John Quiggin

The point of paradox

Suppose you have encountered Zeno's Achilles paradoxfor the first time. Zeno offers a rigorous (looking) proof that, having once given the tortoise a head start, Achilles can never overtake it. Would you regard this as¹

1. A startling new discovery in athletics;

1. A demonstration of the transcendent capacity of the human spirit - although the laws of logic forbid it, Achilles does in fact catch and overtake the tortoise; or

1. A warning about how not to take limits?

Productivity takes a breather

That's the headline the Fin gave to an Op-Ed piece by Dean Parham today. This is, as far as I know the first acknowledgement from official sources of the productivity growth slowdown of the last four or five years. It's significant because Parham is the most prominent advocate of the hypothesis that microeconomic reform has generated a new economy.

Bilious

Ken Parish has inaugurated his "Blog bile" awards, a category that should not lack for entrants. The first winner is Chris Sheil appropriately enough, since he notes that Howard's 30th anniversary bash made him "puke all over my keyboard".

At least according to regular commentator Observa, writing in the comments thread, I'm not in the running, and am in fact notable for "serenity". This word always reminds me of the holiday shack scene in The Castle, with the high-voltage transmission lines crackling in the background, and not at all of blogging, but there you go.

Kto, kgo ?

When you want the most succinct statement possible statement of the power politics view of the world, VI Lenin is your only man¹. A lot of free-market advocates of revealed preference theory, and supporters ofexit over voice"> exit over voice, would be surprised to learn who they are quoting when they refer to people voting with their feet.

In relation to the proposed "handover" of power in Iraq on June 30, the only question that really matters is the one posed by Lenin "Kto, kgo ?", that is, "Who can do what to whom?".

Intelligence?

From an NYT story on "ghost" prisoners in Abu Ghraib

The memorandum criticizing the practice of keeping prisoners off the roster was signed by Col. Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, and a James Bond, who is identified as "SOS, Agent in Charge." Military and intelligence officials said that they did not know of a Mr. Bond who had been assigned to Abu Ghraib, and that it was possible that the name was an alias.

Some good news

Abu Ghraib prison is to be demolished. Obviously, I welcome this news and hope that this symbolic measure will be accompanied by the substantive changes it should represent, including the abandonment of the policy of detention without trial.

Copenhagen Con ?

I've written a couple of posts critical of the Copenhagen Consensus exercise being run by Bjorn Lomborg''s Environmental Assessment Institute and The Economist. The stated objective is to take a range of problems facing developing countries, and get an expert panel to form a consensus on which ones should be given the highest priority. This is a reasonable-sounding idea, and the process has produced some useful contributions in the form of papers by experts arguing the importance of particular problems.

There are however, two big difficulties.

Time to give up the day job ?

I've been meaning for a while to post on some of the claims made by Ross McKitrick . Since McKitrick is, like me, an environmental economist, I feel some responsibility to rebut his arguments, but I've been put off by the thought of untangling the mess he has made of the global warming issue, most notably in his attack, written jointly with retired mining executive Stephen McIntyre, on the Mann et al study of the history of global temperatures.

Fortunately, Tim Lambert is on the job. As his demolition of pro-gun academic fraud John Lott showed, Tim has exactly the required qualities for a task like this. He's careful, painstaking, scrupulously honest and (unlike me) hardly ever loses his temper even when faced with the most arrant nonsense. He's started off with a truly devastating blow, nailing McKitrick (and co-author Christopher Essex) as the source of the absurd claim, now required belief in many anti-global warming circles) that there is no such thing as an average temperature (see also here.

The work of Lambert and others has made it pretty certain that Lott will never again hold an academic job, though that doesn't stop the American Economic Institutions. McKitrick reports that he has started taking bagpiping lessons, and this sounds like a good career move to me.

Global warming and nuclear power

He now believes recent climatic events have shown the warming of the atmosphere is proceeding even more rapidly than the scientists of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) thought it would, in their last report in 2001. On that basis, he says, there is simply not enough time for renewable energy, such as wind, wave and solar power - the favoured solution of the Green movement - to take the place of the coal, gas and oil-fired power stations whose waste gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), is causing the atmosphere to warm.

Monday Message Board

Time as usual for the Monday Message Board. Post your thoughts on any topic (civilised discussion and no coarse language).

Putin and Kyoto

The announcement by Vladimir Putin that Russia will move rapidly to ratify the Kyoto treaty, thereby bringing it into force, is encouraging news, though scarcely conclusive. Putin has gone back and forth on this several times before, and it's not immediately clear what has prompted the latest announcement.

What is obvious is that it's bad news for Bush and Howard. Putin can scarcely have been unaware of the impact on Bush, and has presumably made the judgement that he's on the way out, and this judgement may in fact have been one of Putin's motives for switching sides. Howard, of course, is merely collateral damage.

One good thing about the long delay is that it's given those who want to do something other than Kyoto plenty of time to put up or shut up. In effect, they've done the latter. Both Bush and Howard have gone for business as usual, while alternatives to Kyoto like the McKibbin-Wilcoxen Proposal have gone nowhere. It's Kyoto or nothing, and I certainly hope it will be Kyoto.

What I'm reading and doing

I've spent most of the weekend at our annual karate training camp. As a result, I'm both stiff and bruised, but still, a good time was had by all. The camp was at Tallebudgera, one of the most pleasant places on the Gold Coast. We stayed at the Recreation Centre there, which has been extensively, and expensively, upgraded since last year. The 1950s bunkrooms are gone. The new ones are much brighter and airier, and include their own bathrooms as well as what appeared to be Internet ports, though I didn't have any capacity to check on this. The other main essential has been dealt with, as the centre now has a cafe. The high point of the weekend, after some rugged training on the beach was to walk past a tree full of rainbow lorikeets - I don't think I've ever seen so many so close.

Although most of the non-training time was spent sleeping, I managed to get a bit of reading done, finishing Gil Merom's book on democracies and small wars (on which more soon), Tiffin and Gittins How Australia Compares and Stephen Bell's The Money Mandarins, certain to be the standard work on the Reserve Bank for years to come.

Fertility and partnering

There's been a bit of discussion of fertility issues in comments threads. Rather than present a view of my own, which I'm still refining, I'll point readers to a paper by coming out of the Monash Uni Centre for Population and Urban Research, and commissioned by the Australian Family Association[1]. Here's the blurb. As I read it, the central theme is a causal chain from economic reform to less secure employment for men with low education to low rates of partnering to lower fertility. The paper gives some good evidence on the later links in the chain, while assuming the earler ones. I don't have a problem with this, since I think it's clear that there has been a general increase in economic insecurity, though it rises and falls over the economic cycle.

I'm less concerned than the authors, and some commentators on this blog, about declining aggregate fertility levels. But I think the study makes a strong case that economic insecurity is producing a society in which central life goals like having a family are out of reach for (or at least not attained by) an increasing proportion of the population.

¹ The AFA is a socially conservative lobby group, which is very concerned about things like cloning and the "gay agenda". As with all such groups, it's necessary to apply an appropriate level of scepticism. But in my reading of the Monash study, I haven't noticed any obvious signs that the research has been slanted to fit a particular agenda.

Responsibility, part2

we'll be occupying a bizarro world in which the secretary of state is more accountable than the New York Times.

A shameful episode

With the claims of the last of the Tampa refugees being recognised, one of the most shameful episodes in recent Australian history has drawn to a close¹. All those involved in the government's actions deserve undying historical obloquy.

¹ I don't intend to enter into debate on this post, but I do plan to put forward and defend a more general assessment of the issues in the near future.

Howard channels Whitlam

Mr Howard said this week that the federal system was being undermined by bickering between the states and Canberra.

He was angered by repeated claims by the states that they were being underfunded when they were receiving more money courtesy of the goods and services tax.

"I don't think our present system, federal system, is working all that well," he said.

"I think if we were starting a country all over again we'd have a national government and a whole series of regional governments – we wouldn't have states if we were starting all over again; but we're not, so that's quite academic."

That said, I'm glad to see that the government is once again floating the idea that the Commonwealth should take over the entire health system. If, in return, the Feds got out of the school sector, we'd have a much more manageable division of responsibilities.

Australia and Abu Ghraib

Although Australia, as part of the Coalition that invaded Iraq, has a general responsibility for the actions of the occupying forces, it's been generally assumed that we don't have any direct involvement with the Abu Ghraib prison/interrogation centre/torture chamber. So it's disturbing, to put it mildly, to find that the front man for the Abu Ghraib operation appears to be Captain Mark Doggett, an Australian army officer and press officer for the Coalition forces.

Doggett is quoted here, for example, in a piece by Deroy Murdock in the National Review Online, the general tenor of which is that we need more and better torture if we're going to win the war on terror. Doggett doesn't say this, or anything like it, himself, but he clearly has the job of defending the operations of Abu Ghraib and minimising the crimes committed there, thereby providing ammunition for the likes of Murdock. As another example, he's quoted here , defending a decision to exclude human rights groups from the first of the Abu Ghraib trial.

I'd like to know something about the conditions under which Doggett holds this job. To whom is he answerable? In particular, are his statements endorsed by the Australian government? If so, is not Australia just as responsible as the US for conditions at Abu Ghraib? If not, how does it come about that an Australian army officer is a spokesman for a foreign government?

Two envelopes

Via Juan at Philosophy617 (who doesn't think much of the proffered solutions, and probably won't like this one) I came back to this version of the two-envelope problem put forward by Brian over at Crooked Timber last year.

In this case, once you observe that Brian's angel is giving you faulty theology, it's easy to show that you should reject his¹ mathematics, and his offer. At the end of the problem, the angel says “It’s purgatory,” says the angel, “take all the time you want.” But the whole point of Purgatory is that it's finite - you purge off your sins one at a time until they're all paid off. Since we now have a finite problem, the solution is straightforward.

The Shanahan spin

After last year's budget, which included a $5-a-week across-the-board tax cut, 15per cent of people said they would be personally better off and 32per cent said they would be worse off. This year, almost twice as many people said they would be better off and only 22per cent said they believed they would be worse off.

Responsibility

It's striking to observe that the Daily Mirror has more stringent standards of personal responsibility than the Blair government (or, for that matter, any government in the Coalition of the Willing).