Slate’s Saddamometer giving a US estimate of the likelihood of war has been drifting downwards for a few days, but remains at 68 per cent, near its all-time high.

Meanwhile, numerous British sources have carried reports quoting “a senior cabinet minister” saying that the odds had shifted to 60-40 against action, compared to 60-40 in favour before Christmas. Downing Street (that is, Blair’s office) has dismissed the reports, but they point up the difficulties Blair is facing.

Downing St is quoted as saying “nothing has changed” but, quite obviously, something has changed. Hundreds of inspections have been undertaken and nothing has been found. Despite some recent grumpiness, the Iraqis have opened all the Presidential palaces that were the sticking point last time and have supplied lists of scientists as demanded. The US has, it is reported, started giving its intelligence reports to the UN inspectors, but it doesn’t seem to have been of any use. None of this is conclusive proof that Iraq has no weapons. At the very least, though, it proves that the dossiers on which Blair relied so conspicuously, were worthless.

The next big event comes with Blix’s reports to the UN Security Council, Barring some unexpected shocks, they will say that nothing has been discovered, that the Iraqis have complied with the inspection regime but that the declaration made on December 7 remains inadequate. He may well make an explicit request for more time to continue inspections. The assumption in Washington is that the persistence of the December 7 ‘material breach’ will be enough for war.

But it seems increasingly unlikely that the UNSC will agree. This poses a nasty problem for Blair. He wouldn’t be too worried if a UNSC resolution authorising armed force were vetoed by France or Russia. But it will be very hard for him to sell a war carried out without at least majority support in the UNSC and in a situation where the only obvious case for immediate action is based on American war planning.

Without either Britain or the UNSC, any plan for war would be in massive disarray. A British pullout would almost certainly create a massive attack of nerves in Kuwait and Qatar. Neither government has yet agreed to the use of its bases for an invasion, although it’s pretty clear they would go along with a UNSC-backed war.

Of course, there are still some possible surprises. UNMOVIC could discover a cache of nerve gas or, equally damning, a locked gate with an armed guard. On the other hand, Saddam could upset Bush’s applecart by supplying some documents proving that (some) weapons had been destroyed. Neither seems very likely in the next week, but the second looks more likely than the first.

Now that the New Year hangovers have worn off, quite a few of my regular commentators have returned. There are particularly good comments threads for the posts on political correctness and ‘mirror-image’ Marxism. These posts have also attracted quite a few links, both favorable and otherwise. So to any new visitors coming via a link to these posts or just surfing in, I want to invite your comments (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). As I’ve said many times, I think this blog has some of the best comment threads in blogdom, and new participants are always welcome.

A while ago, I raised the idea of reposting old articles since a lot of new readers would not have seen them, and very few people seem to dig through archives. I got the idea from Nathan Bierma, but it seems we were both beaten to the punch by magazines of the dotcom bubble era, such as the Industry Standard. Desperate for some editorial material to separate their bloated ad pages, they regularly reprinted old stuff, using just the defence I have mentioned.

Anyway, here’s my first repost, a discussion of the economic concept of efficiency. Comments much appreciated.

Replying to Jason Soon, Tim Dunlop puts his finger on one of the more embarrassing secrets of economics. Although we use the term ‘efficiency’ all the time, we don’t really have a consistent and rigorous definition of what it means for an economic policy to improve efficiency. A typical welfare economics textbook will define an economic situation as Pareto-efficient if there is no other situation that would constitute a Pareto-improvement, that is, make some people better off and no-one worse off. This doesn’t just require technical efficiency in production. It’s also necessary that there be no unexploited gains from trade (often called allocative efficiency)

So a Pareto-improvement would be an improvement in efficiency. But policies that naturally produce Pareto-improvements are as scarce as hen’s teeth. So when economists talk about improvements in efficiency, they are usually talking about one of the following possibilities (neither of which is generally defined in a rigorous fashion)

(a) If the gainers from the policies felt like it, they could fully compensate the losers while remaining better off themselves
(b) If the government chose it could tax the gainers, still leaving them better off, and use the proceeds to fully compensate the losers
Cases like (a) are common, but, in the absence of an outbreak of altruism among the beneficiaries of efficiency-oriented policies, don’t tell us much about the impact of policy changes on the welfare of society as a whole. If a policy change makes all 20 million Australians (but one) $100 poorer and James Packer $2.1 billion richer, it’s not helpful to know he could pay us back and keep $100 000 for himself if he chose.

Cases like (b) are more relevant, but the required analysis to show that a policy satisfies this condition is generally difficult and rarely done.

Geoff Fox sent me this interesting account of his time in Indonesia. Well worth a look.

Following a piece by Gerard Henderson noting the preponderance of ex-leftists on the Australian intellectual right, quite a few bloggers have revealed themselves as part of this tendency to a greater or lesser degree.

It has always struck me how much of the tone of the Australian and US right is set by ex-leftists and particularly by ex-Marxists. Particularly noticeable is the fact that, despite having been deceived by one ideology claiming to have all the answers, the ex-Marxist rightwingers are just as dogmatic in their new faith as in the old one – Keith Windschuttle is just the latest example of this.

Another feature which is almost as universal is the persistence of whining about persecution. This was always rather tiresome when leftists were complaining about being persecuted by ruling classes (‘Dennis’ in Monty Python and the Holy Grail captures the tone perfectly), but after all there was some basis for the complaint. The left was routinely spied on by security agencies and the Menzies government did try to ban the Communist party. To hear the same whining tone when highly paid employees of well-funded thinktanks are complaining because a few students call them nasty names is just pathetic. David Horowitz is the prime exponent of this, but it’s the central characteristic of the whole right-wing campaign against ‘political correctness’.

The final noteworthy characteristic is over-compensation for past sins. Undoubtedly it was a mistake to support dictators like Ho Chi Minh and Castro, as many leftists did in the 60s and 70s, let alone Stalin and his successors. But recognising that obvious fact shouldn’t blind people to the fact that there are plenty of very nasty types on the other side, starting close to home with Suharto and his cronies. Nor should an appreciation of the faults of communism lead to automatic endorsement of capitalism. This latter point was recognised by consistent anti-communists like BA Santamaria and Robert Manne, both of whom moved sharply to the left once it was clear that communism no longer posed a threat.

I don’t feel any need for such compensation myself. I don’t go in for protest marches these days, but when I did, I was just as keen to demonstrate against the Russian invasion of Afghanistan as I was to protest against apartheid and the neutron bomb. The spectacle of people who were once far to my left whizzing past me on their journey to the far-right leaves me bemused, especially when the tone in which they attack social-democratic views like mine remains essentially unchanged.

In the comments thread for my post on ‘political correctness’, Derrida Derider argues, citing Orwell, that

The language gamesters are unfortunately right – you CAN change the way people think, up to a point anyway, by changing language.

I think Orwell’s discussion of the issue left some ambiguities unresolved. Orwell is clear on the point that sloppy language can be a tool for self-deception. The prime example of this is the 1984 concept of ‘doublethink’, the capacity to maintain two contradictory beliefs at the same time that is essential to survival in a totalitarian system.

But the other side of doublethink is that, at some level, everyone knows the score. Experience of totalitarian systems over a long period suggests that in the end, command over language does not entail command over thought. Rather, in a totalitarian system, people necessarily develop a series of language codes:

• the official propaganda language for business dealings

,

• a set of very subtle and deniable codes for talk with a general circle of friends to be used, for example, to refer to blackmarket transactions or office politics
• and a still-coded but more direct language for intimate friends who can be presumed ‘safe’

.

I’ve referred to totalitarian systems in general, but in fact a lot of this discussion is only really applicable to Communist systems, which claimed to be democratic socialist states run by and for workers. Reflecting La Rouchefoucauld’s maxim that ‘hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue’, the maintenance of this claim in states which whose oligarchical and exploitative nature was evident to all required a high degree of ‘thought control’.

By contrast, as I observed in my review of Lilla’s Reckless Minds, ‘Although Nazi propaganda was mendacious in every detail, it never concealed the fundamental nature of Nazism.’ The Nazis never pretended to embody ideals of peace and democracy, openly declaring their preference for war and mastery. As a result, the language of the Nazis was mostly simple and direct. As with Bismarck a generation or two earlier, Nazi rhetoric was full of references to blood and iron, and this was a pretty fair summary of what they actually gave the world.

Virginia Postrel has quite an interesting piece on Tax Policy as a Tool and a Weapon focusing on the compromises that inevitably upset economists when their ideas on tax reform get implemented.

A little while ago, I mentioned the topic of urban heat islands as an example of a dead horse that shouldn’t be flogged any further. But no topic in discussion today is as tired as that of ‘political correctness’, dragged up in today’s Oz by Les Murray.
Australian users of this phrase betray their ignorance, since the term ‘politically correct’ was never used in Australia until people like Les imported it from American right-wingers campaigning against its alleged tyrannical sway over public debate. The equivalent term in the Australian Left was ‘ideologically sound’.

More significant is the fact that the term ‘ideologically sound’ was almost invariably used ironically, as a gentle criticism of those on the Left who were more concerned with getting verbal formulations of policy precisely right than with actually getting anything done. As far as I can tell the same was true of ‘politically correct’, before the Right got hold of it.
One aspect of this focus on words rather than deeds, more pronounced in the US than here, was the belief that appropriate use of language would automatically bring about desirable social change – for example that attitudes to less developed countries would change for the better if they were referred to as ‘developing’.

This idea was the subject of much well-deserved parody – the invention of terms like ‘gravitationally challenged’ in place of ‘fat’. The obvious implication of this kind of parody was the one that left-wing users of terms like ‘politically correct’ had already drawn – that practitioners of this kind of verbal gymnastics were unlikely to pose any serious threat to capitalism, or to anything else except the English language (which has, however, shown almost infinite resilience in the face of misuse by lawyers, bureaucrats and others).

Yet the right-wing critics of political correctness sought to make exactly the opposite claim. Somehow, a handful of leftists playing verbal games were elevated into a tyrannical dictatorship, posing a fundamental threat to freedom of speech. Thus, in Australia, we have had the absurd and continuing spectacle of a government which has not only a tightly controlled House of Representatives and a publicly-funded official media machine, but also the editorial support of most newspapers and a vociferous claque of commentators in electronic and print media, posing as an underdog fighting against an entrenched ‘elite’. The situation in the US is similar, but even more laughable because of the absence of anything even faintly resembling an organised political left.