January 2025 newsletter
Like most Australians, I spent a fair bit of January at the beach, something that’s easier now that we live on the Sunshine Coast. I’m doing my best, with only partial success, to ignore events in the US, except as they affect Australia and the rest of the world.
It was back to work at the end of the month when I went to Canberra for an ANU workshop on the value of life and health. My talk was entitled “How much is a baby worth?”. Here are the slides. The shorter version is that (potential) parents are the only ones who can decide whether the joy of having children justifies the effort and monetary cost that children involve. I’m planning to write a fair bit more criticising policies aimed at boosting birth rates (except those that do so by giving more people the economic stability they need to make that choice).
I got a final acceptance on my paper with my former Honours student, Peter Limerick looking at the way different kinds of Basic Income systems treat households differently (particularly couples vs singles). At the high theory end, I’ve just completed a paper with Ani Guerdjikova and Evan Piermont entitled “Do You Know What I mean? A Syntactic Representation for Differential Bounded Awareness” which we’ll be presenting at conferences later this year.
I got a fair bit of attention, including from the Murdoch press, for a short post on my social media (Mastodon, Bluesky and LinkedIn) criticising demand pricing for electricity (where you pay on the basis of highest 30 minutes of usage in a month) as being both “ dopey and deceptive” No one stepped forward to defend them - the attitude seems to be that once we have smart meters, we will be left with no real alternative.
I’ve been dealing with a long-running knee injury, reminding me that getting older means the need to take more care of my body. I’m hoping to recover well enough for my favorite event of the year, Moo Tri in Mooloolaba (1.5km swim, 40km cycle, 10km run). After that, I’ve signed up for a marathon in Noosa to raise funds for the Melanoma Foundation. Expect begging letters soon.
Newspaper articles
Dutton may think voters no longer care about good government. But there’s no such thing as a ‘free lunch’, The Guardian 22 January
Media
My January media report is here (password quiggin). Thanks as usual to Daniela Brins-Norris
Visit my Substack blog
Excellent presentation on "How Much Is A Baby Worth".
I want to make a comment on the slide about how many babies people would like to have, which includes the text:
"Ideal number of children, commonly seen as 2-3;
Personally desired, a little above 2;
Expected, a little below 2;
Actual, ~1.5 and falling in developed countries."
Would I be correct in guessing that the "Personally desired" figure is derived from surveys which ask people their preferred number of children? If so, an important point to remember is that people tend to answer such survey questions in abstraction from all the other considerations that actually bear on the number of children they will eventually have, e.g. their aspirations for higher education, their career goals, their leisure interests, where they would like to live and in what kind of accommodation, etc. The actual decision to birth a child is far from abstract and all manner of material considerations (including opportunity costs of e.g. income foregone, reduced superannuation, etc) come to bear on it.
I also think Julia Gillard was onto something very important with her "decision creep" comment.