2 million voters have selected the World’s funniest joke

Steven Den Beste argues that US opposition to the International Criminal Court reflects attachment to the Bill of Rights. If den Beste is worried about attacks on the Bill of Rights (which is undoubtedly one of the key documents in the history of democracy) surely he could look a little closer to home. As I understand the position of the Bush administration, anyone in the world, including US citizens living in America, can be declared an ‘enemy combatant’, seized and held incommunicado and without trial indefinitely, inside or outside the US. At one point, the government was also claiming the right to execute such ‘combatants’ after a ‘trial’ by a special court with no requirement to adhere to any notion of due process. I’m not sure if this is still the case, but current US reality is far worse than anything that has been imagined about hypothetical abuses by the ICC.

In a recent post on the concession of failure by Czech free-marketeer Vaclav Klaus, I made the bald assertion that the neoliberal program has failed in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Eastern Europe and, most recently, in its heartland, the United States. Naturally, the comment thread was full of challenges and queries. No-one had the nerve to challenge my judgement on New Zealand, but the others were controversial. Ken Parish raised questions about the US. John Ray asked about the view, which he attributes to discredited Blair spin-doctor Peter Manderson that ‘we are all Thatcherites now” And someone with the imaginative pseudonym ‘Anonymous’ asked the question on everyone’s lips ‘What about Estonia?’.
To start with the last question first, I don’t claim to be an expert on Estonia, though I know that it has pursued a more free-market policy than other Eastern European countries. A quick Google search reveals the news that Unemployment in Estonia reached 14.2 percent in the first quarter, up by 0.6 percent year-on-year. More to the point, Estonia, like the Czech Republic, is lining up to join the European Union. As Vaclav Klaus notes, this means signing up for the EU social charter and becoming a social democracy. Anonymous and others can live in hope that EU enlargement will trip over the various obstacles in its path (Cyprus) or that the voters of Estonia will prefer free-market ideology to European citizenship, but I think its safe to say that Estonian neoliberalism is on its deathbed.
As regards the UK, I have pointed out on a number of occasions that, while Tony Blair came to office advocating a version of the Third Way that amounted to little more than “Thatcherism with a human face”, his government has gradually reverted to traditional social democracy, raising taxes in the last budget and, more recently, breaking the taboo against mentioning redistribution. All that is left of the Third Way is the Public Finance Initiative, and this sorry excuse for a public investment policy cannot last much longer.
Finally, there is the United States. A couple of years ago, when the unemployment rate there was 3.9 per cent, I observed that the debate between social democracy and neoliberalism turned on whether this exceptionally good performance could be sustained. This question has been resolved in the negative. Even assuming a sustained recovery in the US (most unlikely in my view), it is now clear that there is little if any payoff, in terms of employment and social mobility, for the massive inequality and poverty generated by neoliberalism in the US.

Update My view that Blair’s Third Way is dead is developed further here, here, and here, and has been endorsed by publications as disparate as The Guardian and The Telegraph. I couldn’t find a really good link for the Telegraph, but this interview with the self-described “last Blairite in the Cabinet” indicates the prevalence of the view I’ve been putting since the middle of 2001.

A good day at The Hague

My paper presented at the Economists’ Conference in Adelaide, entitled “Looking back on microeconomic reform”.
Warning 1: This is a PDF file
Warning 2: Not quite the final version

Tim Blair reveals himself as willing to kowtow to the United Nations rather than accept the rightful verdict of last Saturday.

Peter Fitzsimons puts the boot into ‘eggheads’ who sneer at sport. But are there any examples of this species left? As a leftwing intellectual, I move in fairly ovoid circles*, and I haven’t run across a good example of an anti-sport sneer for at least a decade. The big line in recent years has been “What about us?” claims for equal time. Feminists have successfully shamed the TV networks, particularly the ABC, into covering netball as heavily as football (give me WNBL any day, but each to their own). Meanwhile, the egghead lobby is trying the same thing, arguing that we should be cheering just as loudly for our gallant Aussie solar energy researchers/heart surgeons/postmodernist literary critics as for the Wallabies and Kangaroos. As we’ve seen in the blogosphere, if anybody will be sneering at Sunday’s rugby league grand final, it will be the more bigoted followers of AFL and Union.
*Yes, you can draw a circle on an egg

As this NYT piece makes clear, differences between theJapan and US bubble economies are now matters of degree rather than kind. There are differences, but the similarities are greater. One similarity the article fails to point out is the extent to which both bubbles relied on absurdly long working hours. Most of the ‘loss’ in output in Japan over the past decade can be explained by the fact that Japanese workers have been steadily cutting back on hours. I predict the same thing for the US over the next ten years. This will mean the end of overblown claims about US economic hegemony, but it will also imply an improvement in the real living standard of American workers.

Meanwhile, the Australian property bubble gets more and more alarming, particularly in Sydney. It’s now reached the final stage. The sceptics have been discredited and are licking their wounds, dire warnings from the Reserve Bank have gone unheeded, and the culture is as obsessed with real estate as the US was with stockmarkets two or three years ago. In these circumstances, even if it is possible for policy action to prick the bubble, no one will be willing to take the blame. This will all end in tears.

I met Jason Soon (in person!) at the Australian Economists’ conference in Adelaide and he told me that our exchange on Fisking had been linked by Instapundit. Since I’ve been away from my computer all day, and my tracking is not working I have no idea how many people if any have followed the debate as far as this. But to any who have, welcome!

This NYT editorial about faked research at Bell Labs misses the central point about scientific fraud. The research in question, as the NYT points out, seemed destined for a Nobel prize until it was exposed as bogus (the guy involved is still denying fraud, but his own admissions are enough to discredit the research). The point is that faked research of Nobel quality will always be exposed, because other people will try to replicate it and fail (think of cold fusion). Then they’ll go back to the original papers and , inevitably, find the tell-tale discrepancies that point to fraud (in this case, the same graph appeared for two different experiments).
The lesson is that, if you want to commit scientific fraud in relative safety, fake results that are just interesting enough for publication, but boring enough that no-one will bother to replicate them. Of course, this is ‘scientific fraud’ only in the sense that it’s committed by someone employed as a scientist. In ordinary language it’s the equivalent of ‘goofing off’, ‘goldbricking’ or ‘taking a sickie’ – you pretend to be working when you’re actually taking it easy.
In the large, science is self-correcting. Unimportant false results can stand up for a long time, but important ones will be exposed.
There is, I think, a lesson in all this for corporate governance. There is no way of completely eliminating fraud and bogus accounting, just as there is no way of eliminating fraud by scientists. But in a system where executive pay is relatively modest, and where only a long career will bring big rewards, no-one sensible will commit the kind of large-scale fraud or dodgy accounting that brings a company to its knees. Such fraud is always followed up and brings discredit to all those involved.
In the current environment, though, this doesn’t matter. A sharp CEO or senior manager can reap millions of dollars in a matter of months from cosy deals and sharp accounting. As long as they avoid criminal prosecution and lawsuits with punitive damages, they get to keep it even if they are subsequently exposed as charlatans (think Jodee Rich and Brad Keeling). In these circumstances, the self-correcting properties of the system break down.