Because we can

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Neil Armstrong, the first man to put a space boot and plant a flag on the moon passed away a couple of weeks ago. Many around the world gave a mental nod in remembrance and respect, and rightly so.

Notable for not cashing in on his deserved fame, Armstrong was a modest man who achieved great things. When you realize that the team that put him on the moon did it on less computer grunt than you have in your smartphone, getting to the moon and back was a display of remarkable courage and ingenuity.

One of the media eulogies to Armstrong played part of a speech by President Kennedy made around the time of the space program. There was great passion and determination in the President’s voice that said we will go to the moon. And we will go there simply because we can. Nothing about technology advancement, commercial spinoffs or even the political capital that such an undertaking would generate. It was just a big, audacious goal.

Of course there was political mileage to be had in a time of cold war competition with the Soviets. It was also a time when the nascent power of the capitalist system that America believed was the only way forward, needed some iconic acts to further cement its worth.

Only President Kennedy sounded pure in his desire. We will go to the moon because we can. It was an empowering position, one that allowed Armstrong and the brave folk that followed to show their courage and tenacity to the world. And in Armstrong’s case made great by his manner and modesty.

I suspect that as a species we need this kind of thing. Our brains have evolved to handle complexity and we are always on the lookout for something big to fix. Only lately it has been more about drama that dreams.

What chance a modern day political leader making a Kennedy style speech? Miniscule I suspect. Just think, a president or prime minister leaving on the table the specific issues of the day to imagine something way beyond the mundane; something that inspires us to think, even for a moment, about more than ourselves. Hard isn’t it?

Maybe modern leaders do not understand that people like a collective ambition. We warm to big possibilities that take us further than our personal goals. We actually like the idea that there is something more than our own desire for a house with a white picket fence.

Or maybe the world has changed so much that audacious goals that have a collective outcome really are now out of reach. People found it easy enough to believe Kennedy. Today the hugeness of just keeping the global economy alive seems audacious as economies teeter and the global population grows. A leader with ideas not focused squarely on the drama receives short shrift.

But we need dreams too. And not just those that say we can fix global warming, end poverty and provide everyone with quality healthcare. We need audacity.

What is the next “because we can”?

Chance

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Back in the day one of the first things I used to teach in my undergraduate biostatistics classes was that correlation is not causation.

For example, there may be a pattern between sun spot activity and the number of storks nesting in northern Europe, but you cannot conclude that sunspots cause nesting success. If it were that easy to assign a cause to all the patterns we see then a whole bunch of professions from currency speculation to climate change science would be unnecessary.

In my classes I used the presence of correlation to introduce the two main theme of my course: the concept of chance and the importance of the scientific method in helping us know when it is reasonably safe to ignore it.

Chance, and its measure probability, is a concept more intuited than taught. It was always fun to see the lights go on for a student who got it. More often though the pain of understanding likelihood was forsaken and students reverted to the age old standby of wrote learning.

All this recollection came about after I listened to a radio host who was recounting figures showing a significant spike in poker machine revenue in May and June 2012 (up 10 and 7%) across Australia. And in the same breath he reminded listeners that this coincided with cash payments to households from Federal government as compensation for cost of living rises from its introduction of a carbon price.

Now, of course, the radio host was smart. He didn’t imply or even hint that there was a causal relationship between the arrival of free cash and an increase in gambling revenue; but merely placing the two pieces of information together was enough.

My own emotions leapt to confirm gross inefficiency and lack of foresight in the government policy frame. Obviously people spent the money gambling.

Back in the classroom I would have berated my students for making the connection that I made. And really there is no evidence that a one-off cash payment to pensioners and low-income households ended up in slot machines, or even that some of it did.

Except that 10% of monthly poker machine revenue is roughly $100 million. This is a tidy sum and $500 more than usual in each and every poker machine.

Given that roughly 600,000 Australians play pokers machines weekly, that $100 million will be around $167 each.

The cash payments for families were $100 per child and for pensioners $250.

Chance is a fine thing.

Policies on the scrap heap

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alloporus has been a place where the topic of leadership has popped up consistently.

It is after all an intrinsically fascinating topic [leaders not heroes] but mostly it gets a mention because of the leadership vacuum in the political life of Australia [Wot, no politics | Leadership is tricky | Labour leaders].

An insightful article in the News Review section of the Sydney Morning Herald by Miriam Lyons, executive director of the Centre for Policy Development based in Sydney, showed what a lack of leadership could mean. Her idea, presented in a neat analogy with fantasy football, was that there have been many policies proposed by politicians that would be laughed at by their parties if presented to the current parliament.

The best one for me was Andrew Peacock who, as shadow environment minister, went to the 1990 election proposing a 20% cut in GHG emissions. The Liberals didn’t win. When they did, in 1996 under John Howard, there followed a decade of keeping well away from emission targets and ignoring the Kyoto protocol completely. Today such a target would be preposterous.

Lyons point was that policies are fickle things, easily left behind when the mood of the day makes them unpalatable. And that many a good idea languishes even when international moves are in favour.

In Australia the trend for rejection seems to have become so severe that there are few policy ideas left standing.

Except that policy is core business for politicians. We entrust our elected members to discuss, debate and land at the right balance between our personal freedom and the necessary efficiencies from the collective. And we allow them a small army of staffers to figure out and implement all the rules, regulations and incentives that chosen policy requires.

So why, when I read the list of policy options now considered laughable, do I cry?

I despair because all of those policies once proposed by parties from all persuasions but now on the scrap heap contain a kernel of leadership. Each one of them was just a little bit out there, sufficiently different to be on the edge. Their proponents needed to be bold and took a risk in putting them up because there was a chance that the policy would be unpopular.

And this is partly why they were cast aside, for on the edge can also be on the nose. It is easy then to retreat into the entrenched assumption that the public will bite you if you present unpopular policy.

But is this true?

Like Lyons, I don’t think so. Unpopular policy can easily become popular if it works. That is if it delivers balance on the public and private interest. But it needs to be told and sold, and that takes courage or, dare we say it, leadership.

Astonishing

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ImageImagine a Manchester United supporter on a commuter train to work. He sits next to a random person and, for once, starts a conversation. Turns out that the fellow passenger is a Manchester City supporter.

Outside the emotional pressure cooker of match day the exchange is civil.

Even though United are on a poor run of form and are trailing in the league, neither fan gives an inch. They spend a competitive half an hour talking up the virtues of everything from the merits of their best players to the quality of the meat pies at the grounds.

This is what we do when we declare our support… we support, talk up, cheer our team however lowly or troubled it may be at the time.

Maybe I am naive but I thought that a similar responsibility befell senior politicians when it came to talking about their jurisdiction.

So I nearly fell of my chair yesterday when on the radio was a recording of the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard complaining about transit times and departure congestion at Sydney airport. Every business traveller will tell you stories of long delays, she said.

What! Can you ever imagine a United supporter saying that Sir Alex is a bit slack, “came in late for work yesterday he did”? Or hear the City fan suggest that Balotelli should be dropped from the squad. Never, not in a million years.

The back story to the Gillard harangue was that the G20 leaders summit in 2014 was to be held in Brisbane and not Sydney, a choice made by the government for either political gain (the preferred media spin) or because the Sydney Convention Centre was scheduled for refurbishment and unavailable (a practical explanation not favourable to spin). Or maybe they just wanted to spread it around.

Whatever the real reason, the Prime Minister chose to claim airport inefficiency as her sound bite for why it was Brisbane over Sydney.

What a crazy call. Whatever your political motivation you don’t bag out your own team. In fact, I would say that Gillard, who has a loud public voice because of her position, was being irresponsible. She should be talking up Australia in every day in every way. It is in her job description.

If the Australian people ignore such gaffs and her inability to see the consequences of them and re-elect her to office, I reckon she would be one lucky lady.

And as a United supporter, I also hope and pray that she supports City.

Food security | What’s wrong with this ad?

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Check out this ad snapped on a recent rip to the local supermarket.

A handsome, young bloke stands with his arms wide to embrace his achievement, another nutritious crop of vegetables for the table. Good on him you think. A warm feeling creeps up on you as though you are being wrapped in a safety blanket. Thanks to strong dudes like this one, I know I am going to be fed with healthy nutritious food.

No doubt the ad, that also appeared as a full page spread in the Sunday magazines, would have cost several hundred thousand dollars to run has nothing much to do with bok choy, or even fresh vegetables for that matter.

It is all about putting the retailer front and centre.

By showing the farmer as a member of the team we are being made to think that our food comes from the supermarket and not the paddock. The retailer is now the supplier.

The messaging appears to be about fresh food, from local farms grown by young and, dare I say, virile farmers who may be in search of a wife. But really it is about the retailer being the source of our food security.

So what is wrong with this particular ad beyond the obvious sexism?

Here is a hint. I purchased the weekend paper in the supermarket and not far from the newspaper stand was a special in the vegetable isle: a net of onions for $1.

That is pristine, firm onions for 15c each.

Good food at great prices. It’s enough to close down the agencies on Madison Avenue. Who needs advertising when the prices are this cheap and the produce so enticing?

The reality is that farmers cannot supply produce sold out of the supermarket at 15c unless they are selling to one buyer who runs a monopoly over them. What is wrong is that the smiling farmer is actually walking a tightrope of viability. If fertilizer prices rise by 20% then they go out of business.

The market is failing them.

The profiteering opportunities and perverse competition of a retail duopoly (two supermarket chains supply most of the food to households across the country) creates huge risks for Australian production systems. Running at the price margin is a challenging way to run any business but in farming the corner cutting and frugality it severely limits sustainability.

It is well known that farmers look after their land best when they are doing well. When they are under pressure they tend to push the land harder to make ends meet.  We are at the point globally where we cannot afford for such structural risk. We need every acre of productive land to produce and to remain productive.

The message of food security provided by your friendly supermarket is false. It fails to take into account the risk that the farmer takes on when he has only one buyer of his produce.

And another thing, most farmers are over 50.

Have we lost the plot?

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This week Colin Barnett, the premier of Western Australia, was quoted in the Australian from a speech at a business leaders forum in Perth as saying that “We’ve lost the plot as to what we are trying to do here” implying there were other ways to reduce emissions than imposing a carbon tax.

“Why would we have a carbon price of $23 when the only somewhat credible trading market in Europe has a market price of $10?” he said.

This is the sort of thing you might expect a premier from the contrary political code to the Federal government to say. More so when it is the colossal revenues from mining that has been the engine of the WA economy for decades. The last thing a Liberal government wants is to dampen that particular fire.

At the same forum and quoted in the same article, the head of Westfarmers, who own a big chunk of Australia’s retail sector, described the carbon tax as “unnecessarily complex” and that “you have to be a rocket scientist to understand this stuff.”

Oh well, you could say, it’s just a couple of browns in a brown newspaper having a go at what they see as a constraint on the golden goose of capitalism. It’s to be expected.

And that would be a big mistake.

What everyone has forgotten to explain is why such a cost is necessary.

A few years ago we knew it was the “biggest moral issue of our time” at least according to Kevin07. Unless we took action global warming would consume us. And the majority believed that action was necessary.

Then the government prevaricated, forgot whose behviour they needed to change and introduced complex legislation that was more about plugging leaks than achieving a result.

It is emission reduction. Remember?

We thought that if we reduced greenhouse gas emissions then there would be fewer of the molecules that can trap long wavelength back radiation in the atmosphere than under business as usual and, if we managed reasonable reductions, we might slow global warming.

And then there is the real and far more critical reason. In a relatively short time we will run out of oil. If we haven’t at least begun the transition away from our dependence on oil for transport and fertilizers then we risk economic collapse everywhere. This is a huge deal, easily as important to the global economy as spiraling sovereign debt. Emission reduction might seem a bit left field as a means to transition away from oil but it starts the process of introducing and incentivizing alternative fuels and it starts to set the price signal that will come in a hurry when supply cannot meet demand.

Australian politicians must know this. They are well-educated, can interpret a graph and have a day job that puts this sort of issue front and centre.

Only they come up with a clunky policy that they have chosen not to explain to any of the people who really matter.

Maybe they think that because we have seemingly endless coal reserves, and now natural gas too, all will be well.

Or they just cannot bring themselves to explain the details behind the necessary pain of a transition – even though we already know that transitions are painful.

Perhaps they can’t explain something that they do not understand themselves.

Whatever the reason no one in the government has stood up to calmly, and with clarity, tell us why.

Then again, perhaps they really have just “lost the plot.”

Greek debt again

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I came across this interesting visual presentation on the size of the Greek national debt… maybe staggering is a better adjective.

Recall that the talented presenter was dwarfed by half a trillion dollars. Now let’s go across the pond to the US.

The US national debt is roughly $15,717,900,000,000

That is $15.7 trillion if my conversion is correct – a tad more than Greece and a huge $50,000 for every US citizen.

In principle the US has a better capacity to repay creditors given the debt is 107% of GDP compared to 143% for Greece, but I just can’t get my head around the absolute number. And even though I lay no claim to an understanding of economics I am sure that owing more than you earn is not a good place to be.

You can see why climate change action is neither here nor there when the world has chosen to walk along this kind of fiscal knife edge.

Climate change action and Greek debt

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A few days ago I asked this question on HubPages

Why has action on climate change stalled?

More than 250 views and over 30 answers and comments in 48 hours suggests that the topic still fires people up.

HubPages has a useful counter that shows how many people vote each comment up or down. As most of the comments were at the margins reflecting strong views for or against climate change action, the up votes were almost always balance by down votes.

Then today I came across an ‘advertisement’ for the 2012 climate change intercessional meetings – the discussions held between the main UNFCC Conference of the Parties – this year to be held in Bonn, Germany.

Here is an extract:

[Bonn] will need to pick up the momentum generated in Durban. The Durban Platform has the goal of “enhancing mitigation ambition to identify and to explore options for a range of actions that can close the ambition gap with a view to ensuring the highest possible mitigation efforts by all Parties”, and includes a commitment to develop a “new protocol, another legal instrument or agreed outcome with legal force” by 2015.

As the youngsters would say ‘What the…’ Talk about disappearing up our own rear ends.

Somewhere in our subconscious we know that this stuff is important. A wicked problem it may be but it talks to the very fundamentals of our survival as individuals. Not least the challenges of where we will get our food, water and shelter.

Only this importance is playing out as denial. There isn’t a problem, go away and get on with you life and don’t bug me and really don’t expect me to pay to fix a problem that isn’t.

Or if not denial then a fear of catastrophe. If we don’t fix climate change the sky will indeed fall in.

What are we thinking? Feeding us all is, like the Greek debt, not something we should still argue about. We should be figuring out and implementing the best solutions.

For me solutions will have two pillars.

The first is nipping out the drivers. For climate change this will be to hasten the transition to sustainable energy and land management. In Greece (and a whole host of other countries) it is to stop spending money you don’t have.

The second pillar, and the one we seem to have completely ignored so far, is to implement adaptation. We should be channeling all that argumentative energy to think up and implement ways to cope with the change. In climate that is to change our water use, land management and plan for more extreme weather, shifts in seasonality and rising sea levels. Noting that all of these will be easier if we have cheap alternative energy.

In Greece it will be thinking up and implementing ways to employ a generation. Tough call.

$6 a gallon, heck no!

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I came across this quote in a biofuels newsletter

Mad as heck about $5 gasoline? According to new research from Iowa State, the price would have hit $6 per gallon, if the US had not had its ethanol supply

And next to it was a picture of a dude in a white T-shirt with the slogan

“I saved you $1220 last year, ask me how”

in green letters.

Research is suggesting that ethanol production saved US householders $143 billion, or roughly $1220 per household in 2011. And for the headline, a dollar a gallon.

No doubt the transition away from fossil fuels will have to be as gentle as possible. There will be any number of tactics to ease the system through to avoid cost and supply discomfort.

At the same time the oil people will want to keep selling every last barrel at top prices. The dance to oil at $200+ a barrel will be interesting to watch.

So here is the thought.

If we measure the success of our economic system on wealth and lifestyle it generally stacks up. Measure it on the number of people it sustains and its performance is stellar.

And so far that system has been supported by ancient fossilized energy. Power that the sun sent to earth millions of years ago that was captured by plants and stored by quirks of decomposition and sedimentology.

Ethanol is power from today’s sunshine that is captured by plants and converted to a liquid fuel.

Seems like a very clunky way to do things. Why not just harness the power directly?

I am sure you know the answer.

 

The new gold

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You would never call an actuary sexy. Number logic people just don’t have the suave of a James Bond or the sass of a Marilyn. They are just too precise. Absorbed by detail and loving that a + b = c, especially when b is the reciprocal of the square root of f, they just lack that playful oomph.

That said being a good number cruncher was never a bad career. Thanks to the acute need for their skills, especially from insurance companies treading the tightrope of premiums over risk, data people have always been well paid and in reasonable demand. Over the years it has been quite tricky to get a place on an actuarial degree.

Now, however, sexy is in for the statisticians too, because the mad men need them. Or more strictly, there is a new breed of advertiser who have taken the mix of imagery and psychology invented to persuade us all to buy things to a whole new level. Now it is possible to predict as well as persuade.

Thanks to the already huge and rapid accumulating databanks on our online profiles, our offline purchases and even where we are throughout the day (yep, that handy little app in your smartphone does more than tell you where you are and how long it takes to walk three blocks), it is now possible to track behaviours and from that predict what might happen next, or better still intervene with an irresistible offer.

The mad men who want to place that person specific ad on the right device at the right time need the data crunchers to do the sums.

Here is a simple example. Your Facebook profile says that you like the delectable British soul singer Sade (mine does) and your mobile pings a GPS signal that you are in Sydney. Instantly the ticketing website you use puts two and two together and sends you an email with Sade tour dates. Not only that but her Sydney concert listing is flashing with a special offer of 10% off the usual ticket price. Outcome obvious, you have an outstanding night out and can’t wait for her next tour.

Here is another example. Your credit card purchases at the casino hotel, activity at the gaming tables and even what goes out of the mini-bar in your room are monitored in real time. What you buy, win, and loose on your casino weekend break are matched to a predictive model based on thousands of previous punters that tells the hotel staff the optimum time to offer you a free meal voucher or a discounted show ticket for the next evening. That optimum being the point being just before your instinct tells you to cut your losses and check out.

This is just the start of the thousands of uses that analysis of data can support. Take a moment and you will think of plenty yourself.

Usefulness readily translates into products and services that become a new gold, the nuggets that come from data mining. The vast datasets on what people do, where they do it and when trawled, filtered, analysed and modeled to predict what, where and when they will do next. All so that businesses can deliver a timely intervention.

The talk is of a multi-billion dollar industry built around analysis, interpretation, and prediction, followed by delivery of highly targeted suggestion. It is a whole new field for anyone unfazed by terabytes of data and permutation algorithms…. and who are also unfazed by where the money comes from.

I wonder how many of the new gold diggers will dare to ask.