The Erskineville Trendy

I’m pleased to meet you, my name’s Will
I’m doing up a terrace in Erskineville
Two up, two down and an outside loo
It’s a perfect steal, only 1.2
Hooray, home sweet home
Paying 6 per cent on a thirty year loan

Work a six day week and a twelve hour day
But the mortgage gobbles up all my pay
So I dabbled in dotcoms to make some cash
I lost the lot, now I’m dealing hash
Hooray, grateful thanks
For second mortgages and Japanese banks

I’m ripping up th floorboards and stripping back the walls
Putting potplants on the balcony and pictures in the halls
Getting bruises on my knees and blisters on my hands
Hooray, aches and pains
It’ll all be worth it for the capital gains

Prices keep on rising, I’m telling you
A man just doesn’t know what to do
The cost of a living is a perfect disgrace
You should see what they charge for iron lace
Hooray, ain’t that nice
Fifty grand more on the resale price

I’m between two railways with a flight path overhead
Very close to transport the agent said
But we’ve blocked off all the roads, it’s really neat
You need a degree just to find my street
Hooray, happy days
Living out my life at the bottom of a maze.

I pinched this one from the master of Australian satirical parody, John Dengate. The original was about a battler, who worked in a factory in Erskineville, and followed the ponies in a futile attempt to save the deposit for a block of land. My parody was written in the 1980s, but updating was easy – I just multiplied the prices by a factor of ten.

Alex Robson has announced that he is closing his blog and moving to intermittent posting at the new Australian Libertarian Society collective blog – this seems to be something of a trend.

Given that a significant proportion of the posts at ALS so far have come from the unspeakable “Strawman” (his pieces gloating over the Canberra fires represent the bottom of the Australian blogging barrel), additional input has to raise the average standard. At this point, I can’t resist the temptation to refer to the joke about an academic moving from Oxford to Cambridge and raising the average intelligence level in both places, but I’ll try to redeem myself with a serious comment.

While I’m not a libertarian, I’ve certainly learned a lot from libertarian contributions to public debate, particularly in the blogosphere. I’m always interested, for example, to read what Jim Henley or Jason Soon has to say on any issue of public concern. I wish the ALS site well, and hope that open debate there will strengthen the humane and rational strand in libertarian thought.

Although Howard is still calling for more time for the UN process to be completed and denying that we have taken a decision to participate in an invasion of Iraq without UN sanction, our masters think differently.

It is their prerogative, if they choose, to be on the sideline,” the White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said of France and Germany. He said President Bush was confident that much of Europe, including Britain and probably Spain, Italy and some Eastern European countries, would “heed the call,” as would Australia.

We all know the score, and Fleischer is almost certainly right, but I thought the US government liked to make some pretence of deferring to the constitutional processes of its client states. The correct form is to give the orders to Howard and then let him announce them to us.

From what I can see, almost all the governments nominated by Fleischer as obeying US orders are still doing their best to keep the hope of some sort of UN sanction alive (even Blair has been careful not to commit himself all the way, despite his recent swing to tough rhetoric). This is a war that no-one outside Washington really wants, particularly given the desperately thin casus belli Bush is currently putting forward.

Update Judging by today’s papers, Howard has got his orders, but has yet to work out a palatable way of passing them on. In the meantime, here’s another take on the coalition of the not unwilling from Andy Borowitz. Link via Tom Spencer

In the course of following up the work of John Lott, I came across some interesting points about defensive gun use (DGU). There has been a dispute between estimates based on surveys of crime victims, such as that of Hemenway et al, which show very low rates of DGU (less than 100 000 per year for the US) and others such as that of Kleck et al, which show as many as 2 million DGU’s per year. I came across an interesting piece by Tom Smith, which attempted a reconciliation between the two estimates. Among other things the the crime victimisation surveys exclude such crimes as “trespassing, vandalism, and malicious mischief”. By including these cases, Smith adds as much as 40 per cent to the derived from the crime victims survey, though this still doesn’t get him anywhere near the Kleck estimates.

It struck me that, even on the most generous definition of reasonable force, shooting or threatening to shoot a trespasser or vandal would be a crime more serious than the original offence, so I emailed Dr Smith to ask him about this. His response:

I’m no expert on American law, but such uses do meet the criminological definition of DGUs that has been used in the research literature. That literature also states that not all DGUs are necessarily legal or appropriate, just that the gun is used in response to a crime/threat in the mind of the user.

From this definition, it’s pretty clear that the kind of person who brandishes or even fires a gun in the course of, say, a dispute between neighbours over fence lines, could correctly record this as a DGU. The same goes for this case, where the outcome was more tragic (the killer was acquitted of a manslaughter charge, but that says more about Louisiana juries than anything else). Even the use of a gun in a street brawl would qualify, assuming that the shooter felt threatened.

On Smith’s estimates, such criminal misuse of guns constitutes as much as a third of all DGUs. The rate would be higher for the much more frequent use estimated by Kleck et al.

In summary, it appears that, if the Kleck estimates have any validity, they represent an epidemic of unrecorded gun crime.

This is good, if somewhat ambiguous, news. I’ll blog more on this at a later date

The Telegraph reports a public ownership plan for failing British Energy, the nuclear electricity generator privatised by Thatcher.

As yet renationalisation is primarily a device for picking up the pieces when privatisation has manifestly failed, but we can expect more aggressive action now that the taboo has been broken. And already the notion of privatisation as the inevitable wave of the future (taken as gospel only five years ago) is as dated as dialectical materialism.

As I mentioned, my last AFR piece on unemployment has been reproduced at australian policy online. Stephen Kirchner criticises me and says

The unemployment rate in NZ has already posted a low of 5.1% and could well push sub-5%. The NZ case demonstrates that a more liberal approach to labour market institutions can be successful in lowering unemployment.

I think this is drawing a pretty long bow. The National Party government in NZ passed the Employment Contracts Act in 1991. When the Nationals lost office in 1999 the unemployment rate was close to 7 per cent, above that in Australia. The incoming Labour government (which Kirchner criticises pretty regularly) repealed key aspects of the Act. The subsequent decline in unemployment (latest rate 5.4 per cent) may not be a consequence of Labor’s reforms but it certainly doesn’t help Kirchner’s case in the slightest.

Oddly enough, Kirchner goes on to endorse the ‘characteristically intelligent’ comments of John Edwards who begins by pointing out the failure of the radical free-market model in the US. Edwards goes on to respond to a number of the points that I raised in my piece (though he doesn’t mention names on either side), and concludes

If the Australian economy continues to grow over the next few years at the rate I expect, it won’t be long before we are more worried about finding workers than finding jobs.

Of course, a few more years of growth would imply a 15-year expansion, which would certainly be good for unemployment. This may happen, but I see no reason to suppose that Australia is any more immune to the business cycle than the US where similarly rosy predictions held sway until very recently.

As I’ve noted before, I hate being conned. It is now clear that John Lott has been conning a lot of people, including me. Given the favorable assessment by James Lindgren of the witness who claimed to participate in Lott’s survey on defensive gun use, I felt it was necessary ‘in the absence of new developments’, to drop the case of fabrication against Lott. The new developments did not take long to emerge.

According to Julian Sanchez it turns out that the ‘witness’ is a pro-gun activist with a focus on the specific issue where Lott made his name (concealed carry laws). This isn’t absolutely conclusive – there are enough such activists that the inclusion of one in the survey is not surprising, and this is obviously the type of person who would find out about the controversy and approach Lott .

But then it turns out Lott has been using a false identity (‘Mary Rosh’) to post pieces defending himself on Usenet. This is the last straw for me. In particular, Lott reviewed his own book under the name Mary Rosh. Although trivial in relation to the alleged fabrication of a survey, this is, in my view, a clear-cut piece of academic dishonesty. His university (he’s now at Yale) should take immediate action to investigate this and other allegations of misconduct.

Update Lott isn’t at Yale either, but has moved on to the American Enterprise Institute. Judging by my dealings with them (read here or search the site for “Zinsmeister”) he should fit right in.

Rather lost in the debate over plans for war in Iraq has been the question of whether Saddam Hussein actually has weapons of mass destruction. Those in the pro-war camp have generally taken Bush’s word for it that he does, while those opposed to war have implicitly taken the line that it’s up to Bush to prove it. I don’t find either argument entirely satisfactory.

The absence of anything seriously resembling a smoking gun after six weeks of inspections is proof enough for me that the US ‘dossier’ being flourished about six months ago, complete with satellite photos of suspicious installations, was worthless. The sites in the photos have been inspected and found to be innocuous. And the claim that the Americans have the evidence but don’t want to compromise their secret methods is inherently implausible. Assuming that they had enough evidence to nail Saddam, the fact that he might learn about their surveillance techniques seems pretty much irrelevant.

On the other hand, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. All the nasty things that Bush says about Saddam are true, even if they were just as true when Bush senior was turning a blind eye to Saddam’s use of chemical weapons. Saddam is evil and dangerous, if he has kept stocks of weapons of mass destruction in the current crisis, irrational. So it’s important to consider what we’ve learnt.

First, I think it’s pretty clear that Saddam doesn’t have nuclear weapons or any operational program to produce them. The UN found and destroyed his plants in 1991 and he’s been under tight sanctions ever since. Moreover, this is just not the kind of thing that can be hidden easily, or dismantled at a moments notice and moved on a truck. Nuclear operations produce radioactivity and this can be detected. If there were a nuclear weapons program, the kind of inspections we’ve seen would have turned up something by now.

It’s harder to be sure about germ warfare. The Iraqis have produced stocks of various germ warfare agents in the past (though they claim to have destroyed them), and the facilities are easier to conceal than those needed for nuclear weapons. On the other hand, it’s hard to keep stocks of germ warfare agents from degrading in storage, and Moreover, unlike chemical and nuclear weapons, they’ve never been used. The horror associated with these weapons is such that all those involved would almost certainly face either deadly retaliation or subsequent execution, but the actual military effectiveness is probably quite limited. There are some discrepancies in the Iraqi account of what happened to the stocks they produced. However, based on the absence of evidence and the irrationality of persisting with germ warfare programs, the balance of probabilities favors the hypothesis that these programs have been abandoned.

The balance of evidence is much closer in relation to chemical weapons. Lots of these were produced and used and the amount unaccounted for is much greater. Moreover, it would be easy to hide a substantial stock in a bunker somewhere, with a much smaller risk of dectection than for germs or nukes. On the other hand, while scary, chemical weapons are clearly not a threat to be compared with nuclear weapons or with the possible uncontrollabe consequences of germ warfare. Despite extensive use, chemical weapons weren’t decisive in the Iran-Iraq war and Saddam didn’t dare use them in Gulf War I.

This means that the rational course of action would be for Saddam to destroy the weapons. On the other hand, while Saddam isn’t crazy he’s also not exactly rational. This justifies intrusive inspections, private interviews with scientists and continued demands for more documentation of the supposed destruction of these weapons. When this process is complete, a judgement will need to be made.

The threat posed by Saddam’s chemical weapons (if he has any) is not a clear and present danger. The possibility that they will leak to a terrorist group would, if anything, be enhanced by an invasion. The weeks of softening-up bombing implied by standard US practice in these matters would give Saddam plenty of time to arrange this, assuming that he was willing and able.

What is clearly not justified, on the evidence so far, is a pre-emptive invasion based on the absence of proof of a negative.

Because of the fires, I didn’t open up the message board as usual on Monday. So rather than put up my own “Thursday thoughts”, I’m asking for your comments (civilised discussion and no coarse language) on any topic. I’d particularly like further ideas on blame, chance and Fate, which has been the subject of some valuable discussion in earlier comments threads this week.