Which all goes to show that Pericles's statements against Sheila Newman's work are no more defences for his non-existent argument than, for instance, are government statements justifying the culling of kangas on pseudo-demographic grounds.

Formulated, sprawling on a pin, pinned and wriggling on the wall, Pericles,
Yet,
Seeing that it was a soft October night, this fog of human letters came to rest,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

yrs obscurely, as befits the narrowing, half-deserted streets of this tedious argument, to misquote TS Eliot.

Kanga
:-)

Oh dear, daggett, yet more attempts to paint yourself as somehow an injured party in this little storm in a teacup of ours.

Beneath all your huffing and puffing remains the fact that you have not, on one single occasion, shown the relevance of France to the (as you perceive it) horror of the Australian property market.

The closest you came to offering some supporting material was to refer me back to the document in question, then claim that this, somehow, proved the point.

If I were to write a paper on the shortcomings of the NSW rail system, and use the experience of the Paris Metro to support my views, would you or would you not regard this as "valid"?

There are about 10 million people in Paris and suburbs, about two and a half times as the population of Sydney.

Is this "roughly comparable" in your terms? It is, after all, "roughly" the same ratio as the difference between the populations of France and Australia, and (another of your questionable "similarities") that of each country's area of arable land.

If you were to complain at the irrelevance, would I be justified in asking you simply to read it again, as if repetition makes it suddenly right?

And once again, just to set the record, that you continually insist upon abusing, straight, the exact wording of my promise to end the discussion was

>>I shall let the matter of the unsubstantiated comparisons in Ms Newman's thesis rest, and give you the opportunity to move on to more important topics.<<

Since you chose not to move on, but continued your fantasy of trying to justify the unjustifyable, you gave me no alternative but to continue to defend myself against your aggressive imaginings.

And Kanga, I've no idea where this comes from:

>>Which all goes to show that Pericles's statements against Sheila Newman's work are no more defences for his non-existent argument than, for instance, are government statements justifying the culling of kangas on pseudo-demographic grounds<<

....but it is about as relevant as anything else you have written, so hey...

Pericles,

If you insist on taking us off on yet another tangent, I would have thought that Sydney's rail system could benefit a good deal from a study of Paris's highly efficient rail system, and, conversely, there would be many lessons of what not to do, from the destruction that successive NSW governments have inflicted upon Sydney's rail network.

I realise the difficulty that you have in grasping new concepts, but there happen to be many areas of scientific enquiry, where a difference by a factor of three is not regarded as significant. What can be regarded as significant is when the two entities being studied differ by one or more "orders of magnitude", meaning, roughly, by at least a factor of 10. Given that the cited differences are less than this, it is my subjective view, which is no less subjective than your own, that the differences do not prevent us from drawing useful lessons.

In fact your own views are not altogether consistent. On the one hand you say that the cited differences of population size and land mass preclude any meaningful comparisons being made between Australia and France, yet elsewhere you concede that they might not. Either they do or they don't, I would have thought.

In any case, if they do preclude meaning comparison, are you therefore saying that the differences you have cited will always ensure that housing in France will be more affordable than Australia, regardless of what polices the different Governments might adopt?

Of course, given your outright refusal to answer my previous question:

"If you dispute that France or any one of these countries make valid comparators, then what comparators would you suggest?"

... I won't hold my breath waiting for an answer to this one, let alone one which is comprehensible.

However, I do anticipate that you will, for your part, continue, until at least Christmas 2007, with your carping demand for a far more detailed answer, presumably from from first principles at the sub-atomic level, to your vague, unclear and open-ended question:

"Why France?"

daggett, you complain about...

>>...your carping demand for a far more detailed answer, presumably from from first principles at the sub-atomic level, to your vague, unclear and open-ended question: "Why France?"<<

You have managed to avoid offering an answer to this in so many different ways to date, but to suggest now that it is in some way deficient as a question is a masterstroke of obfuscation.

Vague? Unclear? How much more specific could it possibly be? 'Why' being simply an adverb meaning "for what purpose, reason, or cause; with what intention, justification, or motive", and France being the country chosen by Ms Newman as the baseline for comparing housing policies.

If you consider this simple question to be unclear, it is little wonder that you had so much difficulty responding to it.

But now you choose to, for some reason.

>>What can be regarded as significant is when the two entities being studied differ by one or more "orders of magnitude", meaning, roughly, by at least a factor of 10. Given that the cited differences are less than this, it is my subjective view, which is no less subjective than your own, that the differences do not prevent us from drawing useful lessons.<<

You propose that the statistical parameters of land area, population density, arable land etc. are within an order of magnitude of each other, and therefore consistent with the norms applied to research of this kind. Why has it taken so long to suggest this? It might have saved a lot of trouble.

Except....

Even though it is heavily qualified as being your subjective view, isn't a factor of ten in itself just a little difficult to fit under the heading of "comparable"? Can you suggest any other field of academic study where this magnitude of difference would be considered "roughly equivalent"?

(Correction: 'meaning' near the start of third paragraph in http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=4834#59795 should have been 'meaningful')

Pericles,

Thank you for yet another of many posts which have so brilliantly illuminated the question of Australia's (non-existent) housing crisis and what to do about it. Other visitors to this thread will definitely be impressed by the wealth of facts to be gleaned from all of your clear, thoughtful and well-reasoned contributions as well as many highly relevant analogies. Please don't stop.

---

More seriously, Pericles, firstly I note that you have, typically and unsurprisingly, declined to answer the question I put to you in the previous post:

"... if they do preclude meaningful comparison, are you therefore saying that the differences you have cited will always ensure that housing in France will be more affordable than Australia, regardless of what polices the different Governments might adopt?"

Regarding orders of magnitude: Clearly the land mass sizes and population sizes are different in an obvious sense, but why should these differences necessarily prevent us from being able to draw useful lessons?

You wrote: "Vague? Unclear? How much more specific could it possibly be? 'Why' being simply an adverb meaning "for what purpose, reason, or cause; with what intention, justification, or motive'"

Already answered many times before starting from Kanga's response at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=4834#54903 and myself at http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=4834#55100 :

"Clearly this country's housing policies have not worked ... Surely it is of interest to see whether we can do better by comparing Australia with another country which has, at least until very recently, managed to provide all of its citizens with affordable good quality housing."

Your statement that I have "avoid(ed) offering an answer to this" is therefore a lie and you are obviously nothing more than a time-wasting troll. So, who is paying you to do what you are doing in order to prevent others from learning from this thread?

If the lack of an answer you deem to be satisfactory prevents you from discussing the substance of the thesis (downloadable from http://www.candobetter.org/sheila), why can't you just move on and stop wasting everybody's time?

More facts about the effects of population growth on South East Queensland:

* 75 square kilometres of bushland and open space is being destroyed each year to accommodate new housing.

* 70% of SEQ forests has been cleared to date

* 46% of the vegetation along SEQ streams has been degraded

* The koala population has declined 47% in urban areas and 30% across the region. They are now listed as a 'vulnerable' species whereas they were previously listed as 'common' (see also http://www.candobetter.org/node/15)

* The Healthy Waterways report, (an independent scientific monitoring program) is showing that after seven years of monitoring, most of SEQ's waterways and Moreton Bay are either not improving or are on a downward spiral due to pollution and drought. The latter is a sign that the natural systems are no longer resilient enough to cope with the negative impacts created by SEQ population. In the Pumicestone Passage (Moreton Bay) bacteria analysis showed there was a 5 - 10% risk of swimmers experiencing gastrointestinal illness. Also, as I pointed out above(http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2005/11/25/peak-oil/#comment-37808) Moreton Bay is filling up with silt as a consequence of the frenetic land-clearing and building activity in SEQ.

Clearly, if we are somehow to make the supply of housing match the endlessly increasing demand as foundation has suggested we can(http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=4834#55661), the environmental cost will almost certainly be too great. What happened to the soils and environents of many past civilisations, with far fewer means to destroy their natural environent (http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2005/11/25/peak-oil/#comment-37808), will almost certainly happen to our own, unless we act very quickly in order to change our direction.