If you have never missed a plane flight . . .

From today's Radio National - an interview about a new book by Jordan Ellenberg. It goes along the lines of -

"If You've Never Missed a Flight, You're Probably Wasting Your Time". 

The basic idea is that there is always a chance of missing a plane, for example by getting caught in traffic on the way to the airport. Whether you consciously realise or not, you have to decide how much time you are willing to waste, to reduce your chance of missing the flight to a level that suits you. Mentally, you are making some calculation about what it would cost you, compared to what you spend wasting time at the airport.

The original idea was proposed by Nobel Prize winning economist, George Stigler. For example there could be three different scenarios:

Option 1: arrive two hours before flight, miss flight two percent of the time
Option 2: arrive one and a half hours before flight, miss flight five percent of the time
Option 3: arrive one hour before flight, miss flight fifteen percent of the time

Of course, there are all sorts of other considerations. For example Kath and Kim chose to spend their whole holiday at the airport, rather than having the trouble of boarding flights and travelling to far-off places.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/case-missing-your-next-airline-flight-180951650/?no-ist

What wool industry failure might tell us

I recently met up with David Lindsay, a former UWA Animal Science lecturer and now presenting on scientific writing -
http://www.hr.uwa.edu.au/development/workshops/communications/scientific-journals
He also ran a small flock of merinos after his formal retirement from UWA and within a few years, by his claim, his genetics was as good as as the best in the country. He now has some sobering views on the wool industry.
David claims that evidence for just about every other domestic livestock species, shows we should be able to quadruple production from individual sheep in 40-50 years using modern and still-to-be developed research. So far, we have used largely traditional methods and made an advance if 11 per cent in the last 70 years. Dairy cattle, by contrast have improved individual yield by 360 per cent in the last 40 years. "That sort of progress would be game changing and might even allow the industry to survive."
David blames stud breeders for this malaise, atrophy within AWI (Australian Wool Innovation Ltd), and perhaps apathy from wool producers over their expectations for productivity improvement.
It may well be too late for the wool industry, but other farming enterprises should take heed. My own research interest is - how could we have allowed ourselves to fall so far behind?

Another view on the "Dutch disease"

For some time, we have been discussing the "Dutch disease" - for example our mining boom has sucked resources from other industries such as farming -

http://davidreesconsulting.blogspot.com.au/search?q=dutch+disease

Here is another example - in this case called the "paradox of plenty".
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/05/avoiding-resource-curse-kenya-2014517115053638503.html

This explains the social difficulties that can arise from a resource discovery. Note the source of this story was "Aljazeera" - one way for another perspective on news stories.

Meanwhile, the concerns we felt about perverse effects of the mining boom are increasingly becoming evident in the Australian economy.