Jason Soon proves he’s definitely not a warblogger with a very sensible analysis of the problems that would follow a successful US invasion of Iraq.
As I said a month or so ago,

“The NY Times says that America ought to be discussing Battle Plans for Iraq. The bigger question, I would have thought, is, what do they do once they’ve got rid of Saddam? Bush senior had no answer to this one, and therefore decided to leave him in place.”

Ray Cassin at The Age has an interesting piece, pointing out the discrepancies between Tony Abbott’s social conservatism and his economic radicalism. I made much the same point in the Financial Review a couple of years ago.
Along the way, Ray gets stuck into “Theodore Dalrymple” the pseudonymous social commentator for the UK Spectator who is currently much-beloved of the Australian right.

Business Week may have its doubts about Greenspan, but the Brits love him. Forbes.com reports that the British Treasury announced on Tuesday that Queen Elizabeth had approved an honorary knighthood (KBE) for Greenspan.
“The award is in recognition of his outstanding contribution to global economic stability and the benefit that … (Britain) has received from the wisdom and skill with which he has led the U.S. Federal Reserve Board,” according to press release issued by the British Treasury.
I have a feeling this will look about as good a judgement as Yasser Arafat’s Nobel Peace Prize in a year or two. Of course, in a year or two, Yasser Arafat’s Nobel Peace Prize could look prescient.

In a Business Week interview, William Wolman gives a very sensible take on the current US economy (that is, he and I agree on almost every point). Highlights are
(i) His critique of Greenspan for not deflating the bubble earlier
(ii) His discussion of pension liabilities, particularly those for firms with defined benefit plans
On the latter point, it’s also worth looking at The New Pinch from Pensions. Paul Krugman estimates the impact at “50 WorldComs”, but doesn’t say how much a WorldCom is. I assume he means the $4 billion in outright fraud, making the total impact $200 billion. Since this would occur with -6 per cent returns, it looks conservative.
More on pensions as a 50+ supporter of Social security privatisation recants.
And a bit more from Floyd Norrisat the NYT

Brad DeLong says Mac OS X gives Five Nines Instead of Nine Fives (reliability that is).

The great Kaus vs Krugman war rolls on. The first round was about whether Krugman misstated the details of an allegedly cosy deal that Bush got in relation to his baseball team in Texas. The second deals with the saga of an Office of Management and Budget press release which grossly underestimated the impact of the Bush tax cuts on the Budget balance. Krugman called it a “lie” and Kaus says this is unfair, it’s really only a “mistake”.
Few will have the patience to wade through the details on such fine semantic points. The real issues in this feud are:
(1) Was Bush the beneficiary of a series of dubious deals in his Texas days ?
(2) Are the Bush administration’s budget projections honest ?
Unless Kaus can answer “No” and “Yes” respectively, his criticisms of Krugman are nothing more than nitpicking.

This guy ranks economists by their publications using a bunch of different measures. Of course, this means everyone can pick the one they like best. My pick is the Bauwens scale.

Four or five days ago, I was waiting for an explosive response to the TIME Magazine piece “Before Sept. 11 — The Secret History”, which showed that bungling and infighting in the incoming Bush administration caused a Clinton administration plan for a concerted attack on al-Qaeda to be shelved. Apart from brief mentions in a few lefty blogs, there’s been nothing. Apparently, if it doesn’t fit the warblogger world view, it doesn’t get mentioned

Update: My post seems to have aroused more of a response than the original article (well, 2 responses anyway).

Over at Pre-whacked snakes, Tex points to the rather lame response I’d already cited from Andrew Sullivan, as well as a brief mention in Right Wing News and a lengthy piece by Pejman, of whom I hadn’t previously heard.

Meanwhile, Jason Soon asks
” Am I considered a warblogger or no? ”
I’d certainly never call you a warblogger, Jason.

He goes on to observe:
“You might have an intellectual obligation to blog on this if you’ve had a history of condemning Clinton and praising Bush to the skies. So I’d argue only warbloggers who have done this are obliged to blog on this report notwithstanding the fact that bloggers are entitled to blog on whatever they find interesting.”

I agree with this.But there are an awful lot of warbloggers and other pundits in this category.

But before we get carried away in a flame war, I just want to say that I predicted a lively response to the Time article and I was wrong, notwithstanding the pieces noted by Tex.I think this says something about the capacity of some blogging circles to ignore unwelcome information, but maybe, as Jason says, this was already old news.

A nice piece on corporate hubris from the New York Times. Not that we in Australia can laugh – the collapse of Ansett and FAI among others hit corporate sponsorship of sport pretty hard.
All this is a reminder of how deep the worship of business has gone in the last twenty years or so. Just about everything, from sporting stadiums to university buildings has a corporate name attached. MBA programs have proliferated despite the fact that, even during the boom, most of them were worthless. Senior teachers, who used to have titles like “Subject master” are now called “Executive teachers”. The bursting of the bubble has undermined all of this, but social changes like this take a long time to develop, and an equally long time to unravel.
Still, people are starting to ask questions that were once unaskable. For example:
Does the Government Have a Role in Stabilizing the Economy?
A decade ago, anyone in Australia who asked this question was automatically accused of the dreadful crime of “pump-priming”. Today, Keynes is coming back into fashion.

Scott Wickstein pushes two of my hot buttons at once, supporting both Telstra privatisation and Windoze. The problem with Scott’s argument is that, in both cases, he thinks there’s a choice between competition and monopoly. In reality, Telstra is and will remain a monopoly for all practical purposes. The real choice is between
(i) a publicly-owned monopoly, limited to the natural monopoly component of the business
(ii) a privately-owned (ultimately foreign-owned) monopoly extending from telecoms into all kinds of media (eg TV and Internet)
As regards operating systems, the forces pushing for monopoly (compatibility/network externalities) are huge. Only this can explain why a lame OS like MS-DOS ruled the roost for more than a decade, before being succeeded by an imitation (Windows 3.1/95) of an alternative that had been available all along. And only the brilliance of MacOS (plus Bill Gates’ fear of antitrust) can explain why we have a 95 per cent monopoly instead of 100 per cent.