After getting so much good publicity lately, a lot of Ozploggers, beginning with Gary Sauer-Thompson have been discussing whether blogging is the new forum for public intellectuals. Inevitably, mention has been made of Richard Posner’s book, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline . It’s not a great book, but it has its moments, and of course it has that essential for a bestseller, a list. I reviewed it for the Fin Review a while back. Here’s a short extract:

For an Australian reader, though, the really striking feature of Posner’s list is the obscurity of so many of the names on it. and especially of the American academic public intellectuals who are the primary focus of the book. I could only recognise about half the names in this category, and my efforts were boosted by the overrepresentation of economists in the list, reflecting the fact that my academic roots and Posner’s are much the same.

Although we are allegedly living in a globalised world, it is evident that the market for public intellectuals remains nationally segmented. Each country, it seems wants to hear its own policy problems discussed in its own accent. To illustrate this point, a Google search of Australian websites gives over 900 references to Donald Horne and over 2400 to the late Manning Clark, compared to just over 100 for William F. Buckley and 33 for William Kristol. Even rank-and-file Australian public intellectuals (such as the present reviewer) are better represented on Australian websites than these giants of the US scene.

Although the Australian (political) blogworld began as an offshoot of the US warblogger scene, and people like Tim Blair remain primarily attuned to that scene, a similar pattern is now emerging as ‘Ozplogistan’ becomes a real (virtual) community, rather than a mere collective noun.

Samela Harris in The Advertiser gives nice plugs to Tim Blair, Gary Sauer-Thompson and me, managing a local angle by mentioning that I am Adelaide-born.

At the end of a long and learned post Scott Wickstein awards the palm to “John Quiggin – Ozplogistan’s best beard”.

As Scott correctly observes “The Romans were quite insistant on this issue, and they regarded facial hair, and trousers, as the mark of a barbarian. ” In fact, the word “barbarian” means “bearded”.

Update Even blind Homer nods. I was confusing Latin barba “beard” with Greek barbaroi (babble or speak like a foreigner. Thanks to Robert and Scott for correcting this error. Actually the word appears to have come into English via Latin and it may well have gained popularity in Latin because of the association with beards. A comparable case is “hype” originally from “hypodermic”, but gaining strength from the fact that it can also be regarded as a short form of “hyperbole”.

It’s back! Give your views on any topic in the comments thread for this post. I’ll try to spin out a new thread for anything that looks interesting. However, as someone once remarked about universities, trying to keep order in a comments thread is like herding cats. As before the rules are
1. Civilised discussion and no coarse language
2. There is no Rule 2

Jason Soon refers to student criticism of a public statement by Sydney academics professing their Christianity and asks:

Would it surprise anyone if the people doing this condemning would be the first ones to defend the right of the same academics to sign anti-war and anti-WTO or pro-Kyoto petitions.

As one who has signed pro-Kyoto petitions I agree strongly with this. I also agree with Jason’s observation that

By the same token, neither should religious beliefs be exempt from criticism, even strong and robust criticism. If it is perfectly alright to excorciate ‘capitalism’ or ‘neo-liberalism’ or ‘communism’ it should be perfectly alright to mete out the same treatment to Christianity or Islam

I’d qualify this slightly. To the extent that religious views are proclaimed publicly and used to advance political and social arguments, both the arguments and the religious position behind them should be open to criticism. On the other hand, social norms of civility discourage criticism of purely private religious beliefs. The danger is that these norms are exploited by participants in public debate to insulate their positions from justified criticism.

I’ve been slowing down with the move – I just finished Palace Walk and I’m still partway through The Eustace Diamonds. In the absence of anything else to report, I thought I’d give a plug to Frank Moorhouse and his two-volume novel sequence on the ill-fated League of Nations, Grand Days and Dark Palace. His protagonist is an idealistic young Australian, Edith Berry, who confronts both the deceptive world of 1930s diplomatic manoeuvre and her own ambiguous sexuality.
Most advances in democracy are failures the first time around, and the movement towards a peaceful world based on democracy within countries and co-operation between them has had plenty of failures. But the last decade has seen more and more successes, even if most have involved messy compromises rather than glorious victories.
In sporting news, my son and I attained the rank of yellow belt in karate today. To give an idea of the status attached, if a black belt qualifies academics to tackle crazed gunmen, a yellow belt is about enough to prevent yourself being shoved out of the queue at the refectory. But with practice, we’ll continue to improve.

Scott Wickstein broadly agrees with me on Telstra, but notes

I must admit, I normally read the writings of these worthies with a cynical and suspicious eye. John Quiggin is certainly no friend of the government, and I must admit I tend to take a lot of his statements with a pinch of salt, especially on political economy- my own observation is that he will talk down or ignore anything that makes the government look good on the economy, and highlight the reverse, with unemployment being a case in point. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as long as you are open about it. I’m a fan of the government, and I don’t mind who knows it, and anyone that reads this blog should take it into account.)

I don’t make any pretence of political neutrality, and I’m glad that Scott doesn’t either. In debate over social and economic issues, it’s almost impossible to be a neutral expert (or a neutral non-expert) and I think a clear statement of one’s position is far preferable to a pretence of neutrality.

However, while it’s true that I’m no friend of the government, this is more or less a chronic state with me – I was no friend of the last government either. On an issue like Telstra I’m anti-government because I’m anti-privatisation, not vice versa. Similarly, I don’t attack the government’s performance on unemployment because I want to undermine its economic credentials. Rather, I’m critical of its economic credentials because it’s done so little about unemployment.

To summarise, I’m happy to identify myself as an advocate for a particular political/economic viewpoint (social democracy for short), and readers should bear that in mind. But I make every effort to avoid being partisan in a party-political sense.

A great piece from Arianna Huffington pointing out that a combination of unpredictable electoral turnout and the refusal of Americans to answer the phone to pollsters has made opinion polls almost worthless, thereby potentially restoring old-style democratic listening. This raises a couple of questions. One is why telemarketers are such a plague in the US, but remain a modest annoyance here. I have no answer to this, but perhaps there are some differences in rules or calling costs that explain it.
The second is how Arianna Stassinopoulos, darling of the right in the 1970s and later the wife of millionaire Republican senate candidate Michael Huffington reached her current position as one of the most articulate and thoughtful critics of the status quo. Her answer is here.

With my move to Brisbane drawing ever closer, blogging is likely to be terse and sporadic for a while. I’ll briefly note

• Tim Dunlop’s new site Very nice looking and yet another instance of the general exodus from Blogger. I’ll look into the shift as soon as I get time (Ha!) But meanwhile I have to update my links
• Don Arthur and Ken Parish have nice posts on equality of opportunity. I’ll make just one observation here. A highly unequal society like today’s US typically gives the appearance of great social mobility without the reality. The appearance is encouraged by the frequent (but still unusual) observation of individuals going from ‘rags to riches’. One case of this kind is more impressive than 100 instances of transition from working to middle class in a society where few people are either very poor or very rich. But highly unequal outcomes give well-off parents the means and the incentives to buy substantially better life opportunities for their children, thereby ensuring inequality of opportunity.
• Finally, Steven Den Beste is obviously plugged-in to the thinking of the war faction in the US Administration, or maybe, the influence of the blogworld is such that they get their ideas from him. His suggestion that attacks on planes patrolling the no-fly zone could be construed as a material breach and therefore a basis for an invasion has apparently been echoed by some US officials at the UN.
  I dismissed this cursorily, but was apparently premature. To spell out my reasoning let me make the point that the only approach to the interpretation of UNSC resolutions that makes any sense is ‘original intent’. The understanding of the resolution was clearly that it meant that Saddam must accept unfettered inspections or face invasion. In the absence of some court that could interpret the language, using some spurious interpretation of the text as a basis for war is the same as, or worse than, repudiating the resolution and will be seen that way by all parties.
  The whole point of going to the UN was to show that the US was prepared to accept a peaceful settlement leading to Iraqi disarmament and thereby to build support for a war if there was no alternative. Dumping this process and going to war anyway will mean the US has less support than if it had never gone near the UN

This will, I promise, be the last thing I post in relation to Lomborg and Kyoto for some time. I want to explain a bit about the development of my ideas and why I’m so strongly pro-Kyoto and anti-Lomborg. I didn’t, as the Man Without Qualities suggests, reach this position in some kind of green-liberal cocoon. Anyone who knows the ANU economics department, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) or Townsville, to name a few of my formative influences, will find this idea laughable.

Rather, I am an environmentalist for the boringly straightforward reason that I love natural environments and want to see them preserved. My favorite environments, reflecting the places I’ve lived most, are the Australian Alps and the Great Barrier Reef. If we get the kind of global warming that seems likely under ‘business as usual’, both will be destroyed or at least radically transformed.

In this context, I think it’s important to take some modest actions now so as to prepare for the need for more substantial reductions in CO2 emissions once the scientific doubts are resolved. If, as is possible but in my view unlikely, it turns out that the problem has been greatly over-estimated, and we have incurred some small economic losses (less than 3 months economic growth) needlessly, it will in my view have been a worthwhile insurance premium. In this context, Kyoto is far from ideal, but it’s the only game in town. The US Administration has given up pretending it has an alternative – it’s talking about adapting to climate change. This is fine (if potentially costly) for agriculture in the developed world and maybe even in the developing world, but it’s not an option for the Alps or the Reef. So, I’m 100 per cent for Kyoto.

On most other issues, I am, to coin a phrase, a ‘sceptical environmentalist’. That is, I accept the need to take substantial action to control pollution, make agriculture sustainable and so on. But I’ve never believed in the kind of doomsday scenarios postulated in the 1970s by the Club of Rome.

I’m also sceptical in the sense that I try to evaluate each issue on its merits, and to reach my own conclusions, rather than accepting or rejecting environmentalist claims holus-bolus. For example, I’m happy to eat GM food, provided it is properly labelled so I can make my own choices. Similarly, while I doubt that nuclear power is ever going to prove an economically viable energy source, even in the presence of high carbon taxes, I have no problem with mining and exporting uranium, subject to the usual environmental safeguards needed for mining operations in general.

With this background, I began with a very positive attitude towards Lomborg. He seemed to be taking a sensibly optimistic attitude towards environmental problems, pointing to our successes in fixing up pollution problems, the ozone layer and so on, rather than focusing on doomsday scenarios. Then I gradually realised that Lomborg only endorsed past actions to address environmental problems – whenever any issue came up that might involve doing something now, Lomborg always had a reason why we should do nothing. In particular,he came up with an obviously self-contradictory case for doing nothing about global warming, and gave a clearly biased summary of the economic literature on this topic, which I know very well.

After that, I looked at his story about being an environmentalist reluctantly convinced of the truth according to Julian Simon. As I observed a while ago, I first heard this kind of tale in Sunday School, and I’ve heard it many times since. It’s almost invariably bogus, and Lomborg is no exception. You don’t need to look far to find errors in Simon’s work as bad as any of those of the Club of Rome, but Lomborg apparently missed them. Going on, I realised that Lomborg’s professed concern for the third world was nothing more than a debating trick – otherwise he wouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss emissions trading with poor countries as politically infeasible.

There’s nothing I hate more than being conned. Lomborg tried to con me, and, for a while, he succeeded. That’s why I’m far more hostile to him than to a forthright opponent of environmentalism like Simon.