Month: June 2006

A puzzle on US politics

John Quiggin30 Comments

One of the striking features of US politics over the past fifteen years is the rise of partisan feeling. The blogosphere reflects this, and has helped to accelerate it. Whereas US political discussion used to be dominated by appeals to bipartisanship there now seems to be more party-specific rancour than, for example, in Australia.

On the other hand, there’s a lot of commentary about the absence of competitive races and the increasing advantage of incumbency.

These two trends seem inconsistent to me. Of course, with strong partisan loyalties you expect a fair number of safe seats for either party, but the discussion of incumbency is mostly about the strength of individual incumbents. And even with many safe seats, there ought also to be a large number of marginals.

Has anyone attempted to reconcile these conflicting trends?

Monday message board

John Quiggin41 Comments

It’s time, once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual, civilised discussion and absolutely no coarse language, please.

As a discussion starter, should we continue to celebrate the Queen’s Birthday with a public holiday?

Renationalise Telstra

John Quiggin124 Comments

Tim Blair cites my recent observation that privatisation in Australia is political poison and goes on to ask for further advice on the issue

Take the next step, Quiggler; tell us which industries or businesses should be nationalised. People will like it, apparently.

I’m happy to oblige. The best case for (re)nationalisation is undoubtedly Telstra, minus peripheral bits like BigPond which should be wholly privatised. I’ve been making this argument for years.

Although Tim correctly points out the logical symmetry – if people hate privatisation, and clearly they do, then they should welcome nationalisation – he seems to be in some doubt about the politics. There are overseas examples to help here. Helen Clark’s government renationalised both accident compensation and Air New Zealand and didn’t seem to suffer any political damage, but of course, that’s New Zealand. More interestingly, the government led by Tim’s UK namesake renationalised Railtrack, to widespread applause, a couple of years ago.

What these examples have in common is that the privatisation was badly bungled, so that renationalisation was easy to sell. Although it isn’t, like Railtrack and Air NZ, on the verge of bankruptcy, Telstra is also a prime example of a bungled privatisation.

As Tim notes, given the deep public opposition to privatisation, exhibited recently over Snowy Hydro, there’s no reason to suppose that renationalisation would be unpopular. The problem is that the elite (not the people who drink cafe lattes, but those in both parties, banks and big business who actually run the show) benefit from privatisation and have no desire to stop it.

Update Tim liked this suggestion, and now he wants more. Next cab off the rank, in my view, should be airports. The privatisation of these monopolies was followed by massive increases in navigation charges, as well as a whole string of petty imposts on travellers. Another large part of the attraction, in Brisbane at least, was the ability to (mis)use the power of the Commonwealth to evade state and local controls on land development. And the involvement of politically well-connected types like Max Moore-Wilton only made the whole thing worse in every respect.

Letting off steam

John Quiggin5 Comments

With a bit of welcome rain (well, drizzle, but every little helps) Brisbane is, unusually, both cold and humid today. As a result, after a fairly intense training session at karate today, my son informed me that I was, literally, giving off steam.

Darfur appeal last chance

John Quiggin3 Comments

The Darfur appeal ends today, and generous readers have contributed $400, which I’ll match. The target is $500, so I’m hoping someone will pony up part or all of the last $100 before 6pm today, when I’ll close off. To follow the tragedy in Sudan, visit Passion of the Present. There seems to be no end to the war, and no easy solution (though the world could surely do better than it has done) but we can at least help to stop people starving.

Weekend reflections

John Quiggin13 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.

More conversions on global warming

John Quiggin35 Comments

It’s getting lonely for the denialists. According to the Sierra Club, even pollster Frank Luntz, author of an infamous memo urging Republicans to exploit doubt on global warming, has jumped ship.

More interesting perhaps is Tyler Cowen, who concedes that

It is by now pointless to deny that global warming is man-made to a considerable degree.

but is very pessimistic about our ability to do anything about it. (via Brad DeLong)

Since such pessimism is inversely correlated with faith in markets to achieve adjustments to changing prices, I find this quite surprising. Given a reasonable long-run elasticity of demand for C02 emissions, there’s every reason to suppose that very large reductions in emissions (say 60 per cent) could be achieved in the long run at a welfare cost of only a few percentage points of GDP.

A win for the spammers

John Quiggin48 Comments

I’ve always resisted imposing general restrictions on comments. To make life easy for genuine commenters, I’ve dealt with trolls and spammers manually. But, after a period when they’ve been in retreat, the spammers are back in force. So, I’m implementing a moderation scheme. If it works as intended, commenters will have their first comment moderated until I approve it, and will then be automatically approved.

To simplify things, regulars (or those who plan to be regulars) can just comment here, and I’ll approve them en masse.

If this doesn’t work, I’ll probably go to one of those annoying code-deciphering thingies. If readers would prefer annoying code-deciphering thingies, feel free to say so.

If it works well, I’ll be able to reduce the class of words, like pharm*cy that trigger the automoderation software.

Update It looks as if everyone who has a comment in the database is approved, unless they trigger the automoderation tests. And, so far, the spammers are being consigned to moderation, so this may work OK.

The misallocation of scepticism

John Quiggin37 Comments

With today (6/6/6) bearing the number of the beast, my thoughts went back to the most recent scary date 1/1/00 when we were promised TEOTWAWKI thanks to the famous Y2K bug.

Oddly enough, although we seem to be overwhelmed with alleged sceptics on other topics, only a handful of people challenged the desirability of spending hundreds of billions of dollars to fix a problem which was not, on the face of it, any more serious than dozens of other bugs in computer systems. Admittedly not all the money was wasted, since lots of new computers were bought. But a lot of valuable equipment was prematurely scrapped and a vast amount of effort was devoted to compliance, when a far cheaper “fix on failure” approach would have sufficed for all but the most mission-critical of systems.

As far as I know, there was no proper peer-reviewed assessment of the seriousness of the problems published in the computer science literature. Most of the running was made by consultants with an axe to grind, and their scaremongering was endorsed by committees where no-one had any incentive to point out the nudity of the emperor.

Why was there so little scepticism on this issue? An obvious explanation is that no powerful interests were threatened and some, such as consultants and computer companies, stood to gain. I don’t think this is the whole story, and I tried to analyse the process here, but there’s no doubt that a reallocation of scepticism could have done us a lot of good here.