The Club of Rome’s report from 1972 is 50 years old.
I read it when it was first published… A sobering and influential read then.
#KiataWindFarm connected to grid and generating. Largest operating turbines in Australia. More, cheap #RenewableEnergy pic.twitter.com/dN617amLU2
— Windlab (@Windlab) November 6, 2017
Kiata Wind Farm is a wind energy project located 50km north west of Horsham, Victoria. Windlab, an Australian owned company, is developing the project from its Canberra headquarters. Kiata Wind Farm is a 30 MW wind farm. When operational the project will provide enough clean energy for over 20,000 households.
It [WindLab] was established to commercialise world leading atmospheric modelling and wind energy assessment technology, developed by Australia’s premier scientific research institute, the CSIRO.
At a time when it appears revealed truths, beliefs and opinions are increasingly privileged in public and political debate,there was always Hans…
Vale, Hans Rosling
[ted id=2090]
The term “innovation” has been embedded in Australian public policy discussions for many decades, in many domains of activity, from Education, to Science, Health, Manufacturing, Agriculture and yes, even Mining.
We hear this term a lot… Unfortunately, we seem to conflate genuine innovation, [which in my view requires the interdisciplinary approach of many groups, supplemented by visionary legislative and regulatory frameworks encouraging and supporting creative and entrepreneurial actors] with what can only be described as risk-averse, managerial, cost-saving approaches to existing activity.
A structural bias against the “new”. Barry Jones opined years ago about the rise of the managerial-class in Politics…
In 2013, Andrew Dempster, The Director of the Australian Centre for Space Engineering Research; Professor, School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications, UNSW Australia made a salient argument in his paper – Ten reasons why Australia urgently needs a space agency.
He referred to the 2008 Senate Committee on Economics and their assessment of Australian Space capability and future opportunities. The report: Lost in Space? Setting a new direction for Australia’s space science and industry sector
In a nutshell?
Hardly the future focussed, innovative and visionary view that could unlock generations of science, technology, engineering and mathematics graduates [S.T.E.M ]. Not to mention the entrepreneurial opportunities for new materials, systems and products.
Meanwhile…
Blue Origin [ @blueorigin ] is an American privately-funded aerospace developer [yes, the other one…] and manufacturer set up by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos [ @JeffBezos ] .
The company is developing technologies to enable private human access to space with the goal of dramatically lower cost and increased reliability. It is employing an incremental approach from suborbital to orbital flight, with each developmental step building on its prior work. [Read the Australian Senate Committee Report on their view of sub-orbital and orbital opportunities]
Just last week, January 22nd 2016, they completed the SECOND launch and landing of their re-useable system.
This is what innovation looks like in the West Texas desert. Stunning achievements.
It is important to consider the Latitude and Longitude of the Blue Origin Launch site 31.422927°N 104.757152°W.
Consider the same LATITUDE line in Australia? 31.5 degrees south. A line that dissects a point just north of Perth on our West coast and runs through the lower section of our continent, [funnily enough, right through the WOOMERA rocket range, dissecting a point on our East coast, just south of Port Macquarie.
Consider for a moment the strategic asset that open-space, serviced by existing infrastructure provides for such “orbital industries”. It is the same strategic asset that gives us our Aviation training industry [among others]. Consider our existing settlements, roads, rail lines, cities and populations along this line.
Consider our world-class Higher Education sector.
Consider the input-cost of “open space” and the potential value-add of a square kilometre of that open space, compared to mining, tourism, and space-flight, just to name a few.
Consider Australia’s current employment trends and when and how the “new industries” we so often discuss will actually eventuate?
The upcoming Australian Federal Budget in May of this year, will once again struggle with the challenges of “getting the balance right”. Trimming percentage points, raising a tax here, offsetting with incentives there, worrying about reduced receipts so “managing” the budget by cutting costs…
All the while, “orbital industries” don’t have an Australian flag…
There still comes a time when we need to consider the calculus of historically contracting “core-industries”, leaving the country with between four to five MORE people looking for work than the number of vacant positions… Yes, the State of Victoria alone has more registered unemployed people than the number of Job Vacancies advertised nationally!
New jobs? Real jobs? Perhaps we need to look to the sky…
Gradatim Ferociter
Australia tops Global Creativity Index
Mapping the connection between cities, inequality, and creative economics http://t.co/ZaHzQscksk pic.twitter.com/0Udmiy6Z6S
— CityLab (@CityLab) July 9, 2015
The OECD has released its Economic Overview for Australia for 2014.
The OECD report suggests Australia’s material living standards and well-being compare well internationally, reflecting a well-managed and successful economy. The economy is slowing as the prolonged mining boom recedes. Output growth of about 3% is expected for 2014 and 2.5% in 2015. [Editor’s note – Growth of 2.5% is seen by many observers as ’optimistic’ in light of the ”MYEFO” report published after this OECD report. ]
Of interest is the House Markets chart. Look closely.
“Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, written by the French economist Thomas Piketty
I am yet to finish reading this, but earlier this year, the economist said:
“Capital” is built on more than a decade of research by Mr Piketty and a handful of other economists, detailing historical changes in the concentration of income and wealth. This pile of data allows Mr Piketty to sketch out the evolution of inequality since the beginning of the industrial revolution. In the 18th and 19th centuries western European society was highly unequal. Private wealth dwarfed national income and was concentrated in the hands of the rich families who sat atop a relatively rigid class structure. This system persisted even as industrialisation slowly contributed to rising wages for workers. Only the chaos of the first and second world wars and the Depression disrupted this pattern. High taxes, inflation, bankruptcies, and the growth of sprawling welfare states caused wealth to shrink dramatically, and ushered in a period in which both income and wealth were distributed in relatively egalitarian fashion. But the shocks of the early 20th century have faded and wealth is now reasserting itself. On many measures, Mr Piketty reckons, the importance of wealth in modern economies is approaching levels last seen before the first world war.
From this history, Mr Piketty derives a grand theory of capital and inequality. As a general rule wealth grows faster than economic output, he explains, a concept he captures in the expression r > g (where r is the rate of return to wealth and g is the economic growth rate). Other things being equal, faster economic growth will diminish the importance of wealth in a society, whereas slower growth will increase it (and demographic change that slows global growth will make capital more dominant). But there are no natural forces pushing against the steady concentration of wealth. Only a burst of rapid growth (from technological progress or rising population) or government intervention can be counted on to keep economies from returning to the “patrimonial capitalism” that worried Karl Marx. Mr Piketty closes the book by recommending that governments step in now, by adopting a global tax on wealth, to prevent soaring inequality contributing to economic or political instability down the road.
The book has unsurprisingly attracted plenty of criticism. Some wonder whether Mr Piketty is right to think the future will look like the past. Theory argues that it should become ever harder to earn a good return on wealth the more there is of it. And today’s super-rich mostly come by their wealth through work, rather than via inheritance. Others argue that Mr Piketty’s policy recommendations are more ideologically than economically driven and could do more harm than good. But many of the sceptics nonetheless have kind words for the book’s contributions, in terms of data and analysis. Whether or not Mr Piketty succeeds in changing policy, he will have influenced the way thousands of readers and plenty of economists think about these issues.
– See more at The Economist
Tim Harford wrote a piece in ft.com earlier this year, documenting the [not-so-surprising] inaccuracy and just-plain “wrongfulness” of economic forecaster[s] [ing]……
In the 2001 issue of the International Journal of Forecasting, an economist from the International Monetary Fund, Prakash Loungani, published a survey of the accuracy of economic forecasts throughout the 1990s.
The record of failure to predict recessions is virtually unblemished.
He reached two conclusions.
The authors returned to the topic during/after the “Global Financial Crisis”.