apparently economists are real scientists now; they’ve finally managed to reach that nadir of absent-mindedness that’s a requisite for genius in the hard sciences, so much so that they’ve forgotten we’re human. A choice claim:

[Clive Hamilton’s] book, Growth Fetish, published by Allen & Unwin, is a powerful attack on conventional economics and its rarely examined assumption that unending growth in the consumption of goods and services is what will make us happy.

But hey, increased consumption is what makes us happy. Having enough food that we don’t starve is a fabulous increase in consumption since the 18th century, having the ability to visit distant lands to enjoy other cultures is pretty much new in the 20th century, being able to enjoy fabulous artworks from any part of the globe within days of their completion anywhere in the world is barely a couple of decades old. Cars are a recent enough invention on their own, even discounting tape decks, AM radios, FM radios, CD players, CD changers, air conditioning, power windows, power steering, anti-lock breaks, seatbelts, air bags, GPS enabled electonic street maps, blackbox recorders, sun roofs and all the other things we take for granted. All of those are increased consumption, which are you eager to do away with?

Even better, no one’s asking you to do away with any of them. Instead, we’re finding more efficient ways of doing them all: using less materials, less power, less resources, which all adds up to less cost, either to your pocket book or to the environment.

That’s not to say you can’t increase your happiness by means that don’t involve increased consumption. Meditation, gossip, sex, can all enrich your soul. Just make sure you don’t fly to Tibet, or troll the internet for interesting news, or buy a pack of ribbed condoms to do it, if you find economics quite so demeaning.

Another quote:

How’s this for a weakness in the model: economists never doubt for a moment that if someone’s annual income rises by $1000, they’ll be happy. It never enters the economist’s mind that, if my income rises by $1000 while everyone else’s rises by $2000, I’ll be either murderously angry or suicidally depressed.

That would actually be what’s usually called “inflation”, in this case 100% inflation, which is to say that your real income has actually dropped by $500. It’s also not what usually happens, or at least, nor the most significant factor — inflation is generally a bad thing, and something central banks like to limit. The real trick, is that generally things get cheaper, so that what it used to cost $1000 for, now only only costs $500. Compare the cost of getting a car with air conditioning and power windows in the 1980’s and now. But the great thing about lower costs is that it benefits everyone; unlike governments, the market doesn’t discriminate.

Continuing on.

But from the laughable assumption that we’re all rugged individualists flow two key assumptions of market economics.

The first is that a consumer’s preferences are “exogenously determined”. Each of us knows exactly what it is we want to buy, and all we’re waiting to be told is the prices we have to pay. Once we know that, we adjust the quantities on our lifestyle shopping list so as to maximise the “utility” we derive from what we have to spend.

In Physics, this is what’s known as a “simplifying assumption”. Take the prediction that if you drop any two objects from the same height, they’ll take the same time to fall to the ground. Doesn’t matter how much they weigh, or what they’re made of. It’s true — try it, hold a glass in one hand and your laptop in the other at shoulder height, then let go. The shards of glass will be cutting your legs at the same time the shards of remorse are cutting into your wallet.

That doesn’t always work since we made some simplifying assumptions: we assumed that air resistance wouldn’t matter, but sometimes it does: try a rock and a bit of paper sometime if you like. We also assumed air pressure wouldn’t matter: try a rock and a helium balloon if you want to see what effects that can have. We also assumed that the Earth’s gravity field was constant: if you want to check on that one, try dropping a rock from shoulder height at sea-level, and try again on the International Space Station. Those caveats are all important to know, because sometimes they dominate the calculations, but good simplifying assumptions generally introduce errors that don’t make any real difference in the outcome, but make the calculations easy enough to perform without having to do the experiment.

For economics, simplifying assumptions (like the rationality of your customers) allows you to make predictions like “all other things being equal (availability, price, features, etc), the car that is the most comfortable will sell better”. If that comes out to be right nine times out of ten, it’s probably better to try to design a more comfortable car, than ignore that and just spend money on advertising.

Let’s look at:

Hamilton, however, argues that for most people in the rich countries, the economic problem has been solved. After 200 years of rising real incomes, capitalism “has moved to a phase of abundance, and abundance broadly spread”.

Is that true? Are we in a post-scarcity world? There’s plenty of food to go around, but is it abundant enough that we can give it away? Why are lobsters so expensive? The answer is we simply don’t live in a post-scarcity world; we live in a highly efficient world (compared to anything that’s gone before us, although probably not whatever’s coming next). If people want tomatoes and steak and bananas, we can grow more than enough to give everyone what they want without taking up too much time. But we can’t provide an arbitrarily large amount, and nor can we do it for no effort. We can’t even provide a particularly large amount of delicacies like Moreton Bay bug or Lobster, instead they manage to sustain prices such that your average punter can only afford them once every now and then. Likewise petrol’s a long way off being free, and it’s certainly not so abundant that people don’t bother even thinking about how much they use. Far from being a society of such abundance that capitalism and markets have been rendered useless, we’re instead seeing the continued usefulness of markets as a means to regulate scarce resources.

And this has turned the economists’ model on its head. Unending growth in the consumption of goods and services doesn’t create happiness.

Rather, unhappiness sustains economic growth. The marketers and advertisers have to play on, and play up, our discontents, holding out the promise that another tub of margarine – or a Rolex watch – will bring us to nirvana.

The producers have to con us into keeping up our consumption so that production can keep growing. This makes sense?

Ross Gittins is the Herald’s Economics Editor.

Mmm. I’m halfway through a book called Basic Economics, and the Herald’s Economics Editor can’t come up with arguments that I can’t see through? (The alternative explanation, that Ross’s analysis requires more economics background than I have isn’t particularly complimentary to someone who is presumably writing to an audience that doesn’t read textbooks for entertainment)