The Bush stimulus plan is just like the last one only more so – permanent tax cuts for the rich instead of temporary assistance for those in the bottom half of the income distribution and temporary increases in public expenditure. Nathan Newman has a more specific critique of the centrepiece, elimination of taxes on dividends, as does Paul Krugman.

There’s a plausible microeconomic case for not taxing dividends, or for imputation on the Australian model, based on a simple model of how companies work, but when you look at all the tax advantages associated with company structures, the case looks a great deal weaker.

Update Brad DeLong has much more on this, with detailed analysis of the distributional impact, a ‘more in sorrow than anger’ piece on the declining credibility of CEA Chair Glenn Hubbard and lots of links. While you’re there, check out his “overheard at the AEA meetings” post, for a view of how (academic) economists talk among themselves.

To see a proper critique of dubious statistics, look at The New Republic’s debunking of the Body Mass Index. This rough and ready statistic (weight in kilos divided by the square of height in metres) has become the standard number in claims about obesity, with values over 25 being taken as overweight, and values over 30 as obese.There are two big problems with this, according to TNR
(a) Since it doesn’t distinguish fat from muscle, the BMI is a lousy measure of fatness. Estimates of body fat percentage can be obtained reasonably reliably using calipers for skinfold measurements
(b) There’s little convincing evidence that fatness per se, as opposed to inactivity and lousy diet, poses a health risk

Point (a) is well-known, but the persistent use of the BMI reflects the perceived need to simplify health messages, even at the risk of distorting them. The most recent issue of the Scientific American has an article on rebuilding the food pyramid that makes the same point regarding the famous food pyramid. A revised and more complex version (refined starch including potatoes are bad, and unsaturated fats and oils are good) has now been issued.

On point (b) it’s difficult from the evidence in the paper to disentangle the problems associated with the BMI with the evidence regarding the effects of fatness. I suspect it’s somewhat moot, in that with regular exercise and a good diet, you’re unlikely to have excessive body fat, whatever your BMI says.

(Disclosure: As measured most recently, my BMI is 25.2)

Update As if to prove TNR wrong The Age has a story showing a big reduction in life expectancy for those who are obese (BMI>30) at age 40. The objection that obesity per se is not disentangled from phsyical inactivity still appears to apply.

I’ve been getting quite a few visits lately from a site called Numberwatch. Its front page states:

This site is devoted to the monitoring of the misleading numbers that rain down on us via the media. Whether they are generated by Single Issue Fanatics (SIFs), politicians, bureaucrats, quasi-scientists (junk, pseudo- or just bad), such numbers swamp the media, generating unnecessary alarm and panic. They are seized upon by media, hungry for eye-catching stories. There is a growing band of people whose livelihoods depend on creating and maintaining panic. There are also some who are trying to keep numbers away from your notice and others who hope that you will not  make comparisons. Their stock in trade is the gratuitous lie. The aim here is to nail just a few of them.

This sounds fair enough, though the reference to “Junk science” raises some alarm bells.

Turning to the piece that’s linked to mine, the first thing I read is

You are now 25 times more likely to be mugged in London than in Harlem (according to The Mail on Sunday)

This sounds like precisely the kind of misleading media number that deserves debunking, and I look forward to the demolition, but nothing of the sort follows. Apparently, the Sunday Mail is not among the “growing band of people whose livelihoods depend on creating and maintaining panic.” For Numberwatch, it’s an authoritative source.

A factoid like this is impossible to pin down exactly (what exactly distinguishes “mugging” from robbery in general, and where do you get crime statistics for Harlem, which is not, as far as I know, an official jurisdiction of any kind). The best I could do is this sudy of Crime and Justice in the U.S. and England and Wales: Convictions per 1,000 population from the US Bureau of Justice Statistics. According to this source, the robbery rate in England is 1.4 times higher than in the US (similar comparisons hold for other property crimes and for assault, while rates of rape and murder are much higher in the US). Perhaps the Mail on Sunday has special statistics showing that Harlem is much safer than the US as a whole, but I doubt it.

Coming to my own sins, it turns out that they are not to do with numbers at all, or with anything of substance, but with the prose style of my post on political correctness, which Numberwatch author John Brignell describes as “stream of consciousness unconscious humour”. Brignell also dislikes a graph by Alan McCallum, which I linked to, though again he offers nothing substantive. Alan responds, with characteristic courtesy, here.

While we’re on the subject of “keeping numbers away from your notice”, I’ll mention that I get email notices of a number of monthly surveys put out by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. One is on mass layoffs. My last email contains the advice

This is the final news release for the Mass Layoff Statistics (MLS) program. Since 1994, the Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration has funded the program. That funding will end on December 31, 2002. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has been unable to acquire funding from alternative sources and must discontinue the MLS program.

And on political correctness, Gerard Henderson makes the same point as me about the absurdity of people like Les Murray claiming to be persecuted dissenters.

I haven’t yet got a copy of Windschuttle’s book, but this paper at the Sydney Line contains the guts of his accusations against Ryan. Having just looked at Ryan’s book, I can confirm that Windschuttle has, as she says, run the last sentence of one para into the next, then taken the footnotes of one para as referring to a sentence in another. At the very least, Windschuttle is guilty of the same sloppy treatment of sources that constitutes his main gripe against Ryan and others.

To make matters worse, Windschuttle then truncates the para, omitting a direct quote from Robertson (the leader of the roving parties hunting the Aborigines) that states that the Aborigines saw themselves as engaged in a national war against white invaders. This is directly contrary to Windschuttle’s key thesis and if the quote were fabricated, he would presumably have pounced on it. Instead, he ignores it, which seems to be his standard practice when dealing with evidence from the other side that he can’t refute.

I think it’s pretty clear that Windschuttle’s book is little more than a full-length version of the kind of “Fisking” we’ve all (most of us, anyway) come to be tired of in the blogosphere, in which the work of opponents is searched for trivial errors and opportunities for cheap point-scoring, while anything inconveniently hard to refute is clipped. But Windschuttle is not just a blogger letting off steam. He’s making a serious accusation of academic fraud and he has the backing of many leading participants in the policy debate. When making such serious accusations, you can’t get away with bloglike sloppiness. Both Windschuttle and his backers should be called to account.

On the other hand, Ryan’s response doesn’t fully resolve the issues. It’s still unclear, for example, what basis she has for her claim that the roving parties killed 60 Aborigines. Hopefully, she will restate her current position and the evidence she has for it. The fact that Windschuttle’s work is sloppy and dishonest doesn’t remove the need for clear attention to evidence.

PS: Here’s a profile of Henry Reynolds. What I like about Reynolds is that he is genuinely seeking the truth and is not embarrassed to say so. This contrasts favorably both with the pomo mush coming from many on the left and with Windschuttle, who is vehemently anti-pomo in theory but a proponent of both extreme relativism and socially constructed reality in practice.

PPS: Gary Sauer-Thompson has more, including some useful contributions from Cathie Clements, the Mistake Creek historian whose work was used (without attribution and via a secondary source) by Windschuttle.

One of the problems of being pretty much monolingual is that it’s hard to find out what is happening in a lot of interesting parts of the world. I have enough French to struggle through Le Monde (the more popular French papers are too idiomatic for me) but that’s about it. It was great to come across bertramonline, an English language blog with from Denmark. It’s great to have a Scandinavian, broadly social-democratic perspective on world events, but what I value even more is commentary on what’s happening in Denmark, including translations of Danish sources I would never even find. Here, for example, is a piece from a Danish newspaper on the sinecured travels of our old friend, Bjorn Lomborg.

Rippy the Aggregator is not a blog, but a summary of recent updates to Australian plogs, using the magic of RSS (it’s all explained there). This service is being setup by Tom Vogelgesang and currently covers me, Tim Dunlop, Scott Wickstein and (I think) Rob Corr. A bit of a left bias, so all you right-wing technophobes should get in and set up your feeds. It’s easy in Blogger Pro and I think also in Movable Type.

I’ll add these to the blogroll when I get time and energy.

Reader Mark Chambers has sent me this note on a new blogging project, which reminds me of an idea I had years ago, to republish, one day at a time, a newspaper from, say, 50 years ago.

On Jan 1 this year a new blog was set up which will be posting each day a new daily entry from Samuel Pepys’ Diary. The site is here.

I’m pretty sure you would have heard of Pepys, but just in case, he wrote what is widely regarded as the greatest personal journal in the English language. The years he covered – 1660 to 1669 – covered some of the great events of the 17th century: the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy, the Black Death of 1665, and the Great Fire of London in 1666. Over this time Pepys grew into a well respected civil servant in the English Naval Office. As well as being of historic interest, he was extremely honest in writing about himself – the reader gets a warts and all insight into Pepys’ personality.

This sounds fascinating. It would be great for someone to do this with Boswell’s journals as well.

I’m back in beautiful Brisbane, and ready to resume normal blogging. First cab off the rank is the Monday Message Board where you get to have your say, without the time and expense of running your own blog. Suggested topic: The relative merits of Australian cities (non-Australian readers are welcome to comment on any interesting local rivalries and so on).

As always, feel free to comment on any topic – civilised discussion and no coarse language please.

CalPundit reveals himself as one of the many lefty fans of Robert Heinlein. I’ll out myself too and confess that Starman Jones (#4 on Kevin’s list) was my absolute favorite book when I was 14 – I read it so many times I could recite whole pages from memory. I liked quite a few of Heinlein’s other books, but I could never take his heavy stuff (Starship Troopers and so on) seriously after reading Harry Harrison’s Bill the Galactic Hero.

Link via Electrolite

Exhibit A in Keith Windschuttle’s case that Australian Aboriginal history has been ‘fabricated’ has been the famous Ryan footnotes. In a wide variety of contexts, including this piece in the Oz , Windschuttle has claimed that historian Lyndall Ryan presented three footnotes to back up a claim about killings of Aborigines by roving parties but that none of these footnotes actually included any mention of Aborigines being killed. Until now Ryan hasn’t replied, except with a piece of pomo stuff about multiple truths, so it seemed reasonable to assume that Windschuttle had caught her out badly. But her reply in the Letters column of Saturday’s Oz suggests that it is Windschuttle who is in trouble:

In The Weekend Australian (28/12/02), Bernard Lane repeated Keith Windschuttle’s false claim that none of the references in a footnote in a passage in my book The Aboriginal Tasmanians (1996) support my conclusion that: “Between November 1828 and November 1830 the roving parties captured about 20 Aborigines and killed about 60.”

If Bernard Lane had read this sentence himself on page 102 of my book, he would have found that Windschuttle, in quoting it on page 151 in his own book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, had detached the sentence from its original paragraph and attached it to the next. In manipulating my text, Windschuttle has made the footnote appear dishonest.

This failure by Bernard Lane to check my text, has led him to repeat Windschuttle’s serious breach of academic scholarship.
The footnote that Windschuttle claims that I have used falsely comes at the end of the previous paragraph in my book. It contains references to the discussion in that paragraph about the formation of government and settler roving parties, their relations with the military parties and their potential to create conflict with the Aborigines. The last sentence in that paragraph contains my estimate about the number of Aborigines killed and captured by these parties. This is based on my wide reading and careful analysis of the sources available at the time I wrote the book.

I don’t have a copy of either book at hand, and Windschuttle will presumably reply, so it’s a bit early to rush to judgement. But if Ryan is right, this is fatal for Windschuttle’s credibility. After all, this is not only his biggest single point, but represents the core of his research strategy, which is based on checking footnotes to show that the ‘black armband’ school has misrepresented the primary sources. All this ought to be very embarrassing for his cheer squad, which includes quite a few bloggers, but on past form I suspect the majority of this crowd will not even blush.

I’ll be reading Monday’s Oz with more than usual interest – presumably this is one controversy that should be easy to resolve.

Link via Rob Corr

Update 06/01/03 Nothing from Windschuttle yet. Instead there’s another nail in the coffin from Bain Attwood (link via Tim Dunlop, who has more on this. Also, while I was on my travels there was a letter from Cathy Clement the main historian of the Mistake Creek massacre, complaining about Windschuttle’s misuse of her work and failure to acknowledge it properly. She didn’t use the “P” word, perhaps on legal advice, but Windschuttle’s claims to uphold standards of scholarship are looking weaker every day. As I pointed out a while ago, just listening to Windschuttle on the radio I picked up a series of misrepresentations and errors.

(Thanks to Chris Owen for clearing up my persistent confusion between Mistake Creek and Forrest River. For future reference, the primary Forrest River Massacre historian is Neville Green. )

I’m back in beautiful Brisbane, and the newlyweds are off on their honeymoon. It was an excellent holiday and a wonderful wedding.

More to the point for readers of this blog, I have a broadband connection again and I’m getting over the blogging blues noted by quite a number of others in recent weeks. So normal blogging should resume shortly.