The irrational electorate and economics

Ross Gittins today in the SMH, regarding the bewilderment of the Howard government’s economic-rationalism ideologues as to why we sheeple aren’t more happy about the wonderful economy: It’s not only the economy, stupid

Gittins points out that growth in real incomes is not enough to satisfy when people no longer compare their circumstances only with themselves 10 years ago but also with the people around them, and all can see that the disparity in wealth between the social classes is growing. The evidence in the electoral polls shows that a growing proportion of voters prefer predictable job security to a booming share price, and are made more anxious that their children will be able to afford home-ownership than grateful over their own capital gains in the skyrocketing property market.

Economic-rationalism has never sufficiently factored in people’s attachment to intangible goods. Gittins’ final line nails it:

Another explanation for our base ingratitude, of course, could be our dawning realisation that there’s more to life than economics. No, that couldn’t possibly be right.

Filed under: Sociology, economics, elections

Disabled in a disaster? Just wait until we’ve helped all the real people, all right?

Lauredhel had a post a few days ago noting the plight of a quadriplegic man abandoned while the ablebodied passengers were evacuated during the train breakdown on the Sydney Harbour Bridge recently and told he would be evacuated “in two or three days”. (Luckily nearby construction workers showed some initiative and rescued him using a forklift.)

Apparently this was not just a regrettable lapse or someone’s wires getting crossed about emergency procedure, it’s standard operating procedure for CityRail: CityRail’s new generation of passenger carriages have been designed with no facility for evacuating wheelchairs at all.

A CityRail spokeswoman confirmed last night wheelchair passengers would not be able to access the evacuation ramps and must wait for a stretcher in an emergency on the new public-private partnership-funded trains.

The Paraplegic and Quadriplegic Association of NSW and Spinal Cord Injuries Australia fear the system will place wheelchair passengers at greater risk than able-bodied passengers.

They are worried that disabled travellers would be forgotten in a terrorist incident like the July bombings of the London Underground.

ParaQuad spokeswoman Deborah Schofield said evacuating wheelchair passengers from the side of the train posed a problem inside tunnels.

Filed under: disability, economics, health, sheer incompetence, technology

A timeline to think upon

If Iran Were America (And We Were Iran): A Timeline

This is a very well done example of reversing protagonists and putting shoes on other feet. It’s also a useful pointer for people who have been previously unaware of just how much throttling of autonomous political movements in ex-colonial resource-rich states has been done by the industrial powers of the West over generations.

Via Pandagon.

Filed under: economics, history, islamophobia, middle east

What about the sex workers?

I want to examine two points I’ve noted are repeatedly raised by anti-feminists, and both ignore certain realities of sex work.

The first argument is against the idea that the gender gap in pay either exists, or, if it does exist, the argument goes that it is justified because men’s work is more dangerous than women’s work. I don’t deny that labour statistics show that men are more often maimed or killed in the workplace. There are standard arguments about how sexist institutions discourage women from entering dangerous and well-remunerated professions, but I don’t want to go there. I want to discuss the one dangerous yet [ETA: reputedly] well-remunerated industry in which the overwhelming majority of the workers are women: the sex industry.

My question is: are sex workers in countries where prostitution is considered a crime included in the labour statistics?

Filed under: economics, moral panics, sexual violence, sexuality

Workchoicesplace cases

Peter Lalor at the Australian’s blogs takes a fairly standard potshot at our goverment deciding to rename the Orwellian Worckchoices scheme and then delivers a litany of cases of workers drastically disadvantaged by unscrupulous employers pushing the Howard government’s new legislation as far as it can go and then some, and sums it up with:

Prime Minister John Howard argues you can’t legislate against companies behaving like this, but the point is his legislation allowed them to do it.

Too bloody right.

Lalor then opens up comments to readers telling of their experiences with AWAs and other employment contracts over recent years, and particularly since the advent of Workchoices. Compelling reading.

Filed under: Politics, economics

Aargheeheee! The rapier wit of the Gore-Deranged is destroying me!

Carbon Credit Killers.

Why We Do It

The reason we sell Carbon Debits is simple – we want to take away the pathetic excuse of Carbon Credits from those liberals who hide their shame filled lives behind money-bought lunacy. Carbon Credits are simply a way for the rich (Al Gore) to continue to hypocritically live lives that look nothing like what they try to enforce on everyone else in society. We want to take away those excuses.

Our goal is to completely wipe out every Carbon Credit ever bought by selling their nullifying opposite – the Carbon Debit. The guilt and shame that caused people to buy Carbon Credits in the first place will be placed back on them as we let them know that their actions caused us to nullify their credits. They are the cause of us killing trees; they need to face up to their guilt.

This message is important for one reason – Far Left Liberals are lunatics that operate solely on shame of themselves, their success, their country, and their wealth. It is time to expose their ideas and self-defeating idiocy – and selling Carbon Debits is the best way to do that.

Seriously, I hate this site. But underneath all the hateful posturing they may just have a point about the rich simply outsourcing their carbon debt, while people living in poverty are fingerwagged at for failing to embrace their squalor and starvation while knowing from observation that industrialisation is a proven path to relative prosperity.

Then of course I realise that distracting me from important messages about broad ecological responsibility (poor people may want prosperity, but not at the price of toxic contamination when fully informed) and the reactionary attack on rational discourse in the public arena is exactly what they want to happen, and I nearly fell for it.

Complex issues are hard by definition. It’s wrong to try and boil them down to two opposing sides playing chess and trying to sweep the board.

Filed under: Politics, activism/charity, consumerism, economics, vitriol

Knowing Your Market

Today’s Guest Poster “Little Jim” is a masked IT professional and blogger

While the outside perception is that it is still a male domain (and indeed some segments of the industry are very much like a post office), within the IT industry female techos and IT managers are quite the norm. I know as I have spent the day chatting to them at a trade show demonstrating a company’s product.

However, with the prevalence of female IT employees and at a major trade show, one would think that IT vendors would have grown out of using provocatively dressed women to sell computer hardware.

Just near us was one vendor who decided that the stereotypical blonde in short pants would somehow enhance their sales pitch. Not too much further away, another vendor had two young ladies dressed up in police uniforms in a weird attempt to capture the IT fetish demographic (you’d be forgiven in thinking that those two had turned up at the wrong convention). And that was just in the immediate vicinity. A tour through the halls turned up more than a few vendors with young women in various forms of near dress as some sort of attraction.

As a male, the attitude of these vendors was demeaning and disappointing. Demeaning as it implies that all one had to do to sell a product to your average male IT professional is have a few scantily clad women draped over it.

Disappointing at it seems with what progress has been made in the industry, it seems there are those who see the only role for women in IT is to represent stereotypical male fantasies at trade shows. Given the number of female IT professionals on the floor, the antediluvian marketing approach of some vendors will have cost them more than a few deals.

Filed under: economics