After 44 years, Geelong has finally won a Grand Final, and in stunning fashion with the largest margin ever in a grand final. Having followed them for 40 of those years, before changing religion as a symbol of commitment to my move to Brisbane, I was really glad to see this, even though it was too late for me to be part of it.
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This story of a DFAT employee sacked for the “unethical” action of responding to an email from a Labor party staff member, and reinstated yesterday by the IRC seemed to be just another example of the politicisation and rule by fear that characterises the public service under the current government*. But digging into the story a bit further, my wife found an amazing tangled web, in which the government’s star witness was entangled in drug dealing, money laundering and blackmail. This naturally qualified him to be part of the team that successfully oversaw the actions of AWB in Baghdad, and, in 2002, to have his security classification restored
The original reason that the DFAT employee, Trent Smith, was targeted was that he was under suspicion for leaking minutes of meeting in early 2003, in which Alexander Downer stated what we all now know to be true, that, despite its protestations the Australian government was committed to war with Iraq**.
* Of course, this process started before the current government
** Subject of course, to the need to keep Saddam sweet as long as possible so he would keep buying our wheat.
Having decided more or less unanimously that war, torture, and indefinite imprisonment without trial are good (provided, of course, we talking about actions of the US), the Right may finally have opened up a topic where they can find some disagreement. Was slavery (in the US, of course) all that bad? Michael Medved at TownHall says No, and gets plenty of support from TownHall readers and other rightwing bloggers (here, here, here, here, here and here. But there’s at lest one dissenter, and some qualifications here.
Of course, leftwingers have been looking for the great split, in which real conservatives repudiate the rightwing radicalism of the Republican party, for longer than I can recall, and it’s never really happened. Every now and then someone like Andrew Sullivan or Bruce Bartlett peels off, and the rest of the Right circles the wagons a little closer. My guess is that the final abandonment of the anti-slavery tradition on which the Republican Party was founded cannot be far off, and that the party of Lincoln will become, once and for all, the party of Jefferson Davis (in some places, this has already happened).
Among many questions that you could ask about the US electoral systems, one of the more minor but harder to answer is Why Tuesday. More precisely, if you want to maximise turnout, why not hold the election on Saturday as in Australia, or even keep the polls open all weekend? I asked this question a couple of years ago , and there was no obvious answer. Now there’s an effort to raise the issue and force candidates to take a stand.
As with many other features of the US system, there is a historical explanation that has long since ceased to be relevant, but the bigger question is why such things persist. In particular, why don’t
It’s fair to note that the UK situation is even worse. Elections are traditionally held on Thursday, even though the Prime Minister is free to select a more sensible day of the week.
I’ll be talking today at the Australian blogging conference, at the Kelvin Grove Campus of QUT. More details here
A reader writes
‘Im about to assume duties as Treasurer of my local church and have found that our reserves are not diversified but are with one institution already in the news as possibly suspect. The outgoing Treasurer is convinced that bank (ADI) deposits are guaranteed by the Reserve Bank and is resisting diversification. My reading of the Reserve Bank site, the APRA site and the modified Banking Act suggests that this “protection” was done away with by changes introduced by the Howard Government and that the claimed “protection” is an urban myth. Hence could you, or any of the readers of your blog advise – are deposits with ADIs protected in that someone will repay them in the event of institutional failure? and if not what should church (and club) treasurer’s do to protect these investments (many people in my position fail to realise that they can be personally liable for any losses)?
My response is that there is no explicit guarantee of deposits, although there is a strong expectation that the Reserve Bank would protect depositor. Unfortunatley, it is not entirely clear which deposits would be guaranteed, which makes life tricky for people like my correspondent. I don’t think there ever was an ironclad guarantee but it’s correct to say that the changes associated with the establishment of APRA moved us further away from such a situation. Coincidentally, the editorial in today’s Fin discusses this very topic, noting that Costello has been sitting, for the last two years, on a report recommending an explicit guarantee, limited to $20 000. I must have missed the whole thing, as I don’t remember any movement on this issue since the Wallis Committee.
Here are some thoughts from 2002. An extract
the medical insurance panic would be nothing compared to what might happen if, in the midst of a liquidity crisis at a major bank, one of our socially responsible talk-show hosts suddenly discovered that there was no government guarantee for bank deposits. This happened on a small scale in the 1970s, forcing NSW Premier Neville Wran to take a loudhailer into the streets to stop a run on a building society.
It’s midsemester break at UQ, and I’m just back from a few days holiday on beautiful North Stradbroke island, where beaches are white and Internet connections are patchy. I see that various comments threads have run out of control, with my post on US experience of war being derailed into a string of general rants about the merits or otherwise of US social organisation.
If you believe what you read in the papers, Stradbroke was similarly out of control, although a close textual analysis reveals that the “drunken teen packs” terrorising the island did so mainly by standing around looking bored and not picking up their rubbish. Admittedly Point Lookout is strung out over a couple of kilometers, and its “dimly lit streets” make it hard to be sure what’s going on, but the end of town we stayed at was sufficiently quiet that the ticking of the clock kept us awake. Having invested in a reporter and camera crew, I guess the Courier-Mail had to beat up a story of some kind.
It’s time, once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual, civilised discussion and absolutely no coarse language, please.
A brawl has erupted over a statement in the stump speech of Republican candidate Fred Thompson, who asserts that the US has “shed more blood for other people’s liberty than any other combination of nations in the history of the world” As the WaPo points out, our Russian allies lost millions in WWII alone, as did Britain and France in WWI which (at least nominally) they entered ‘that small nations might be free’. In fact, US casualties in World War I (about 120 000 killed and 200 000 wounded) were comparable to those of Australia and New Zealand,which between them had about 5 per cent of the US population.
Unsurprisingly, vvarious people have tried to quibble by saying that the other losses weren’t in defence of freedom, so that Thompson’s claim is true by default. But in that case, Thompson ought to have said something like “the US, alone among nations, fights for the freedom of othersâ€? which at least sounds like standard meaningless stump-speech rhetoric rather than a false factual claim.
Leaving motivations aside, the striking fact is that Thompson’s claim is pretty much the opposite of the truth. The US is notable among major nations in how little it has suffered in foreign wars, and this helps to explain why the war party is so strong there.
Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.
One of the stranger efforts of the political right over the last decade has been the effort to paint Rachel Carson as a mass murderer, on the basis of bogus claims conflating the US ban on non-public health uses of DDT with a non-existent ban on the use of DDT as an antimalarial. Starting from the lunatic fringe of the LaRouche movement and promoted primarily by current and retired hacks for the tobacco industry, this claim has become received wisdom throughout the US Republican party and its received offshoots. Although this nonsense has been comprehensively demolished by bloggers, most notably Tim Lambert, article-length refutations are desperately needed. Now Aaron Swartz has a piece published in Extra!. It’s great to see this but, as the global warming debate has shown, one refutation is never enough in resisting the Republican War on Science.
The NYTimes experiment with putting premium content behind a paywall lasted a bit longer than I expected, but eventually the cost, in terms of separation from the Internet at large, has outweighed the benefits. The NYT columnists and archives will now be available to all readers. (Hat tip, Andrew Leigh).
As Jay Rosen says, this is good news for the conversation that is the blogosphere. Paywalls are an obstacle that we can’t get around individually, since, even if I have free access to a site, there is no point in linking it for readers who have to pay.
But there’s always a downside. The Times decision has been motivated not only by the increasing costs of a closed system but by the increasing returns to advertising, of which the lion’s share is driven through Google (and to a lesser extent, other search engines), which rely on links to place their ads.
In my experience, growing returns to advertising are being manifested in more, and more obtrusive, ads. This may signal a renewed arms race with ad blockers. I’ve just installed Adblock Plus on Firefox, and am waiting to see if that gets me blocked from ad-dependent sites.
I was on Lateline Business last week, with a couple of sentences out of a 10-minute interview on the possible privatisation of Medibank Private. Here it is for your enjoyment
Not surprisingly, given the mini-crisis surrounding Howard’s leadership, the Newspoll released yesterday, with the two party preferred position for Labor shifting from 59-41 to 55-45 was big news. But was there really any news, or just the usual random fluctuation. The ABC News on Monday night made it sound huge, describing it as the government cutting Labor’s lead by 8 per cent. On the other hand, if you started with the view that the true position was 57-43, neither this poll nor the last one would lead you to change this view. Two percentage points is well inside the usual allowance for sampling error in polls with a typical sample size of a bit over 1000. So, you might say, it’s all just a beatup.
Comparing the two polls gives a somewhat different answer, which my son Daniel kindly computed for me. Given two polls with 1000 respondents, and the stated results, you can reject, at the 5 per cent confidence level but not at the 1 per cent level, the null hypothesis that they are from the same population. That’s because, given no underlying change in the population, the chance of two variations in opposite directions is smaller than the chance of each variation considered separately.
But that doesn’t end the problems. If you run polls every fortnight, you’re bound, sooner or later to get two samples in a row that deviate in opposite directions, producing a big apparent swing.
FWIW, looking at the Newspoll results since July, I see no reason to think there’s been any real movement in either direction. Aggregating all the polls, and reducing the sampling error accordingly, I’d put the Newspoll 2PP vote somewhere in the range 56-57. The other polls seem to be much the same.
The real problem, though, is non-sampling error. If the question being asked doesn’t match up to the way people are actually going to vote, all of these statistical considerations count for nothing.
Over at Cosmic Variance, physicist Sean Carroll offers some admittedly uninformed speculation about utility theory and economics, saying
Anyone who actually knows something about economics is welcome to chime in to explain why all this is crazy (very possible), or perfectly well-known to all working economists (more likely), or good stuff that they will steal for their next paper (least likely). The freedom to speculate is what blogs are all about.
I didn’t notice anything crazy but there’s a fair bit that’s well-known. For example, Carroll observes that utility is generally not additive across commodities, and that some goods are likely to be more closely related than others. That’s textbook stuff, covered by the basic concepts of complementarity and substitutability.
This is a more interesting and significant point
But I’d like to argue something a bit different — not simply that people don’t behave rationally, but that “rational� and “irrational� aren’t necessarily useful terms in which to think about behavior. After all, any kind of deterministic* behavior — faced with equivalent circumstances, a certain person will always act the same way — can be modeled as the maximization of some function. But it might not be helpful to think of that function as utility, or as the act of maximizing it as the manifestation of rationality.
I can only agree. But economists and (even more, I think) political scientists in the “rational choice” tradition regularly get themselves tied up in all sorts of knots about this, switching between the trivial notion of maximising a function and substantive claims in which rationality is frequently equated with egoism. Joseph Butler demolished this kind of reasoning nearly 300 years ago, but it keeps on popping up.
* This qualification isn’t necessary, and Carroll notes later on that choices are often stochastic. The resulting probability distributions still maximise an appropriately defined function.
As I foreshadowed, my Fin column last week gave John Howard some unsolicited advice on how to deal himself back into the electoral game; namely ratify Kyoto. Of course, he’s done nothing of the kind, but still I was surprised by the lameness of his latest offering, a retro stunt involving hospital-based training for nurses. With this and the Merseyside fiasco a month or so ago, Howard seems determined to discredit himself with anyone who takes health policy seriously.
Anyway, I think Howard would still benefit by breaking with Bush and ratifying Kyoto. As my piece concludes “If Howard won’t take this step, it’s good evidence that he is, as both internal and external critics have claimed, out of touch and out of ideas.
”
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Andrew Leigh points me to a recent study of US bankruptcy (paywalled, but the abstract is over the page). which concludes that the increased variability of income, and exposure to expense shocks such as medical expenses are not important factors in explaining the dramatic increase in bankruptcy rates since 1970. (I’ve seen a blog link to this also, but can’t find it now).
Count me as unconvinced. The main reason for rejecting income shocks is an explanation of bankruptcy is that, in the model of the paper, households should respond to increasing variance of permanent shocks by increasing precautionary savings. This appears to impute to households a much higher level of ex ante information about future income shocks than they actually possess, and also to rely critically on strong assumptions about rational planning. The whole credit card business is centred on the fact that lots of people (about half the population) don’t pay their monthly balances down to zero and therefore carry semi-permanent debt at very high interest rates. It seems pretty clear that it is people in this group who are most exposed to bankruptcy, and it’s hard to imagine that they are the type to hold precautionary savings.
That’s not to discount the importance of the ‘supply side’, in terms of easier access to credit, which has assisted people in managing increasingly risk in income and expenses, at the cost of steadily increasing debt-income ratios. But you have to look at both sides of the story, and this paper rules out one side by assumption.
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In a piece on the canon wars which quotes CT member Michael Berube, the NYT asserts that college English curricula have seen “a decided shift toward works of the present and the recent past. In 1965, the authors most frequently assigned in English classes were Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope and T. S. Eliot, according to a survey by the National Association of Scholars, an organization committed to preserving “the Western intellectual heritage.â€? In 1998, they were Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Milton, Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison.”
TS Eliot died in 1965, but given the lags in assigning textbooks, I think it would be reasonable to regard him has having been a living author when his work was set. So, the number of living authors in the top six has moved from one to … one. The only other evidence of the recent past is the inclusion of Virginia Woolf, whose major works were written only 70 years before they made it into the curriculum. Indeed, we are in the throes of radical change here, it seems.
Since the NYT doesn’t mention the obvious difference between the two lists, I won’t either, but I will say that I think the 1998 list is an improvement.
Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.
Now that everyone has finally agreed that Iraq is another Vietnam, we can move on to the next point which is that, having lost the war, the war party in the US is going to blame their domestic opponents, just like they did after Vietnam.[1] The only difference is that the war-peace divide now matches the partisan division between Republicans and Democrats.
In this setting, the idea of looking for a compromise is just silly. The Republicans have made it clear that they don’t want one. Even the dwindling group of alleged moderates aren’t going to vote for anything that would seriously constrain Bush. So, the Democrats can choose between acting to stop the war now, or inheriting it in 2009 [2] . There’s no possibility of pushing anything serious past the Senate filibuster, let alone override a veto.
The only real option, apart from continued acquiescence, is for Congress to fulfil its constitutional role and refuse to pay more for this endless war, starting with the $50 billion in supplementary funding Bush is asking for. There’s no need for any Republican votes, just for the Democrats to stick together and stand firm. That hasn’t been the Democratic way for a long time, but maybe its time now. Certainly, the majority of Americans want to get out of Iraq, just as, in the end, they wanted out of Vietnam.
1. In this context, it’s notable that despite the revisionism of the war party, there’s no evidence that Americans have changed their minds about Vietnam. The great majority still see it as a mistake, just as they did when the war ended
2, I suppose the counterargument is that, by doing what they were elected to do in 2006, the Democrats will wreck their presidential and congressional chances in 2008. If so, perhaps they should give up now.
A couple of months ago, there seemed to be some hope that the record-breaking drought in south-eastern Australia was breaking. There was good rain, and the switch from El Nino to La Nina seemed to be established. Now, it seems, those hopes are gone. The really good rain was confined to coastal areas, most notably Sydney. Temporary water entitlements are now going for $1000 a megalitre, and irrigators are likely to receive something like 5 per cent of their normal allocations.
The water market should do some good in ensuring that water flows where it is most needed, most obviously in keeping tree crops alive. But water is also needed for cities and towns in the Murray-Darling Basin and for Adelaide, so the market will have to be combined with administrative allocation, and there may be a need for emergency measures.
In these circumstances, the last thing we need is the continuing squabbling between Federal and State governments, and within the Federal government between Nationals and Liberals, which has led to only marginal progress under the National Water Initiative. It’s likely that nothing much will happen until after the Federal election and, to be fair, there’s not much that can be done until we see how bad the summer is going to be. But it seems clear that the incoming government will have an emergency on its hands.
Nanni at RSMG has more on the limitations of demand management. This is not going to be an easy problem to solve.
Meanwhile, and relatedly, several species of coral and many seaweeds have been listed as vulnerable or critically endangered as a result of climate change, specifically the increasing frequency and severity of El Niño events.
As the Liberal party meeting begins it looks unlikely that Howard will go, but not beyond the realms of possibility. If Costello stands up and demands the job, he will probably get it. And Howard might just decide to pack in the whole sorry crew. However, neither of these scenarios looks likely.
I have a trivial and selfish reason for hoping Howard stays at least until tomorrow. My Fin column, due out tomorrow, gives Howard some unsolicited advice and will have to be rewritten if there is a new PM.
A while back, I observed in a footnote
Bush isn’t stupid. He’s shown himself to be quite sharp in the pursuit of his own short term interests and those of his backers. But he’s ignorant, narrow-minded, intellectually lazy and unwilling to learn from experience, a combination that produces reliably stupid policy decisions.
Google finds quite a few similar judgements, suggesting that the BlogGeist is in tune. Now Salon’s write-off for an interview with Bush’s biographer says “Bush has a surprising intellect but is incapable of curiosity and owning up to mistakes.”
I’m guessing this initial judgement will be confirmed by a historical verdict that will rank Bush among the worst of US Presidents, if not the absolute worst (Among other candidates for this dubious honour, Nixon had many positive achievements, Harding did no real harm, Andrew Johnson was at least trying for reconciliation and Buchanan’s big failure came after his successor had been elected). Harding’s case in particular shows that amiable stupidity is less dangerous than other intellectual flaws.
Looking at today’s news, it’s pretty clear that the Prime Ministership is Peter Costello’s for the asking. We have two senior ministers, Downer and Turnbull giving non-denial denials to claims that they want Howard out. That means there have to be enough numbers for a serious challenge. That in turn means that Howard’s position is untenable, if such a challenge is made. Howard might win a party-room vote, but he would be doomed at the election even if he did. By contrast, Costello would have a chance. The remorseless logic of game theory now implies that anyone who cares about keeping their seat should support the challenger, and try to force Howard to bow out gracefully.
But Howard has made it clear he won’t do this in the absence of an overt challenge from Costello. He judges, on the basis of past experience that Costello won’t have the bottle*, and that facing the challenge down gives him a chance to present himself as a strong leader in the contest with Rudd.
* I had various thoughts about the origin of this term for nerve/guts. A quick search of the Internet found support for all my ideas and quite a few I hadn’t thought of. It looks as if it will remain a mystery.
Quite a few people have pointed out that, while the betting markets have now caught up with the opinion polls in making Labor hot favorites to win the election, seat by seat markets while shortening suggest a very tight outcome. The question that doesn’t seem to have been asked (not aloud at any rate) is whether there is (or was) an arbitrage opportunity here. That is, if you backed the Liberals to win the election, while backing Labor in all the marginal seats needed to win, could you make a “Dutch book” against the bookies and guarantee a net gain no matter what happened (within reason – you would still lose if Labor got in by winning lots of supposedly ultra-safe seats while losing in the marginals).
Looking at the movements in seat prices, I suspect this was a real possibility not long ago, and that alert punters have exploited it, closing the gap. But this is definitely a case for Andrew Leigh.
Update As you might expect, I’m not the first to have asked this question. Here’s John Barrdear asking and Simon Jackman answering (a bit obscurely – I think he’s assuming a uniform swing, but I’m not sure). I’m still keen to discover Andrew’s thoughts on all this.
Immediate further update No need to worry. They’ve stopped taking bets
It’s time, once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual, civilised discussion and absolutely no coarse language, please.
A few thoughts, not well organised, which I may update
* Labor has now changed leaders in five states, twice as a result of illness and three times because of a voluntary decision to retire, with no sign of any damage as a result. Such a string of smooth transitions is almost unprecedented in Australian political history where the rule is that all careers end in failure (defeat by the electorate or by a party rival, or resignation in disgrace)
* Following from the previous point, if the Federal Libs get the drubbing predicted by the opinion polls and Rudd doesn’t run rapidly into disaster, Labor will be established as the natural party of government. It’s hard to see how the Liberals, for whom success is the main raison d’etre could survive this for long
* I imagine Beattie’s departure will take the sting out of the council amalgamations issue in Queensland, which will be a gift to Kevin Rudd in a couple of marginal seats such as Herbert.
* Obviously, this has contributed to the pressure on Howard to follow Beattie’s example. I can’t see him caving in to this, nor can I see a last-minute switch to Costello doing the government any good. On the other hand, the way things are going, this is Costello’s last chance to be PM, if only for six weeks or so.
Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.
Unsurprisingly, the APEC leaders meeting in Sydney have signed a statement on climate change, grandly described as the
Sydney Declaration and described by Dennis Shanahan and Cameron Stewart in the Oz as a ‘sweeping triumph’.
It’s unsurprising because once the host nation has proposed a topic, it’s pretty much unthinkable for a meeting like APEC to break up without some sort of agreement, because such agreements commonly have grandiose titles and because the Oz … well, you get the idea.
Most of the attention so far has been focused on the set of initiatives referred to as the “APEC Action Agenda”, which includes various voluntary steps on energy efficiency, reafforestation and so forth. As my co-author Frank Jotzo notes, “In practical terms, that will mean almost nothing”. A fair indication of the significance of this agenda is its treatment by the New York Times, which gives a one-line link to the AP wire service report in which Jotzo is cited. The Washington Post has a story on the Bush-Howard statement a couple of days ago, but nothing so far on the great Declaration.
The really important point, though, is the section on Future International Action which begins “We reaffirm our commitment to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).” (Kyoto is a protocol to this convention). There’s more, spelling out the post-Kyoto bargaining process embodied in UNFCCC In other words, the idea that APEC would produce an alternative to Kyoto, or a post-Kyoto agreeement outside the UNFCCC is dead.
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Ken Parish has written in with some comments on whether the requirement to acquire land on just terms applies in the Territories (short answer: probably not). It’s crossposted at Club Troppo.
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