This lengthy piece by Nicholas Confessore, (link via Brad de Long) gives plenty of insight into the operations of James Glassman’s Tech Central Station, which is among other things, a leading purveyor of global warming contrarianism. In essence, the site is a commercial lobbying venture, which pushes the political interests of its sponsors. Sponsors of the site mentioned in the article include ExxonMobil and General Motors.

Among the contrarians affiliated with the site are Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon, astronomers, lead authors of the recent “Harvard study” a survey of historical studies of climate which yields findings totally contrary to those reported by scientists who are actually qualified to study the topic.

While I’m on this topic, I’ll pass on these links supplied by Robert Parson, which give a good idea of Baliunas’ general approach. These are Congressional reports from one of the previous contrarian campaigns in which she was a leading advocate, denying the impact of CFCs on the ozone layer. (larchived version of “http://www.house.gov/science_democrats/archive/envrpt96.htm” from Wayback archive) and making the usual claims about scientific conspiracies as well as gross overestimates of economic costs of mitigation.

A while ago, I noted that a US prosecutor was going after methamphetamine “cooks” on terrorist charges, on the theory that “drugs are chemical weapons”. I’m pleased to see that this piece of nonsense did not impress a North Carolina judge. I wonder if the US Supreme Court will display the same backbone with respect to “enemy combatants”, Guantanamo Bay etc.

Talking of stretching definitions, I’ll offer this free theory to any US prosecutors who may be reading this blog. Guns (like all weapons based on explosives) work by means of an exothermic chemical reaction, and are therefore chemical weapons.

(If you really feel like pushing your luck, you might want to observe that knives and clubs are made entirely of chemical elements, as are fists and boots.)

My column in today’s Fin (subscriprtion required) argues that the best explanation for our current good performance and low unemployment is the trivial one – we haven’t had a recession, and that microeconomic reform and productivity growth have nothing much to do with it. This is fortunate since the rapid growth in multifactor productivity experience in the mid-1990s has ground almost to a halt in the last four years.

I reject the idea that microeconomic reform ‘fireproofed’ us against going into recession during the Asian crisis. As I observe

To refute this claim, we need only look across the Tasman. New Zealand had much the same microeconomic reform as Australia; if anything the reforms were more radical. And the Asian crisis produced the same immediate outcome, a currency depreciation. But the NZ Reserve Bank raised interest rates to offset the depreciation, while the Australian Reserve Bank allowed our dollar to decline. The result was recession in New Zealand and a smooth adjustment here.

Interestingly, while wandering through the blogs this morning, I linked (via Stephen Kirchner) to this piece in the Oz by Alex Robson (formerly a colleague of mine when I was at ANU, and also a former econoblogger), who says

Taking low unemployment for granted is understandable, given that it has been consistently low for such a relatively long time. But it is a risky position for economic policy-makers to take. The primary factor behind the sustained growth in job creation is the stunning success of commonwealth-driven reforms during the past two decades – much derided as “economic rationalism” by the likes of economist John Quiggin, sociologist Michael Pusey and political scientist Robert Manne. It is these market-oriented policies that have led to substantial improvements in individual economic freedom for all Australians.

Robson is correct to nominate the past two decades as the period of substantial microeconomic reform. But there are a couple of problems with his claims about unemployment. The official unemployment rate now is only marginally below that of the previous cyclical minima in 1989 and 1979. When you take into account the growth in various forms of disguised unemployment (such as disability benefits) the rate is actually quite a bit higher. The proportion of men engaged in full-time employment has plummeted. So the growth in job creation has been anything but “stunning”.

So I expect I’ll be watching the RWC Final like everybody else, but there’s still a basic point about the game I don’t understand, especially after the France-England game (I’m from the AFL half of the country, but I’ve watched a reasonable amount of rugby league). It seems as if it’s a lot easier to kick three goals than to score and convert a try. (This is certainly true in rugby league which is why you only get one point for a field goal.) So the obvious strategy seems to be to go for goals.(On standard game-theoretic grounds, you should make the occasional attempt at a try, just to force the other side to defend against it).

But most teams seem to have only one player who’s any good at kicking. If a team had three or four players who could regularly kick goals from 40 metres, the task of the defence would be just about impossible. As soon as the attacking side got to within, say, 30 metres, they could pass it back to a randomly chosen kicker for a set shot at goal. Even with 50 per cent accuracy, this ought to bring in 30+ points a game, which is usually enough.

Chicago-style reasoning (Isn’t that a $50 bill on the pavement? No, if it was, someone would have picked it up) says there’s something wrong with this analysis. Can someone set me straight before Saturday?

Although being an opinion columnist gives me a great opportunity to air my views, one of the minor annoyances is that it’s customary not to respond to letters, no matter how obviously wrong they are.

But there is no such custom or constraint when it comes to blogs. David Smith (I assume the same one who announced the dismissal of the Whitlam government) has criticised my column on the constitution, which I mentioned here. Smith writes:

In their haste to continue with an open season on John Howard-appointed governors-general, some commentators, having made up their minds, do not want to be confused by the facts.

Michael Costello, former secretary, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, criticised Governor-General Michael Jeffery for the way in which he gives the royal assent to bills passed by parliament, when they come before the Federal Executive Council (The Australian, October 24).

Costello gave details of alleged conversations between the Governor-General and ministers to illustrate the extent of the Governor-General’s interference.

But the Federal Executive Council does not deal with the royal assent, and ministers are not present when the Governor-General gives it.

Now John Quiggin, in “Our model constitution”(AFR, November 6), has followed suit. Quiggin has accused the Governor-General of politicising his position by “endorsing a policy of pre-emptive military action”. I have searched Major-General Jeffery’s speeches, and all I have found is a call for “co-operative interventionist action by the UN with a view to pre-empting bloodbaths”. That is the very opposite of what Quiggin has alleged.

Quiggin calls for a directly elected governor-general or president. Direct election of the head of state has been so roundly condemned by intelligent republicans such as a former governor-general, a former prime minister, a former chief justice of the High Court, and several legal and political academics of distinction, among many others, that it requires no further comment from me.

I can’t quite figure out Smith’s point in the second-last paragraph. Presumably he’s saying that because Jeffery called for the UN to be involved, his position was different from that of the government, though it’s still a stretch to say that the two are opposites. But I wasn’t concerned to criticise Jeffery’s position, merely to make the obvious point that it was a political one.

His final paragraph is a classic argument from authority. A former PM, a former GG and a former CJ disagree with me, therefore I must be wrong. This ancient fallacy is common, but I’ve rarely seen it in such a pure form.

Chris Sheil, late of Troppo Armadillo, has launched his new blog here

I’m generally sceptical about sociobiology/evolutionary psychology, on the grounds that, since we know almost nothing about the conditions under which we evolved (hunter-gatherer societies that survived into the 20th century are necessarily exceptional, and therefore unrepresentative), it’s very hard to see how we can make any useful inferences.

But the simple fact that our ancestors were hunters enables us to make one kind of inference with high reliability. Encounters with other*, armed, humans must have been a frequent occurrence

Two things follow, both of which have been remarked on, but typically by different people.

First, if even a modest proportion of such encounters led to armed combat, our ancestors would have wiped each other out

Second, if even a tiny proportion of such encounters led to armed combat, the death rate from violence would far exceed that associated with modern warfare.

(Do an example, and you can substitute your own values for “modest” and “tiny”)

From the first point, it follows that there must have existed some combination of cultural and genetic constraints that ensured that the vast majority of encounters between armed humans passed off peacefully. From the second, it follows that any cultural or genetic characteristic that increased an individual’s probability of surviving such encounters would yield substantial survival benefits.

If you emphasise either one of these in isolation, you can derive strong, and seemingly compelling hypotheses about genetic constraints on human behavior. But taking the two together, the picture is a lot more complex.

*The most frequent encounters would have been with close kin, but on any plausible assumption about the organisation of hunting there must have been plenty of encounters with distantly related or unrelated individuals (or social constructs such as territorial boundaries that acted to reduce the frequency of such encounters).

The Oz runs this piece from the Weekly Standard on supposed proof of links between Al Qaida and Saddam. But they obviously don’t read blogs at the Oz or they would have known that the US Department of Defense has already denied this report (link via Brad DeLong and Tim Dunlop).

For some reason, my career seems to have gone exceptionally well since I started blogging. I had two pleasant surprises last week. First, I was told that I’d been elected as a Distinguished Fellow of the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society. This is a big honour for me, as agricultural and resource economics is where I started out, and still a core focus of my research (particularly on the Murray-Darling Basin). Admittedly, once academics reach a certain age, we like nothing better than to give each other awards, but that doesn’t detract from the pleasure in getting one.

Much more unexpected was receiving an email from Kenneth Arrow. There are a lot of very smart and insightful people in the economics profession, but in most cases I tell myself that, if only I work hard and think clearly I have a shot at matching them (this may not be true, but it keeps me motivated). Then there are a handful of people like Arrow, Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman. Reading their stuff, I get the feeling I could work for a hundred years without matching them.

Anyway, the email had a fairly generic title and I expected I was just on an address list. But when I opened it, it was an invitation to me to give a series of lectures on the economics of risk, in Jerusalem next year. Of course, I plan to accept.

I mucked up the first guest posting, putting up what was intended as a comment-length version. So here’s the full version of Brian Bahnisch’s thoughts.

The steel decision and the WTO

While the WTO steel decision poses a significant domestic dilemma for Bush, the implications for international trade relations are interesting. Pascal Lamy of the EU was very quick to remind the Americans about their taunts by saying that the cheese eating surrender monkeys are now biting back. You’d have to think they will hit hard with retaliatory tariffs.

Australia usually follows the correct pure free trade line, even against the US. On this one we did special deals, so can afford to sit back.

Japan, though, is considering sending a shot across the bows with a few hundred million dollars worth of sanctions against the US. It’s symbolic, but very significant.

The WTO has been a joint project of the US, the EU and Japan. With Canada, they make up the famous “Quad”, which calls the shots in the WTO. Dangerous cracks have opened up in Quad solidarity prior to Cancun and were unsuccessfully papered over. It was Japanese and South Korean intransigence above all that sunk Cancun.

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