Month: May 2003

Excuses, excuses

John Quiggin14 Comments

Kevin Drum at Calpundit says:

But why do I get the feeling that most people who complain about traffic cameras are actually just people who routinely push their luck at intersections and are afraid of getting caught? Is it because their principled arguments always strike me as completely lame?

Yeah, that’s it.

I’d note that, in my experience, complaints about enforcement of road safety laws of all kinds come mainly from the political right, and, as Kevin notes, mostly from people who routinely break the law themselves.

By contrast, suggestions for more lenient treatment of burglars, drug users etc come mostly from liberals, most of whom are not prone to burglary or even (relative to the general population) illegal drug use. This, along with the Bill Bennett affair, leads me to the following gigantic overgeneralisation. Conservatives make excuses for their own wrongdoing, liberals for the wrongdoing of others.

Prestige in economics

John Quiggin4 Comments

Kieran Healy fresh from defending sociology against attacks from ignorant economists, returns fire with this sly dig in a post about the underrepresentation of women

Even the lower-status fields in Economics (e.g., those that involve looking at data of any sort, hem hem) require a very high degree of competence in formal methods.

Actually, Kieran is out of date here. The availability of large cross-section data sets and the development of new techniques for analysing them has led to a resurgence in the prestige of empirical methods accompanied by a decline in the status of abstract theory. Steve Levitt’s Clark Prize is the most recent example (of winners in the last decade, I’d say only Matt Rabin is primarily a theorist).

What remains striking is the ambiguous status of policy. Although quite a lot of high-profile economists are engaged in the policy debate, there’s still quite a strong undercurrent of academic disdain for such a grubby activity, especially when it involves being embroiled in controversy (Stiglitz, Krugman etc). The situation in Australia was quite different in the generation preceding mine, when the top economists were almost automatically those actively involved in making or criticising public policy (Gruen, Gregory and Pitchford, just to name a few of the ANU contingent), but we now conform to the global norm. For the general public, an economist is someone who shills for a bank, and within the academic profession, involvement in policy is at best an optional extra . As in many things, I prefer the attitudes and institutions of the past, to those of the present in this matter.

What I'm reading

John Quiggin

I’ve been reading lots of different things, but a couple of books illustrate the opposite ends of the spectrum of thought about the Internet and its possibilities.
Clifford Stoll’s 1995 Silicon Snake Oil was one of the first manifestations of neo-Luddism. An interesting example of a failed reductio ad absurdam is a critique of estimates of the growth rate of the Internet, where Stoll says

Just by counting network nodes, the Internet is now doubling in size every year. This growth rate can’t continue for long – at this rate, everyone on Earth will be connected by 2003. Impossible

Here we are in 2003, and while it’s not literally true that everyone on Earth is connected, it is true that almost everyone in the developed world has access to the Internet.
Stoll is similarly dismissive of prospects for a revival of public debate on the Internet, taking as his model the dying days of UseNet. He misses almost completely the impact of the Web. Of course, he does not anticipate blogging which, I think, has gone a long way towards fulfilling the early promise of the Internet. Imperfect as blogs are, they contain a lot of well-written and well-argued discussion of a wide range of issues that would have had very little chance of publication in the days before the Internet.

If Stoll was too pessimistic, this was nothing compared to the ludicrous overoptimism of the dotcom boom, chronicled in James Ledbetter’s Starving to Death on $200 Million a Year: The Short Absurd Life of the Industry Standard We have yet to see a really good book on this topic. (Thomas Frank’s One Market Under God, which I reviewed here is easily the best book on the 1990s boom as a whole, but is only peripherally concerned with the dotcoms.

Read Soon soon

John Quiggin

After a long period of relative quiescence, Jason Soon is back with a string of interesting and lengthy posts (made lengthier by the narrowness of his blogger template!). As he implies in one of them, his long-delayed adoption of a comments facility has been a major stimulus and has implied something of a change in blogstyle.

Worth reading

John Quiggin

Keneth Miles has returned from hiatus with a string of interesting posts. He’s particularly good on the science of global warming (I think I’ll just point to him from now on rather than chasing down the data myself).

I’ve added Keneth to the blogroll as an Ozplogger even though his title “The UnAustralian” indicates he clearly isn’t (he’s from those other nearby islands).

This is consistent with standard Australian practice of claiming for ourselves anything creditable done by a Kiwi who has even the most tenuous link to this country (see Jane Campion, Russell Crowe, Phar Lap etc etc).

Where are the women?

John Quiggin5 Comments

Kieran Healy and Brian Weatherson, among others, have been discussing the absence of women at the top levels of economics and analytic philosophy. For example, all the winners of the JB Clark Medal and the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences have been men.

Kieran is mainly concerned to dismiss the idea that this reflects some fundamental difference between men and women. He takes the hypothesis of discrimination within the occupational groups as the alternative, more or less by default.

I’d argue that the bulk of the explanation can be found in high school or earlier.
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Who will pay for rebuilding Iraq

John Quiggin1 Comment

One of the curious developments in the aftermath of the Iraq war has been the fight over who will get contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq. It?s curious because, so far at least, the only money that has been put up to fund this reconstruction is $US2.3 billion included in the Bush?s $US73 billion war appropriation. This is a fair sum of money, but scarcely the stuff of an international incident. It?s important, then, to consider how much Iraqi reconstruction is likely to cost and where the money is going to come from.
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Not a good start

John Quiggin7 Comments

No sooner had I made the move to my new home than the server for mentalspace and drivelwarehouse domains crashed, taking out a fair part of Ozplogistan. You can read the gory details here.

However, everything seems to be fixed now, and I plan to start working on improvements to this site. Suggestions gratefully accepted.

Update I’ve implemented a number of suggestions, including some changes in colour scheme and the addition of a photo. It’s newer (that is, older) than the one on the website, which I’ll update soon. More suggestions and criticism still very much welcome.