Month: June 2003

Glad to be wrong: Part 2

John Quiggin5 Comments

Jack Strocchi has engaged in some justified gloating at my expense in relation to the Israel-Palestine peace talks where progress has been much better than I expected, though success is still far from being assured.

Sharon’s concession that the Israeli occupation is untenable, and apparent acceptance of a contiguous Palestinian state means that there is now no logical alternative to a deal similar to the Clinton plan of a few years ago. Although Sharon would undoubtedly like to keep substantial parts of the West Bank, the logic of the process will push it towards a limited exchange of territory. But Sharon is still hedging, and may be hoping to wait out the notoriously short US attention span. Still, Bush, prodded by Blair, has gone a lot further than I thought he would, and has dragged Sharon with him.

Having made this concession, I’ll point out that, as I predicted, the Bush Administration is making just as much of a mess of the occupation of Iraq as it did in the case of Afghanistan, and for the same basic reason. They have been prepared to spend billions of dollars and lots of attention on war, but almost nothing on peace.

In an odd sense, the postwar mess in Iraq has been good for the Israel-Palestine peace process. It’s clear now that if the peace process fails, the chances of a successful outcome in Iraq would be greatly reduced by resurgent anti-US feeling throughout the region. That along with the failure to find WMDs and the gradual realisation that Iraqi casualties were much higher than first claimed, would discredit the case for war, although this would probably take the form of gradually disillusionment (as with Gulf War I) rather than a sharp swing in public opinion. So Bush has a lot riding on this, and Blair even more so.

Thought for Thursday

John Quiggin13 Comments

Having had plenty of interest in my posts on road safety and speeding. I thought I’d work it up into a column for the Fin (Subscription required). Thanks to everyone who participated in the debate, on all sides of the question. This ‘road test’ certainly helped to sharpen up my arguments, and maybe also helped people on the other side of the question to clarify their position. Here’s the closing bit

One of the great strengths of the campaign for road safety has been the bipartisan support it has attracted. Labor, Liberal and National Party Transport ministers have been willing to brave the mindless reactions of those drivers who consider that their special skills should exempt them from the rules applying to the common herd (80 per cent of drivers class themselves as ‘above average’). Even more remarkably, their political opponents have refrained from trying to score cheap political points at the expense of public safety.
Until now, that is. Victorian Opposition Leader Robert Doyle pandered to the leadfoot vote at the last election with a proposal to legalise speeding, in the form of a 10 per cent tolerance above speed limits. Despite a comprehensive thrashing, he’s returned to his ‘soft on crime’ line, with complaints that the Bracks government is enforcing speeding laws too vigorously.
Doyle raises the tired argument that speeding fines are motivated by ‘revenue raising’. Even if this were true, what would be wrong with that? Governments have to raise revenue, and dangerous drivers are at least as good a tax base as gamblers, homebuyers and wage employees, the targets of the main taxes left to state governments. In fact, however, the increase in fines seems to be contributing to a renewed decline in road deaths, which have fallen sharply in 2003.
If he had any chance of being elected to office, Doyle’s irresponsible demagoguery would be dangerous. As it is, it gives his long-suffering colleagues yet another reason to dump him.

Word for Wednesday: Rule-Consequentialism definition

John Quiggin21 Comments

This is a followup to my earlier posts on consequentialism/utilitarianism. A notable debate in the literature on this topic is on whether, from a consequentialist or utilitarian perspective, it is best to try always to choose the action with the best consequences (act-consequentialism) or whether to try to find those general rules which, on average, yield the best consequences, and follow those rules even when in particular cases, they yield bad consequences (rule-consequentialism).
Read More »

Is Poverty Obsolete ?

John Quiggin11 Comments

I’ve been reading Clive Hamilton’s Growth Fetish on which quite a few bloggers have already commented. I agree with some of the points Clive makes and disagree, sometimes strongly, with others. I may do a full length review some time, but for the moment I’ll post a bit at a time.

I’ll start with a point of disagreement. Clive dismisses traditional social democratic concerns with absolute deprivation as being relevant, at most, to those in the bottom 10 per cent of the income distribution.

Taking food as the most basic necessity and the US as the developed country where social democracy has lost most ground, I looked for stats and found this briefing by the US Department of Agriculture. The key finding:

89.3 percent of U.S. households were food secure throughout calendar year 2001. “Food secure” means they had access, at all times, to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members. The rest (10.7 percent) were food insecure at least some time during the year, meaning that they did not always have access to enough food for active, healthy lives for all household members. In 3.3 percent of all households, one or more household members were hungry at least some time during the year. The remaining 7.4 percent obtained enough food to avoid hunger using a variety of coping strategies such as eating less-varied diets, participating in Federal food assistance programs, or getting emergency food from community food pantries.

The figure is close enough to Clive’s 10 per cent, but this is a one-year snapshot. Since people move into and out of poverty, it’s clear that the proportion of Americans who have problems feeding their families at some time in a given period of say, five years, is well above 10 per cent. And this is using a very tight definition of deprivation at a time when the US economy, though past the absolute peak in 2000, was still doing very well by the standards of the last two decades. I’d say that the traditional social democratic concern with poverty is not yet obsolete.

Resurrection of Troppo Armadillo

John Quiggin6 Comments

By force of circumstance, Ken Parish has moved yet again. This time he’s sharing digs with Scott Wickstein at Ubersportingpundit. Ken already has his first post up, about being given (undesired) ringside tickets at a divorce. The archives are still lost behind the cyberfuddle permissions shield, but we can hope that they are not permanently bloggered.

I was feeling pretty disheartened about the prospect of a blogworld without Ken and his co-bloggers, so I’m very grateful to Scott for his rescue effort. Please update your links, bookmarks etc. With amazing efficiency (for me), I’ve already fixed my blogroll.

BTW, as Gianna mentioned in a recent comments thread, Scott has joined the self-revelatory trend and posted a picture. Not what I expected either.

Grand theft auto (repost)

John Quiggin6 Comments

Preface to repost A commentator on my previous post accused me of being anti-fun. I’m reposting this to show I’m pro-fun, as long as other people’s fun doesn’t threaten to kill me.

Original post 11/11/02

Tim Blair, as usual, defends his right to play with dangerous toys, like guns and fast cars, devoting a comprehensive fisking to a piece by Hugh McKay about speeding. I didn’t find McKay’s article that interesting when I first read it, but judging by Tim’s response, it hit the target.

On libertarian grounds, I’ve been planning to suggest some sort of theme park, analogous to smoking rooms and safe injecting rooms, where lovers of guns and dangerous driving could act out their Grand Theft Auto fantasies without endangering the rest of us.

But I was wondering – where could such a park be located? Then it struck me that large parts of the US are like that already, except for all the ordinary decent people trying to live there. I don’t suppose it would be too hard to persuade most of the population of, say, South-East Washington DC, to move somewhere nicer, leaving the gangsters and drug dealers behind. The park would be there, ready-made, for Tim and friends to enjoy.

The economic viability of the park would be greatly supplemented by reality TV. I, for one, would happily sign up for pay-TV just to watch this.

Update I missed it, but Tim has indeed blogged again on this very topic, with the headline Government good. Drivers bad Certainly if the drivers I encounter on a daily basis are a fair sample, the second part of Tim’s headline rings true

Leadfoot Doyle rides again

John Quiggin26 Comments

Fresh from his flogging at the last state election, when he advocated legalising speeding (he called it a ‘tolerance zone’), Victorian Opposition Leader Robert ‘Leadfoot’ Doyle is back at it again, complaining that there are too many speed cameras collecting too much in fine revenue. The fact that Victoria’s road toll is falling substantially (according to the same report “The state’s road toll was 160 yesterday, compared with 185 at the same time last year”) is of no concern to Doyle.

Until now, Victorian politics has been characterised by a bipartisan commitment to road safety which has been reflected in a stunning decline in road deaths. Since 1970, when seat belt laws were introduced (over the objections of people like Doyle),

road deaths in Victoria have been lowered from a peak of 1,061 to 378 last year, despite an increase of 140% in registered vehicles and 41% in population. The Victorian fatality rate in 1970 of 8.1 deaths per 10,000 registered vehicles was one of the worst among motorised countries, while the 1997 rate of 1.2 was one of the lowest.

By contrast, in the US, where people like Doyle have been successful in resisting strong road safety laws and effective enforcement, road deaths are rising.

Doyle is a disgrace. He has no place in Australian politics.

Repost: Putting the "Urban Heat Islands" issue to bed

John Quiggin22 Comments

Preface on reposting policy I and others have been discussing concerns about the ephemerality of blogging. Given that blogs are a searchable database, there’s no real reason why people should look only at the current pages. But in my experience, comment threads tend to die off after a few days. However, Aaron Oakley has just put in a comment on a post from December 2002, and this gives me a chance to announce my new policy. If anyone comments on a post that has been archived (more than 10 days) I will do my best to repost it and thereby reopen the debate.

Preface to the repost Now here’s the reposted piece. I think the article quoted in the paper refutes Aaron in advance, but just to be clear I’ll restate my point. I agree with Aaron that urban heat islands are real even in small towns (in fact, I’m glad to see Aaron endorsing the reality of human-induced climate change). I also agree that estimates of climate change need to be checked using only rural stations. But, as the cited article says this has already been done, and it makes no significant difference to estimates of global warming. Note that Aaron himself recommended this article.

Reposted article begins
Bizarre Science points to this study confirming the IPCC contention that Urban Heat Islands, while a real phenomenon, are not important in assessing estimates of the rate of global warming C.J.G. (Jon) Morris of the School of Earth Sciences, The University of Melbourne, reports

Whilst climatologists now think that the warming in the temperature record from some small urban areas is partly the result of the UHI, this is not evidence that Australia’s climate has remained unchanged rather than warmed over the past 100 years. Average minimum temperatures from many stations over most of Australia have shown an increase of between 0.1 deg C and 0.3 deg C per decade since 1951. Whilst some temperature records from small towns do not represent the large scale climate, it is unlikely to have any major impact upon our estimates of temperature warming over Australia. This is because there are numerious other weather stations located in remote areas such as lighthouses and regions far removed from urban areas that still indicate a warming temperature trend.

Thanks for this useful link!

Update While I’m at it, I also appreciate this post, in which BS reader Reader George Bogg points out that, given the number of points in Alan McCallum’s scatterplot, the trend he finds is almost certainly statistically significant (thereby resolving the main remaining point of dispute). However, Bogg misses the point that this is a panel data set, consisting of observations from many different stations over time. An analysis taking this into account would yield a much stronger correlation. Of course, as Bogg points out the fact that the world is getting hotter doesn’t prove anything about the causes. But at least agreement on the facts is a start.

Monday Message Board

John Quiggin10 Comments

I’m running a bit late today. It’s past time to put up the Monday Message Board, where you can comment on any topic that takes your fancy. I note that Tim Dunlop is thinking of adopting this idea. Does anybody have any suggestions for other regular features they’d like to see?

As always, comment on any topic, civilised discussion, no coarse language

Some good news among the bad

John QuigginLeave a comment
.!.

The news seems to be particularly bleak at present with continuing bushfires, impending war, the rail crash of a few days ago with nine people dead and now the loss of the Space Shuttle with all on board. As this list indicates, the news tends to made up mostly of the bad things that are happening at any given time, while good things tend not to be news.

Rereading the comments thread from this post on Australia and Indonesia three months ago, I was struck by the universally gloomy tone regarding the prospects for Indonesian democracy and the survival of Indonesia as a state.

Only three months later prospects seem a lot better. As Scott Wickstein has noted, the Indonesian police have confounded expectations with their success in catching not only those directly involved in the Bali bombing, but those further up the hierarchy (no-one convicted yet, but the evidence seems pretty damning).

In the process, the whole trend towards militant Islamism seems to have been halted. Not only has much of Abu Bashir’s JI network been arrested but the equally nasty Laskar Jihad group, responsible for thousands of deaths in communal rioting announced its disbandment shortly after Bali. Disappointingly, its leader was just acquitted on a charge of inciting religious violence but the disbandment seems to have been permanent.

Even more surprisingly, the cease-fire in Aceh seems to be holding for the most part, though there have been the inevitable incidents.

The economy is still in a mess, but the crisis period is past. An essential part of the transition to stable democracy is the recognition that the economy is going to be in a mess a good deal of the time and that neither generals nor revolutionaries are likely to fix it. It’s my optimistic impression that this fact is beginning to sink in with the Indonesian public and, equally importantly, with the military. Demonstrations against recent cuts in subsidies are, or at least should be, part of the democratic process.

In the end, it seems impossible to balance good and bad news. We must grieve for those who have lost loved ones in the latest tragedies without giving way to despair or giving up the hope of making things better.