Salam Pax has posted a diary of the war in Baghdad, sent as a Word file to a friend. Obviously, rumors reported here that he was injured and in hospital were, like most rumors, false.
Month: May 2003
Old Mortality
This NYT report gives ground for a pessimistic view about SARS, but has some credibility problems. It begins:
The death rate from SARS may be significantly higher than health officials had thought, up to 55 percent in people 60 and older, and up to 13.2 percent in younger people, the first major epidemiological study of the disease suggests.
Mortality rates are bound to change somewhat as an epidemic continues. But unless the numbers fall drastically, SARS would be among infectious diseases with the highest death rates. Until now, fatality rates reported by the World Health Organization had ranged from 2 percent, when the epidemic was first detected in March, to 7.2 percent.
The new findings come from a statistical analysis of 1,425 patients suspected of having SARS who were admitted to Hong Kong hospitals from Feb. 20 to April 15. Over all, their mortality rate was estimated to be as high as 19.9 percent. By contrast, the influenza pandemic of 1918, which killed tens of millions of people worldwide, had an estimated mortality rate, over all, of 1 percent or less.
Let’s look at the last number. If a disease that kills ten million people has a mortality rate of 1 per cent, the number infected is 1 billion. The report is inexact, but clearly implies that several times that many people were killed and that the mortality rate was below 1 per cent. The world population in 1920 was less than 2 billion.
Obviously something is wrong here. This doesn’t mean that the estimates quoted about SARS are wrong, but it would be useful to have a better baseline for comparison.
The opportunity cost of war
My piece in todays Fin (subscription required) is about the opportunity cost of the war on Iraq. An excerpt
In the absence of large-scale discoveries of weapons, attention has focused on the undoubted benefits of overthrowing an evil and oppressive dictator. This is a form of foreign aid and can usefully be compared to other aid programs. The total budget of USAID, the main US agency for development and humanitarian assistance is $8.7 billion for the coming year. That is, the money already spent on the Iraq war could have doubled USAID’s budget for the next five years.
It seems certain, however, that the war will herald a sustained increase in military expenditure of at least $US100 billion per year. A more reasonable comparison, therefore, is the ambitious proposal of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, led by Harvard Economist Jeffrey Sachs. The Commission aimed to achieve, for all a poor countries, a two-thirds reduction of 1990 child mortality levels, a three-fourths reduction of 1990 maternal mortality ratios and an end to the rising prevalence of major diseases, especially HIV/AIDS.
As the Commission pointed out, in addition to the humanitarian benefits of saving as many as 8 million lives per year, reductions in mortality are directly correlated with a reduced frequency of military coups and state collapse. These provide the breeding ground for terrorism and dictatorship and ultimately lead, in many cases, lead to US military intervention. The estimated cost for the Commission’s seemingly-utopian program over the next decade is estimated at between $US 50 billion and $US 100 billion per year.
War is sometimes necessary in self-defence. But when war is adopted as an instrument of policy, it is often counterproductive and almost never cost-effective.
A self-denying argument
In today’s [Thursday} Fin (subscription required) Gary Johns continues the Institute of Public Affairs campaign against the idea of corporate social responsibility. The piece spends 750 words complaining about a Greenpeace exercise solely on the grounds that non-responses to a question were coded as zero.
The more substantive claim is that corporations should focus on making profits for their shareholders, and leave the shareholders to decide whether to keep the money themselves or to allocate it to worthy causes. One obvious implication of this argument is that corporations should stop funding organisations like the IPA. However much or little good the IPA does for Australian capitalism in general, its impact on the profitability of any individual corporation is clearly trivial. Hence, giving shareholders’ money to such organisations is a breach of the directors’ fiduciary responsibilities.
Update As Scott Wickstein points out in the comments, if shareholders want to support the IPA, they should do so as individuals.
Word for Wednesday: Intellectual (definition)
Intellectual is a particularly tricky word. Partly this is because it has no generally accepted definition. To make things even more difficult, almost no-one will admit to being one or even knowing one without some sort of qualifying adjective or caveat. I’m happy to call myself a public intellectual for example, and I know a few people who would admit to being ?literary intellectuals?, but I don’t think I’ve ever met a self-confessed intellectual.
Although there are occasional positive uses like this, the term is far more often used negatively, but again, never in a straightforward way. Negative uses are almost always surrounded by scare quotes, as in ‘intellectuals’, or with some similar qualifier as in so-called intellectual or my personal favorite ?pseudo-intellectual.
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Labour Day
Today is Labour Day in Queensland, held to mark May Day. In most other Australian states, though, Labour Day commemorates the passage of legislation in the mid-19th century limiting the working day to eight hours. This was the first step in a series of legislative measures and agreements negotiated by unions that steadily reduced the number of hours standardly worked per year from about 2400 in 1950 to around 1750 in the mid-1980s.
As we all know, that trend came to an abrupt halt and went into reverse through the 1990s. Strictly speaking, standard hours have not changed, but the majority of full-time workers now work longer-than-standard hours, typically without paid overtime. Similar trends have been evident in other English-speaking countries, most notably the US.
Meanwhile working hours have continued to decline in Europe. The imposition of a maximum 35 hour week in France has attracted most attention, but few Europeans work more than 1600 hours a year.
Is the return of longer hours a desirable market outcome or an aberration. In my view, it’s the latter. the intensification of work in the 1990s seems to be the product of a period of economic expansion combined with employer dominance. Working hours have already begun to decline in the United States.
The experience of Japan, famous for long working hours in the 1980s is instructive. The low growth of the last decade has not been accompanied, as one might expect, by strong growth in unemployment, even though productivity has continued to improve. This is because working hours have declined. As this ILO data shows, average working hours in Japan are now slightly below those in Australia and well below those of the US.
Intuition suggests that leisure is a normal good. Economic progress should entail shorter hours and less stress. Instead, for the last decade or so, we have had the opposite. Productivity gains derived from such sources are built on sand (in fact, correctly measured, they are nonexistent).
Welcome !
Welcome, everyone to my new site! I’d appreciate a comment just to let me know that people are finding their way here.
Monday Message Board
It’s a public holiday here in Queensand (Labour Day, on which I hope to post more soon). But it’s a normal workday in most of Australia which means you have no excuse for not devoting your time and your employer’s Internet connection to posting incisive comments on today’s Monday Message Board. As always, civilised discussion and no coarse language, please.
What I'm reading, and more
I’ve finished the Inferno and am now beginning Dante’s ascent of Purgatory. I also made my first visit to Brisbane Forest Park, a very pleasant expanse of mixed eucalypt and subtropical rainforest, just west of my new home.
Partly because I was thinking about Dante, it struck me that Queensland seems to have more optimistic/picturesque placenames than the areas I’m used to. On today’s journey, for example, I passed Mt Glorious. By contrast, a typical bushwalk in the Snowy Mountains might begin at Dead Horse Gap, and bypass Mt Purgatory on the way to Mt Terrible. Or there’s Scabby Range, Dry Plain and Doubtful Creek, to name just a few of the spots I’ve visited.
It's gone pear-shaped, guv
Despite occasional temptations, I’ve stuck to my resolution to abandon The Bill, which, as Rob Corr pointed out, jumped the shark some time ago (I nominate the station firebombing, which wrote out six characters in one episode, but the warning signs were evident well before that). I have, however, received reports of the ultimate shark-jump, a dramatic wedding episode. I didn’t get any good recommendations for alternative TV addictions, so I’ll be curled up in front of a video, instead of watching while Debbie, covered in blood, escapes from Tom’s office, as promised in the TV guide.
Update Demonstrating yet again this blog’s intimate link with the Zeitgeist, The Age runs a story on the soaping up of The Bill. It confirms that the firebombing was the first initiative of the shark-jumping new executive producer, but then descends into the realm of the bizarre, claiming that all of this reflects viewer demands for more “realism”. This confirms the inversion of the term that first arose with the use of the term “reality TV” to describe live-in game shows.
John Quiggin 