I’m spinning another content-free post out of the Monday Message Board, which is a long way down the page. Please comment asylum seekers, bail, the possible value of an ID card in the comment thread for this post. As before, civilised discussion and no coarse language please. Otherwise, it’s open slather.
Update Another great, if anarchic success. There’s a lengthy and thoughtful discussion of the options for social democracy and the Labor Party, the usual quota of beard-related sniping. The closest we got to asylum seekers was some early discussion of demonstrations, and their frequently counter-productive impact. Read it all, and throw your own thoughts into the mix!

Alan Krueger cites more evidence for the proposition (surprising to some) that the US has less social mobility than most other countries. He concludes “Five or six generations are probably required, on average, to erase the advantages or disadvantages of one’s economic origins.”
This is a complex issue and I plan, as with many other things, to come back to it later

Neither Ken Parish nor the Man Without Qualities is convinced by my claim that Bjorn Lomborg is contradicting himself on the crucial issue of possible responses to global warming. To <a href="http://www.uq.edu.au/economics/johnquiggin/news/Lomborg0204.html&quot;repeat myself

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change cites a range of model estimates of the costs of implementing Kyoto using market mechanisms. They show that, with a global system of emission rights trading, the cost of implementing Kyoto would range from 0.1 per cent to 0.2 per cent of GDP.

This is a trivial sum – for Australia it would amount to around $1 billion per year, a fraction of the benefits yielded by environments like the Great Barrier Reef that are threatened by global warming. So how do we get the claim that Kyoto would be too expensive? As I observe:

Lomborg dismisses global emissions trading as politically infeasible because it would involve the redistribution of billions of dollars to developing countries (page 305). But then he turns around and attacks alternative ways of implementing Kyoto by suggesting that the billions required could be better spent – by redistributing them to developing countries.

I can’t think of a way to paraphrase this that would make the inherent contradiction more obvious, so I’ll venture on to the dangerous ground of analogy.

Suppose that, during the 2000 US election, someone calling themselves a ‘skeptical Democrat’ wrote a book arguing that
(a) liberals shouldn’t vote for Nader because he has no chance of winning
(b) liberals shouldn’t vote for Gore because Nader has better policies
(c) Therefore liberals should stay home.
Would you be convinced be this? Would you be surprised to find the author accepting speaking invitations from the Republican National Council?

To come back to the main issue, a system of tradable emissions permits would enable the West to meet Kyoto emissions targets at low cost and generate large payments to poorer countries, which could be used to finance clean drinking water etc. Lomborg says Western countries are too mean to do this, and would prefer more expensive solutions involving reductions in domestic emissions, and he may well be right. But if so, we should compare the cost of Kyoto to alternative things that Western countries might spend the money on at home, not to foreign aid projects that have already been ruled out by hypothesis.

I get really steamed about this, because, as Ken Parish points out, I am a leftist who thinks that we should give more aid to poor countries. I don’t believe Lomborg could have argued the way he did if he was serious about helping poor countries. For him, this is an example of ‘opportunity cost’, to be wheeled in where necessary, then forgotten.

I could easily be proved wrong on this. There are plenty of areas of expenditure in rich countries less deserving than either Kyoto or aid to poor countries. Lomborg’s point is equally applicable here. Can anyone point to an instance where he suggests cutting some area of non-environmental expenditure and giving the money saved to poor countries?

I’ve previously argued that the success or failure of the European Union in integrating Turkey will be the crucial test of relations between Islam and the West. Not surprisingly, I was unimpressed by French ex-president Valery Giscard d’Estaing’s claim that Turkey is not a European country. This response from Peter Preston of the Guardian captures my views pretty well, in a piece reproduced by the Age.
Update Nathan Lott has a lot more on this and on the Turkish election outcome. Well worth reading.

Reading on in USS Clueless, I note a long post criticising European hate speech laws, in which I get a brief mention. Like most of the Australian bloggers who’ve commented on the Tobin case, I’m with Den Beste on this one. The discussion of individual vs group defamation in a recent comments thread on this blog reached the general conclusion that while a group defamation law might be defensible in principle, it could not be implemented in practice without impinging on the freedom of political speech.

These complexities do not arise here. The European laws are clearly aimed at political speech, banning genocide denial in such generic terms as to raise a host of nasty problems. Leaving aside the undeniable case of the Holocaust, European history is full of disputed cases which might be affected by this (the treatment of the Sudeten Germans after WWII for example). While I’m generally found on the European side of transatlantic disputes, the First Amendment to the US constitution is one of the greatest gifts any country has given to itself and the world. We, and the Europeans, would be well advised to adopt something similar.

The NYT reports Baghdad Accepts United Nations Resolution; Weapons Inspectors Leave for Iraq on Monday

As I observed, the Iraqi Parliamentary vote was meaningless. But it impressed Steven Den Beste at USS Clueless leading him to write “I suspect that the UN/Iraq dance is going to end very soon. It’s looking increasingly as if they’re not even going to get past the 7-day deadline.”

Since Den Beste appears to me to be the most intelligent and reasonable of the warbloggers, I’ve been arguing with him for some time. So far, I’d suggest my predictions have been consistently more accurate than his, basically because he doesn’t want to accept that the Administration has been forced to abandon the policy of ‘war no matter what’.

Thus we see him clutching at straws like this:

One of the clauses in the unanimously-passed UNSC resolution says that Iraq

…shall not take or threaten hostile acts directed against any representative or personnel of the United Nations or of any member state taking action to uphold any council resolution,

which brings up the interesting point: Is Iraq’s constant attempts to shoot down American and British jets a “material breach” which would justify war?

The short answer is, “No”.

The Monday Message board has already been a big success. Rather than waiting an entire week to evaluate the experiment, I’m going to intervene and spin one subthread off here. Comments on beards in general, my beard in particular, and general good-humoured discussion of my various peculiarities can be put in the comments thread for this post. Does anyone have any advance on four stars?

MWQ suggests

Professor Quiggin may want to give at least some indication to his readers of what other economists oppose the fixed-proportions models and give at least one cite to one prominent economist who believes some modification of the model structure solves the problems. For example, has Professor Quiggin consulted with, or researched the views of, Robert Solow on this point?

Solow was one of the six Nobel Prize winners who (along with 2000 others) signed the Nobel economists’ statement on global warming on which the Australian economists’ statement was modelled. Lomborg’s preferred source of economic wisdom, William Nordhaus, also signed, so the statement is broad enough to encompass views opposed to Kyoto, but favoring alternative policy responses. But this doesn’t help Lomborg much, since he wants to do nothing at all.

There’s a brief statement of Solow’s view here Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis-The Region- Robert Solow Interview (September 2002), in which he refers to both the Club of Rome and to the global warming problem. I’ll quote a couple of paras.

iI you go back to what I wrote about the Club of Rome and “The Limits to Growth,” that reveals where I really live. The one thing that really annoys me is amateurs making absurd statements about economics, and I thought that the Club of Rome was nonsense. Not because natural resources or environmental necessities might not at some time pose a limit, not on growth, but on the level of economic activity—I didn’t think that was a nonsensical idea—but because the Club of Rome was doing amateur dynamics without a license, without a proper qualification. And they were doing it badly, so I got steamed up about that.

The major practical problem in connection with global warming is how do we deal with the poorer parts of the world? How do we intelligently and equitably deal with the part of the world that is now preindustrial or primitive industrial and is “uppity” enough to think it has every right to live as well as Americans or Europeans? How are we going to tell them we developed economically by burning fossil fuels at a tremendous rate, by partially depleting reserves and by polluting the atmosphere, but then tell them not to?

The Club of Rome ‘Limits to Growth’ model was, of course, the most famous example of a fixed-coefficient model producing glaringly wrong conclusions. It was roundly condemned by economists of all stripes. It represents the mirror-image of Lomborg’s position on global warming. The Club assumed that pollution and energy use were in fixed proportions to economic output and concluded that a drastic reduction in economic growth was vital.
Lomborg implicitly assumes that energy use is proportional to income and hence that a reduction in CO2 emissions sufficient to have any real impact on global warming must bring the economy to a grinding halt. Since Kyoto is only a first step in this process, he suggests not even starting.

As Solow observes, economists tend to get pretty steamed about this kind of thing, especially when it’s done ‘without a license’. Of course, economists are not alone, and Lomborg got this reaction from the real experts in most of the fields in which he claimed to have disproved the conventional wisdom.

Thomas Friedman gives his take on the UN resolution, with which I mostly agree. The news that the Iraqi Parliament has rejected the UN resolution is, I think, pretty much meaningless. I must say I would not like to be a member of this body – it’s presumably necessary to go through some pretence of debate, and the slightest wrong word could have you delivered to your family in small pieces.
I think it’s virtually certain that Saddam will accept the resolution, but probably with some attempt at a face-saving concession. The US will certainly reject this, and it’s possible that the whole process could go straight to war after 7 days. I think this is unlikely and that the real issue is the declaration required after 30 days.

Meanwhile, I have no idea what to make of this. First, Al-Jazeera produces what is supposed to be a handwritten message from bin Laden, and now an audiotape, assessed by US authorities as ‘probably genuine’. If someone can smuggle a tape recorder into and out of whatever hole bin Laden is hiding in, why not a videocamera ? That would prove he’s alive, which seems to be the object of the exercise. I prefer the hypothesis that someone is producing spurious evidence of bin Laden’s survival and that the US is playing along, either because they’re the ones producing it, or for some other obscure motive. Of course, even if the evidence is spurious, bin Laden could still be alive.

‘Robert Musil’, the Man Without Qualities responds to my intervention in his debate with Arnold Kling. He raises a lot of points, so rather than have a single monster post, I’ll begin by conceding some errors, then deal with other issues as I get time.

First, I apologize for my crack that ‘MWQ clearly wouldn’t know an economic model if he fell over one’, for which I had no basis except that MWQ appeared to assume the correct conclusion without addressing the modelling issues. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Second, I accept that it was Arnold Kling who made the allusion to my Australian nationality (for which he has, in any case, graciously apologised via email) and that MWQ in fact gently tweaked him on this point.

Third, I know that I get a bit overheated (awful pun intentional) about Lomborg and global warming generally. I care a lot about global warming – I’ll say some more about this soon. Moreover, I don’t regard Lomborg as an honest opponent, for the reasons I’ve stated in previous posts, and I am annoyed to see his claim to be a ‘Sceptical Environmentalist” given credit. No doubt I sometimes get too annoyed.
That said, I find it amusing that MWQ invokes The New Australian as an arbiter of Internet decorum. Australian readers will know that this site drips vitriol from every comma. For those who want to check, if you follow the link provided by MWQ, be sure to read a few other articles.

Finally, this debate reminds me that I must get around to reading the real Robert Musil. Look for a response in a “What I’m reading” post some time.