I’ll be different If you were designing a cost of living index that would set the pension, would you include in it the cost of alcohol and cigarettes? Australia’s Statistician Brian Pink has had to grapple with the question in implementing a Budget promise to draw up a new ” pensioners and beneficiaries only ” cost of living index and he’s decide not to make “social or moral judgements”. “Some people may regard the use of tobaccoo or alcohol as socially undesirable,” he says in a discussion paper released ahead of the launch of the index next month
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It’s now the second half of 2009, so it’s a convenient time to remember that, early last year, Keith Windschuttle published a piece in the Oz , touted as an extract from his “forthcoming, later this year” Volume 2 of The Fabrication of Australian History . This Volume 2, devoted to the Stolen Generations, and attacking historians such as Peter Read is different 1 from the Volume 2 announced back in 2002 and promised for 2003, in which Windschuttle was supposed to make good his claims that Henry Reynolds had fabricated the history of frontier conflict in Queensland. Neither promised Volume 2 has appeared, and there is no sign that either of them ever will. Stephen Koukoulas: “We have enough difficulty forecasting the economy and markets, so we are not about to delve into long run weather forecasts. But this story has popped up on Reuters and it notes that El Nino is “all but certain” this year. For Australia, this means an “all but certain” drought. I’d never seen any data on the deaths of international students while in Australia, so I was interested in this story in The Age this morning reporting 54 deaths in the year to November 2008 (though annoyed at the beat-up elements - claiming the information was ’suppressed’ by the coroner, when there is no evidence of anything other than reluctance to publish possibly unreliable data). Obviously 54 deaths is 54 too many, but so far as I can work out this a death rate below that of the general population. Though there are statistical problems in working out the base population for overseas students (because the number of overseas students who will be in Australia at some time during a year will give a too-high number, due to short courses, mid-year starts and finishes etc), my estimate is that this gives a death rate of about .02% An interesting illustration of Obama’s character dates from 20 years ago, when he was a not-very-well-off law student. Just out Price Incentives and Consumer Payment Behaviour John Simon, Kylie Smith, Tim West - Reserve Bank “In this paper we estimate the effect of particular price incentives on consumer payment patterns using transaction-level data. We find that participation in a loyalty program and access to an interest-free period, both of which lower the price of credit card use, tend to increase credit card use at the expense of alternative payment methods, such as debit cards and cash. Specifically, we find that a loyalty program increases the probability of credit card use by 23 percentage points and access to the interest-free period increases the probability by 16 percentage points Enjoy! Peter Martin is the economics correspondent for Australia’s two leading newspapers, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age . He blogs at peter martin’s blog , peter’s picks and twitter . Each of the last six months have been our biggest-spending on record ! Peter Martin is the economics correspondent for Australia’s two leading newspapers, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age . He blogs at peter martin’s blog , peter’s picks and twitter . Steve Keen might have to climb Kosciusko! A five-month surge in Melbourne home prices has undone all of the damage wrought by the global financial crisis, pushing up the median house price to $469,357 and the median unit price to $377,077 - both record highs. Melbourne home prices have soared the fastest in the nation so far this year, jumping 6.1 per cent in five months to eclipse 5 per cent-plus gains in Sydney and Darwin I’m not all that good at remembering which way various standard distinctions go, especially when I have some underlying doubt about them. In classical hypothesis testing, for example, Type I error involves erroneously rejecting the null hypothesis, while Type II error involves erroneously failing to reject. |
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