I can’t resist baiting from Ken Parish, even when he shifts the blame by heading his piece Bettina baits Quiggin. He’s referring to an article describing the debate between the two Peter Saunders whom I’ve mentioned previously. I’ve responded to the main arguments of the “New” or “CIS” Saunders here. I’ll just note the end of Arndt’s piece where she observes ” the huge gulf between the two men on the extent of poverty in Australia – Saunders the Old claims disadvantage is increasing, while the New cites evidence to show it remains constant ” (note, BTW, the use of “claims” vs “cites evidence to show”, a typical pundit trick)
In other words, after a decade when we have been told incessantly that Australia’s economic performance is ‘miraculous’, ‘world-beating’ and so on, the best that the advocates of free-market reform can claim is that poverty has remained constant.
Update Yet another comment thread that dwarfs (is this still a PC verb?) the original post in length, thoughtfulness and erudition. Be sure to read it. I plan a lengthy post covering the issues raised here, but I’ll have my work cut out.

Arthur Rorris of the the South Coast Labour Council has a very good analysis of the Cunningham by-election result, including an effective critique of the idea that Labor should be going after ‘aspirational’ voters. Having followed the entire debate on this, I conclude that “aspirational” refers to someone whose parents voted Labor, but whose economic situation and political views make them natural Liberal supporters, a description which applies to most of the leading members of the NSW Right.

The idea that former Labor heartland in the Western suburbs is full of these aspirationals is one of those factoids that takes a bit of work to refute. I have a go here, pointing out that lots of the Western suburbs are very like Pauline Hanson country in statistical terms.

The debate over gun control rages on, but as far as I can see, no-one on the pro-gun side of the debate has taken up my invitation to present a principled libertarian position. Instead, as Jack Strocchi points out in the comments thread for a previous post, the pro-gun side is trying to make a consequentialist and utilitarian argument that widespread gun ownership will save lives. It’s dishonest to make this argument if, in fact, you would oppose gun control regardless of the net impact on murder rates and so on. So, I’m putting forward a proposition which I’m inviting pro-gun writers like Alex Robson to join me in endorsing:
Proposition: Since any other costs and benefits of gun policy are trivial in relation to the saving of lives, I support whatever gun policy is most likely, on the available evidence, to minimise the loss of life from homicide and related causes
As far as I’m concerned, anyone who is not prepared to endorse this proposition (or some marginal variant) should be assumed to be dishonest when they present factual claims about the effects of different gun policies on murder rates and so on.

Anyone who is genuinely interested in the facts should read the analysis posted by Ken Parish. My prediction, though, is that having lost both the statistical argument and the political debate, the gun libertarians will resort to Steynwalling.

Update The proposed response of the Howard government has been excellent – a ban on all handguns except for police, security guards and elite pistol shooters and a gun buyback. Importantly this means a total ban on most types of handguns, which are not used in shooting competitions. And after initially ducking the issue as is their wont, the Labor state premiers have sniffed the political wind and realised that their only chance is to be even tougher. Bracks is pushing for a change which would require sporting shooters to keep their guns locked up at gun clubs, and Carr is pushing to include a bigger push against illegal gun imports (a factor in the localised rash of gun crimes in Sydney’s inner west). My guess is that the combination of requirements for psychological testing and the impossibility of actually having a gun to stroke at home will deter most of the marginal types from taking the sporting shooter route to gun ownership, and that membership of gun clubs will decline precipitously as a result.

Further update I should note that a couple of libertarians have responded to my invitation. ct8o (can you believe that I’ve seen this sig about 50 times and not realised that it’s a fancy way of writing “Cato”) put up some points to which Ken Parish has responded both in the comments thread and on his own blog. John Humphreys has a comment under “Guns and Libertarians” a couple of posts down, to which I’ve responded.
As I’ve been getting a lot of new visitors lately, some of whom may be new to blogging, I’ll repeat my advice to click on the comment line. In my not-so-humble opinion, this blog has one of the best comment threads to be found anywhere. In quite a few cases, the comments add more value to the debate than the original post. And please, don’t be shy about adding your own comments. You can always use a pseudonym, or just “Anon”.

Lots of American warbloggers and pro-gun types (there’s almost 100 per cent overlap between these groups in the blogworld) have been arguing that the Washington shootings are probably being carried out by a terrorist – either an Al Qaeda operative or a ‘volunteer’ like Hessan Hadayat, who shot two people dead at the El Al ticket counter at LAX before being killed himself by a security officer. Tim Dunlop’s coverage has lots of links on this. We can be certain that, whoever is doing this, Al Qaeda hasn’t failed to notice his success in creating terror.
The reasoning of the US writers seems to be that the implications for the gun control debate would be more favorable if this killer turned out to be a terrorist. At least as far as Australia is concerned, I think the opposite is true. We are, sadly, becoming used to periodic multiple gun murders committed by professional criminals and by ‘ordinary law-abiding gun owners’ who’ve cracked under the various pressures of life. We must now face the new threat that some local supporter of bin Laden (or some other terrorist) will decide to martyr himself and, more importantly, other Australians.
For the American warbloggers, the answer seems to be that ‘ordinary’ Americans should be armed at all times, and that ethnic and religious profiling should be used to identify and disarm those who are not ‘ordinary’. Leaving aside the awful implications of such a policy, these guys seem to have conveniently forgotten Oklahoma City, not to mention many other acts of terror committed by a groups and individuals whose ethnic and religious profiles are very similar to their own.
The likelihood that terrorists will adopt a strategy of random shootings adds to the urgency of removing as many guns as possible from circulation. This might be of limited value against ‘professional’ terrorists, but it would reduce the risk of ‘volunteers’. If we diverted the resources currently allocated to chasing drug users into a crackdown on illegal guns, a lot of progress could be made. Guns are, after all, metal objects, and much harder to conceal than drugs.
Update The main suspect arrested in the sniper case, John Muhammad, appears to fit the profile of a ‘volunteer’ . Basically, as Jack Strocchi points out in the comments thread (does he ever sleep) a black Islamic version of Timothy McVeigh.

This NYT piece by Floyd Norris has been given the headline Looking Glass on Earnings Just Got Darker, but I think this is wrong, assuming “dark” is used correctly to mean obscure (it’s a slightly mangled quote from the Bible), and not to mean “dismal”.
The S&P definition of “core earnings” reported in the article is pretty much right. It
(i) expenses stock options
(ii) calculates pension costs correctly
(iii) does not allow the exclusion of ‘one-time’ charges for restructuring
(iv) allows the exclusion of charges for impairment of goodwill in acquisitions (this is correct in the case of stock-only mergers, it’s not clear whether it also applies when cash is paid).
The upshot is that core earnings give a much clearer picture of profitability than pro-forma earnings, operating earnings or Generally Accepted Accounting Practice (GAAP).
The bottom line – profits are less than half those reported by companies and the S&P 500 is currently trading at around 50 times earnings.

Doonesbury is running daily strips on blogging at the moment, but the Sunday strips are on a different cycle. Ken Parish should love this one.

Ken Parish presents a solid demolition of gun lobby lies, particularly those of John Lott in yesterday’s Oz. The claim that widespread ownership of deadly weapons is going to save lives is so silly that no-one without a strong prior prejudice could believe it, even without the glaring evidence of the US. The most common prejudice is that of ‘ordinary law-abiding gun owners’ who have no intention of killing anybody, and don’t see why they shouldn’t have a gun. Almost certainly, the Monash killer fell into this category until fairly recently.

Another possible prejudice is political/ideological. Jason Soon took the trouble to argue that gun control wasn’t inconsistent with his libertarian views, but most of those arguing against gun control (including John Lott) are ideological libertarians. Rather than fighting over the statistics, which are pretty clear-cut, I’d be interested to see some of these critics present a principled statement of a libertarian position (there’s obviously more than one) on gun ownership. In particular, does it extend to private armies, and to military weapons, that is, heavy weapons and not just firearms? This would seem to provide a defence against the state so feared by libertarians, whereas handguns just give citizens the means of killing each other.

Update: The two students killed in the Monash attack were Steven Chan and Xu Hui (William) Wu. We should think of their families along with all the others mourning loved ones in these dreadful times.

A blogging welcome to Gary Sauer-Thompson who has a fascinating blog, but hasn’t yet learned how to hyperlink. The best way of learning all these things is to find a page with good stuff on it, save it as HTML and then copy what you want. But for those who don’t want to go to this trouble, Blogger.com has a “Blog this” button you can download. And of course you can always buy a book on HTML, and follow the advice of the classic acronym RTFM (read the … manual).

Early news reports suggested that the Monash killer was disarmed by an econometrics lecturer, Lee Gordon-Brown, who tackled him, with the assistance of students. But this report says the helpers were another lecturer, Brett Inder (a distant acquaintance of mine) and a student who turns out also to be a part-time lecturer and martial arts champion. I certainly hope I never have to deal with anything like this, but these guys are setting a pretty high standard for the rest of us, whether or not they want to be called heroes.

At this stage, it’s not clear whether the push for better gun laws will fizzle out into meaningless tightening of rules that will be evaded as soon as our attention is diverted, or whether we’ll get a buyback sufficiently broad to remove most handguns from the community. I suspect that the politicians who are ducking for cover have misjudged the politics of this question (I’m sure they all know that the right policy is a near-total ban). At least in country Australia, rifles and shotguns were standard tools until quite recently, and restrictions on their ownership and use raised real concerns about the erosion of traditional ways of life. Handguns are the province of urban criminals, psychos, collectors (whose motives must be considered dubious) and a relatively small number of genuine sportspeople whose needs could be accommodated through an armoury system. A handgun ban will be much easier politically than the ban on semi-automatic rifles and shotguns.

Update Alex Robson weighs into the gun debate, showing in the process that you can prove anything with statistics, or at least give it the old college try. He quotes Joyce Malcolm saying:

In 1981 the American rate [of homicide] was 8.7 times the English rate, in 1995 it was 5.7 times the English rate, and the latest study puts it at 3.5 times ..(one sentence snipped)… Yet Americans still enjoy a substantially lower rate of violent crime than England, without the “restraint on personal liberty” English governments have seen as necessary.

If Americans “enjoy” 3.5 times the murder risk, I’ll stick with Australian misery. And while I’m not sure precisely what is meant by “restraint on personal liberty” , the reduction in American murder rates in the 1990s has been achieved, in part, by imposing the highest rates of imprisonment in the developed world (I think anywhere in the world, but I’ll check this).

• Unemployment on the rise. Australian Financial Review 12 September
  Summary: The real rate of unemployment is between 10 and 20 per cent
  Grab: Taking all the evidence into account it seems reasonable to conclude that unemployment in Australia is worse than at any time since World War II, except for the trough of ‘the recession we had to have’. This dismal outcome has been recorded at a time when our economic performance is routinely touted as ‘miraculous’ and ‘worldbeating’
• Breaking the camel’s back. Australian Financial Review 26 September
  Summary: In the name of consumers, economic rationalists and managerialists have made life miserable for producers
  Grab: The fable of the straw that broke the camel’s back is, among other things, a warning about overburdening those who actually do the work. Economic reformers and enterprising managers have been adding straws to the bundle for at least a decade. It’s time to reduce the burden.
• A case for equity partners. Australian Financial Review 10 October
  Summary: Responds to critics of a proposal to allow financial institutions to take an equity stake in owner-occupied housing. Surveys the housing bubble.
  Grab: There are plenty of unresolved questions about equity partnerships, but the proposal does not, as many have suggested, deserve instant dismissal. Along with a number of Australian and international economists, representing a broad spectrum of opinion on economic policy issues, I was a signatory of a statement arguing that further investigation of this proposal was desirable. Nothing I have seen in the ensuing debate has led me to change my mind.