Views of Australia

Here's a picture of me, scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef, a few miles off the coast from Cairns. It was taken in September 2002.

The solution to low voter turnout

The European elections are upon us and, as is traditional during this event, worthy people in the media are wringing their hands at the prospect of fewer than thirty percent of voters turning out to vote. This, it is generally agreed, is a Bad Thing and as usual, we can look forward to the entertaining spectacle of politicians desperately constructing from whole cloth, reasons why those of us, who have the cheek to exercise our right not to vote, are a disgrace to our country. (I sometimes wonder why they bother. Those of us who don't vote, well, don't vote, so it can't be our votes they're angling for. There must be some public choice explanation of this phenomenon.)

As part of this tradition, there will be occasional discussions in the media about what should be done about it and, in keeping with tradition, nobody will propose anything that might actually work. This always disappoints me. It has nothing to do with a lack of solutions to the problem. It's simply a failure of imagination on the part of our politicians.

Here's how to solve the problem of low voter turnout. It was suggested by a friend of mine.

Presently, in British elections, the candidates all pay a deposit. Any candidate who fails to reach some threshold, five percent of the votes cast I think, loses his deposit. Instead, only the winning candidate should keep his deposit.

The voters should write their names on the back of their ballot papers, or, if you wish to maintain the secrecy of the ballot, the numbers of their Swiss bank accounts.

Forget about counting the votes; that's a waste of time. Instead, all the ballot papers should be put in a tombola and a single ballot paper pulled out.

The winning ballot paper determines which candidate wins the election.

The lost deposits are paid as a prize to whoever casts the winning vote.

Under this system, every voter is, in effect, being given a free lottery ticket, and who would turn down a free lottery ticket? Additionally, the system is a statistically noisy form of proportional representation that retains the link between an MP and his costituency, thus answering a common objection to PR. It's just the sort of policy the Liberal Democrats could support.

It's so simple. Why hasn't any party proposed it?

Views of Scotland

A few weeks ago, David Farrer published some pictures of Adam Smith's grave. Today, I went on a pilgrimage to the other end of Adam Smith's life:

In a deft touch of irony, the hometown of the founding father of economics graces us with this monument to the lump of labour fallacy:

Kirkcaldy also has a theatre named after Adam Smith:

The Adam Smith Theatre (originally the Adam Smith Halls) was opened by Andrew Carnegie, the American steel magnate, robber baron and thoroughly splendid chap. He was born in Dunfermline, only a few miles up the road from Kirkcaldy. Unlike Adam Smith's home, Carnegie's home is still standing:

Among other buildings named after Andrew Carnegie, Dunfermline boasts its own Carnegie Hall. I bet you thought New York had the only one. (How do I get there?, I hear you ask. Practice, practice, practice.)

Adam Smith was Chair of Logic and later Moral Philosophy at Glasgow Univeristy. Here is a picture of Glasgow University in the midst of Kelvingrove Park. The university moved to this campus in the mid-nineteenth century, long after Adam Smith's day.

In my opinion, this is the most beautiful view in the world (six thousand milliHelens, at least). It's just as beautiful in the winter, when the trees are bare and covered in snow.

Also from Glasgow, we have a statue of Robert Peel, the man who put Adam Smith's ideas into practice:

and Donald Dewar, the man who gave us our present day Parcel of Rogues:

The high esteem in which Scotland's first ever First Rogue was held by his constituents is revealed by a close up:

Here's a little opinion poll: Who was the greatest man of the four fellows mentioned above? (I would vote for Andrew Carnegie, but I think I should disqualify my vote, lest I be accused of corruption: he payed for my PhD.)

The volatile price of beauty

I saw Troy earlier this week and rather enjoyed it. Michael Jennings saw it too and made this complaint:

[T]he part of Helen is impossible to cast. Virtually anyone is going to get the response of "A thousand ships?. Her. Give me a break". It is a truly thankless role for anyone to play, and this one is the same. Diane Kruger is perfectly attractive, but she doesn't strike me as greatly remarkable.

I thought that this was a little unfair. Michael is, I believe, economically literate, so I'm sure that on reflection he'd probably agree. What provoked me to think about this was the following letter, published in the Scotsman on Tuesday:

Bearing in mind the publicity regarding the film Troy, many decades ago, the late Professor Max McGlashan, of Univeristy College, London, invented an expression for the international unit of female beauty, namely the milliHelen (mHe).

One milliHelen is the degree of female beauty required to launch exactly one ship.

(PROF) FINDLAY SWINTON

It should be obvious that what the milliHelen measures is not some universal standard of beauty, but its price, and as with any commodity, there is no reason why we should expect the price of beauty, as measured in ship launches, to remain constant over three millenia. Here are some reasons that occur to me why a face worth a thousand milliHelens in ancient Greece might only be worth a few milliHelens today:

The market is currently suffering from a glut of beauty. With modern dentistry, cosmetic surgery and the eradication of disfiguring ailments such as smallpox, women today have opportunities to retain or achieve beauty that were not available to the ancient Greeks.

The market today is much more liquid than in the past. Not only is beauty much more abundant now, but with modern communications and photography, a king could find a replacement for a kidnapped wife with relative ease. Even if beauty were abundant in ancient times, finding it would have been a much more expensive task. Launching a thousand ships to get back the one you already had might well turn out to be the cheaper option.

Modern ships are very different from ancient ones. A modern ship is much more sophisticated, and surely much more costly to build, than an ancient one. A king, who might quite casually launch a thousand of the ships that were available to Agamemnon, might think twice about launching even a fraction of the ships of a modern navy.

On the other hand, a king is likely to have a navy anyway, so the capital costs, being sunk [excuse the pun], are surely a red herring.

Back to the first hand, the marginal costs are not a red herring. The most significant is, I guess, the cost of manpower. Launching a ship manned with sailors hired from a third world country will be cheaper than launching a ship manned with sailors hired from the rich West. I'm willing to bet that if we knew the wages of sailors from ancient Greece, we would be stunned at how cheaply we could launch a thousand of their ships. It would have been a much greater stretch for the ancient Greeks, of course, being much poorer than us.

The norms of warfare have changed. In the past, the rape and pillage of a defeated enemy were par for the course. Today they are war crimes. The ancient Greeks could offset the benefits of plunder against the costs of launching their ships. Although still available today, it is likely such an option would be foregone by many modern kings.

On the other hand again, the benefits of plunder cut both ways. The outcome of a war is uncertain in advance. If the benefits of plundering reduce your costs in the event of your winning, the costs of being plundered increase your costs in the event of your losing. It's possible that the effect on the expected costs, ex ante, is a wash.

Returning again to the first hand, the effects of plunder are not symmetrical, so the effect on the expected costs is unlikely to be a wash. Only the home side will suffer significant plunder in the event of its defeat. A beaten away side can simply retreat with only its abandonned corpses and equipment being plundered.

I have, of course, presented a somewhat one-sided argument, and the significance of any effects would require emprical testing. However, it should be clear that the matter requires considerable thought before we complain that Diane Kruger is worth too few milliHelens to play Helen of Troy.

Views of Scotland

Loch Creran, a few miles north of Oban:


Kerera, across the water from Oban:


Scuba diving in Loch Creran:

A mathematics joke

A few weeks ago, I brought you an astronomy joke. Now, courtesy of Marginal Revolution, I bring you this:

Most media reported that Google was seeking to raise 2.7 billion in its IPO. Actually they are seeking to raise, $2,718,281,828. An odd number? No, an irrational one.

The crime is compounded at FreedomSight:

Would Alan Greenspan accuse them of "irrational exuberance"?