If there’s one thing that the many supporters of gun rights in the blogosphere agree on at present is that the Lott saga should not become a “reverse Bellesiles”. However, this has been interpreted in two different ways. One interpretation is that the pro-gun side should not copy the mistakes of those on the other side who defended Bellesiles even when it became clear he was indefensible. The other is that Lott’s offences are not comparable with those of Bellesiles.

In the early stages of the debate it was possible to hold both views simultaneously, favoring fair investigation of the charge that Lott had fabricated a survey, while maintaining the stance of ‘innocent until proven guilty’. All this changed with the near-simultaneous emergence of the key ‘defence witness’, David Gross, and the exposure of Lott’s Internet ‘sock puppet’, Mary Rosh. (You can read the whole saga, as reported by Tim Lambert, here).

A number of gun rights supporters, led by Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, took the second approach, treating Gross’s evidence as closing the case against Lott, and dismissing the Rosh exposure as ‘not news’. This approach is looking steadily more and more untenable as more is learnt about both Gross and Lott/Rosh. Given the obviousness of the symmetry – lost data, a series of steadily more incredible explanations, and a gradual expansion of the scope of the problem, all that is required for a reverse Bellesiles is a group of supporters unwilling to accept the truth, and, so far at least, Reynolds is providing the leadership for this group.

On the other hand, Mary’s defrocking was itself a victory for the first approach, since the observation that Rosh and Lott shared the same IP address was made by Julian Sanchez, a staff writer at the libertarian Cato Institute and supporter of gun rights. Quite a few others have followed a similar approach, most recently Michelle Malkin.

The end result is in fact a further symmetry with the Bellesiles affair, with some diehard defenders standing by Lott, while others recognise that even the most charitable interpretation of the facts cannot rehabilitate his scholarship.

One final symmetry. Even if Bellesiles’ research had stood up to scrutiny, it would have represented little more than a footnote in the debate about gun policy. Who really cares whether American gun culture developed before or after the Civil War? Similarly, straightforward calculations of numbers and probabilities suggest that the impact of concealed carry laws is going to be primarily symbolic, at least in the short run. There aren’t enough extra guns involved to either deter or cause a great many crimes.

And a footnote. I’ve been very critical of the Cato Institute in the past, most notably when they danced to the Republican tune by relabelling social security privatization as social security choice or ‘personal accounts’. So I’m glad to observe that, as with other groups, there’s good as well as bad at Cato. Julian Sanchez has certainly demonstrated his personal integrity on the Lott issue. And this little aside

Doubtless opponents of privatiz… [cough], ahem, personal accounts could come up with their own list of countervailing considerations.

suggests that he would prefer to argue the issue on the merits, rather than relying on dubious rhetorical ploys.

Update (11/2/03) Julian Sanchez has written to offer ‘a quick mini-defense’ of the Republican & Cato name change, discussing the way the political debate evolved. He makes some good points I think ‘partial privatisation’ is the only short and reasonably accurate description of what’s being proposed.

Another PFI (private finance initiative) project in the UK (in Australia these are called Public Private Partnerships) has run into strife. It’s a tramway in the London suburb of Croydon. The problem has arisen with a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) which is not, as you might think a new kind of tram. The SPV is a financial entity set up to make it appear that the risks of the project have been transferred from the public to the private sector, which is crucial in justifying the high rates of return paid to private investors in these deals. Unfortunately, it appears that this particular SPV doesn’t have any assets with which to meet the costs of something going wrong so, in all probability, the public will have to pick up the tab. The story is reported here. What’s really striking though is the comment of one of the financiers

Mr Rawlinson did not see the Croydon difficulties as a problem for SPVs generally. “Most are perfectly safe because they refer to schools or hospitals where the source of income is guaranteed and if they run into trouble they are supported by local or central government.”

In other words, the supposed risk transfer in these schemes is a fraud, which is what the critics have been saying all along.

I just got this message from Haloscan

Your comments are very safe and we still have them. However the database
server has been switched out with a backup temporarily as we are
currently working on the server. When it’s switched back to the main one, all
comments should be available again.

Thanks for your patience.
—
-Jeevan

I hope this will work. Given the trouble the Haloscan guys are having, I don’t want to try to maintain a comments facility on the basis of my own coding skills.

Like 60-odd other suckers, I put a submission into the House of Representatives committee inquiring into the structural separation of Telstra. I knew it was an Alston stunt, designed to embarrass Labor, but I thought it might provide a useful forum for public debate. Apparently Alston has now realised this and panicked. Even though he had the numbers on the committee, the evidence showed that his policy was incoherent and unsustainable. So he’s ordered the troops to put up the barricades.

Here’s the email I just got from the Committee secretariat.

Dear Professor Quiggin
The committee has decided NOT to hold the public hearing scheduled for
tomorrow, 7th February, 2003. It has also decided NOT to hold any of the
scheduled public hearings.
I apologise for any inconvenience.

You can read the submissions in PDF form here. Mine’s number 40. I’ll have it up on the Website soon. As regular readers might expect, I call for the core operations of Telstra to be renationalised and the rest to be spun off and fully privatised.

Update As several commentators have noted, the Committee was killed off after Labor announced that it was abandoning plans for a split up. While deplorable, this kind of backflip on Labor’s part is par for the political course. By contrast, the government’s suppression of a Parliamentary inquiry is, as far as I can tell, unprecedented, and Christopher Pyne, who was Alston’s hatchetman in the Reps, deserves to be condemned along with Alston. The Fin editorial today (subscription required) issued the appropriate condemnation, but it was all too hard for most of the rest of the press.

While Labor looks a bit silly here, Alston looks even worse. The fact that he was unable to find credible defenders for the government’s line, even in the context of a the kind of kangaroo court Pyne was clearly ready to operate speaks volumes for the incoherence of telecommunications policy in this country.

Reaction to Powell’s UN speech has been pretty muted so far. Certainly, it doesn’t seem as if anyone is going to change their position as a result of it. On the whole, I thought Jack Straw did a better job of presenting a case for war. Powell had some significant new evidence but the speech had a lot of weaknesses. Of course, there was no ‘smoking gun’, but the speech was disappointing even relative to the diminished expectations of the recent past.

First, Powell (or the Administration) was unwilling to retreat from, or even pass over, those elements of the US case that have already been made public and have failed to stand up to critical scrutiny, most obviously Saddam’s supposed links to Al-Qaeda, but also claims about Iraq’s nuclear program. Given the weakness of these claims, it’s reasonable to be skeptical about new and untested evidence. Powell would have been better off admitting that the link is unclear, and pointing out that it’s not directly relevant to 1441.

Second, he led off with a telephone intercept which contained no direct evidence about weapons and relied critically on the translation of a single word, which he rendered as ‘evacuate’ (as in ‘weapons were evacuated’). Powell says this means ‘hidden, not destroyed’. I don’t know any Arabic, but we (those of a certain age, anyway) can all remember the fuss about the translation of words like ‘recalcitrant’. I’ll bet dollars to dinars that this will end up in a tangled debate that will confuse even Arabic speakers.

Third, the speech undermined the claim that the really good stuff can’t be revealed because it might tip the Iraqis off with respect to surveillance techniques etc. In what appears to be the most damning intercept (two Republican Guards officers talking about nerve gases) one warns the other that the Americans will be listening. In other words, as I pointed out in a comment that is probably lost forever in the Haloscan, everyone with a telephone and a secret must already be aware that Echelon (the US electronic surveillance system) is listening. The speech itself doesn’t include a full translation of the intercept, so it’s unclear how damning it actually is.

Overall, the speech doesn’t change things much. In the absence of a substantial backdown from Saddam on things like U2 flights and scientist interviews (both mentioned in Powell’s speech) the UNSC will very probably back a US invasion in some form or another, even if there is a delay of six weeks or so.. But this means that such a backdown is more probable than most commentators seem to think.

Update William Safire notes the possibility of a Saddam backdown. He also asserts, as he has done repeatedly, that the CIA has been lying and concealing evidence against Saddam. If Safire doesn’t believe US intelligence evidence, why should anyone else?

Another striking feature of Powell’s speech is that very little of the evidence predates Resolution 1441. This is surprising given the dossier of evidence that was previously circulated. Since that evidence is six months old, most of the problems with releasing it should have been resolved by now. And it was supposedly enough to convince Blair, Howard and others. It would have been good to see this dossier.

If two teams played each other in successive matches, would they be going head-to-head back-to-back? Sounds painful to me

Uncle at ABCwatch asks:

But why are political films always left-wing caricatures?

But can you imagine the uproar if someone made a film in which the hero/ine was expected to retain our sympathy while admitting to idolatory of Adolph Hitler, as the sainted Frida Kahlo, also the subject of a recent depiction, worshipped the monstrous Joseph Stalin? Or even cordial relations with Albert Speer?

Fascists! Beyond salvation by Art. Kiss that investment goodbye.

Two examples of recent films with sympathetic treatment of fascist characters are The English Patient and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.

It’s true that, for both good and bad reasons, Hitler has come to be regarded as a uniquely evil historical character. But Speer has largely got away with passing himself off as a good guy. And the other fascist leaders (Mussolini, Franco, Pavelic etc) are generally regarded as being less morally objectionable than Stalin. This means that (allegedly) misguided sympathisers with these fascists can get the same kind of sympathetic treatment as (allegedly) misguided believers in Stalin.

As soon as I noted problems with Haloscan’s comment counter, they went away at least for me.

But the real news in this post, is that according to Haloscan’s count, there have been 2999 comments made on this blog since I started using this service. So whoever wants to respond to this post can be number 3000.

This kind of response makes the whole thing worthwhile. This blog may not get the hit counts of an Instapundit, or even of some other Ozblogs, but I think it has some of the best discussion going anywhere in the blogworld.

Update I spoke/posted too soon! As of now, Haloscan appears to have chewed up the last 75 comments. Miserable! I must repeat my advice to keep a file copy of any comments you think worth preserving.

My post on the national income identity has raised lots of interesting discussion, particularly focused on the notion of the ‘Laffer’ curve [scare quotes reflect the fact that neither the curve nor the underlying idea was original with Laffer]. The basic theory underlying the curve, that both zero and 100 per cent tax rates will raise no revenue, is close to self-evident and certainly accepted by all mainstream economists*

What might be called the Laffer proposition is that the US is, or was, near the point at which taxes can be cut without reducing revenue. This is empirically false, as was demonstrated under Reagan.

Standard economic estimates suggest that the loss of output associated with each additional dollar of tax revenue is somewhere between 0 and 50 cents, with the best estimates (IMO) around 20 cents. This isn’t all a loss of measured output. Some of it is due to time spent in compliance and some reflects losses in consumer welfare because of misallocation of resources. So, I’d guess that a $1 reduction in tax revenue might produce, in the long term, an increase in output of 10 cents.
[This would be offset if the money was taken from high-return investments like education, or if the deficit was allowed to grow, but let’s suppose the cuts are applied to panem et circenses – in Australia, fireworks are the obvious example].

On average, because of things like progressive income taxes and social insurance, about half of any change in output arising from greater capacity utilisation flows through to government budgets. So, of the 10 cents worth of extra output, governments would get about 5 cents. But if you used a high-end estimate of welfare loss, and assumed that most of it was reflected in measured output, you might get a clawback of 15 cents. So Laffer is between 5 per cent and 15 per cent right.

All of this is relevant because, as a result of consistent Republican pressure, the Congressional Budget Office is likely to implement what has been called ‘dynamic scoring’, incorporating assumed supply responses into estimates of the budget impact of fiscal policies such as tax cuts. You can read a critical assessment by Stan Collender here. While we have yet to see how, and if, this will work in practice, the numbers that are being bandied about justify Collender’s “fear for the future of the republic”. Here for example, is Bruce Bartlett of the National Review

At present, there is a systematic bias in the revenue-scoring process that encourages tax increases and discourages tax cuts. Look at it from the point of view of members of Congress. In the former case, they are told that a 10% increase in tax rates will raise 10% more revenue, when in fact it will raise perhaps 7%. In the latter case, they are told that a 10% tax-rate reduction will lose 10% revenue, when it probably will only lose 7%.

That is, dynamic scoring will reduce the measured cost by 30 per cent. As I’ve argued this is twice as much as a reasonable upper bound estimate and five or six times as much as is likely. This is for the favorable case when the tax cut is financed by reducing current government consumption. If it is financed by cutting investment, printing money, or issuing debt, the overestimate is even worse. In these cases, the final cost of the tax cut will typically be equal to or greater than the first-round effect.

Finally, I should say that I’m talking about the long run (the average over a full business cycle) here. In a recession, tax cuts may provide a Keynesian stimulus and produce a short run increase in output. Conversely in a boom, there are no unemployed resources to bring into action, so there’s no possibly dynamic payoff.

*It’s obviously true at zero. With 100 per cent taxation, a few idealists might keep working for nothing in the hope of providing enough revenue to keep themselves and everyone else from starving, but economists don’t like to count on this kind of thing.

My commenting facility, Haloscan, is generally pretty good, but it’s been having troubles lately. A week or so ago, it chewed up some comments, and now the comment count is not updating. As I’ve said many times, the comments are, as often as not, the best part of the blog. There’s a good discussion of the Laffer curve going on in the post on “Identity crisis”, and the Monday message board is excellent as usual. Just for now, you’ll have to disregard the numbers and click on the comments box even if it says “No comments yet”