Author: John Quiggin

PM=GG?

John Quiggin24 Comments

I kept away from the Hollingworth issue, but I enjoyed the Monday Message Board discussion on a possible replacement so much I started thinking a bit about it. The main argument against an elected President, as far as I can see, is that Australian democracy is built on the premise of Prime Ministerial dictatorship (similarly with discussions about ‘mandates’ and the Senate).

If you accept this argument, it seems that the best Governor-General is the one who does least, and therefore that the best option is to leave the position vacant, with a stand-in to do the necessary attendance at Parliamentary openings and so on.

An even better solution, and one which would surely appeal to John Howard, is for the PM to appoint himself as GG. This would resolve the 1975 problem once and for all, while making any challenge to the monarchy that much more difficult. There may be constitutional obstacles, but they’re not obvious to me. After all, the office of PM doesn’t appear in the Constitution, so it can’t be ruled out explicitly.

Update Glenn Milne gives a cogent exposition of the theory that the GG should be a clone of the PM.

The organ bank

John Quiggin17 Comments

I mentioned recently the gratuitously violent nature of lots of philosophical examples. Here’s another one quoted by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and also alluded to by Eric Tam in his criticism of one of my earlier posts

Another problem for utilitarianism is that it seems to overlook justice and rights. One common illustration is called Transplant. Imagine that each of five patients in a hospital will die without an organ transplant. The patient in Room 1 needs a heart, the patient in Room 2 needs a liver, the patient in Room 3 needs a kidney, and so on. The person in Room 6 is in the hospital for routine tests. Luckily (!), his tissue is compatible with the other five patients, and a specialist is available to transplant his organs into the other five. This operation would save their lives, while killing the “donor”. There is no other way to save any of the other five patients (Foot 1966, Thomson 1976; compare related cases in Carritt 1947 and McCloskey 1965).

We need to add that the organ recipients will emerge healthy, the source of the organs will remain secret, the doctor won’t be caught or punished for cutting up the “donor”, and the doctor knows all of this to a high degree of probability (despite the fact that many others will help in the operation). Still, with the right details filled in, it looks as if cutting up the “donor” will maximize utility, since five lives have more utility than one life. If so, then classical utilitarianism implies that it would not be morally wrong for the doctor to perform the transplant and even that it would be morally wrong for the doctor not to perform the transplant. Most people find this result abominable. They take this example to show how bad it can be when utilitarians overlook individual rights, such as the unwilling donor’s right to life.

I don’t know if it’s been pointed out before, but this example doesn’t work as claimed. The proposal of killing the test patient is dominated by the following alternative: With the agreement of the five needy recipients, draw lots. The unlucky one is cut up (but of course, they would have died anyway) and their healthy organs are transplanted into the others. The number of lives saved is the same as in the proposed case, no rights are violated, it’s a Pareto-improvement on the status quo ante and so on. We even save one transplant operation relative to the proposal.

Of course, you can impose some sort of ad hoc assumption to rule this out, but this just points up the other flaws of this example.
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Troppo Kaput ?

John Quiggin2 Comments

Along with the rest of infinitebabble, Troppo Armadillo has been inaccessible for a day or so. Hopefully, this is just a permissions error, but Ken is threatening that, if the data is lost, Troppo Armadillo will be gone for good.

I don’t know how seriously to take this – threats to swear off blogging, [and, even more so, promises to avoid particular topics] are far more common than actual departures, but I certainly hope it doesn’t come to pass.

What I'm reading, and more

John Quiggin3 Comments

Wealth and Democracy by Kevin Phillips. It’s a good time to be reading it in parallel with the ongoing debate on wealth and inequality being pushed along, among others, by the blogosphere’s #1 Kevin, Kevin Drum at Calpundit.

Having completed unpacking, we were sufficiently relaxed yesterday to take the CityCat ferry to Southbank (cultural/cafe precinct including State Museum, Library, Art Gallery etc). I always love riding on the ferry. In fact, I’d say that, in terms of enjoyment/dollar a ferry ride is the best bargain available in transportation. And of all ferry rides, fast catamarans are the most fun. The museums were pretty good too.

Be careful what you wish for

John Quiggin2 Comments

Matt at Bright Cold Day posted a couple of weeks ago on A function I wish Microsoft Word had, and set up this impressive mockup
MSWordfunction.gif
A cool post, but I can just imagine how this would actually turn out. The function would be set on by default. Adjectives would be inserted based on some lookup function derived from a database of purple passages. In the manner of Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss, it would turn short, stubby sentences into elegant multi-topic ones. Before long, the world would be overwhelmed in Redmond’s idea of scintillating prose.

Update Kieran Healy tempts fate with an even more ambitious wish. I suspect that anyone granted the wish of a boss mind-reading function would be doomed to endless administrative work.

Reblogging

John Quiggin1 Comment

I prodded Rob Schaap’s guilt buttons on the quiescence of his blog a while back, and he’s responded by adopting a device which I’ve occasionally used – reposting something from the Dark Ages (2002) when much of the current audience hadn’t yet discovered blogs.

Now it’s my turn to feel guilty for having said nothing for ages about the topics Rob covers so well – health and higher education. Stay tuned while I trawl through my archives and consider whether I can somehow distil a bunch of old posts into a sparkling new one, or just repost them and let you do the work.

Rob’s also put up new posts including the observation that “bearded men are rarely found in the usual course of Australian life these days”. I guess this is right, but, rather than going along with modern fashions, I’m sticking with all my hair. Once you start removing it, it seems that there is no agreed stopping point short of Brazilian-style total depilation.

Hyperterrorism

John Quiggin5 Comments

My occasional correspondent, Graeme Bond, is as far as I know, the only other person in Australia to have pointed out in public (and in advance) that the Y2K panic was based on patently spurious arguments.

Not surprisingly, Graeme is also a sceptic about cyberterrorism and sent me this link to a story headed ASIO slams cyberterror ‘hype’. I’ve been a sporadic reader of The Crypt Newsletter, a debunker of computer-related panics, and can particularly recommend this story on how U.S. infowar commandos smuggled a deadly computer virus into Iraq inside a printer. Set to go off on April 1 of course.

UpdateLooking over my files, I realise that I forgot to mention Stewart Fist of The Australian who also debunked Y2K , and whose judgement in matters technological is usually reliable. Feel free to remind me of others I’ve omitted.

Economists v philosophers Round V

John Quiggin16 Comments

Matt Yglesias accepts my invitation to demonstrate the naivety of economic thinking about consequentialism. He proposes the following example

John is at the casino and he puts $100 on the number 12 spot at the roulette table. While the wheel is spinning, John dies suddenly. The body is removed and the casino manager finds John’s wife and sole heir Jane. The manager now needs to give Jane the money she’s inherited from John. Instead of just giving Jane the $100, however, he decides to cover the wheel and offer Jane the following choice. She can either choose to just take John’s $100 or else she can leave the $100 on the table and the manager will uncover the wheel. If it turns out that the ball has landed in the 12 slot Jane will get the $3,200 payoff, if not she will get nothing. Jane chooses to take the $100 so the manager gives it to her, then uncovers the wheel revealing that the ball had, in fact, landed on the 12.

Yglesias agrees that Jane adopted the correct decision procedure (since the odds were unfavorable), but nonetheless goes on to say

The purpose of the procedure, after all, is to get you the most money possible, and given these circumstances, Jane could have made more money by taking the bet. Thus, there is a sense in which Jane did the wrong thing

This example seems to me to suffer from exactly the same problems as the stock market example put up in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy which, the post informs me, is by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong .
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Risk and return redux

John Quiggin3 Comments

It seems as if the BlogGeist has suddenly focused on the issues of risk and income distribution – admittedly they’re hard to avoid with news of near-infinite payouts for failed chief executives (including Governors-General) being announced daily. At the same time as Ken Parish and I were discussing risk and income distribution, a very similar debate was taking place in the Antipodes (relative to Oz, of course).
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