We respond to the risk of getting away with breaking the law

Or, as Thom Yorke once famously said, the more you drive, the less intelligent you get.

The Roads Minister, Eric Roozendaal, has backed away from his promise last year to enforce school-zone speed limits by rotating covertly monitored mobile speed cameras across the state.

Instead, fixed cameras will be installed in just 50 school zones in NSW, meaning almost 11,000 school zones have infrequent and sporadic police enforcement.

So, “rotating covertly monitored mobile speed cameras”: there is a single manner in which a permanent stop would be put to all speeding. By ensuring, publicly, that every inch of road had a speed camera pointed at it. I.e., ensuring, and making publicly known, that your probability of not being caught speeding was exactly zero. Anything less will not be effective. Double-demerit weekends work fine, because they usually include (or at least imply) elevated policing – i.e. the chances of being caught go up.

This, by the by, is also among the reasons why capital punishment is idiotic. It’s just a human logic problem: we’re hyperbolic discounters. We just do not properly value – or evaluate – the consequences of our actions. Especially when behind the wheel.

So, this reaction:

In May last year, Mr Roozendaal announced an initiative to use mobile hidden cameras, warning that “any school zone could have a camera in it”.

is wrong. The message to motorists would be that any school might not have a camera in it – unless there were simply far more zones with them, and this were known. I would say (without any analysis at all) that anything, certainly, below 50% would be ineffective.

Also this:

He said Mr Roozendaal had been “rolled” on the initiative by his cabinet colleagues, who feared a political backlash about revenue-raising from drivers caught by covert cameras.

is probably true but, on the part of motorists, equally wrong. If we honestly believe we will be caught speeding we will not speed. Ergo: the government will invest in all the cameras and earn no money. Which is fine (full disclosure: as well as an unsympathetic non-motorist, I am also an unsympathetic non-road-law-breaker, non-life-threatener, and so forth. Speeding motorists are complete twats).

Using roving, probabilistic methods of policing, however, only ensures that people will speed. Because people will believe they can get away with it. Anything other that total saturation is in fact revenue-raising, but motorists just refuse to see the basic calculus at work. Just like Thom Yorke said.

There are no basic principles of good economic management that Zimbabwe will not break

That, at least, is my understanding. Sadly, because I’m a naive tool, when I saw the headline, “Zimbabwe will grab foreign firms”, my response was positive. ‘Ooh, great’, I thought. ‘Zimbabwe is investing in foreign enterprises.’

I’m still a little sleepy, is my only excuse.

Zimbabwe’s parliament has passed a bill giving local owners majority control of foreign-owned companies including mines and banks, threatening to drive the fragile economy deeper into crisis.

President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party, which enjoys a majority in parliament, pushed through the legislation today after members of the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) walked out in protest.

Mugabe’s government – which critics accuse of plunging Zimbabwe into turmoil by seizing white-owned farms and handing them to inexperienced black farmers – says the bill is part of its drive to empower the country’s poor majority.

“We cannot continue to have a skewed economic environment where our people are not able to fully participate,” Paul Mangwana, the Indigenisation and Economic Empowerment Minister told parliament during the debate.

A few things: first, Zimbabwean voters must be dumber than ours. Mugabe’s been in power (actually in power – not like Republicans are in power) for 27 years now. Who in the hell else ought to be considered responsible? I don’t think the IMF has even done that much damage to Zimbabwe.

Second:

Mugabe … has accused some foreign-owned firms of working with his Western opponents to topple his government by unfairly hiking prices and stashing foreign currency proceeds abroad.

That would, of course, also be known as doing business in a country with countless-digit inflation and a habit of the government’s of mandating prices for everything.

Third: fortunately at least one opposing spokesperson understood one of the key rules of developing economies.

MDC legislators argued the law was designed to enrich a few powerful individuals and win votes for ZANU-PF in parliamentary and presidential elections due next March.

“As far as we are concerned, this bill is cast in concrete but I want to urge the minister to reconsider because our economy needs foreign direct investment,” MDC MP Innocent Gonese said during heated debate in which an opposition member was ejected.

Stanbic Zimbabwe – a subsidiary of South Africa’s Standard Bank noted in a presentation to a parliament committee yesterday that only four of the 28 banking institutions in the country were foreign owned, proposing that “the current status be retained.”

Don’t get me wrong – I believe in people over profits, but understand that Mugabe’s policy is precisely the opposite. Poor developing countries, especially utter basket-cases like Zimbabwe, need to follow the few basic rules of stabilisation and attracting foreign capital:

1. Increase savings and investment
2. Increase investment in education and health
3. Stop internal unrest
4. Enforce the rule of law

Given that Zimbabweans can’t even afford food, these days, even inflation does not affect the absence of savings. Nor, it seems, can they manage investments in education and health. What remains? Attracting foreign capital that can do that for them. Which will not happen without recognition of property rights and enforcement of the rule of law.

Anyone who thinks my attitude equals colonial paternalism, drop me a line – I have a business in Zimbabwe in which I’d like you to invest.

Meanwhile, of course, the rest of us (Prime Minister Brown notwithstanding), just don’t give a shit. The President in this country cheerfully goes around talking about all the Mandela’s that Saddam Hussein killed (gassed them with all that US aid money and political cover, I suppose). God forbid we could do something about the 2008 Iraq War Budget of USD198bn (and that’s just what they’re admitting to) and start improving Africa. Hell, even the current administration’s criminal Trade Not Aid (they do prefer style over any substance whatsoever, don’t they?) bait-and-switch would still be an improvement.

“Inflation”

This is really beginning to get on my tits.

The Fed’s preferred inflation measure, which is tied to consumer spending and strips out food and energy costs, rose at a 1.4 percent annual rate in the second quarter and was up 2 percent from the same time in 2006.

…

Less inflation has opened the door for the central bank to cut interest rates.

One hardly knows where to begin. The Economist’s Economics A-Z seems not to mention fuel or food being special anywhere.

Shouldn’t smarties like Bloomberg know better than this? Should they not indicate, somehow, that at least they understand that the line “tied to consumer spending and strips out food and energy costs” has a serious internal logic problem, or that they understand that, just because inflation as measured by the Fed is advancing slowly, inflation itself need not be?

Unless it’s me, and all these people – the Fed, financial reporters, etc. just don’t consumer fuel and food. They live in a world of employer-provided (and never discussed) high-rise apartments, on a diet of hookers, whisky and cocaine. All of which costs are fairly stable. It’s as reasonable as any other explanation up with which I can come.

Two discoveries made while trying to remember the whereabouts of The Economist’s Economics A-Z:

1) The New Economic Reality Dictionary: includes such things as

Jobjack: (JAHB’-jack) [also: jobjac, jobjacked, jobjacker, jobjacking) In their rush to find least-cost labor, American companies have stolen jobs from American workers on American soil and have sent them overseas where the labor will be provided much more cheaply.

As corporations have no consciousness or social concerns, there’s only one thing that will stem the tide against jobjacking. Consumer resistance to purchase of goods made overseas.

2) A very entertaining site called The Mechanics Of Inflation: The Great Government Swindle And How It Works. A site loaded with axes being ground, and scattered with excellent quotes from economists.