Category: Boneheaded stupidity

Interesting arithmetic

John Quiggin7 Comments

Presumably relying on his Queensland government sources to get their sums right, ABC business reporter Peter Ryan writes

The biggest public share offer in more than a decade is expected to raise more than $5 billion for the Queensland Government … The Government will retain between 25 and 40 per cent of QR and will sell up to 1.68 million shares at between $2.50 and $3.00 a share. Individual investors will pay no more than $2.80 a share.

It’s a good thing all that money will be used to build new schools [1], since some arithmetic lessons are clearly in order. Unless all the shares are sold to institutions at the maximum price, there is no way the revenue can reach $5 billion.

fn1. I’m joking of course. As I and other economists have explained at tiresome length in the past, the sale of income-earning assets cannot, in any meaningful sense, finance social investments like schools and hospitals. The taxes that would (in the absence of asset sales) be required to finance debt for additional investments must be used instead to replace the income lost from the assets that have been sold.

Crying poor

John Quiggin41 Comments

The Queensland government has cited an alleged financial crisis as one of its spurious justifications for the sale of public assets, but apparently it can find a spare billion or so to spray on yet another sporting event which will almost certainly return little or nothing in revenue. I had my say on the Commonwealth Games bid here and here. The ABC story includes Treasurer Andrew Fraser’s admission that the proceeds of the asset sales, which were supposedly going to finance schools and hospitals, are the source of this luxury expenditure.

I’m happy to say that on this occasion I was accurately quoted in the Oz. The reporter Roseane Barrett did her job properly, and there was no editorial interference, presumably because the story was critical of a Labor government.

Links to a parallel universe

John Quiggin58 Comments

A few stories about what theorists of postmodernism call “the social construction of reality” on the political right

* The Irish science minister, who planned to launch a book denouncing evolution as a hoax, has pulled out after a lot of criticism and some embarrassing revelations about the author
”
* Newt Gingrich is touting a new version of birtherism, developed by Dinesh D’Souza, formerly one of the bright young things at the Hoover Institute

* The standard ploy among anti-science amateurs has been to compare themselves to Galileo. But now Robert Sungenis and Robert Bennett have taken the War on Science to its next logical stopping place, with a work in favor of geocentrism, entitled Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right

* The tobacco industry is secretly funding a “grassroots” campaign against plain packaging for cigarettes. This is obviously close to home, but tobacco money spreads far and wide, supporting anyone willing to tell lies about health and environmental science. Among their many targets was Rachel Carson.

* On the global warming front, Lord Monckton is still at it. Here (via Tim Lambert) is a demolition of his latest nonsense, from Alden Griffiths.

A particularly interesting feature of all this is what might be called “cafeteria craziness”. I’m referring to the kind of person, common on the Australian right, who takes the anti-science line on climate change, DDT and so on, but is indignant about being associated with the (virtually identical) arguments of creationists and geocentrists. Or, even pickier, those who are embarrassed by Monckton’s claims of a plot to establish a communist world government, but still want to cite him as a scientific authority

List of the clueless

John Quiggin69 Comments

As I’ve mentioned, the “No significant warming since 1995” meme provides a convenient basis for identifying people who are too dishonest (if they deliberately confuse statistical insignificance with insignificance in the ordinary sense), too ignorant (if they don’t know the difference) or too gullible (if they simple recirculate the Daily Mail “no significant warming”) to be take seriously on climate change, or on any other issue that involves reasoning about data.

One to add to this list: Des Moore, formerly a senior Treasury official, and of course, Quadrant. Moore and Quadrant get extra bonus points for using the word ‘flawed’, which is usually an indicator of lazy thinking at best.

The good point about this is that Moore’s pronouncements on economic issues, which might have some credibility due to his former position can be safely disregarded – if you can’t get basic stats right, you can’t get economics right either

Some more predictable additions to the list, people you would expect to get this kind of thing wrong, but still taken seriously by many.

Glenn Beck
Sarah Palin
Alan Moran
Piers Akerman

More to come …

Also, my list of self-described sceptics who’ve got this one right. Additional entries welcome
…
{List ends}

Birds of a feather

John Quiggin32 Comments

The similarity between creationist ‘scepticism’ about evolutionary science and rightwing ‘scepticism’ about climate science is obvious to nearly[1] everyone, whether pro-science or anti-science. So, it’s no surprise that creationists have sought to combine the two issues, and that, conversely, opponents of climate science have pushed ‘teach the controversy’ legislation modelled on those of the creationists. Here’s the NYTimes describing the US scene.

In Australia, Quadrant offers the whole package – anti-science climate delusionism, and historical revisionism as well as anti-Darwinism. This recent book review by DM Armstrong , echoing the ‘science is not settled’ line on climate change, says ‘let us not regard the case is closed’, gives a sympathetic reference to Behe, then rather bizarrely goes on to endorse sociobiology. In between he cites Ian Plimer against climate science.

Update An interesting feature of this process is the emergence of anti-vaccination as a cause embraced by the right, pushed by figures such as Glenn Beck and the unofficial leader of the US Republican Party Rush Limbaugh. As a commenter here pointed out, itseemingly started with vaccination of girls against HPV. The final trigger seems to have been the mass vaccination campaign against H1N1 flu, which hit even more hot buttons for these guys – big government, the WHO, preparation against something that might not happen and so on. Anti-vaccination used to be one area of anti-science thought where lefties predominated, and it still has some support on the fringes of the left, but not from anyone comparable in influence to Limbaugh. But it’s rapidly becoming part of rightwing orthodoxy.

In particular, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say they will get vaccinated

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/robert-schlesinger/2009/10/16/democrats-more-likely-to-get-h1n1-vaccine-than-republicans-2.html

fn1. Except in Australia, where lots of people who will accept just about any anti-science talking point on climate science get unaccountably riled when it is suggested, by consistent thinkers on both sides of the debate, that they ought to accept the parallel talking points on evolution (gaps in the data, alleged frauds by evolutionists, evolution as a religious belief etc etc).

Four lies and an empty set

John Quiggin119 Comments

The switch from ‘scepticism’ to an overtly anti-science, and anti-scientist, position has paid some dividends for the advocates of delusional views on climate change. Although the only wrongdoing in the CRU harassment/hacking campaign was that of the hackers and their allies (more on this soon), the false charges of scientific fraud got much more media attention than their refutation, and the early responses to alleged FOI breaches (including that of some pro-science writers such as George Monbiot) failed to recognise of the deliberately vexatious misuse of FOI by the anti-science group. In this context, the discovery of a genuine error in the 1700 page IPCC Fourth Assessment Report regarding projected changes in glaciers could easily be spun into something much bigger.

It seemed for a little while as if the delusionists had scored another win, when Phil Jones, the scientist who has been most viciously target by the hackers/harassers gave an honest answer to a deliberately loaded question prepared by them and put to him in a BBC interview

BBC: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?

Phil Jones: Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods…

This was headlined by the Daily Mail as “Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995?.

But, now it looks as if this is starting to backfire. Anyone who has successfully completed a basic course in statistics knows that “statistically significant” has a special meaning which bears almost no relationship to the usual sense of the term “significant”, and this fact is beginning to sink in.

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Zombie economics gets a mulligan: or, how Obamacare caused the Global Financial Crisis

John Quiggin28 Comments

I’m adding a little section to each of the chapters in my Zombie Economics book called “Reanimation”, about the attempts that are already under way to revive economic ideas killed (at least according to the standard rules of hypothesis refutation) by the global crisis. I wasn’t surprised to find plenty of examples for the efficient markets hypothesis (easy to render immune from any kind of refutation by an appropriate formulation) or for policy ideas that yield big benefits to the rich and powerful, such as privatisation and trickle-down economics. But I was surprised a little while ago to see the crisis described as a transitory blip in the continuing Great Moderation. Still that pales into insignificance compared to this piece by Casey Mulligan of Chicago (h/t commenter Daniel ), in which (I swear this is true!) the crisis is the result of financial markets correctly anticipating the adverse labour market impacts of possible legislation under Obama, such as a health plan that might include means tests.

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Ignoring the elephant

John Quiggin77 Comments

My piece in Thursday’s Fin noted the prevalence of delusional conspiracy theories about climate change on the political right, pointing in particular to Lord Monckton, Nick Minchin and the Lavoisier Institute as sources for the claim that the whole thing was a plot to destroy the economy and bring in a communist world government. Among other points on the silliness of this claim, I observed that all credible economists agreed that the cost of measures to stabilise global climate (less than 5 per cent of GDP) on all estimates, did not appear sufficient for the catastrophic destruction required by the conspiracy theorists.

The piece attracted a couple of responses, one from the Lavoisier Institute and one from Sinclair Davidson (who has given Monckton plenty of favorable treatment on his blog, and his pushed conspiracy-theoretic views of the IPCC). Curiously, neither of them mentioned the conspiracy theories that were the main subject of the piece, and which Lavoisier has pushed for years.

Rather they cavilled at the point that the economic costs of an ETS or carbon tax would be marginal. Lavoisier’s Ray Evans did not offer a counterargument, but simply claimed that economists had been wrong when they said the effects of Thatcher’s 1981 Budget would be disastrous. Davidson accepted the standard estimates, but said that, if you converted them into present values at a low discount rate, they looked really big. He also made a spurious personal attack on me (reply over the fold).

This is just silly. Although Australia got off relatively lightly from the GFC, our national income is several percentage points below where it would have been in the absence of the crisis and is likely to remain below trend for some years to come. Has anyone noticed the collapse of civilisation as we know it? Even in countries like the UK, where the impact of the GFC has been many times the size of the maximum estimates put forward by economists for the cost of climate stabilization, many observers believe that the threat of imminent communist dictatorship and a return to the Dark Ages may yet be staved off.

As I said in my original piece, it is tempting to dismiss all this as mere hyperbole. But, for delusionists, the only alternative to crazy conspiracy theories is the claim that thousands of professional scientists have fallen prey to errors that can easily be discerned by the average (scientifically untrained, innumerate, information derived from blogs) rightwing pundit. Now that’s really crazy.

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Well, we did do the nose … and the hat

John Quiggin70 Comments

In discussing the loony antics of Lord Monckton with climate delusionists/rightwingers (the two categories are now pretty much coextensive), I’m struck by the frequency with which I get the line (pushed a little while ago by Janet Albrechtsen) “Well he did say that Rudd and Obama were planning a communist world government, and that Jackie Kennedy killed millions of people and that the child of holocaust survivors was a Nazi and that he was a member of House of Lords, but why focus on that stuff … you should be debating him on the science”

I’m not sure whether the appropriate Monty Python reference is the witch sketch in Holy Grail or “What have the Romans ever done for us” in Life of Brian. Certainly, the idea of supposedly hard-headed politicos going to this guy for scientific advice is one that would stretch credulity even for a Python gag.