Via David Appell, I came across this marvellous quote from Freeman Dyson
In desperation I asked Fermi whether he was not impressed by the agreement between our calculated numbers and his measured numbers. He replied, "How many arbitrary parameters did you use for your calculations?" I thought for a moment about our cut-off procedures and said, "Four." He said, "I remember my friend Johnny von Neumann used to say, with four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."It came to mind when I read this story in the NYT with the introductory claim What really stimulates economic growth is whether you believe in an afterlife — especially hell.The report is of some estimations done by Rachel M. McCleary and Robert J. Barro (the story notes that the two are married) published in American Sociological Review.
Barro is probably the biggest name in the field of cross-country growth regressions (a field in which I've also dabbled), and I'm sure he's aware that thousands of these regressions have been run and that, with very limited exceptions, results that particular factors are conducive to growth have proved highly fragile. I haven't read the paper, so for all I know, the results have been checked for robustness in every possible way. But my eyebrows went up when I saw this para
Oddly enough, the research also showed that at a certain point, increases in church, mosque and synagogue attendance tended to depress economic growth. Mr. Barro, a renowned economist, and Ms. McCleary, a lecturer in Harvard's government department, theorized that larger attendance figures could mean that religious institutions were using up a disproportionate share of resources.What this means is that at least two parameters have been used in fitting growth to religiosity and that the two have opposite signs - most likely it's some sort of quadratic. In my experience, there's always at least one arbitrary choice made in the pretesting of these models (for example once you have a quadratic, the scaling of variables becomes critical). That gives three free parameters, if not more.
I'm not John von Neumann, but with two parameters I can fit a dromedary and with three I can do a Bactrian camel.
I just got the latest issue of Scientific American, and noted with interest the Table of Contents, in which the Skeptic column promised an evolutionary explanation of the mutiny on the Bounty. I vaguely expected the usual stuff about alpha and beta males or somesuch, but I found that the ev psych boffins have come up with a startling new discovery. Young men like having sex. At this point the mathematics and biochemistry get a bit complicated for me (oxytocin is in there somewhere), but apparently this has something to do with the survival of the species.
Even more startling, though, is the fact that
Although Bligh preceded Charles Darwin by nearly a century,he managed to anticipate this discovery. Who would have thought that a former governor of New South Wales (and not a successful one) would share with EO Wilson and Stephen Pinker the honour of founding evolutionary psychology? In Bligh's words
I can only conjecture that they have Idealy assured themselves of a more happy life among the Otaheitians than they could possibly have in England, which joined to some Female connections has most likely been the leading cause of the whole business.Delivery times are somewhat strange here in the Antipodes, and I thought perhaps I had an advance copy of the April edition, but the cover says February.
There seem to be "Best blog" awards going on all over the place, but the only one where this blog a was serious contender was the Australian Blog Awards over at Keks. The contest was run on proper Australian lines with optional preferential voting, and when the preferences were all distributed, 60 per cent of the "two-blog preferred vote" for best Queensland blog went to 85 George Street, with this blog as runner-up.
Although not everyone is happy about awards and so on, I think it's all good fun (It would have been even more fun if I'd won something!). Thanks to vlado at Keks for taking the trouble to run this, and thanks to everyone who voted for me or who took the trouble to vote at all.
Big congratulations also to Gianna, who got best NSW blog, Troppo Armadillo (NT), Ubersportingpundit, one vote ahead of Gary Sauer-Thompson in SA, and Sam Ward and Robert Corr in WA. I realise that I've missed out the two great Tims of Australian blogging and quite a few others, but if you go back to Keks you can see the entire list. As with the Laughing Clowns, just about every player has won a prize, which is as it should be.
The Economist runs a piece endorsing the Hutton inquiry's rejection of BBC claims that the Blair government's dossier on Iraqi weapons was "sexed up", but runs it under the headline George Bush and Tony Blair exaggerated, but they did not lie What, precisely, is the difference between "exaggerated" and "sexed up"
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Wendy James posts the thoughts on public schools of pseudonymous teacher S. Whiplash, who says
If the figures are to be believed, increasing numbers of Australian parents are choosing to send their children to private schools. I believe this is happening totally – well, maybe not totally, but damn near – because parents are unhappy with the values being taught in public schools. Some of these values are taught overtly and some covertly. Either way, parents don’t like the values package on offer and are voting with their children’s feet.As it happens, my opinion piece in yesterdays Financial Review (subscription required)was on this very topic, making the point that economists would look at the issue rather differently
Consider first the premise, shared by Howard and many of his critics, that the shift in enrolments from public to private schools must reflect increasing dissatisfaction with the public system. An economic appraisal suggests a much less abstract explanation.I should observe that one reason for high attendence at private schools before 1963 was the effective subsidy provided by the voluntary labour of members of religious orders in Catholic schools. The gradual disappearance of this group and its replacement by lay teachers, paid out of public subsidies, has greatly reduced the differences between Catholic and government schools.Thanks to changes in Commonwealth government policy, subsidies to private education have been steadily increasing. Meanwhile the effective subsidy to publicly educated students has remained constant or declined in recent years. Standard economic analysis suggests that when a service is subsidised, its consumption will increase.
The analysis even works when comparing Catholic and other independent schools. Under Labor, the Catholic system received fairly generous assistance, but aid to the wealthier independent schools was limited. The Howard government has greatly increased aid to the wealthiest schools and enrolments have followed, with both government and Catholic schools losing market share in recent years.
From this perspective, in fact, the surprise is that the increase in attendance at private schools has been so small. In 1963, before the Menzies government began the provision of government aid to private schools, around 24 per cent of students attended non-government schools. After 40 years of steadily increasing public assistance, the non-government share has reached only 32 per cent. This suggests either that parental preference for non-government schools is very weak, or that the perceived advantages of private education have been declining over time.
In my experience there is a close to 100 per cent correlation between the stated belief that society is suffering from a decline in "civility" and a willingness to proclaim that we are all being oppressed by "political correctness". John Howard neatly illustrates this. A week or two ago, he was denouncing public schools as hotbeds of political correctness, and the excessive concern with offending religious minorities that (allegedly) led to the curtailment of Christmas celebrations. Now he's calling for more civility.
The common analysis underlying both demands for "political correctness" (this actual phrase was never used, except jocularly as far as I know, until critics seized on it, but terms such as "sensitivity" or "inclusive language" cover much the same ground) and for "civility", is that offensive words give rise to offensive acts. In both cases, there's some ambiguity over whether the problem is with the offence to the recipient or with the reinforcement of the hostile/prejudiced attitudes of the speaker, but the central claim is that modes of speech are an appropriate subject of concern and that some form of government action to encourage more socially appropriate modes of speech, ranging from subtle pressure to direct coercion, is desirable. The only difference between the two positions is that they have different lists of inappropriate words.
I don't have a sharply defined position on any of this, except that I find people who think that being "politically incorrect" is exceptionally brave and witty to be among the most tiresome of bores. I doubt that changes in speech will, of themselves, produce changes in attitudes. The obvious evidence for this is the rate at which euphemisms wear out and become as offensive as the terms they replaced (for example, 'handicapped' for 'crippled'). On the other hand, I think there's a lot to be said for avoiding offensive words and forms of speech and can see a place for (tightly drafted and cautiously applied) laws prohibiting or penalising various forms of collective defamation.
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Having finally managed positive earnings over a full year, Amazon shares have now acquired that most basic measurement of value, a price-earnings ratio. With shares at $53 and earnings of 17 cents per share, it's a bit over 300 to 1, which suggests that perhaps the New Economy is not dead after all.
Thanks to the nice people at Copyright Agency Limited, I just got 77 cents in royalties on this article, reviewing Lawrence Lessig's attacks on the extension of copyright.
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To Steve Waugh on being selected as Australian of the Year. Commentary on the award focused on the fact that Waugh was the third Australian cricket captain in a row to get it. The implied critique is that, if the award is thought of as rewarding excellence in some particular sphere, sport in general, and cricket in particular, get much more than their fair share.
My view on this is that, assuming the award is some sort of all-round commendation of a prominent Australian, Waugh is considerably more deserving than his two predecessors. His charitable work in India, and all-round good behavior seems to go well beyond the perfunctory good citizenship expected of sporting role models. I hope that Waugh's award will set a high benchmark and that the committee (or whoever) will think long and hard before making another award based on nothing more substantial than a good batting average.
I'm not clear enough on the workings of the British Parliament to know whether Blair's 5-vote win on the second reading of his education bill means that the political fight is over, but I thought I'd have my say anyway. The core elements of the bill are a substantial increase in fees, the right of universities to charge variable "top-up fees" and the introduction of a HECS-style repayment mechanism using the tax system. Thus it's like a combination of all the education financing changes in Australia from the late 1980s, when HECS came in, to the recent Nelson package. Not surprisingly, I like some parts of it, and dislike others.
First, I'll respond to other CT bloggers who've discussed this issue. Chris primarily makes the argument that, given that money isn't going to come from anywhere else, or on any other terms, it's better to take what's on offer than to refuse on the basis that the terms are bad ones. I suppose I agree with this, but it's not a helpful basis on which to discuss policy. Assuming you don't want the Tories back, the same argument could be used for acquiescence in whatever policy Blair chooses to propose. Chris also dismisses concerns about variable fees, and I'll return to this.
Daniel argues on risk grounds against the repayment mechanism (borrowed from the Australian HECS scheme) and, in my view, gets the risk analysis wrong. For precisely the reasons he outlines for not using NPV rules in assessing the effects of fees, the insurance implicit in the provision that no repayment is required until/unless earnings exceed some percentage of average earnings is considerably more valuable than he suggests. Assuming the proportion is set to give a level higher than the average earnings of non-graduates, it makes education a one-way bet. If you win, by earning more than you would have expected otherwise, you pay back some of your winnings. If you lose, you pay nothing. I don't know what the actual proportion is, so I should stress that my support for the repayment scheme depends critically on this variable - in the absence of a high threshold substantial insurance, Daniel's analysis is correct.
The critical sticking point, though, is not the level of fees but the principle of variable fees. If this provision had been dropped, it seems clear that the rest of the package would have passed fairly easily. The claim that these are not the same variable fees that were specifically excluded in the manifesto is nonsense, and the determination with which Blair and Clarke have stuck to them shows this.
The variable fees proposal raises two main issues. The first, which I assume is dominant for Blair and Clarke, is the desirability of a market-based and profit-driven higher education system, in which prices determine the allocation of resources. I could go to great length on why this is a bad idea, but most of the arguments will be familiar to readers so I'll raise one that I borrow from archetypal Chicago economist, George Stigler who formulated the 'survivor principle'. Stigler argued that if you want to determine the optimal firm size and structure for a given industry, you shouldn't rely on abstract theoretical arguments or engineering estimates of cost functions. Instead, you should look to see which firms have actually survived. In the case of education, for-profit providers have (almost) always and (almost) everywhere failed in competition with non-profit and state providers, even when competing on apparently level playing fields. The big exception is that of providing vocational training to adults (commercial trade schools and the University of Phoenix are examples) . But this is the exception that proves (tests) the rule, since most of the standard arguments against for-profit education don't apply in this case.
Chris raises the framing issue of whether there would be similar objections to discounts from a set fee as to top-ups. In principle, my answer is "Yes", but in practice there are two offsetting observations. On the one hand, discounting is very difficult to stop. On the other hand, unless the basic fee is set too high, relative to the cost of provision, discounting will be a marginal issue.
The other major issue is that of equity, and raises afresh a whole lot of issues which have been debated at length in relation to school education, notably with respect to selective education and the 11-plus examination. Supporters of the proposal take it for granted that some university students (for example, those going to Oxford and Cambridge) should receive a substantially better education than others, even when both are undertaking essentially the same course of study. If so, it seems only fair that those receiving the better education should pay more. And since the extra payments go to the university, the difference in quality can be maintained indefinitely.
The same case can be made for a user-pays system in almost any public service, once the principle of unequal provision is accepted. Long after the NHS was introduced, health services were better in rich areas than poor ones, and the same arguments could have been applied for user charges, which would then have perpetuated the inequalities.
The only way in which variable fees could be regarded as egalitarian would be if the grants to top universities were reduced in line with their capacity to charge higher fees. That is, in effect, Oxford and Cambridge would be taxed on the capital accumulated during centuries of state and church support.
An important difference that used to apply to higher education was that only a small proportion of the population, selected on the basis of competitive examination, went to university. In these circumstances, there was no obvious reason for trying to equalise provision within this group. But this difference has ceased to be relevant. In most developed countries, a majority of people can be expected to undertake some form of post-secondary education.
This means that the issues applying to the funding and organisation of post-secondary education are, in essence, the same as for school education (particularly for the post-compulsory age group). The primary objective of public policy ought to be the provision of a high standard of universal education, encouraging diversity in the type of education provided (traditional university, technical and so on) but not in quality. If there's some extra money for a few flagships like Oxford and Cambridge, well and good, but they should not be allowed to set the pattern.
To the extent that there's a case for "elite" universities, it relates primarily to research. But even here, the case for elite institutions is weak. There's no particular reason why the best economics department and the best physics department should be located at the same place, and this is recognised in the Research Assessment procedure which focuses on disciplines rather than institutions. The link between top-quality research and undergraduate education is made much of, but is quite tenuous these days, The distance between research frontiers and undergraduate work now is as great as the distance between research and upper secondary school was thirty or forty years ago in many disciplines - certainly this is true in economics.
Moving on to the blue-sky department, I'd suggest that since post-secondary education is unlikely to become properly universal for a long time, we could think about providing every 18-year old with a capital loan which could either be traded for a post-secondary education or used for some purpose such as establishing a business, with the whole being repaid by a tax surcharge when (if) incomes exceed average earnings.
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The idea of a magazine about the Internet seems strange at first sight, but the idea that the Internet was going to wipe out print media can now be seen as one of the popular delusions of the late 20th century, and if I can blog about what's in magazines, there's no reason why magazines shouldn't run stories about blogging.
Internet.au (whose very limited online presence is here has done just that in its February issue, including quite a few comments from me. There's a teaser about how "blogs are so dangerous they could get you into trouble with your work, the government ... or your mum ...", but the article itself is quite sensible, except that a piece from the Onion on the last point is reported as fact.
Talking of slackness, I looked at my blogroll and realised that I'd failed yet again to include Chris Sheil's excellent Back Pages. This time, I promise I'll get it right.
I realised as I was going to bed that I'd failed, yet again to open up the Monday Message Board on time, though it is still Monday in Queensland, just. I can only plead that a long weekend does not get me into a Monday mood. As we all return to work, please vent your frustrations on any topic (in a civilised fashion and without coarse language, of course).
My summer holiday activities over the last couple of months included a lot of work on my music collection (I'm slowly transferring from vinyl to MP3/AIFF) and rereading Nick Hornby. So, I was naturally struck by how rapidly the skill of making compilation tapes, a central theme of High Fidelity has gone from the esoteric to the everyday. Not surprisingly, not everyone is happy about this. Joel Keller, writing in Salon, says
Putting together a home-brewed compilation of songs used to be an act of love and art. Now it's just too damn easy to be worth caring about.and much more in the same vein, though his conclusion is more elegiac than polemical
When making the decision between practicality and artistic merit, I'll choose practicality more often than not. I may be wistful for the old days, but I'm not an idiot.The first time I heard this form of argument, it was from my Grade 4 teacher, lamenting the arrival of the ballpoint pen, and its adverse effect on the quality of handwriting. Possibly since I never mastered the steel nib/inkwell technology still favoured by the South Australian Department of Education in the 1960s, I was not impressed. Since then, I've seen the same argument applied to calculators, word processing and desktop publishing. And of course, the argument wasn't new when I first met it - in one form or another, it's been applied to almost any technical innovation that replaces a complex skill with an easily usable machine. (It's separate from the income-distributional arguments that apply when skilled workers are displaced by unskilled ones, although the two are often entangled).So let's have a moment of silence, for the mix as we used to know it is dead. Technology has overtaken the experience and made it cold and impersonal. But it's time to look forward, as the Internet has allowed us to trade and download more varied types of music, making for better-sounding, albeit more antiseptic, mixes. One of these days, Nick Hornby should do a sequel to "High Fidelity" and list Rob's Top 5 music downloads. I'm sure it'll be a nice read. But it just won't be the same.
Before defending modernity on this , let me extract what I believe to be the core of validity in this argument. If the production of an item requires substantial skill and effort, the average quality of the items produced will be higher. This is for the same reason as (I ahve been told) some Japanese stores giftwrap their fruit - given the cost of a piece of fruit, giftwrapping makes sense. If making a compilation tape at all takes hours of work, and requires skills that only a music enthusiast will bother to acquire, a lot more effort and judgement will go into the selection and ordering of the tracks, correction of the levels and so on, than if a 14-year old can put together a CD in five minutes, as is now the case.
Similarly, when WYSIWYG word processing first became feasible, it was asserted that the quality of writing declined because students were spending too much time on flashy presentation. While this possible, I suspect the truth is that the total input of time declined substantially. Students judged (probably correctly at first) that an essay that looked professional, contained no spelling errors and so forth would get by even if the content was pretty weak. Moreover, cut and paste made it easy to produce an apparently final version without rewriting. In this case, the problem is that those setting the essays wanted to elicit some amount of work from the students but (with the exception of those students who actually wanted to learn something) the student's objective was to minimize the effort required to do the job. At least until teachers learned to disregard cues like good presentation, the result was a decline in average quality which (if you agree that Teacher Knows Best) made everyone worse off.
Another case where average quality declined with bad effects, following an increase in ease of use, was that of Internet newsgroups. These were useful forums as long as the skills and effort required to use them confined access to those willing to make serious contributions. When they became easily accessible (roughly when AOL merged with the Internet) the newsgroups were flooded with garbage. It's only since the rise of blogging software that the old vision of the Internet as a forum for debate that could bypass media monopolies has reasserted itself.
In most cases, though, (including that of blogging) a decline in average quality is quite consistent with an improvement across the board, in the sense that more and better good quality outputs are produced, even while the average is dragged down by people who would previously not have produced at all. People like Sal Tuzzeo, quoted by Keller may sneer that
On the subways you see people with iPods. They have, what, a thousand songs on them. Ten thousand, even. They stare random-glared into oblivion. [R]obots with s***ty music taste and too much money to spend on music-listening hardware and shoes, in that orderbut why shouldn't people be free to follow their taste, s***ty or otherwise? Keller argues that
Fewer people who are connected to the music they listen to translates into a less critical and picky audience for the crapola that the record companies and radio stations promote. The quality of music overall goes downhill.but, again, why should anyone care about average quality or what is promoted on radio stations? People who are critical and picky, but don't have the time or skills to make compilation tapes, chase down obscure records and so on, now have a much better capacity to find and reward those who are producing it.
By the way, talking of innovation, this post was produced using Ecto, a blogging client for Mac OS X currently in version 0.2.1, but already a big improvement on anything else I've used. Thanks to Brad DeLong for the tip.
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Following my visit a month or so ago, I've decided to join the Crooked Timber collective. When I polled readers around the same time, the response was, as usual, in favour of the status quo, but I think the arrangements I've made will be a Pareto-improvement. I'll continue to run this blog as normal, but posts I think appropriate to CT will also appear there. As far as I can tell, the overlap in readership is quite small.
One complication is that for posts appearing here and on CT, there will be two separate comments threads. I don't think this is too much of a difficulty - the same issue arises when I put up several posts on the same topic, and it's analogous to the case in comment systems that support multithreading.
Looking ahead, I'm planning on moving from mentalspace to a domain of my own. I see that Robert Corr who originally set me up on mentalspace, has just done the same. Although one can never tell, I hope the new arrangements will last for quite some time.
Australia Day seems like a suitable occasion to look at the question of whether and how Australia should become a republic. The whether question is, in my view, straightforward. Monarchy is an undemocratic institution. The monarch in a constitutional monarchy is at best, a dignified but powerless figurehead and at worst an undemocratic centre of power. In Australia’s case, the monarchical role is split between a political appointee with significant (if only occasional) power and a hereditary foreign monarch whose powers are presumed (but only presumed) to be nonexistent. The contribution of this setup to national dignity is negative.
Turning to the “how”, this issue has, in my view been simplified by Howard’s cleverness in defeating the republic last time around. The idea of an appointed President has been put to the people and rejected. Hence, there is no need or justification for a multistage procedure (agreement in principle to a republic, choice of model, ratification of choice). The appropriate approach is to choose a model for an elective presidency, then present the appropriate constitutional changes as a referendum. If that fails*, we should stick with the status quo.
Looking at the lineup of support, I think there are five main groups that can be distinguished. First, there are unconditional republicans, that is, those who would support any reasonable republican model, whatever their preference. Next, there are minimalists, those who would support a republic if and only if it involved no significant change in the existing power structure, which entails some form of appointive presidency. On the other wing of the republican support are those who support an elective presidency, and prefer the status quo to an appointive model. Fourth, there are status quo conservatives, including both those who think the current constitutional model is the best available and those who simply vote “No” to any referendum proposal against which opposition is mounted. Finally, there are those whose support for the status quo is based on attachment to the British monarchy as an institution or to the Queen herself.
The fifth group is shrinking over time and has, I think been further disheartened by the (tactically sound) insistence of anti-republicans that the Queen is not our head of state and should not be discussed when the issue of the republic is debated. Given the reliance of this form of monarchism on tradition and emotion as opposed to rationalist arguments about constitional design (not necessarily a bad thing, by the way), the “don’t mention the Queen” attitude of groups like Australians for Constitutional Monarchy must erode its base over time.
Both the fourth and fifth groups have been weakened, I think, by the politicisation of the Governor-General’s office, including the Hollingworth fiasco, the adoption of clearly political stances by both Deane and Jeffreys and the continuing squabbles over whether the GG or PM should open things like the Olympic Games.
The crucial political issue is the relative size of the second (minimalist) and third (direct election) groups. The ARM was a coalition of minimalists and those unconditional republicans who judged that the minimalists were the crucial swing votes for a republic. They were proved wrong by the result of the referendum. It’s my judgement that, when push comes to shove, the number of true minimalists will prove very small, particularly if the election procedure for the President allows some sort of Parliamentary screening, sufficient to prevent the major parties from running candidates (in practice, I doubt that such candidates would win, but that couldn’t be proved in time for a referendum.
Obviously, nothing will happen until Howard goes. At that point, the opponents of the republic will find it hard to come up with a leader of stature It’s unclear if Costello would do anything about the issue, but I assume Latham would do so reasonably soon after getting elected.. Although carrying a referendum is always difficult in Australia, I predict that a model for a directly elected president, inheriting the current powers of the GG would be successful.
*Given our constitutional setup, there's the possibility of winning a majority of votes but not of states. This would leave the issue unresolved.
Reality check After writing this, I checked the latest Newspoll which suggests stable majority support for the general idea of a republic (51-32 with 32 per cent strongly pro and only 18 per cent strongly anti). On the other hand, it seems unlikely that GG Jeffrey's political statements have had much impact, given that only 7 per cent of respondents could name him.
This piece by Christopher Pearson in today's Oz, denouncing green opposition to DDT, encapsulates everything that's wrong with Australia's right-wing commentariat. Not only is almost everything in the article either false or grossly misleading, but it's a fourth-hand recycling of points that have been flogged to death in the blogosphere.
Pearson's source is an article in Quadrant, which in turn relies on such authorities as Bjorn Lomborg, Michael Crichton and junkscience.com (Steven Milloy), none of whom have any scientific qualifications more advanced than Milloy's master's degree in health sciences, and none of whom have done any research on this topic.
Having accused the green movement of being responsible for millions of deaths as a result of DDT, Pearson's sources come up with three specific claims.
First that the ban on agricultural use of DDT in the US was unjustified by the health risks. Whether or not this is true, widespread agricultural use of DDT was a major contributor to the rapid increase in resistance that rendered anti-malarial use of DDT largely ineffective in many countries. Illegal agricultural use is still a major problem.
Second, that Greenpeace is campaigning to close the factory in India that is the sole source of DDT. Greenpeace's official position, easily discovered is that it supports a phase-out of DDT, and its replacement by safer, but more costly substitutes, to be funded by industrialised countries. More precisely
Financial and administrative mechanisms be included in the UNEP POPs treaty to assist less industrialised countries eliminate DDT production and use
Third, that aid agencies in Scandinavia refused to fund programs using DDT. This claim isn't supported in enough detail to check it, but it's scarcely much of a basis for alleging a global conspiracy, especially since there are equally effective and safe, but more expensive, substitutes which the Scandinavians may well have preferred to fund.
I've written more on DDT, indicating just how thoroughly Pearson is engaged in recycling, and how fundamentally the case he presents is undermined by consideration of resistance.
Meanwhile, shouldn't journalistic and magazine ethics be extended to include some kind of Google rule, prohibiting the publication of articles that can be replicated by less than an hour's Googling, or at least the payment of more than an hour's casual rates for such pieces.
Update Various commentators have pointed out that this kind of thing is not confined to the right wing of the commentariat. Still, the DDT story is a particularly egregious example. And I can put my hand on my heart and say I've never signed my name to a recycled piece like this. I do occasionally repeat myself, but that's because not enough people listened the first time I said it.
Responding to my post on Sistani, Brad de Longsuggests that I need to read the Declaration of Independence , going on to assert that
A Bonapartist or a fascist or a theocratic dictatorship is not a legitimate government, no matter how large are its plebiscitary majorities and how enthusiastic are its crowds. The only governments that have even a possibility of being truly legitimate are those that maintain an underlying liberal order--which means protecting minority (and women's) rights.I'm tempted to snap back with Dr Johnson's observation on the American revolutionaries
How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes (quote from memory here)but Brad's post and the comments thread raise a number of important issues.
Before coming to the serious issues, let me agree that the kind of once-off plebiscites pioneered by Napoleon III don't confer legitimacy on a government, any more than the caucuses proposed by Bremer, or the spurious elections held under Saddam. I don't see how this could be inferred from my post. Obviously there's a risk that any post-Saddam government could close down democracy, but I don't think that a Shia majority government is any more likely to do this than any of the obvious alternatives. Such a government could win office in a free and fair election.
The serious issues are twofold. First, what kinds of violations of a liberal democratic ideal are sufficient to justify the forcible overthrow of a government. As many commentators on Brad's post noted, the example of the United States is relevant. Until the Civil War, the US Constitution enshrined slavery as part of its fundamental law, notably in the provision counting slaves as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of calculating voting rights. Until around 1900, women were denied the vote. Until the civil rights era, blacks were denied the vote in much of the US. Until the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, many of the kinds of discrimination against women likely to be introduced by an Islamist government were lawful and some were mandated by law.
Which, if any, of these would have justified the forcible overthrow of the United States government by a government with more liberal and democratic policies, assuming this had been militarily feasible. I'm going to take my stand with Dr Johnson and say that, any time between the abolition of slavery in Britain and the election of Abraham Lincoln, Britain would have been justified in reconquering the United States in order to free the slaves, assuming that such an invasion could have been undertaken and sustained. ( In practice, of course, not only was such a course of inaction not feasible, but the British government came close to recognising the Confederacy)
On the other hand, egregious though the subsequent violations of liberal democracy were, none were such as to justify the overthrow of the (imperfect) democratic institutions of the United States. even if this had been feasible. The same applies to the many other examples of democratic governments that have restricted the rights of minorities or even mahorities.
The second question is whether, the occupying powers have some sort of right of conquest which enables them to demand more of the Iraqi people, before restoring their right of self-government, than would be sufficient to give a government international legitimacy in other circumstances. I don't believe there is. The invasion was illegal, but to the extent that it had any legal justification, it was based on the Saddam government's noncompliance with a range of UN resolutions. There's no reason to suppose that a Shia majority government will not comply with those resolutions, and therefore no justification in deferring elections in the hope of preventing the election of such a government.
I went to see Something's Gotta Give recently and noted what appears to be a recently-established convention of romantic comedy and related genres. The sensitive, intellectual one (normally the woman) always has a Mac (more precisely, a late model Powerbook), while the opposite-to-attract has a Windows machine (also a laptop, brand depends on who bids most for product placement). This seems a pretty good convention to me.
A couple of times in recent weeks, I've had the experience of being at the front of a queue to pay a machine, with the exact money ready, only to discover that the machine doesn't accept 5-cent pieces. I have a few observations on this.
First, this is really annoying, and I will do my best to avoid patronising the operators of these machines in future. I don't mind them being slow in modifying machines to accept new coins, but what possible justification is there for modifying machines (or changing the design for new ones) to reject existing coins.
Second, since consumer sovereignty is invariably impotent in situations of this kind, I guess it's time to exercise voice in support of the abolition of the (now-useless) 5-cent piece.
Third, this presumably implies that 5-dollar coins can't be far away.
Finally, in all this process, would it be totally impossible to introduce a 50-cent piece with a sensible size and shape?
I’ve been arguing for a while that the only sustainable course in Iraq is that demanded by Ayatollah Sistani, that is, early elections which will, almost inevitably, produce a Shia majority government and some form of official Islamism. The occupying powers have no legitimate basis to resist this demand.
Admittedly, legitimacy is not a major concern for Bush, either at home or abroad, but the lack of it produces practical adverse consequence. No serious decision can properly be made under these circumstances. The occupiers have already found this out in relation to their economic agenda of privatisation free-market reform and so forth
Now there’s the news that the ‘Governing Council’ appointed by Paul Bremer has revoked a lot of Baathist laws protecting the civil status of women. If Bremer overrides this decision, he’ll be exposing the Governing Council as a sham. On the other hand, since the Governing Council is a sham, a decision by Bremer to approve the revocation is, in effect, a decision by the US to deprive half the Iraqi population of civil rights without ever giving them a chance to vote on it.
It seems likely that the government produced by an election would adopt similar policies. But, although this would be undesirable, it’s the typical outcome of democratic government in countries where religion is taken seriously - divorce and contraception have been banned wherever Catholicism is dominant, for example. Just as the US would not have been justified in invading Ireland to reform its divorce laws, it is not justified in denying democratic self-government to the Iraqi people because they might pass illiberal laws.
Update This report from the Guardian suggests that the British government accepts the need for early elections.
Although described in the news as a surprise, the timing of the Queensland election was fairly predictable. The government wants to keep the campaign separate from the local council elections in March, and to avoid going after the elections which may turn out badly for Labor in Brisbane following the mishandling of Jim Soorley’s retirement. Since no one wants to campaign over Christmas, the timing is a forced move.
I’m in the happy position of agreeing with the pundits that Labor is virtually certain to win and in welcoming this. The current crop of Labor state governments may be unexciting, but they are uniformly preferable to their opponents.
In the case of Queensland, Labor has an advantage that does not seem to have been remarked on. The only plausible alternative government is a Liberal-led coalition, but for historical reasons, this isn’t on offer. In fact there are only three Liberals in Parliament and of these only one is running for re-election. Instead the Opposition is in effect the National Party (there are also the remnants of One Nation and assorted independents). Even though the Nationals have held office for most of the past fifty years, I don’t think we’ll ever see another National Party premier.
The dominance of the Nationals (previously the Country Party) rested on three main factors. The first was the gerrymander inherited from Labor, which favored rural seats (going back even further in time, the votes of rural workers favored Labor and particularly the Australian Workers Union). The second was the fact that Queensland was substantially less urbanised than other states. The third was the fact that the Nationals held lots of seats that had been rural but had become urban, notably in the Gold Coast.
None of these factors applies any longer. The gerrymander has been replaced by a one-vote one-value system with optional preferential voting, which marginally favors Labor. The share of the rural population has declined - more than 60 per cent of voters now live in the ‘South-East corner’ (Brisbane, the Gold and Sunshine Coasts and Ipswich) with a another large share in coastal cities like Townsville and Cairns. The people living in these areas, even outside Brisbane itself, have no more natural affinity with the Nationals than does the average resident of, say, Newcastle or Geelong, Finally, the National Party lost most of its Gold Coast seats in the wipeout in the last election. Once the advantage of incumbency is lost, the natural alternative to Labor in these seats is Liberal, not National.
In my view, therefore, and barring disasters, it will take three more elections for Labor to lose. The Liberals need one to become a credible party rather than a trivial joke, a second to become the leading opposition party, and a third to beat Labor.
By mid-day this time. I'm up in the Snowy Mountains with a very flaky phone and Internet connection, but that's all the more reason for you to talk among yourselves (in a civilised fashion, of course, and without resorting to coarse, language).
Normal service will really, truly be restored by next week.
I also dug out some old books on ESP and the paranormal. These were from the 1970s, about the time of Uri Geller and the Bermuda Triangle. It struck me that the debate here seems to have moved on, in the sense that no-one any longer takes seriously the idea that ESP etc might be real in the same sense as (say) radio waves, and was a reasonable subject for scientific investigation. The exposure of Geller as a fraud, his subsequent career in the back pages of the Women's Day and the derision visited on the scientists he fooled with his conjuring tricks seem to have put an end to all this.
Of course, there are still plenty of believers but the belief is now general recognised as quasi-religious and therefore not subject to refutation by empirical evidence.
At least that's my impression. I'd be interested to hear whether others see thing shte same way.
The Neoconservatives by Peter Steinfels. This book, written in 1979, is billed as the first major study of neoconservatism and covers both the obvious names (Kristol, Bell, Podhoretz, Decter) and some who now seem a bit surprising (Moynihan, Brzezinski, Jackson). It strikes me that there have been two main changes affecting the neoconservatives since Steinfels wrote.
First, the rise of the centrist ‘New Democrats’ associated with the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1990s attracted the support of the more moderate neoconservatives (confusingly, DLC supporters like Clinton are often called ‘neoliberals’ in the US, a term which is used in an entirely different sense elsewhere, much closer to neoconservatism in its meaning). The remaining neoconservatives are now strictly Republican partisans and have continued moving to the right.
Second, the Jewish element in neoconservatism (more dominant as a result of the first trend, which was more significant among non-Jewish neoconservatives) changed its character. Prior to Oslo, the general position was one of support for Israel, normally interpreted to mean support for the general position of whatever Israeli government was elected by the Israeli people. The neoconservatives in general took a rejectionist position on Oslo and became partisans of its opponents, Likud, the settler parties and the maximalist advocates of Eretz Israel. There was a piece by Podhoretz in Commentary about the time of Oslo making all this explicit. It will be interesting, in this context, to see how the neoconservatives react if Sharon finally comes to blows with the settlers. I predict that they will be bitterly divided.
For those anxious to see the end of my series on climatologist Stephen Schneider, and the famous doctored quote, here’s my bottom line.
He’s an alarmist who tends to overstate and overdramatization environmental threats, and he doesn’t always argue fairly, but he isn’t deliberately dishonest. The much-quoted statement is a description (in fact, characteristically, an overstatement and overdramatization) of a real problem that affects anyone with expert knowledge engaged in public discussion. The frequency with which the statement has been (mis)quoted is, paradoxically, an indication that the point Schneider makes is a valid one.
Now, those who want the whole argument can read on.
I’ll begin with the claim that Schneider is an alarmist who tends to overstate and overdramatization environmental threats. As is well-known, Scheider raised the possibility of a new Ice Age in the 1970s, only to become one of the most extreme pessimists regarding global warming a decade or so later. This isn’t inherently inconsistent - someone who believed the climate system to be characterized by strong positive feedbacks could predict extreme outcomes from modest shocks in either direction. Still, looking at his record in its entirety, I’d say that Schneider almost invariably takes a pessimistic view of environmental issues, and publicises this view in a way that is likely to create excessive alarm. As a result, he has attracted a lot of publicity, more than scientists with views I’d regard as being more credible.
Next, I want to talk about the media handle complex policy issues involving expert judgements, and the way scientists and other academic experts handle them. There are three striking features of the media approach (particularly true of TV, but also of radio and tabloid newspapers and still present in the ‘quality press’).
The first is an addiction to ‘soundbites’ and ‘quotable quotes’, regardless of their actual information content. The article I linked recently from the NY Times has a good discussion of this.
The second is a strong preference for definite, unqualified statements. If an expert is quoted, the last thing the media wants is “one the one hand, this, on the other hand that”. If there are unresolved questions, the preferred format is that of adversarial debate, with one expert presenting one viewpoint and another presenting the alternative (It is rare to present more than two viewpoints, and the range between the alternatives is often small).
The third is a very limited capacity to discern the relative strengths of arguments. The implicit assumption is that, if two sides of a question are presented, they must be of roughly equal merit.
By contrast, as Schneider says, scientists and other academics are supposed to present ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but - which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. ’ While this is an attractive ideal, it has its own problems.
First, a lot of academic writing contains meaningless qualifications, apparently conforming with the ideal set out above, but actually serving to cover the writer against the possibility of being proved wrong.
Second, and relatedly, this approach is not very useful if it is necessary to make policy decisions. In the absence of any effective guidance, scientists and other academics tend to veer from one extreme (refusing to give any substantive advice until further evidence is obtained) to the other (stating personal policy preferences as if they were necessary deductions from objective scientific knowledge).
I face these problems in my capacity as an opinion columnist where the availability of 700 words makes them easier to handle than in the context of TV or radio. At this length it’s possible to present your own policy conclusion and the main arguments in its favor while acknowleding the existence of alternative views (of course, the readers of an opinion column are predisposed to assume first that the writer is presenting their own opinion and second that they would not bother to do so if everyone already agreed with them).
In treating alternative views, there are two issues which usually need to be mentioned. The first is the extent to which such views are supported within the economics profession - that is, whether I am presenting a minority viewpoint (as in the case of microeconomic reform), taking one side in a continuing debate (for example, Keynesians vs classicists) or stating something on which all (mainstream) economists agree (for example, that work effort is socially costly).
The second is an indication of the main arguments against my position. In line with the media conventions noted above, it is up to the other side to present these arguments, but it is worth noting them and, if possible, briefly indicating the line of rebuttal. In part, this is a nod to fellow-experts to say that I am not ignoring these points but don’t have space to cover them.
Now let’s look again at Schneider’s statement.
On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but - which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people, we'd like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that, we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This 'double ethical bind' we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.I hope that means being both)It seems clear to me that it is an attempt to respond to the kind of issues I’ve discussed above, rather than advocacy of lying in the cause of the environment. In forming this view, I’ve taken the trouble to track down and read the original Discover article in which Schneider was quoted.
Characteristically, Schneider overstates the severity of the ‘double ethical bind’ and thereby hands his enemies a stick to beat him with. The norms of debate in the media differ from those of the scientific community but that doesn’t make them inherently dishonest.
I’ve previously mentioned the paradox that, in deliberately or recklessly misquoting Schneider his opponents have engaged in the very practices they accuse him of advocating. And by endlessly recycling this quote, they’ve indicated the importance of ‘simplified, dramatic statements’ and of the ‘scary scenario’ of an environmentalist conspiracy at the economy.
A second paradox is that even when anti-environmentalists argue honestly, it is easy to support the analysis above with reference to their behavior. Participants on both sides of the environmental policy debate make unqualified statements all the time, without worrying about caveats, ifs and buts. Looking at the people who’ve attacked Schneider how many have ever mentioned having doubts about their own views, or drawn attention to qualifications on the evidence they present?
The only time anti-environmentalist advocates routinely mention doubt is when it’s to their advantage to do so, because the overwhelming majority of expert opinion is against them, as in the case of CFCs and global warming. (Of course, this is true of most participants in public debate, and not merely of anti-environmentalists. But anti-environmentalists are notable for the frequency of extreme statements backed by weak evidence, for example about the economic costs of environmental policies.)
To summarise, while I wouldn’t rely on Schneider for a balanced statement of expert opinion, this whole debate shows him in a substantially better light than any of those who have tried to use his words against him.
Before the Iraq war, Kenneth Pollack The Gathering Storm was among the leading advocates of the arguments that Saddam’s weapons represented an imminent threat justifying preventive war. In this piece in the Atlantic he discusses why the intelligence on which he relied was so badly wrong.
What’s startling about Pollack’s piece is that he simply ignores the resumption of inspections in December 2002 and the declaration by Iraq that all its illegal weapons had been destroyed. These two events made it clear, within a matter of weeks, that none of the main suspect sites previously mentioned had any weapons and that the intelligence held by the US and UK (particularly as summarised for political and public consumption) was way off the mark. Until about a week before the Iraqi declaration, official statements from the US and UK governments implied not only that they had definite knowledge of Iraqi weapons but also that they knew where they were located. If this had been true, the weapons would have been pointed out as in the previous case of Cuba, and war would have been justified by the terms of Resolution 1441.
Even without such knowledge, it was obviously impossible to conceal nuclear weapons facilities under the UN inspection conditions. Since nuclear weapons are the only ones that represented a threat to the world more serious than that of ‘conventional’ weapons, the WMD-based case for war was greatly weakened by the beginning of 2003 and was completely untenable by the time the war actually took place.
The absurd legalism that suggests that war was justified because, although the weapons had been destroyed, Iraq's accounting for the destruction was not sufficient to satisfy the Bush Administration, can be dismissed. This kind of argument would be available to justify any war of aggression, any time (that is, Country A asserts a violation of international law by Country B, demands an explanation, then asserts that the explanation is inadequate).
What remains defensible is the argument that Saddam was an evil dictator, and that the world community could justifiably overthrow him. This was the argument that should have been made. It would have required the issue of a postwar government to be addressed in advance instead of being left in limbo as it was, and still is.
Quoted today's Age
Seven's director of programming and production, Tim Worner, said his network was not gambling heavily on reality TV. "That notion is querulous."
Here's part of my next AFR piece, which will focus on the claim that long-term interest rates, particularly in the US, are bound to rise. Comments much appreciated.
The idea of bubbles in asset prices is a troublesome one for economists. To say that there is a bubble in the price of some asset is to claim that the relevant financial market is not doing its job properly. In the atmosphere of uncritical reverence for ‘the markets’ that prevailing during most of the 1980s and 1990s, such a claim was unthinkable for all but a handful of heretics (Will rational bubbles fall on the infallible markets ?, AFR, 24 Jun , 1994.)
Even now that a more measured view has been restored, the suggestion that market prices for assets are unsustainable raises what American economist Deirdre McCloskey has called ‘the American question’ - ‘if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?’. To make the point more explicitly, if asset prices are out of line with economic fundamentals, why don't economists and others who can see this back their judgement in the markets and make large speculative profits. This argument is the cornerstone of the famous ‘efficient markets hypothesis’.
The now-standard response is usually attributed to the great economist and successful speculator, John Maynard Keynes (though there is no evidence that he actually said it) and states ‘‘the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent’. This point is illustrated by the experience of the greatest speculator of all, George Soros, who bet heavily, in 1998 and 1999, that the NASDAQ stock market was overvalued.
Soros was right, but the market kept on rising, and he was forced to liquidate his short positions. By the time the market turned down in April 2000, Soros had lost billions of dollars. As one of the many economists who shared Soros' view of the dotcom mania (Don't overrate E-commerce, AFR,,8 April 1999), I was glad to have stayed on the sidelines, although I did switch my superannuation strategy away from overvalued US shares.
The same issues arose in relation to the US dollar bubble that ended about a year ago. Although any competent economist could see that the US dollar was grossly overvalued (US dollar needs a pasting,AFR, 29 March 2001.), the currency was supported by the stated ‘strong dollar’ policy of the Clinton and Bush administrations, and the evident market belief that this policy meant something. Once again, a lot of money was lost by those who were prematurely right in their belief that the US dollar must depreciate.
I've got my Powerbook back, but I'm still recovering from the hard disk crash. I'm only half a day late with the Monday Message Board - back to normal next week, I hope.
Please post your comments on any topic - civilised discussion and no coarse language please.
Ozblogger Gianna points to this report in the Australian and suggests that it falls to me to sort it out. Looking at the thinning ranks of Australian econobloggers, she's probably right.
The report is based on a Labor press release which appears to be based on the income tax statistics for 1999-2000 and 2000-01. The central claim
JOHN Howard's battlers are going backwards, with new tax research showing that lower and middle-income earners suffered a reduction in real incomes of up to $430 a year between 2000 and 2001.I wouldn't put a lot of weight on this - it's only a couple of years data and the numbers were affected by the introduction of the GST in that year. That said, there's no doubt that the basic claim of the release is true. Almost everyone (even, as I recall, the Centre for Independent Studies) agrees that the inequality of market incomes has been increasing over the past twenty years or so, though different studies date the increase at different times and attribute different causes.Analysis of Australian Taxation Office figures carried out by the Opposition, which adjusts earnings against increases in the cost of living, has found the incomes of Australia's middle class shrank by between $150 and $430 a year.
The figures also show the gap between the rich and poor has widened, with the incomes of the wealthiest 5 per cent of taxpayers increasing by $4159 a year in real terms over the same period and their average taxable incomes increasing from $146,661 to $150,820.
Although real incomes have generally risen for all income groups over the past decade or so, the bulk of the gain has been concentrated among the top 20 per cent of income-earners. The rate of growth of real incomes for everyone else has been very slow. So it takes only a modestly bad year, or a price shock like the GST to see real incomes going backwards.
Under Hawke and Keating, the increasing inequality of market incomes was offset to some extent by progressive changes in tax and welfare policy, but the reverse has been true under Howard. One of the experts cited in the report suggests that the figures are distorted by tax concessions associated with negative gearing and encouraged by the cut in capital gains tax under Howard. That's probably true, but, contrary to what he says, implies that the real picture is even more unequal than that given in the statistics.
From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Lifeby Jacques Barzun. As the title indicates, a rather dyspeptic, but very well-informed big-picture piece that raises two items of particular interest.
First, the book, published in 2000, employs a variety of quasi-hypertextual linking devices, though it does not mention either hypertext or the Internet. The Zeitgeist at work ?
Second, Barzun refers to Bentham's famous claim that,
given equal pleasure, pushpin is as good as poetry. The dictionaries I've looked at merely say that pushpin is an obsolete children's game, but Barzun asserts that pushpin is bowling (I assume some relative of skittles).
For me, at least, this sharpens up Bentham's point a great deal. I have to confess that, if Barzun is right, I get a good deal more utility from pushpin than from poetry (of course, the invention of the automatic pinspotter and the decay of modern poetry are relevant factors). On the other hand, I (implicitly, given my general position) support the use of taxes on pushpin to subsidise the production of poetry and the retransmission of old poetry to new generations.
Comment spammers have somehow got around my IP banning and have rendered the display of recent comments largely useless. I'll try to fix this as soon as I can.
This piece by Michael Kinsley is presented with the write-off (what Americans call the "lede") "I'm for free trade but" usually means you're not for free trade at all. Kinsley makes some good points in the article, demolishing a rather silly NYT Op-ed piece by Charles Schumer and Paul Craig Roberts but his central claim is contradicted by his own observation that
Almost everyone acknowledges some exceptions to the general rule that a nation is better off if it doesn't try to tell its citizens what they are allowed to buy from or sell to foreigners.In other words, nearly everyone, including Kinsley, is "for free trade, but". Kinsley tries to salvage his argument in the next sentence where he says
A free trade butter (FTB) is someone whose exceptions take a big bite out of the rule itself.(as an aside, I note that the annoying acronym is introduced but not used thereafter). This move won't work. Who is to decide what is "a big bite" and what is a modest exception, acknowledged by "nearly everyone", and therefore part of a "reasonable free trade position"?
The point can be made in relation to the issue of trade and labour rights which, as it happens was the subject of one of my earliest blog posts. Kinsley is hopelessly vague on this, as was the article by Kristof to which I referred then. He is open to the notion of
working conditions so wretched and wages so low and practices, like child labor, so heartless that you do want your own government to ban imports of the product at issue, to avoid the taint of association and, with luck, to pressure the exporting nation to change., but rejects the idea that American standards of health, safety and wages should apply globally.
These extremes leave a gap wide enough for a Hummer to drive through, and fail to make the distinction between process and outcomes. There is no reason why workers in poor countries should not have the same sort of legal protections and bargaining processes, for example with respect to rights of union representation, as those in rich countries. Given lower levels of productivity the outcomes in terms of wages and conditions won't be as high as those in rich countries. It's reasonable to use trade policy as a lever to demand protection of workers rights, but not to exclude imports simply because the people who produced them received low wages.
I haven't got time to discuss capital movements where, these days, even free-trade stalwarts like Jagdish Bhagwati are in the "but" camp.
In a recent post on the ethics of quotation, I referred to a doctored quote by environmentalist Stephen Schneider, in which he is made out to advocate scientific fraud in the interests of the environment. As I'll argue, the use of this quote has served to show up, as dishonest or inexcusably sloppy, dozens of Schneider's opponents, while doing only modest damage to Schneider himself.
(Warning: Long post follows)
Here's the full quote.
On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but - which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people, we'd like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that, we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This 'double ethical bind' we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.I hope that means being both)Now here's a fairly standard blogosphere version, taken from the Web Site of global warming denialist John Daly(I've included in bold, sentences omitted from the quote by Daly)
To do that, we need to get some broad-based support, To capture the public's imagination That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This 'double ethical bind' we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both)Note that the omission of sentences is not indicated by ellipses (...) or in any other way and that Daly runs sentences together to mislead the reader - the purpose "simplified, dramatic statements" is presented as being to "attract public support", but in the original it is because these are needed if you are to get media coverage.
An earlier version, propagated, and perhaps originated, by economist Julian Simon not only omitted sentences but inserted the entirely fabricated (but conveniently damning) sentence "Scientists should consider stretching the truth". Schneider caught him on this one in an article in article in the American Physical Society news, and demanded a retraction. Simon's response was to drop the fabricate sentences, and to switch to the modified, but still doctored, quote now generally reproduced.
Before looking at what Schneider actually said, it's worth considering what the widespread reproduction of this quote says about the opponents of environmentalism. Those who have used the quote fall into two classes
(i) people who know the quote to be doctored, but are willing to engage in conscious dishonesty to discredit an opponent
(ii) people who are willing to reproduce a quotation reported by a hostile source without undertaking elementary checks on its accuracy
Anything said by someone in either of these categories on any environmental issue (indeed, on any issue*) must be regarded with skepticism.
The has been disputed by many, who have argued that the quote in its original form is damning enough, and that therefore no harm is done by "sexing it up", to use the terminology of Blairite spin doctors. For example, Ozplogger Bargarz recently dismissed my earlier objections to quote-doctoring as 'semantic..
I have two observations in response. First, these claims can be used to support any dishonest argument in support of a proposition the claimant believes to be true or a policy position they believe to be desirable.
Second, in this specific case, history proves the claim to be false. If it were true, when Simon was caught using the original doctored version, he and others would have switched to using the accurate quote. The fact that he and his successors have generally failed to do so is evidence that the doctored quote works well for their purposes, and the accurate quote does not. (I should note that I found one hostile use which includes the final sentence and indicates omissions by ellipsis, by Jeffrey Salmon of the Marshall Institute. There are also quite a few cases where the final sentence is omitted without any indication, but other omissions are noted with ellipses This treatment, which would clearly fail the journalistic standards of the NY Times is employed, for example, by The Economist.
I plan to continue with an assessment of Schneider's original statement, and his position in general. But in the meantime, here's a sample (selected from 400+ Google hits) of those who have discredited themselves by using the doctored quotation, knowingly or recklessly. As well as Simon and Daly, the list includes Doug Bandow of Cato, David Wojick at SEPP, Iain Murray at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Dixy Lee Ray in Trashing the Planet
*I should observe that environmental issues tend to raise the emotional temperature and that people on both sides tend to resort to practices they would reject in other contexts. I know that I tend to lose my temper in such matters, though never to the extent of fabricating evidence or doctoring quotations. So, it might be best to confine skepticism about users of this quote to their claims on environmental issues.
Paul Krugman is routinely called 'shrill' for his attacks on Bush's economic policy, and particularly the shift to large and chronic budget deficits. He certainly invites this, with routine comparisons to banana republics like Argentina. So Krugman took some satisfaction a couple of days ago, in pointing out that former Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin is now speaking in similarly shrill tones.
Now the IMF is getting shrill too.
Update This is front-page news in most of the Oz papers today, but bloggers got to read it yesterday
Talking of the NYT, it ran this AP piece headed Powell Refutes Report Saying U.S. Overstated Iraq Threat. The body of the article makes it clear that Powell said he disagreed but produced nothing that would prove the report false (in debating terms, he rebutted the article, but in logical terms, he did not refute it).
At least in educated Australian English the use of "refute" for "deny" is still, I think, unacceptable. Has the language changed in the US, or has the NYT slipped up on this one?
Update Reader Sven notes that the NYT has changed "refutes" to "dismisses". The blogosphere at work or just the sub-editors coming back from a long lunch?
The question of quotes has come up once again. This piece by Daniel Okrent called The Quote, the Whole Quote and Nothing but the Quote
from the New York Times gives a pretty good discussion of news ethics regarding quotes. The Times policy states that it's completely illegitimate to change the actual words of a quote
Readers should be able to assume that every word between quotation marks is what the speaker or writer said," according to the paper's ''Guidelines on Our Integrity." ''The Times does not 'clean up' quotations.and the discussion makes it clear that it's also illegimate to elide words or sentences from a quote without a clear indication that this has been done. In a newspaper, this would normally be done by separating the parts of the quote with additional text. In academic writing, it's usually acceptable to mark an elision with dots ... on the assumption that the omitted material was not relevant to the point being made.
This still leaves open the question of when a quote should begin and end. As Okrent observes a quote, by its nature, is always "taken out of context".
except when a newspaper prints verbatim transcripts, all quotations are taken out of context. The context is the actual conversation or press conference in which words get uttered; the printed pages of a newspaper can only rudely duplicate it.
The rule Oklert suggests is that the quote cannot be shortened in a way that changes its meaning, for example by the omission of significant qualifications. The main discussion concerns a quoted statement by President Bush that ''I will support a constitutional amendment which would honor marriage between a man and a woman, codify that." In fact, he said "If necessary, I will support a constitutional amendment which would honor marriage between a man and a woman, codify that." without stating precisely the conditions that would make such an amendment necessary. The NY Times had to apologise for this error, but the initial apology wasn't considered unconditional enough - hence Okrent's article.
All of this is of interest in view of the controversy over the (in)famously doctored quotation by Stephen Schneider which has been reproduced all over the blogosphere, in which Schneider is made out to advocate scientific fraud in the interests of the environment. I'll post more about this shortly.
Everyone who's ever done research has run into cases where the data fail to match up to prior expectations. As the saying has it, there's nothing so tragic as a beautiful hypothesis slain by an ugly fact. I've just run into something of this kind in relation to the debate over road safety that's been going on for some time on this blog. I'm still thinking about how to interpret the data I've found, but for the moment I'll just report it.
A statistic that often comes up in the debate about road safety is the death rate per million vehicle-miles or vehicle-kilometres. This statistic is commonly used by defenders of US policies since it's the only one that makes the US look relatively good. The rate of road deaths relative to population in the US is about twice that in Australia, and other leading countries (about 16 per 100 000 as opposed to 8 per 100 000). On the other hand, measured in terms of vehicle miles travelled per person, Americans appear to travel about twice as far, cancelling out the difference.
I've pointed out several times that this statistic takes no account of vehicle occupancy rates. Consider two countries in which people travel the same average distance per year, cars are equally likely to crash and occupants are equally likely to die in a crash. The only difference is that in the first country no-one travels as a passenger while in the second every car has one passenger. For nearly all relevant purposes, the two countries have the same performance on road safety. But, on the "deaths per vehicle-kilometre" measure, the first country has half the rate of the second.
In making this point, I assumed both that the US would have relatively low occupancy rates and that occupancy rates would be declining over time. However, looking at these statistics from the National Household Travel Survey, it appears that occupancy rates in the US have actually been rising since 1990, as can be seen from the fact that person miles of travel have been rising more rapidly than vehicle miles travelled. Also, although I can't get really comparable data, it's not obvious that occupancy rates in the US are lower than in Australia.
I have some doubts about this data. For a start, the revision of the 1990 data raised estimated person-miles and vehicle-miles by about 20 per cent, and the survey reports warn against comparisons over time. The same warning obviously applies even more strongly to international comparisons. By contrast, death rates can be compared fairly reliably.
Looking at the actual numbers, I find it surprising that increasing numbers of cars per household and increasing proportions of one-person households can be accompanied by higher vehicle occupancy rates.
Finally, on the comparison between Australia and the US, it's startling in both absolute and relative terms that the average American is estimated to travel 24 000 km per year (450 km per week) as opposed to about 12 000 km for Australians. The two countries seem similar in most relevant respects, and a difference of 100 per cent surprises me. In absolute terms, the US figure seems very high, bearing in mind that more than a third of the population is under 16 or over 65, and presumably travel a fair bit less than this. To get this kind of average for the entire population, working age adults would have to be averaging something close to 100 km a day, which would presumably imply a couple of hours per day in the car for people in urban areas.
But the fact that the data surpises me doesn't mean it's wrong. I plan to investigate further and report on what I find.
On the principle that we’ll remember it if he’s right, and forget it if he’s wrong, Chris Sheil predicts electoral defeat for Bush and Howard in 2004. A loss by Howard is certainly a possibility, particularly if the housing market tanks rapidly, but I think the odds in favour of Bush are strong.
Now that Saddam has been captured, I think Iraq will be, at worst, neutral for Bush. I think a substantial US pullout is on the cards once the June deadline is met. If there are genuine elections and a reasonably stable government by that time, it will be reasonable to claim ex post that the benefits of the invasion exceeded the costs. Even if this isn't the case, the Republican base and much of the swing vote will be satisfied with shooting Saddam and pulling out.
On the economy, I think there's probably enough momentum in the recovery to carry Bush through to November even if long-term interest rates rise substantially (as they ought to, in view of the CAD and budget deficits). Again, I see this as a near-neutral issue rather than a big winner for Bush.
The big advantage for Bush is that, given his political position, he doesn't face a budget constraint. Bush can promise more tax cuts and more military expenditure while matching the Democrats on any domestic expenditure issue that has electoral bite. Of course, this will imply unsustainable budget deficits, but it's already clear that no-one outside the Democrat camp is going to call him on this. The NYT Op-Ed page may not like the deficit but its news columns are sticking to "he said, she said". If the Republicans say they have a magic money tree, that will be reported in the headline and any refutation will be buried in the body of the report.
It's politically impossible for a Democratic candidate to match Bush on this, and even if this weren't the case it would be most unwise. The adverse consequences of chronic deficits won't emerge for a few years yet. For Bush that means, in effect, that the problems can be left to his successors. But for a first-term Democrat it would spell disaster. And the worst possible outcome would be for a Democrat to try and outbid Bush, then lose anyway.
If a victory is not to prove worse than a defeat,the Democrats have to run on the complete repeal of the Bush tax cuts (this is Dean's position and, I think, Gephardt's also). Unfortunately, I don't think it will be possible to win on this platform.
While I'm linking to Chris, I'll note that he picked up the slack while I was off air with this post which was better than what I would have written on the same point.
At least one reader was kind enough to nominate this blog as the best leftwing blog in the Koufax awards being run at Wampum (I'm backing my memory for the assertion that Sandy Koufax was a well-known left-handed pitcher, but Google makes recall of such trivial knowledge increasingly irrelevant). Looking at the excellent and popular blogs on the list, I don't think there's any serious prospect of making the cut for the top ten, but thanks to whichever reader(s) nominated me.
It's 36 hours late, but here's the Monday Message Board for this week. Fire away on any topic (as usual, civilised discussion and no coarse language, please).
With some excellent help from Pat Kelly (aka theMacGuy pkelly@themacguy.com.au if you are in Canberra and have any Mac tech support needs) I'm back on air. Things may be a bit flaky for a while, but seminormal blogging should be restored soon.
Tony Blair likes to be thought of as a 'moderniser'. So it's startling to see that, on a basic constitutional issue, his position is identical to that held by Australian reactionaries in the 19th century, namely that the Upper House should be nominated and not elected. Athough there are some differences between Blair's position and that of the Australian opponents of democracy, they are minor and not all in Blair's favour.
To begin with, it's fair to concede that, relative to the starting point of a largely hereditary Upper House, almost any change would be an improvement. Proposals for a hereditary peerage in Australia, mainly put forward by WC Wentworth were laughed out of existence as a bunyip aristocracy, but Wentworth's fallback position under which members were appointed for life was successful. This is, as far as I can tell, exactly the model proposed by Tony Blair. Similar models were adopted in other states.
A notable difference between Blair and Wentworth is that Wentworth wanted to constrain the democratically elected lower house, which he feared might undertake radical action, whereas Blair wants to avoid any check on the power of the House of Commons. But given that most recent British governments have had the support of less than 40 per cent of the electorate and that Blair opposes any reform to the electoral system for the Commons, it seems likely that an elected Upper House would be more democratically representative than the Lower House. The differences between Wentworth and Blair are marginal, at best. Moreover, even if Wentworth's proposals were stacked in favour of his own social class, the idea that government should be subject to checks and balances is a sound one.
In Australia, the struggle for democratic election of both Houses of Parliament commenced with self-government and has continued for 150 years. Queensland Labor took the direct route, packing the Upper House with an appointed 'suicide squad' who voted themselves out of existence, but this cleared the way to a series of Lower House gerrymanders introduced first by Labor and then adopted and extended by the conservatives.
In the other states, progress has been gradual and mixed, but the ultimate outcome seems likely to be the same everywhere - an Upper House elected by proportional representation, with a term twice that of the Lower House and no power to overturn the government by blocking money bills.
This is, in my view, an excellent compromise, giving a legislature that is at least partly independent of the executive while maintaining the principal that the executive is responsible to the legislature.
Of course, these merits are precisely why Blair doesn't support democratic reform. He doesn't want any parliamentary check on the power of the executive government - in practice the PM. If he were honest, he'd advocate abolition of the House of Lords and not reform. If he were really honest, he'd advocate an elective dictatorship.
Victoria suffered less road deaths in 2003 than in any year since 1949. Both NSW and Queensland also experienced a decline relative to 2002, though 2001 was better still, at least in NSW. In total, about 100 people are alive today who would have been dead if safety had not improved.
As is shown by the contrasting experience of the United States, where road deaths are rising, the long decline in the road toll is primarily due to tighter law enforcement with additional contributions from better roads and cars, and improvements in emergency treatment of people injured in crashes.
Of course, even in the face of decades of evidence, there are plenty who want to quibble.
Among my standard New Year resolutions for quite a few years has been to work on my weight training to the point where I can bench-press my own weight. When I moved to Brisbane, I decided to tackle this seriously by getting a home gym setup (it only costs the same as year's membership in a commercial gym), and I've been working pretty steadily all year.
At the end of 2003, I'd reached my original goal - 72kg. Sad to say, however, a visit to the scales revealed that, in the years since I first made this resolution, the goalposts had shifted, and I am still quite a few kilos short of my objective. I suspect continuation of my original strategy will keep me in the position of Achilles chasing the tortoise, so this years resolution will have to include "get on your bike".
However, although lycra-clad cyclists whizz past my door every morning, I find summer in Brisbane a bit hot for daytime cycling, so I may have to substitute swimming for the moment.
Alert readers will notice that I haven't mentioned the D-word. I don't plan to, either.