Author: John Quiggin

Oil economics

John Quiggin28 Comments

So I was reading the less interesting bits of the paper and looked at a report on the price of oil which, as is pretty much routine, contained the suggestion that a shortage of refinery capacity was contributing to the high price of crude. Turning my brain on for a moment, it struck me that economics 101 suggests the exact opposite. Refineries and crude oil are complements in production, so a shortage of refinery capacity should lower the price of crude, while increasing the price of refined products such as petrol and distillate (easy thought experiment to show this: if there were no refineries at all, crude oil would be worthless).

A quick Google shows that I’m not the first person to notice this point, but the erroneous claim keeps on getting repeated.

How does an error like this get started. The obvious reason is that if the price of oil is driven by demand fluctuations (as at present) high prices for oil will be correlated with perceived shortages of refinery capacity. It will be easy to find specific instances to support an apparent causation going the other way. For a refinery working at maximum capacity, a breakdown will cause a supply interruption and will be very obvious. The same breakdown, occurring at a slack time, might be dealt with by rearranging operations and rescheduling maintenance and never reported to customers.

What I’m reading

John Quiggin13 Comments

I just reread “The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia” (Ursula K. Le Guin), which I enjoyed as much as ever. There are a bunch of other books I should be reading, most of them weighty tomes on network theory, real options and so on, but Mark Bahnisch has kindly pointed me to a nearly endless source of distraction, China Miéville’s list of Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read. Le Guin is on the list, of course, along with many of my favorites (though many of the books recommended are new to me) and classics like Bellamy’s Looking Backwards and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Heidegger and the Nazis, again

John Quiggin41 Comments

Continuing on a European theme, and on recycled debates, the hardy perennial issue of Heidegger and the Nazis has re-emerged.

Back in the Pleistocene era of Australian blogging (2002), there were some interesting discussions of how we should react to the political mistakes and crimes of philosophers. Examples included Heidegger’s involvement in Nazism, Hayek’s support for Pinochet and Sartre’s adherence to the Stalinist French Communist Party . Don Arthur (site long gone, alas), Tim Dunlop (can’t find a link, but maybe still in the archives), Jason Soon and Ken Parish all had some interesting things to say.

Most contributors to the debate were more willing than I was to separate thought and action. I don’t think the idea that the arguments of a political theorist or philosopher can be treated in isolation from their life and work as a whole is, in general, sustainable. There are exceptions to this: a philosopher might collaborate with a dictatorial regime out of fear or ambition, even though this was the opposite of the course of action implied by their philosophical views. But that doesn’t appear to be the situation in any of the cases I’ve mentioned.

Much closer to the centre of the action, controversy over Heidegger has been reignited by the publication of Emmanuel Faye’s Heidegger, l’introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie, which also includes an attack on Carl Schmitt, another thinker associated with the Nazis but now popular on the left (Mark Bahnisch gives some background here). Not surprisingly, Faye’s book has produced a reaction, in the classic form of a manifesto (in 13 languages!). The manifesto announces this site, with many contributions (all in French), , with lots of references to to rprevious contributions to the debate, but without a systematic organisation, which makes it all a bit hard to follow. Some of the arguments focus on the details of the historical evidence, and others on the more general question of whether this kind of attack is legitimate.

I haven’t read Faye, and it sounds as if he pushes his case too far, but I’m not ready to acquit Heidegger of collaboration with the Nazis or to conclude that his philosophical views are untainted by his own apparent interpretation of them as a guide to action. Comments appreciated.

It’s the median, but I shouldn’t call people “stupid”

John Quiggin34 Comments

David Brooks resurrects the claim that

The Western European standard of living is about a third lower than the American standard of living, and it’s sliding. European output per capita is less than that of 46 of the 50 American states and about on par with Arkansas.

This was done to death in the blogosphere a couple of years ago, but it’s obviously time for another go.

Update: Oops! Scott Martens points out in comments at CT that the EIU gives US median household income as $57 936, way out of line with the Census Bureau figure, which obviously invalidates my comparison, and casts doubt on their figures for France. I guess I’d better not just rely on a quick Google next time. I’ll look into the EIU numbers some more.

And, as several commentators point out, that will also teach me to be more careful before slagging off others for sloppy work. Time for a dish of crow.

Further update I haven’t yet found out how the EIU gets its numbers, but I’ve fixed the obvious errors in the post and taken the opportunity to remove unfair comments about Brooks

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Weekend reflections

John Quiggin29 Comments

This regular feature is back again. The idea is that, over the weekend, you should post your thoughts in a more leisurely fashion than in ordinary comments or the Monday Message Board.

Please post your thoughts on any topic, at whatever length seems appropriate to you. Civilised discussion and no coarse language, please.

Since Tampa ?

John Quiggin23 Comments

I’ve noticed numerous statements lately to the effect that the number of asylum-seekers dropped to zero after the Tampa incident, usually with the implication that the associated policies were tough but effective. Those who want to use this argument should be honest about their history. The Tampa was seized in August 2001. There were plenty of boats after that, including SIEV-4, which was at the centre of the “children overboard” incident. The event that brought the whole process to a halt was the sinking of SIEV-X in October 2001, with the loss of 353 lives.

Most of the Tampa asylum-seekers were eventually recognised as refugees, and many made it to Australia in the end. It wasn’t the use of Pacific islands as detention camps, but the willingness of the government to turn back unseaworthy boats, reaffirmed after the SIEV-X tragedy, that ended the flow of asylum seekers. This policy, reinforced by the lesson of SIEV-X, had the desired effect. That doesn’t make it any less shameful.

More on asylum-seekers from Andrew Bartlett, Tim Dunlop, Nicholas Gruen and Ken Parish

Industrial relations reforms, part 2

John Quiggin55 Comments

I worked more on the Industrial Relations reform issue last night and I have written a draft paper, which you can read and, hopefully, comment on.

IR is a very complex topic, and for that reason I’ve tended to shy away from detailed analysis in the past. But with major changes inevitable, there’s no alternative but to get immersed in the details. This is going to be a slow process, but at least I’ve now made a start. I’m pretty much flat-out at present, so progress on this is likely to be slow.

Anyway, you can read my analysis, for what it’s worth (PDF file over the fold).
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IR reform and inequality

John Quiggin43 Comments

The National Tertiary Education Union, of which I’m a member, has nominated today as a day of protest against the government’s Industrial Relations reforms, but has left it up to members how to make their protest. For me, the obvious thing to do is to get to work on my long-promised analysis. I’ve written most of a draft, and I hope to get the rest done this evening, but in the meantime, I thought I’d give a short statement of how I see the relationship between industrial relations institutions and inequality, which is my central concern.
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