Month: March 2006

Milosevic is dead. Hooray?

John Quiggin52 Comments

Like John Howard, I won’t be shedding any tears over Slobodan Milosevic, whose death, apparently from natural causes, has been announced.

An obvious question raised by his death is whether (and how) his trial on a variety of war crimes charges could have been accelerated. The fact that he will never be properly convicted is certainly unfortunate. Even if it would have had no short run impact on opinion among Serbian nationalists, it would have helped to set the historical record straight. Milosevic’s death increases the urgency of capturing his main instruments, Mladic and Karadzic, whose connection to the crimes of the Bosnian war is more immediate, and whose trial could drive home the evil of Milosevic’s policies.

Still, the long trial in The Hague is better than the alternative on offer in Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein, whose wars cost millions of lives, is being tried, and may be executed, for a comparatively minor crime, but one which is politically convenient for the purposes of victors’ justice.

Something you’re not likely to see too often

John Quiggin36 Comments

A favorable citation of my arguments at Tech Central Station. Normally, I’d be pretty concerned about this, but it’s from Tim Worstall, the sole exception, AFAIK, to the otherwise uniform hackishness of that site[1].

Tim quotes my discussion of the Baumol effect to argue that the fact that the US spends so much more on health care than other countries is not necessarily a bad thing. At the aggregate level he’s right. We should expect the share of income spent on services like health and education to rise as income increases, driven by productivity growth in the goods-producing sector. In the case of medicine, the regular discovery of new and costly treatments adds to the problem (there’s an argument that this technological innovation is an endogenous result of the way health care is financed but I’ll leave that for another day).

Worstall is also right to imply that systems of public provision have, at least in some cases, led to pressure to hold expenditure below the socially optimal level. This was most obviously true of the National Health Service in Britain, though expenditure and service provision have increased greatly since the election of the Blair government, and are set to rise further. The same pressures are evident here in Australia.

That said, when you look at the US system in detail, it’s clearly not a matter of paying more to get more. While the health care available to the top 20 per cent of Americans (those with unrestricted Blue Cross style insurance) is probably the best in the world, the average American (insured by an HMO or a fee-for-service insurer with restrictions) doesn’t get any better care than in other developed countries and the uninsured are much worse off.

The real problems are the financing system (Worstall gets off a neat crack at the expense of JK Galbraith here, but the real problems go back to the 1930s, as discussed by Robert Moss in When All Else Fails) and the very high salaries of US doctors compared to those in other countries, reflecting both higher inequality in the US and the huge cost of becoming a doctor through the US higher education system.

One result is that, despite relying primarily on private, employer-provided insurance, the US government actually spends more, relative to GDP, on health than most others.

Finally, there’s the balance between medical care and public health, broadly defined. It’s well known that the US has a lower life expectancy than other countries that spend much less on medical care. This isn’t however, primarily due to inadequate access to lifesaving treatments (the poor miss out on lots of routine health and dental care, but they can usually get emergency treatment). Rather, it’s the result of unhealthy living conditions broadly defined to include guns, car crashes, the consequences of obesity and so on. These things aren’t easily fixed, but there’s more resistance to doing anything about them in the US than in most other places.

fn1. Why he keeps writing for them, I don’t know. Tim would do much better as the opposition writer in residence at a left or liberal site, a slot that is very hard to fill in my experience. He makes good points, is willing to admit that he’s wrong on occasion, and is gracious when he catches someone else in error, as he has done with me. Still, that’s his business.

Weekend reflections

John Quiggin44 Comments

Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.

Factions, yet again

John Quiggin17 Comments

One of the points coming up in discussion of the ALP faction issue is the claim that while factions are destructive in the Federal Party they have worked well at a state level. I think this is the reverse of the truth. The faction system worked reasonably well at the Federal level throughout the Hawke-Keating years. At the state level, the system has been poisonous and destructive ever since it took its current form around the time of the Split in the mid-50s.

Full-scale factionalism has been most dominant in Queensland, NSW and Victoria. In Queensland, the AWU and Old Guard factions kept Peter Beatty and the reformers out for years, promoting instead a succession of hacks and no-hopers, most notably Keith Wright, later convicted of sex offences against young girls.

The NSW Right has been similarly dismal, failing miserably to beat the corrupt Robin Askin and losing horribly whenever it put up one of its own favored sons as a leader or contender for any position of substance (Pat Hills, Barrie Unsworth, Michael Lee and almost certainly Morris Iemma as well). Labor in NSW has only succeeded when outsiders like Wran and Carr (a member of the Right, but not a Sussex St hack) have managed to get the top job.

Victorian factions have been a source of grief and disaster for fifty years, and obviously nothing has changed. From Santamaria & Kennelly[1] to Hartley to Conroy, whatever the ideology, the style hasn’t changed.

Labor’s performance at the state level is, and always has been, inversely proportional to the strength of the factions.

fn1. I always remember my father describing how, as a returned serviceman, he joined the ALP (along with my uncle) in the hope of doing something for the good of the working class, and how Pat Kennelly (the “Kingmaker”) led them to quit in disgust.

The great purge

John Quiggin4 Comments

The Brisbane Bullets have sacked their captain Derek Rucker, having already axed Daniel Egan and Lanard Copeland. It seems pretty clear that Bobby Brannen will go as well. While Copeland has probably reached the end of his stellar career, the others still have plenty to contribute. They seem to have paid the price for the fact that an all-star team didn’t live up to expectations. Given that all of them turned in some superb performances at times, I would have thought the blame for the team not coming together lay most obviously with the coach or management.

I grew up following suburban club football in Adelaide. In those days, there were occasional changes but, broadly speaking, you took on a club for life, either as a player or a follower, and vice versa. I know times have changed, but I can’t say I warm to the wholesale shifts that characterise Australian basketball in particular. Not only do players move all the time but clubs come and go at a great rate, mainly for financial rather than sporting reasons.

Having moved to Brisbane just after the demise of the Canberra Cannons, and just when Derek Rucker (whom I’d previously followed in Townsville) returned, I thought I was in for a bit of stability. Instead reform and structural adjustment are the order of the day. I’ll find it hard to muster much enthusiasm for the Bullets next season.

Call for help (I refuse to type bl*g)

John Quiggin20 Comments

I’m trying to get started on a reasonably substantial analysis of the economics of policies to mitigate climate change. I thought this would be a good time to acknowledge a couple of readers who’ve sent me useful links, and ask if anyone has any others. Of course, I’ve already got a mountain of stuff to get through.

Waratah points me to this link suggesting that California could achieve a net benefit from a program generating a substantial reduction in emissions, and SimonJM has pointed to this useful site.

Factions (repost from 2004)

John Quiggin3 Comments

Reading the comments thread, I notice a few themes that seemed familiar, and checking back I found this post from 2004, which seemed worth reprinting

Given that Labor obviously has to do something more than wait for the housing bubble to burst, one simple (but not easy!) organisational step would be to abolish factions. That is, membership of any organised factional grouping ought to be treated like membership of a rival political party, as grounds for automatic expulsion. Of course, it would be impossible to prevent informal or secret factions from operating, as they do in all parties. But, to my knowledge, the only major political party anywhere in the world with a faction system comparable to Labor’s is the notoriously corrupt Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, and even here PM Koizumi is largely independent of the factions.

There was a time (from the 1950s split to sometime in the 1980s) when the factional groupings corresponded to ideological divisions. But that has long since ceased to be true. It’s probably true that the average member of the Left faction is a little more likely to favor a ‘progressive’ line on social issues than the average member of the Right and Centre, but that’s about the strength of it. Each of the major factions is subdivided into smaller groups, often little more than extended families, with their retainers and servants.

Nowadays, the factions exist because they exist. No-one is willing to bell the cat. However, this is the kind of thing Latham could take on, and perhaps even win. It would certainly be more in his line than Simon Crean’s lame achievement of changing the union voting ratio from 60 to 50 per cent[1].

fn1. While I’m dreaming, I’d like an end to the formal link between the unions and the ALP. And a pony.

The invention of tradition

John Quiggin12 Comments

CP Snow once said that all ancient British traditions date to the second half of the 19th Century, and his only error was to limit this claim to Britain. The great majority of real traditions having been swept away or reduced to irrelevance with the rise of capitalism, the 19th century saw the rise of a whole set of new ones, which were then fixed in shape by the system of nation-states, each with their own newly-codified language and officially sanctioned history that took shape at the same time[1]

Via Barista and an interesting link on the theatrical origins of the ninja, I came to this great piece by Craig Colbeck on Karate and Modernity, a lot closer to my own interests than black-clad stage assassins. Although the jargon is a bit heavy going in places, there’s a pretty clear argument to show that the Okinawa karate tradition developed in the late C19 and was derived from China.

Living in the 21st century, and in Australia, I can’t say I’m too worried about the invention of tradition. Anything more than 100 years old is old enough for me.

OT PS: At my local shops at the weekend, I passed a woman (20s?) wearing a T-shirt that stated “Kickboxers are Nancy Boys”. I was struck by the rather antique slang (unless it’s come back in while I wasn’t paying attention), but also a bit bemused by the subtext. Worn by a man, the implication would presumably be one of aggressive bravado, but I don’t know what it means worn by a woman. And what about women kickboxers?

fn1, This process began a bit earlier in Britain and France and still hasn’t reached finality, but the crucial period, including German and Italian unification and the creation of the US in its current form, took place between 1850 and 1900.

Shame

John Quiggin53 Comments

This event, in which a prominent indigenous opera singer suffered a stroke at a Griffith University bus stop and was left semi-conscious and vomiting for hours on end by commuters and bus drivers alike, is a source of shame for Brisbane, and should be one for all Australians.

Obviously, despite being a well-dressed visitor to a university, Delmae Barton’s skin colour was enough to create the assumption that she was drunk. I don’t want to throw too many stones at the individuals involved: the fact that we live in a society where drunken black people are a fairly common sight is just as shameful as the episode itself. And I don’t have any easy answers. But it’s something for which all Australians need to take some responsibility.