Author: John Quiggin

Trailers

John Quiggin23 Comments

Everybody is pretty much blogged out with Iraq, but I was still a bit surprised that this report on the Iraqi “mobile germ lab” trailers seems to have passed without notice. Given that the official position of the coalition governments, including the Australian government is still that these trailers constitute proof that Iraq had biological weapons, the report that

Engineering experts from the Defense Intelligence Agency have come to believe that the most likely use for two mysterious trailers found in Iraq was to produce hydrogen for weather balloons rather than to make biological weapons

is of interest in itself.

But the report is more interesting because the trailers represent the clearest illustration of the way in which we got into a war where the official pretext was Weapons of Mass Destruction. Unlike, say, the Niger uranium or the dodgy dossier, this process was largely public, or made so by leaks, from day 1.

It’s clear that the Administration honestly thought they had found the smoking gun when the trailers first turned up, then doggedly held to that view as the contrary evidence mounted (the absence of any biological evidence, even on the second truck which had not been cleaned; the insistence of the Iraqi scientists that the truck was used to produce hydrogen; the absence of crucial components etc). In defending its position, the Administration did its best to suppress any alternative view from its own agencies and to prevent outside experts from access to the evidence.

This was the same pattern as we saw in the leadup to the war. A year ago, nearly everyone (including me) assumed that Saddam was hiding weapons, so Bush Blair and Howard felt free to overstate the strength of their evidence, pointing to specific sites and making specific claims which can now be seen to be ill-founded. After Saddam called their bluff and the inspectors went in, the process became more and more dishonest and the pressure directed against sceptics intensified.

In retrospect, it’s clear that the UN Security Council majority was absolutely justified. On the basis of the case presented to them, which solely concerned Weapons of Mass Destruction, there was no justification for halting inspections and going to war.

Of course, there was a better reason for going to war, namely to replace Saddam’s government with a democratic or at least non-totalitarian one. But reliance on the WMD pretext undercut this rationale, since it had to be claimed that war would not go ahead if Saddam complied with the weapons resolutions. Hence, it was not possible to do the things that would be required for a successful war of liberation, such as establishing a provisional government and getting it recognised. Instead, the coalition decided to wing it, on the assumption that victory and the discovery of weapons would legitimate the war.

This assumption now seems to be unravelling. If there has been progress towards a sustainable democratic government in Iraq, it’s not visible in the reports we are getting here.

Taxing and spending

John Quiggin7 Comments

Regular commentator Jack Strocchi has sent me several pieces criticising the Howard government for being fiscally lax. The one that comes closest to my assessment, though not on every point, is from John Edwards of HSBC. Key points:

Costello’s biggest reform, by contrast, has been the goods and services tax. It was a substantial political achievement, but as an economic reform it makes very little difference. The same is true of the sale of half of Telstra. He dramatically reduced Commonwealth debt, but since he did so mostly on the proceeds of Telstra the Commonwealth’s net liabilities are not much changed.

Costello deserves credit for formalising the independence of the central bank to pursue an inflation objective … and above all for not making mistakes which threatened growth.

As several readers have commented, my draft section on macro policy didn’t give the government due credit for simply not making big mistakes, and I’ll try to fix this.

Costello is not the evangelical conservative committed to small government and low taxes he purported to be in opposition. He is just another Victorian Liberal, carrying on the tradition of ample spending from ample taxes while pretending to do the opposite.

As I’ve said previously, I’m all for more taxing and spending, provided the priorities are sensible. My problems with the Howard government’s fiscal policies relate to budget balance (we really should have a surplus at this point in the cycle) and poor priorities. The draft section of my chapter follows.

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Request for help, part 2

John Quiggin5 Comments

I got some useful suggestions from readers for additional reading for my chapter on the economic policies of the Howard government. But most of the readings I have so far (with the exception of some Reserve Bank conference volumes) are critical of the government from a leftish perspective. Can anyone suggest an accessible source for
(i) an overview of economic performance under the present government (I was hoping to refer to the INDECS State of Play books, but they seem to have ceased in 1995
(ii) a defence of the government’s economic performance in general, or on specific issues
(iii) a critique from a free-market or other right-wing perspective (please, no debate on whether free-market = rightwing, I’m just trying to use commonly understood definitions).

What I'm reading

John Quiggin2 Comments

The Passions and the Interests by AO Hirschman. Hirschman is always worth reading – his Exit, Voice and Loyalty is a classic. The Passions and the Interests, is a piece of intellectual history describing the development of ideas about rational self-interest and the invisible hand.

I’m also reading Watershed by Ticky Fullerton. She’s an ABC reporter and the book is about Australian water issues, mainly, but not exclusively, the Murray-Darling. She gives a summary of blogger Chris Sheil’s excellent book Water’s Fall, including an appealing adjectival characterisation

Water’s Fall is eloquent and convincing, but should carry a health warning for any investment banker in the CBD. Such people would soon find themselves frothing uncontrollably at the mouth with outrage at a Quigginesque thesis, which blames almost all incompetence on greed and a general bias in favour of the shareholder over the consumer.

I’m not sure if ‘Quigginesque’ is an original coinage (I have the feeling Henry Ergas has used something similar) but I like it anyway.

Cultural monarchism

John Quiggin26 Comments

I can’t count the number of times I’ve read articles on the theme of Howard’s victory in the culture wars in the last three years. I’d say it must be about as many times as I read similar articles about Joh Bjelke-Petersen in the 1980s, and Keating and Kennett in the 1990s. In each case, almost as soon as they lost office, their supposed cultural dominance evaporated.

The assumption underlying all these articles is something that might be called ‘cultural monarchism’, since it works on the assumption that any elected leader whose political dominance is currently unchallenged must enjoy some sort of occult connection with mass culture, similar to that typically attributed to monarchs.

Bjelke-Petersen’s was perhaps the most substantial example of unchallenged dominance. He was in office for decades, and his government was ruthless in crushing opposition on all fronts, so he did manage to keep Queensland significantly different from the rest of Australia. But after one term of Labor, Bjelke-Petersen’s influence had faded, and by now it’s almost undetectable.

Keating’s supposed dominance was never anything more than a Press Gallery illusion. He was never popular, and won the 1993 election only by default. Far from Keating establishing a dominant orthodoxy issues like multiculturalism and the Republic, support for these causes was damaged by their association with him.

Howard’s supposed dominance is I think equally illusory – in fact, it consists in large measure of the fact that Keating’s illusory dominance has been dispelled. He has had a string of narrow election wins over unimpressive opponents, but his government has never been as popular as the Labor governments at state level.

As regards cultural dominance, the republic issue provides a good test, since its an issue where Howard clearly had a majority against him when he took office. He managed the issue adroitly to ensure the defeat of the referendum, but he’s made essentially no progress in rebuilding support for the status quo – at most he’s held the line. And I’d argue that monarchism has lost more ground in cultural terms under Howard than it did under Labor. Support for the British monarchy has virtually disappeared (although the Queen remains personally popular). The idea that the Governor-General should be an apolitical figurehead, answerable to the PM except in 1975-style emergencies, and exempt from political criticism has also lost ground.

Howard’s current poll majority would disappear if, for example, interest rates rose by a couple of percentage points and house prices fell correspondingly. And if that happens, in all probability, we’ll be reading similar stuff about Crean in a couple of years’ time.

Request for help

John Quiggin5 Comments

For an academic, one of the great things about blogging is the help it provides on questions I would otherwise spend a lot of time trying to answer (I hope those readers who act as unpaid research assistants from time to time feel they are getting fair value from my efforts on the blog) .

I’m currently in need of some suggestions. I’ve posted a few excerpts of my chapter on economic policy under Howard (it’s for a book to be edited by Robert Manne), and I need to give some suggestions for further reading, accessible to that elusive character, the general intelligent reader. I’d say the readers of this blog come as close as anyone I’m likely to find in this respect. Any suggestions? Books would probably be preferred, but articles in easily accessible journals would also be OK.

Politic religion

John Quiggin10 Comments

Writing in Slate, blogger Mark Kleiman demolishes a report from the University of Pennsylvania claiming that faith-based programs reduce recidivism among prisoners. In essence, the report compared ‘graduates’ of the program with a control population, disregarding the larger group who failed to complete the program satisfactorily for various reasons. When the entire program group is compared to the control group they actually had slightly higher rates of recidivism (not a statistically or substantively significant difference though).

This is a striking outcome for a couple of reasons. First, as Kleiman notes,

You don’t have to believe in faith-healing to think that an intensive 16-month program, with post-release follow-up, run by deeply caring people might be the occasion for some inmates to turn their lives around.

Lots of programs of all kinds are strikingly successful when run, in pilot form, by deeply committed people with particular skills but fail when replicated on a larger scale.

In addition, though, you don’t have to believe in God to believe that faith-healing might work. There’s a long tradition, exemplified by Plato, Machiavelli and more recently by Leo Strauss in which religious or pseudo-religious belief is held to be good for the masses regardless of its truth or falsity. (I recollect the phrase “politic religion” in this context, but Google doesn’t show any links that would support this.)

While I would argue that the long-run effects of the kind deception recommended by Plato and Strauss are invariably pernicious, I would not have been surprised to find it effective in the short run. It’s easy to imagine that a promise of eternal salvation would help in supporting a desire to reform, particularly if you take the view that convicted criminals are typically not rational optimizers. So the results are something of a surprise to me.

UpdateThe Blog Geist being what it is, I am now noticing lots of references to the topic of politic/civic/pragmatic religion popping up. I liked this one from Stentor Danielson who argues that the social benefits of Jesus’ teaching do not depend on general belief that he actually existed.

In the comments thread, Mark Kleiman makes the intriguing claim that Plato’s advocacy of the “Noble Lie” was intended satirically. He says

After all, if you were going to tell fairy-tales hoping that they would be believed, you wouldn’t publish a document explaining that they were in fact fairy-tales.

My view is that Plato held an esoteric/exoteric distinction similar to that of Strauss and assumed that anyone literate enough to read his work was on the esoteric side of the divide.

OTOH, Kleiman’s argument points up how bad Plato’s political judgement was – the same is true of Machiavelli and Strauss. If you think lying and cheating in the service of good ends is desirable, the last thing you should do is say so.

Maybe there are some real philosophers reading this who would like to give a better-informed view on these topics.

I expected this, but not so soon

John Quiggin2 Comments

Via Keneth Miles (and a string of others, leading back to Bill Maher), this report says that anti-terrorism laws are already being used in ordinary criminal cases, with the theory that “drugs are chemical weapons” being used to indict someone accused of making methamphetamines on a charge of “manufacturing a nuclear or chemical weapon”.

The accused, facing 10 years to life, should count himself lucky. He could have been seized as an enemy combatant, held incommunicado and executed by a military tribunal. Of course, if this had happened, the Administration would not have had to tell anybody about it.

Error bars

John Quiggin4 Comments

This report in the Guardian cites leading leftwing thinktank the Institute of Public Policy Research as saying that, according to the latest research at the Hadley Centre for Climate Change, the likely change in temperature by 2100 (under business as usual) will be 8 degrees C, as against ‘consensus’ estimates ranging from 1 to 5 degrees C . The argument is apparently based on claims that CO2 stored in the soil will be released with rising temperatures, producing a positive feedback.

I haven’t followed this up, and it seems surprising that such an obvious mechanism should have been overlooked. So I’m not suggesting that this report should be regarded as reliable. Rather, I want to use this report to illustrate a point I’ve made previously.

A lot of critics of Kyoto argue that, since there’s a lot of uncertainty about the estimates produced by the Intergovernmental Panel and Climate Change and similar bodies, we should ‘wait and see’. These critics tend to pounce on any study that produces an estimate lower than the consensus range to bolster their case.

This neglects the fact that uncertainty goes both ways. There’s a nonzero probability that the rate of warming could be lower than the range suggested by the best available estimates, but it’s equally possible that the rate could be higher. The best available estimates suggest we should do something now (Kyoto) and prepare to do a lot more in the future unless we get a favorable surprise.

In the case of global warming uncertainty actually strengthens the case for action because the damage costs are convex. That is, an increase of 4 degrees will do more than twice as much damage than an increase of 2 degrees and an increase of 8 degrees (the IPPR estimate cited above) would be utterly catastrophic. So, the more uncertainty there is, the stronger the case for action.

When there’s a lot of uncertainty, the important thing is not so much immediate action to reduce emissions as the creation of institutions and mechanisms that will allow large reductions to be made in future. With all its imperfections, the Kyoto agreement is the only process that offers any possibility of progress in this respect.