The Guardian knows me so well! It talks here about their new initiative, Tread Lightly:

many people still have doubts about whether they can achieve much of an impact, and nowhere are these doubts aired so loudly as when it comes to lowering our carbon footprints. Like a dieter justifying one more chocolate biscuit, the excuses flow all too easily - why should I bother when China and India's emissions will engulf our own efforts? Why should I bother when the US refuses to sign up to Kyoto?

The Prime Minister's spokesman today on the UK's attempted extradition of Andrei Lugovoi, prime suspect for the murder of Alexander Litvinenko:

Obviously we have political and economic connections with Russia, and Russia clearly plays an important role in international affairs. There are major issues, such as Iran, Kosovo and climate change, where we have to have - given the nature of the world today - serious dialogue with Russia. However, what that doesn't in any way obviate is the need for the international rule of law to be respected and we will not in any way shy away from trying to ensure that that happens in a case such as this. That is the basis on which we proceed.

Attorney General Lord Goldsmith on halting the inquiry into corruption at BAE Systems:

It has been necessary to balance the need to maintain the rule of law against the wider public interest. No weight has been given to commercial interests or to the national economic interest. The prime minister and the foreign and defence secretaries have expressed the clear view that continuation of the investigation would cause serious damage to UK/Saudi security, intelligence and diplomatic cooperation, which is likely to have seriously negative consequences for the UK public interest in terms of both national security and our highest priority foreign policy objectives in the Middle East.

So - when is it OK to do away with the rule of law, when not? Blair and Goldsmith alone made the BAE decision. Goldsmith is a political appointee. Even if 'balancing the rule of law against the public interest' was a legitimate thing to do - and it really isn't - you'd hope that the process of deciding what was and wasn't would be a little less arbitrary than 'Tony says so.'

Today I'm struggling to get my head around Ricardo's difficult idea - comparative advantage. Having thought I'd grasped it several years ago, it seems I'd actually got the 'political economy' version in my head. It's reasonably like the economist's version. It turns out, however, that when examined close up it has some of the strange mental effects (on me at least) of the Monty Hall dilemma, covered elsewhere in this blog.

I've been trying to find something to model for one of my modules: due in next Friday, I've instead found myself falling down an economic rabbit-hole. The Monty Hall Dilemma had an utterly bizarre effect on me for several days, as the above blog entry charts in laborious detail; another problem that I thought I knew, but on closer examination it turned out it had hidden depths. Either that, or my brain had hidden shallows.

MySociety reported this week that Chris Lightfoot has died. I hadn't heard of him until now, but there were a few links to some of his work, and his blog. There's some amazing stuff. First off are the travel time maps - fantastic way to illustrate the cost of travel, and why building new roads may lead to more traffic as the cost of a particular route drops. It would be good to include such cost decisions in any geographical economic model. I made such a decision myself last week, paying one pound for two blank CDs from a local shop. When they told me the price, I left the shop, but on the way past going back home, the cost of waiting and of travelling to buy in bulk seemed too much: I wanted to use them that night. Less trivially would be the cost of getting food via car versus foot. (And the emergent effects of this: car travel is one of Putnam's main causes of the decline in Social Capital in the US.)

Anyway, it's Chris' version of the political compass - the political survey 2005, based on youGov data - I found most affecting. He discusses here the problems he had with the original political compass site, and here he puts the findings from the political survey in some context.

Here's my results from answering the 32 questions. Chris used principle components analysis to reduce the many dimensions of these questions to the two axes of the political compass. I'm not entirely clear if this method can account for the Iraq war question being on the economics axis, but I'm presuming so. (The comments in his blog post above have a lot of good thoughts on the pitfalls of the questionnaire and the methods used.)

The most striking thing is seeing oneself in relation to others. There's a little dot: 'you are here'. Eek.

Just read about a high court ruling by Mr Justice Sullivan, brought by Greenpeace: the Government's consultation on nuclear power was "very seriously flawed" and "procedurally unfair" and they have to go back and do it again. Information given on waste was "not merely inadequate but also misleading". In the process, "something has gone clearly and radically wrong", according to Sullivan.

Wrong? This government's idea of consultation has always been to say, 'we're listening, yes, that's very interesting, yes, yes, now fuck off. You've been consulted.'

But this decision sets a wonderful precedent.