Charitable Giving: How Much, and to Whom?

It was getting close to the end of the Australian financial year (June 30th), and as I reviewed my financial situation I thought, “Oh! I have teh monies!! What to do with them?” So, I gave a few hundred dollars to charity.

The reasons for giving to charity are many and varied, but for me the prime drivers were: 1) the reasoning that I have more than I really ‘need’, so that giving to those with greater needs increases net wellbeing (which makes me feel good); and 2) I feel like it’s the right thing to do.

I’ve donated to causes here and there for years, but since starting full-time work I’ve put off donations because I wanted to put a bit more thought into what I was doing, namely:

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Carbon Pricing: The Big Picture

Updated on Thursday, July 7, 2011 at 18:58 by MCJ

Updated on Tuesday, September 10, 2013 at 10:25 by MCJ

To stabilise the concentration of CO2-e in the atmosphere at levels that would limit the chance of 2°C warming to 75% or less, the world must emit less than 3 tCO2-e per person per year; less than 2 tCO2-e to stop concentrations rising altogether. No-one is pretending that a domestic carbon price of $20-$30 per tonne will reduce Australian emissions from 25 tCO2-e pa to anywhere near two or three tonnes per year.

A balance must be struck between the need to decarbonise the Australian economy and the transitional difficulties that this will bring. Government policy, with the MPCCC’s scheme as its centrepiece, will – and should – be scrutinised on how disruptive the transition will be. But this disruption must be assessed in the long-term context of decreasing our CO2-e production, or else it’s merely politics, not policy.

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Carbon Pricing: It Works, Bitches

In which I create a placard for a rally, appear on Andrew Bolt’s blog, am denigrated by the right, congratulated by the left, and try and explain microeconomics to a lot of people.

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Simple Visual Guide to Internalising Greenhouse Gas Pollution

My contribution to this week’s National Week of Action by the “Say Yes” campaign is the following simplified visual explanation of how a carbon tax/ETS would make the price of products reflect their true (environmental) costs.

Internalising pollution externalities with a carbon price: a simplified visual guide

Robust Response to Climate Change Risk and Uncertainty

The suggestion by sceptics that we should not act on climate change because the science is uncertain is at odds with sensible management of risk and uncertainty.

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Paid Leave Is Just Salary Smoothing

Under current employment law (presumably for most of the western world), it’s possible to have a high nominal salary and little leave but to essentially “buy” more time off by taking unpaid leave. This, however, depends on your employer approving said leave; depending on your employer, this could be difficult.

What if, in your employment contract, you stipulated the right to unpaid leave? One or two weeks per year, say – the idea would be to make it as close to paid leave in treatment as possible, except without actually receiving any money. (Perhaps make it non-accruing between years would make it easier for employers to accept, too.)

The thrust of my idea is to make the concept of unpaid leave more palatable; at the moment I still get the sense that many people (both employers and employees) treat it as something to be avoided, or at least a far worse alternative than paid leave.

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Carbon Pricing 101

Follow me, gentle reader, through some introductory environmental economics as I explain how carbon taxes and ETSs work — and how they differ.

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Give Us Something to Talk About

If you were hoping for some policy debate in federal politics last week, you were wasting your time. Our federal politicians were operating in a content-free zone, with nary the shadow of an intellectual framework in sight.

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Buying Your Way Backstage

Several times when I’ve bought tickets to concerts recently, I’ve noticed that the bands offer “Meet and Greet” packages; these usually cost ~$50 more than just admission to the concert (which is itself ~$50), and get you:

• Entry to the show via name on doorlist, rather than a ticket
• Personal Meet and Greet with $_BAND
• 2 items signed
• Souvenir tour laminate
• Official tour poster
• Priority Entry

From an economist’s perspective, this is a fairly sensible idea: the people who will want these things – colloquially “hardcore” fans – have an increased willingness to pay relative to the rest of the public, and insituting a tiered pricing system is an excellent way for the band to capture more of this willingness to pay in the form of money.

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Donating for Them, Or for Yourself?

Updated on Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 13:56 by MCJ

Accompanying the Twitter commentary of the Queensland floods (see #QLDfloods) I’ve noticed a number of people writing that they’ll donate $1 every time their message gets “retweeted” (RTed; forwarded, in Twitter, parlance). The first message I saw was from @lilithia. I can’t say for certain whether she started the trend, and once I started looking I found several others – e.g. @AUSteambieberr, @bree_101, @xander85 –, but they all seemed to share two initial characteristics:

• These were ordinary people
• The donations were uncapped

The second point, especially, struck me: late last year Daniel Keogh, a science presenter on the ABC, promised to donate $5 to beyondblue⁽¹⁾ for every time he was retweeted (until 10pm), but his offer took off and he ended up with a nominal figure of over $17,000 dollars. That was far above Keogh’s self-imposed limit, but he ended up donating $5000 and the story made it into the papers.

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