Thanks to this comments thread at Crooked Timber, I found an early version of the drunk/lamp-post/keys joke commonly directed at economists in which the role of the drunk/economist is played by a figure from Afghan (or maybe Iranian or Turkish) tradition, Mullah Nasruddin (scroll down or search for basement).
Year: 2007
Monday message board
It’s time, once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual, civilised discussion and absolutely no coarse language, please.
Conserva-bible
I can’t resist following Conservapedia, the Tlön version of Wikipedia, in which the liberal, anti-American bias of the Earth version is replaced with virtue and apple pie. But where did this bias come from, and how is it so deeply rooted in our culture? The answer, it turns out is the Bible, not of course the true version held in the vaults of Uqbar, but the liberal Earth Bible known by such as names as the King James and Revised Versions.
In the Uqbar version, as explained at Conservapedia, all sorts of politically correct liberalism is eliminated or glossed out of existence. Uqbar scholars have discovered that the soft-on-crime John 8:7 ‘”If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone” was inserted by time-travelling liberals some time around the 4th century. Naturally, Conservapedia says, Wikipedia sticks to the Earth version, though a check of the actual site suggests that the annoying liberal habit of looking at all the evidence is at work here as well.
Conservapedia has able assistance from other conservative sources. All that class warfare stuff about the rich not getting into heaven (Matthew 19:21-24) turns out to mean that if you want money, you should cut God (or his earthly representatives) a good share in advance. Other kinds of warfare are fine with the Prince of Peace, though. As for turning the other cheek ((Luke 6:27-31), it’s No More Christian Nice Guy.
Weekend reflections
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.
Miserable failure …
… is a term that will forever be associated with George W. Bush. So, it’s interesting in more than one way that two of our local supporters of the Bush policy line on most issues , Sinclair Davidson and Alex Robson, use the phrase to describe a petition signed by a large proportion of the Australian economics profession in 2002, calling on the government to ratify Kyoto. (I was one of the organisers, and am currently particpating in a similar exercise). Writing in the Oz (where else), Robson and Davidson write “A similar petition was circulated in 2002 but ended in miserable failure when the Government simply ignored it.”
It’s an impressive piece of chutzpah on the part of Robson and Davidson to ignore the fact that, in the intervening five years, the government’s rejectionist position has collapsed, having already been abandoned by the business community and the vast majority of the Australian people. I don’t suppose a petition signed by academic economists had much responsibility for this, but it may have helped to undercut the spurious claim that signing Kyoto would be ruinous to the economy.
But for real chutzpah you can’t go past the fact that when the 2002 petition was released, with nearly 300 signatures, a counter-petition was immediately announced, and a text circulated. But the petition was never released apparently because the number of signatories was embarrassingly small and the number with any real stature in the profession close to zero. The leading organiser of this effort – none other than Alex Robson.
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CEDA lunch on emissions trading
Yesterday, I spoke at a CEDA (Committee for the Economic Development of Australia) lunch on the topic “What would life be like with an emissions trading system for Australia”. Shorter Quiggin: Much as it is now. Slightly longer version: For the average household, it will be a bit like the GST, with some initial disruption and relative price changes, becoming effectively invisible as carbon costs are factored into prices throughout the economy. Other speakers were Paul Simshauser from Babcock and Brown (owners of electricity generators and other infrastructure) and Stuart Dix from e3 International, a firm with a lot of experience in emissions trading markets.
The audience was similarly made up of likely buyers of emissions credits (Stanwell and other electricity generators), sellers (geothermal and other carbon-free sources) and intermediaries (accounting companies, consulting engineers and so on). They are looking at decisions on the billion-dollar scale over the next few years
A couple of points of interest:
* In addition to the usual free lunch and bottle of wine, speakers were rewarded with 17 trees worth of carbon credits, roughly a year’s worth of CO2 from driving for the average motorist.
* The delusionist idea that the whole thing is a hoax dreamed up by scientists looking for research grants/the UN seeking world domination/the Illuminati didn’t get a mention, even in refutation. Unlike the rightwing commentariat and some senior political figures, serious businesses have concluded that the main game now is how emissions trading should work, not whether we should have it.
Saving up the big stuff?
The Budget announced last night has widely been described (both favorably and otherwise) as “clever”. There are tax cuts across the board, with the biggest proportional benefits going to low-income earners. And there are lots of spending initiatives, particularly targeted at areas where the government is vulnerable because of past cuts. There’s a lot of money for universities (which, unsurprisingly, I welcome) partially reversing the cuts of the Vanstone-Kemp era. And the Commonwealth has resumed funding for dental services ten years afer this was abolished. Similarly, there’s a bit more money for alternative energy, an area that’s been cut in the past.
But (again as lots of people have pointed out) there’s no big idea here. Overall the tax cuts continue a pattern of returning real and nominal bracket creep, leaving the share of national income going to the Commonwealth effectively constant. And the new expenditure that’s been announced consists of lots of little things, some better than others, but none likely to make a fundamental difference to the way people perceive the government.
This Budget would make political sense if the government were cruising towards victory, and just needed to shore up its support. But it seems unlikely to do much to claw back the big lead Labor currently enjoys. Maybe the government is confident of winning on the IR front, and doesn’t think it needs any more than this. But that seems unlikely to me.
My guess is that the government is saving up something big for the election campaign. An obvious area would be climate change, where the Budget had only token measures. Alternatively, we might see a relaunch of the water plan. Finally, although the Budget had plenty of money for transport infrastructure, I was surprised that the Melbourne-Brisbane railway proposal, which was the subject of some pretty confident leaks, didn’t get a run. Maybe the government is planning to go the whole hog and announced support for the plan for an inland rail line from Melbourne to Darwin. This proposal has been kicking around for years, and Melbourne-Brisbane can be seen as the first leg.
Red State
Now that I’ve got the upper hand (for the moment) in the endless struggle with spam, I’ve had time to experiment a bit with layout and so on. I’ve moved back from a blue to a red theme, but I’ve also added a widget in the sidebar that lets you pick your own theme if you prefer something more restful. As always, comments and suggestions will be gratefully accepted.
Hayek on evolution and global warming
I’ve been working on a piece on why so many on the right have embracing delusional thinking about global warming, and I ran across a great quote from Hayek’s Why I am not a Conservative, cited by Jim Henley in relation to the debate currently going on in the US right about evolution and creationism/Intelligent Design. Hayek’s statement reads just as well if you replace “evolution” with “global warming”.
Looking at the NYTimes debate, it’s notable that debate at AEI (at least as reported by the Times) is about whether evolution is or is not politically favorable to conservatism, with ev psychists and Social Darwinists pitted against the Christian right. It’s only in the last para that the reality-based community has anything to cheer for (also quoted by Jim).
As for Mr. Derbyshire, he would not say whether he thought evolutionary theory was good or bad for conservatism; the only thing that mattered was whether it was true. And, he said, if that turns out to be “bad for conservatives, then so much the worse for conservatism.�
Monday message board
It’s time, once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual, civilised discussion and absolutely no coarse language, please.
John Quiggin 