John Quiggin

As I’ve said before, I hate being conned. Looking back over my archives in the period leading up to the Iraq war, I realise that I consistently underestimated the likelihood of war, and that the main reason for this was that I thought Blair was fundamentally honest about what he was doing. Of course, there was the dodgy dossier and the 45 minutes claim to show that the spin doctors were hard at work, but I nevertheless accepted that Blair had made an independent decision to support action against Saddam, based largely on his record of crimes against humanity, and that he took the UN process seriously.

It’s been obvious for some time that this wasn’t true, but for some reason the latest revelations from a leaked Cabinet Office briefing dating back to July 2002, along with the Downing Street memo have really hit home. They make it clear that Britain’s policy was entirely determined by the fact that the Americans were going ahead regardless, and that US reliance on British bases meant there was no option of abstention¹. Everything done thereafter was designed to find a pretext for an action the British government knew to be illegal. The appeal to the UN was a cynical ploy – there was never any chance that war would be avoided.

What’s also clear is that Blair knew there were no proper plans for the postwar period, making the chaos that actually ensued entirely predictable. This fact completely undermines his stated humanitarian concerns, but it makes sense given that the central object of US policy was to pursue a vendetta against Saddam, and that the British government had decided it had no choice but to go along.

¹ It’s not clear that this was correct. The Iraq war relied heavily on bases in Germany, but that didn’t stop the German government opposing the war. Still, in this context, it’s what the British believed that matters.

A question that’s often raised in relation to public policy issues involving science is whether conflicts of interest matter. For example, does it matter if scientists who publish reports suggesting that the dangers of smoking are overstated turn out to be funded by tobacco companies? Common sense suggests that it matters, but a lot of commentators, often with a vague recollection of classes in elementary logic, suggest that this is an ad hominem criticism and that the only thing that is relevant is the argument, not who makes it. You can see a defence of this position from Elizabeth Whelan at Spiked here¹ (hat tip, Jennifer Marohasy in the comments to this interesitng Catallaxy post on values and science.

I’ll argue that common sense is right here.

Quite a few recent posts have triggered either moderation or an apparent bug producing an error of the form

Precondition Failed

The precondition on the request for the URL /wp-comments-post.php evaluated to false.

Investigating, I found that my moderation wordlist included such items as “casino” and “pharmacy”, frequent occurrences in comment spam, but also in ordinary posts. I’ve deleted them, but “casino” also seems to trigger the Precondition Failed bug.

Since the move to Wordpress 1.5, the inclusion of the “Nofollow” tag in links means that they no longer count towards Googlerank. This seems to have reduced comment spam, but not eliminated it. I’m going to trim my list and see if I can found out what gives with the “Precondition Failed” problem

As usual on Monday, you are invited to post your thoughts on any topic. Civilised discussion and no coarse language, please. It being a long weekend, I’d be interested in suggestions for new and better public holidays.

Quite a few different things this week, no doubt reflecting the fact that I am spending the week assessing ARC Grant Applications, and am therefore engaged in displacement activity on a massive scale. It’s a job I find very hard going, as there are far more worthwhile applications than can be funded. Assessors don’t actually have to approve or reject, thankfully, but we have to give numerical grades, and only the topscorers get supported. So, rather than do the job in one big hit, I tend to spin it out and find lots of excuses for procrastination.

Jack Strocchi points me to this interesting piece by Michael Duffy, comparing the case of Chinese diplomat and would-be defector Chen Yonglin with the horrific treatment meted out by a series of immigration ministers to Peter Qasim, to whom could be added equally outrageous cases like those of Al-Kateb and Al Khafaji sentenced to indefinite detention because no country will take them, not to mention the many innocent children locked behind barbed wire.

Duffy, says correctly that Chen is a queue-jumper¹ and that the government’s position² is inconsistent with the tough stand it took on refugees from Iraq and Afghanistan. He says

This tide of toughness has lifted the ship of conservative government to ever new levels of success. Refugees have been locked up to deter others overseas, and the voters have given their thanks. The careers of people like Costello and Abbott have blossomed and rightly so, because they are strong men prepared to stand behind the beliefs they hold so passionately.

I agree with Duffy that the inconsistencies are glaring, but not on how to resolve them. We should give Chen asylum and end mandatory detention immediately.

Of course, there’s a big problem here for refugee policy. As Duffy says, Chen brought his exposure to political persecution on himself by denouncing the Chinese government. But, of course this is commonly the case with refugees. Except during (sadly too common) outbreaks of genocidal madness like the Holocaust and Stalin’s purges, the subjects of dictatorships are usually safe enough if they keep quiet. That’s why we used to use the category of territorial asylum, which, as I understand it, said that anyone who could get out of, say, the Soviet Union, automatically counted as a refugee.

But if we allowed anyone from China who denounced the government to seek asylum here, there could well be quite a lot of applicants. I don’t have an immediate answer to this other than to say that it’s a reminder that we shouldn’t get too cosy with the current Chinese government. They may like capitalism now, but its still a communist dictatorship they’re running.

A final point: Duffy coins the neologism “neocoms”, and offers the following explanation (which I missed in the original version of this post)

What a sudden about-face, what a strange and unexpected burst of compassion from tough politicians and commentators who have supported mandatory detention for so long. It needs a name, and I suggest we call it the new compassion, and those who express it the neo-coms.

¹ That is, if you accept the bogus claim that there exists a queue, and that potential refugees are in a position to take their place at the back of it

² As far as it can be discerned among a fog of evasions

Update In comments, Andrew Bartlett suggested that Duffy was writing ironically. That was my first reading also, and seems to have been the impression of others. But the text is clear enough, and Duffy has consistently supported a hard line on asylum-seekers. As I’ve discovered before now, irony is a dangerous weapon. Still if Duffy has turned against mandatory detention in general, I’ll be happy to congratulate him.

Regular commenter Benno (Benedict Spearritt) has sent in a guest post advocating Condorcet voting, a favorite theme of his. My own view is that our current system of (preferably optional) preferential voting (AKA the single transferable vote) is as good as any of the single-member alternatives and drastically better than First Past the Post. It’s a Word document so I’ve tried an HTML translation but I’ll try to upload the file also when I get a moment.

Try this location for the word file and this Try this location for the HTML file

PM Lawrence has sent another version, which I’ve pasted in

This regular feature is back again. The idea is that, over the weekend, you should post your thoughts in a more leisurely fashion than in ordinary comments or the Monday Message Board. On the occasion of the Queen’s Birthday, I’d be interested in thoughts on our relationship to the British monarchy.

Please post your thoughts on any topic, at whatever length seems appropriate to you. Civilised discussion and no coarse language, please.

As a generally left-wing columnist for a generally right-wing paper, I naturally spend a fair bit of time thinking about how to keep my spot. So I was interested to see this piece by Gerard Henderson on why he got sacked from the Age (Hat-tips to Philip Gomes and Tim Dunlop), where he had the converse position. Henderson’s explanation is that the Age is moving to the left and attributed his sacking to the fact that the Left was offended by his last three columns, which

• said that Evatt was to blame for the Labor Split of 1955
• attacked the Labor Party’s opposition to the Vietnam War
• claimed that Australia’s involvement in the Gallipoli campaign was justified.

Having read the columns, I’d say Henderson was half-right. They probably contributed to his sacking, but on commercial rather than political grounds.

That’s a rough estimate of the volume of outstanding contracts in financial derivatives, mainly interest swaps (some year-old and incomplete data here totals $175 trillion). As the name implies, these are usually matched, so that the actual net exposure of any party is a tiny fraction of the gross. But if the counterparty on one side of the swap should default, things could get very nasty. And, given the volume, default on a small proportion of the contracts would overwhelm the resources of the world’s central banks. To get an idea of magnitudes, US GDP is about $11 trillion or 5.5 per cent of outstanding contracts. When Long Term Credit Management went bust in 1998, threatening the stability of the world’s financial system, its gross position totalled $1.25 trillion, or about 0.6 per cent of the amount outstanding today.

Of course, the central bankers and prudential regulators have everything under control, and have simulated all the possible things that can go wrong. As for experimental tests of the stability of the system, we haven’t really had one yet, apart from LTCM. The last time the US financial system came under any real stress was the 1990 recession (or maybe the 1987 crash) at which time the volume of derivatives was maybe $1 trillion.

Still, as Eeyore said in a rather similar situation, “That’s what makes it so terribly interesting. Not really knowing until afterwards”.

It’s nice when blogging pays off in the form of published output, but it rarely happens as quickly as this. On Tuesday night Ken Parish alerted me to an amazing infrastructure proposal, similar to Colin’s canal. The plan is for a 3000-km transmission line connecting Darwin to the National Grid. Even a cursory examination was sufficient to show that the economics of this idea were crazy, and some late-night work produced an analysis ready for publication in today’s Fin (article over the fold).

I’m grateful to Ken for pointing this post out to me in the first place, and to commenters Robert Merkel and Derrida Derider (both regulars here) among others, who raised points that help me clarify my argument. Unfortunately, you can’t give this kind of credit in an opinion piece, but I can do so here. This is the kind of thing that shows the power of blogging.

One of the great things about the internets is that you can instantly find song lyrics, even if you only recall one line of the song. In the case of The Kinks, Dedicated follower of fashion there was only one word I couldn’t make out despite hearing the song many times. The crucial line turns out to be

Everywhere the carnabetian army marches on,
Each one an dedicated follower of fashion.

ANZ is offering to match donations to charity made by its Internet banking customers. There’s a choice of eight charities, so their should be something for people of all tastes and ideological views.

And, particularly if you’re a top-bracket taxpayer, it’s an offer too good to miss as the end of the tax year approaches. Give, say, $200 to your preferred charity. ANZ’s matching money will bring it up to $400. Then Mr Costello will refund you $100 (well, $96.80 or thereabouts), so you get $400 worth of warm inner glow for the price of a couple of tickets to the footy.

Banks being banks, I was naturally suspicious. But I tried it out and the documentation came back indicating that everything had gone as promised. I guess you have to sign up as an ANZ customer to take advantage of this. But it’s no big hassle and loyalty to one bank is a thing of the past – there’s no need to scrap your existing arrangements if you don’t want to.

Today’s big news, for me at least, is that Apple will be moving to use Intel chips in Macs, in place of the PowerPC chip that’s been used for the last ten years or so. This isn’t good news for Mac users, since the required transitions are always messy and painful. The reason for the shift is that IBM, which produces the PowerPC, has been unwilling or unable to produce a low-heat version of the G5 chip for use in Powerbooks. The shift marks the end of the PowerPC strategy, which began as an alliance between Apple, IBM and Motorola and seemed at first likely to produce a serious alternative to Intel’s dominance of the CPU market.

The good news for Mac users is that, thanks to the massive success of the iPod and the flow-on effects to Mac sales, Apple is in a stronger position to make this move than at any time in years. In addition, the Mac OS itself is easily portable. Still, I expect some of my favorite obscure applications will struggle to make the change.

Another item in the positive column is that this ought to make it easier to run Windows on the occasions I need it (I currently use the Virtual PC emulator which is impressive, considering, but still problematic), and may also reduce the difficulty of porting Windows software to Mac.

General Glut turns his attention to Australia’s current account deficit, a topic that’s also being debated in a number of threads over at Stephen Kirchner’s blog. There’s a lot to cover here, so I’ll list the main points I’m going to cover up front

• Martin Wolf makes a point I’ve also been going on about for some time, that the Anglosphere dominates the consuming and borrowing side of the global trade balance
• Although Australia and the US have similar CAD/GDP ratios, the underlying stats are very different
• The claim that Australia’s CAD is being used to finance non-dwelling investment doesn’t stack up well when you look at actual expenditures, rather than volumes derived from dubious price adjustments Read the rest of this entry »

As usual on Monday, you are invited to post your thoughts on any topic. Civilised discussion and no coarse language, please. As we approach the winter solstice (for Southern hemisphere readers), I’d be interested in seasonal reflections.

Pro-war left site Harry’s Place links to a rather equivocal piece by Christopher Hitchens on the Bush Administration’s backing for the Uzbekistan dictator Karimov, and picks out the following quote, among others

The United States did not invent or impose the Karimov government: It “merely” accepted its offer of strategic and tactical help in the matter of Afghanistan.

No exact matches, but “US did not create Saddam” pulls up a bunch of links from sites like Martin Kramer and billhobbs.com defending or downplaying the Reagan Administration policy of support for Saddam during the 1980s, when his foreign wars and internal oppression killed vast numbers of people. “Did not install Saddam” gives more, and no doubt other variants can be found.

Even now, I doubt that Hitchens would accept “the US did not invent or impose Saddam” as a justification for the aid and warm embraces (literal and metaphorical) given to Saddam in the 1980s. But, given his current trajectory, I think it’s only a matter of time.

I am disappointed though, that Harry’s Place, which has generally taken a principled line of opposition to all dictatorship,s should give a favorable link to this weaselly piece, which is more concerned with scoring points against Hitchens’ former allies than in advocating any particular response to Karimov.

PS: Mark Bahnisch is a little kinder, calling Hitchens “confused”.

So I was reading the less interesting bits of the paper and looked at a report on the price of oil which, as is pretty much routine, contained the suggestion that a shortage of refinery capacity was contributing to the high price of crude. Turning my brain on for a moment, it struck me that economics 101 suggests the exact opposite. Refineries and crude oil are complements in production, so a shortage of refinery capacity should lower the price of crude, while increasing the price of refined products such as petrol and distillate (easy thought experiment to show this: if there were no refineries at all, crude oil would be worthless).

A quick Google shows that I’m not the first person to notice this point, but the erroneous claim keeps on getting repeated.

How does an error like this get started. The obvious reason is that if the price of oil is driven by demand fluctuations (as at present) high prices for oil will be correlated with perceived shortages of refinery capacity. It will be easy to find specific instances to support an apparent causation going the other way. For a refinery working at maximum capacity, a breakdown will cause a supply interruption and will be very obvious. The same breakdown, occurring at a slack time, might be dealt with by rearranging operations and rescheduling maintenance and never reported to customers.

I just reread “The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia” (Ursula K. Le Guin), which I enjoyed as much as ever. There are a bunch of other books I should be reading, most of them weighty tomes on network theory, real options and so on, but Mark Bahnisch has kindly pointed me to a nearly endless source of distraction, China Miéville’s list of Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read. Le Guin is on the list, of course, along with many of my favorites (though many of the books recommended are new to me) and classics like Bellamy’s Looking Backwards and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Continuing on a European theme, and on recycled debates, the hardy perennial issue of Heidegger and the Nazis has re-emerged.

Back in the Pleistocene era of Australian blogging (2002), there were some interesting discussions of how we should react to the political mistakes and crimes of philosophers. Examples included Heidegger’s involvement in Nazism, Hayek’s support for Pinochet and Sartre’s adherence to the Stalinist French Communist Party . Don Arthur (site long gone, alas), Tim Dunlop (can’t find a link, but maybe still in the archives), Jason Soon and Ken Parish all had some interesting things to say.

Most contributors to the debate were more willing than I was to separate thought and action. I don’t think the idea that the arguments of a political theorist or philosopher can be treated in isolation from their life and work as a whole is, in general, sustainable. There are exceptions to this: a philosopher might collaborate with a dictatorial regime out of fear or ambition, even though this was the opposite of the course of action implied by their philosophical views. But that doesn’t appear to be the situation in any of the cases I’ve mentioned.

Much closer to the centre of the action, controversy over Heidegger has been reignited by the publication of Emmanuel Faye’s Heidegger, l’introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie, which also includes an attack on Carl Schmitt, another thinker associated with the Nazis but now popular on the left (Mark Bahnisch gives some background here). Not surprisingly, Faye’s book has produced a reaction, in the classic form of a manifesto (in 13 languages!). The manifesto announces this site, with many contributions (all in French), , with lots of references to to rprevious contributions to the debate, but without a systematic organisation, which makes it all a bit hard to follow. Some of the arguments focus on the details of the historical evidence, and others on the more general question of whether this kind of attack is legitimate.

I haven’t read Faye, and it sounds as if he pushes his case too far, but I’m not ready to acquit Heidegger of collaboration with the Nazis or to conclude that his philosophical views are untainted by his own apparent interpretation of them as a guide to action. Comments appreciated.