Karl Zinsmeister has written back to me as follows:

Eric Raymond kindly forwarded me your critique of my essay “Old and In The Way” (http://taemag.com/taedec02a.pdf).

You are too clever by half. The figures you multiply in your response to my essay cannot be so crudely treated. For one thing, you have considered only persons working, and ignored hours worked per person. Nor can overall labor productivity be treated so simply. Overall productivity figures capture a mix of factors: output per labor input (representing about a third of America’s present productivity advantage over the EU), as well as higher labor inputs and other factors.

Incidentally, I used a European source for these particular figures, precisely to insulate myself from sniping of the sort you have attempted in your blog. The data you refer to were first presented by the Dutch Secretary of State for Social Affairs and Employment, Hans Hoogervorst, in a Feb 1, 2002 speech at the Hague. His paper is reproduced in “Europe’s Welfare Burden,” published in 2002 by the Institute for the Study of Civil Society in London (link).

I would appreciate your posting this as a response on your blog.

I can only respond that Zinsmeister does not appear to have read the post carefully or to have thought too much about the response. Hours worked per person are a crucial part of the calculation and are, of course, included. And whether multiplying his figures is a ‘crude’ procedure or not, it’s the appropriate way to deal with a mathematical identity.

Output per person in population = Proportion of employed people in population*Hours worked per employed person*Output per hour worked.

As with Glenn Reynolds and the debate over Sweden a while back, Zinsmeister suggests that quoting a European critic of Europe’s performance ‘insulates’ him from any suggestion of error. I don’t suppose that either Reynolds or Zinsmeister would be impressed if I attacked the performance of the US and then said I must be right because I relied on, say, Noam Chomsky, or even Al Gore. Unfortunately, I can’t check the source as the link is to an a precis of a book with no relevant info. But what kind of procedure is it to rely on obscure secondary sources for data that is readily available from agencies like the OECD and BLS?

One attention-grabbing quote in Zinsmeister is

The unmistakable current in the U.S. over the last generation has been to reduce centralism and the size of government: When Ronald Reagan swept onto the scene in the early 1980s, U.S. federal spending was 24 percent of Gross Domestic Product. Today it is 19 percent. That is only half or two thirds the level in most E.U. states, where levels have been rising, not falling.

This is a nonsense comparison, since Zinsmeister is comparing Federal spending in the US with total spending in Europe. As CalPundit observes, government spending has been a fairly constant proportion of GDP in the US over the past thirty years – the same is true of most European countries. Of course the proportion in EU countries is higher, but that has been true for a long time, during which European countries have generally grown faster than the US

Interestingly, Calpundit prepared his graph to argue against the claim that “US federal spending is growing out of control”. How many of the people who accepted Zinsmeister’s dubious statistics without question in the context of a piece of US triumphalism would equally unthinkingly accept statistics showing uncontrolled spending growth in the context of domestic advocacy of a small government agenda? Not of course, that this kind of thing is peculiar to any given political viewpoint – there is ample supply of implausible and mutually inconsistent factoids routinely quoted by leftists. But I’ve noted before that purveyors of US triumphalism are increasingly losing contact with reality.

Update Responding to Calpundit, Mindles* Dreck (these American bloggers and their self-deprecating humour!) makes a number of variants on the point that the impact of government on the economy is not simply the ratio of public expenditure to GDP. Many of the apparent differences between the US and Europe reflect a US preference for quasi-private, but government-backed or government-guaranteed institutions to perform functions that would be undertaken directly by government elsewhere. Statistics should always be treated with care, but of course if you don’t get the statistics right in the first place, all the care in the world won’t help you.

Jack Strocchi sent me a link to this piece by Karl Zinsmeister on America and the EU a week or so ago. I read as far as this para:

America’s poorest sub-groups, like African Americans, now have higher average income levels than the typical European.

What’s behind this? For one thing, Americans work harder: 72 percent of the U.S. population is at work, compared to only 58 percent in the E.U. American workers also put in more hours. And U.S. workers are more productive–an E.U. worker currently produces 73 cents worth of output in the same period of time a U.S. worker creates a dollar’s worth.

and concluded that the piece wasn’t worthy of serious attention. As I pointed out, multiplying these figures out (including the hours difference) implies that income per capita in the EU is less than half that in the US which is nonsense.

Jack did the sums and got Y = a(0.73) X b(0.80) X c(0.80)

Y = EU/US pc income ratio
a = EU/US labour productivity ratio (EU .73/US 1.0)
b = EU/US labour participation rate ratio (EU 0.58/US 0.72)
c = EU/US labour hours ratio (EU 1600pa/US 2000pa)

So Y = 0.4672
The correct figure, as reported by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics is around 65 per cent for the EU as a whole and 75 per cent for the leading EU nations like France and Germany, as well as Canada (not usually claimed to be in a state of irreparable decline). The big error in Zinsmeister’s piece is the number on output per hour worked – the US actually lags a number of European countries on this measure.

I’m pointing this out now, because the Zinsmeister piece has been taken up by a number of US bloggers, notably Steven Den Beste and Eric Raymond. Before accepting a statistical claim that seems ‘too good to be true’, it’s always a good idea to do a ‘back-of-the-envelope’ credibility check.

Update I’ve been in a bit of a rush today, so apologies for not mentioning that these links are via Bargarz, who has also posted on this and on Kupchan.

I should also note that the big economic difference between the US and the other leading countries is in hours worked per employee (about 20 percentage points of the 25 per cent difference between the US and the other leaders). The US is above average in both employment/population ratios and output per hour, but not the leader on either measure. The Scandavians lead on E/P (all that child care) and the Belgians on output per hour (they don’t put in a lot of hours, which makes it easier.

I stopped reading the Zinsmeister piece when I reached the first major error, but writers in the comments thread point out other unbelievable claims. I’ll try to do a more complete statement later.

Quite a few bloggers have noticed a piece by Paul Sheehan, explicitly comparing Christianity in the Third World to radical Islamism and presented with the alarming headline Christian reactionaries leading a new crusade. This seems plausible in many ways, and is worth another reminder that ‘crusade’ and ‘jihad’ are exact synonyms in both their literal meaning and their metaphorical uses (favorable and hostile),

Numerically, though Sheehan’s argument relies heavily on the 480 million Catholics in Latin America (he doesn’t mention the rise of evalengical Protestantism there, which is notable, but not numerically important). With the exception of the ‘liberation theology’ associated with the radical left and now largely obsolete, he’s probably right that Latin American Catholicism is relatively tradtionalist and conservative. But I don’t get the impression that it’s characterised by crusading zeal. Are there any readers with first-hand experience who’d like to comment?

In a piece which mirrors a lot of the discussion on this board (use Freefind to search for Kyoto or just scroll down to last week), the NYT asks

The Monday message board has produced a discussion which I think deserves its own post, starting with Jack Strocchi’s observation that

My own guess is that the degree of party loyalty to the Labs is at an all time low. The true believer tribalism has gone the way of football club loyalty and church devotions.

No-one rose up to protest continuing devotion to a church or party, but a number of football fans were outraged. I’ve previously blogged on my own
defection from Geelong to Brisbane as part of my move to the world’s most livable city, but that was after 40 years.

As regards political parties, my view is that Labor left me, not vice versa. I haven’t changed my fundamental views in the thirty years since Gough Whitlam was elected, though I have, of course, adapted them in the light of new information about what works and doesn’t work and to deal with changing social and economic conditions.

There’s still interesting stuff on Iraq on the message board, and there must be something more to be said on merkins, so if you’d like to join these discussions, go to the comments thread.

Via Salon, I learn that the Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page is pushing a range of conspiracy theories implicating Iraq in both World Trade Centre attacks and the Oklahoma City bombing. The interesting thing about these theories is not Iraq but the fact they require the continuing complicity of the US government at all levels.

On Oklahoma City, the WSJ relies on a local journalist Jayna Davis and reports

Ms. Davis, for example, has a copy of a bulletin put out by the Oklahoma Highway Patrol immediately after the Murrah bombing. It specifies a blue car occupied by “Middle Eastern male subject or subjects.” According to police radio traffic at the time, also obtained by Ms. Davis, a search was on as well for a brown Chevrolet pickup “occupied by Middle Eastern subjects.” When an officer radioed in asking if “this is good information or do we really not know,” a dispatcher responded “authorization FBI.” Law-enforcement sources tell Ms. Davis that the FBI bulletin was quickly and mysteriously withdrawn. (emphasis added)

Similarly, on the First World Trade centre bombing, the source is a ‘Middle East expert” Laura Myroie, and the WSJ says:

Beyond this, Ms. Mylroie contends that the bombing was “an Iraqi intelligence operation with the Muslim extremists as dupes.” She says that the original lead FBI official on the case, Jim Fox, concluded that “Iraq was behind the World Trade Center bombing.” In late 1993, shortly before his retirement, Mr. Fox was suspended by FBI Director Louis Freeh for speaking to the media about the case; he died in 1997. Ms. Mylroie says that Mr. Fox indicated to her that he did not continue to pursue the Iraq connection because Justice Department officials “did not want state sponsorship addressed” (emphasis added).

Of course, all of this was under the hated Clinton administration (which just happened to be bombing Iraq on a regular basis, but let that pass). The Bushies have been in office for two years, and, if the WSJ is to be believed, seem equally determined to give Saddam a free pass.

The WSJ opinion pages have always been extreme, but, in my opinion this kind of thing, which is, after all, news (claims about fact) rather than opinion, undermines the credibility of the paper as a whole. (To anticipate criticism, I should note that the WSJ does not explicitly endorse these conspiracy theories – it simply reports them and fails to mention the extensive contrary evidence or discuss their inherent improbability).

There’s nothing particularly startling in this interview with Charles Kupchan except perhaps the fact that a journal as sophisticated as Salon sees his views as startling. Kupchan has written a book called The End of the American Era which presents the big issue for the 21st century as competition between America and the EU – a staple topic of this and other blogs.

Yesterday was 30 years since the election of the Whitlam government. Most reporting so far has been positive, but the SMH runs two pieces, both critical Gerard Henderson briefly acknowledges Whitlam’s strengths, but points out a list of generally acknowledged poor performances, (all of which can be traced to an excessively realist view of international politics) on Timor, the Baltic States and Vietnamese refugees.

Criticising a claim that Whitlam ‘defined modern Australia’, Henderson says “The Whitlam Labor government’s impact on the social agenda is obvious. But few would maintain that Whitlamism “defined” contemporary Australia’s economy.” On the contrary, as I argue in my book Great Expectations, the shift to microeconomic reform began with the Whitlam government’s 25 per cent tariff cut and creation of the IAC, now the Productivity Commission. Most of the contradictory trends that define the economic policy debate today emerged under Whitlam.

Meanwhile on the same page, Paddy McGuinness offers a tirade so predictable and trivial it doesn’t deserve a link (you can read it after Henderson). There are no real criticisms of policy, only complaints about the number of political advisors the Whitlam government appointed and their alleged rorts. I haven’t got numbers, but I’ll bet that the number of advisors is much higher today, and certainly rorts haven’t gone away.

Moreover, while some of the steps Whitlam took promoted the trend towards politicisation of the public service, the creation of a separate class of explicitly political advisors helped to slow it down, by providing ministers with a source of advice responsible to them in a personal rather than ministerial form.

Ken Parish, Don Arthur and others blogged on this on the November 11 anniversary. My contribution is here.

note Some Blogger flaw meant this piece wasn’t published when I wrote it this morning, and now Ken Parish has already covered it, so I’m a bit behind the curve here. Ken’s comments thread has lots of interesting stuff.

Thanks to everyone who commented on the first piece of my draft review of Pinker. Here’s another section

In fact, the most interesting parts of Pinker’s book do not relate to human nature at all, but to his restatement of a pessimistic view of the human condition. In the process of this restatement, Pinker abandons his evolutionary psychology model without realising that he is doing so.
Take, for instance, his observation, following an approving citation of Hobbes, that ‘violence is not a primitive, irrational urge, nor is it a “pathology”, except in the metaphorical sense of a condition that everyone would like to eliminate. Instead, it is a near-inevitable outcome of the dynamics of self-interested, rational social organisms’. (p 329) This is backed up by the work of political scientists who claim that war has generally benefited the aggressors.
Pinker may well be right, but his argument is totally inconsistent with the claim that violence is the product of genetic predispositions acquired by our distant ancestors, that is, of primitive, irrational urges. If the Hobbesian view is right, then violence will arise as a rational response to this environment in the absence of any predisposition to violence or even in the presence of an instinctive aversion to violence.
In particular, the emphasis of evolutionary psychologists on the specifically male predisposition to violence seems to imply that an increase in the political power of women should result in the adoption of more pacific policies. As has been observed on many occasions, the political careers of Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher give little support to this view.

I’ve seen this kind of confusion before. Rational egoist models like homo economicus, ‘selfish gene’ models like evolutionary psychology, and ‘realist’ models of international relations (in which nation-states are viewed as unitary actors) use similar styles of argument and therefore appeal to the same sort of person, but they radically inconsistent with each other, because they each posit a single level at which everything can be explained, different in each case.