It’s time yet again for the Monday Message Board. Your comments on any topic are welcome (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please).

My starter question for this week: Has anyone got any good ideas for Iraq?

A short history of the world by Geoffrey Blainey. I bought this for my son, on the view that a good narrative history would provide a framework within which to fit the detailed study of short periods that’s typical of school history courses these days. It’s certainly a good read. Blainey’s geographical determinism provides an idiosyncratic flavor without being overwhelming.

I’m also reading Interest and Prices by Michael Woodford, which I got as an unsolicited gift from Princeton University Press. It’s the first attempt I’ve seen at a theory of monetary policy in which interest rates are the variable of interest and the money supply is excluded from consideration. On the face of things, this is much closer to the world we live in than the standard approach. I’m hoping this will help to explain the paradox (at least for anyone who thinks the quantity theory of money ought to work in the long run) of persistently high growth in most monetary aggregates combined with persistently low inflation.

I went to see the Namatjira exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery, having seen it previously in Canberra. In the light of recent discussion on the blog, I was struck by the fact that Namatjira was a close contemporary of Jackson Pollock and, like him, was killed by alcohol, though in a radically different cultural context.

Each in a sense, represents the end of a line. Whereas Pollock represented the last gasp of modernism in art, Namatjira can be seen as the last great representative of the European tradition of landscape painting. By contrast with Pollock’s programmatic formal innovations in drip paintings like Blue Poles, Namatjira’s innovations came from the interaction between traditional concerns (light, colour and shadow) and a previously unpainted landscape.

Also on show at the Gallery is art of the Cape York Peninsula, including both traditional cultural products and consciously created art works.

The bad news is that Russia has not, as the government previously indicated, ratified the Kyoto protocol and and seems unlikely to do so, although Putin still appears willing to be bought by a sufficiently attractive offer. The combination of Bush and Putin is enough to block the treaty. (The Howard government is the only other remaining holdout, but Australia is too small to tip the balance either way).

The good news is the 55-43 vote on the McCain-Lieberman bill restricting CO2 emissions. Although the bill was defeated, this was scarcely surprising given the opposition of the Administration and the Republican majority. It seems likely, given this starting point, that a pro-Kyoto Administration could secure ratification. In particular, the 97-0 vote on the Byrd-Hagel resolution opposing Kyoto has now been consigned to history.

Meanwhile, nothing much is being done about global warming. Russia’s failure to ratify Kyoto gives those who claim to support action, but oppose the detailed provisions of Kyoto, their chance to do something. In particular, it will be interesting to see whether there is any action on the McKibbin-Wilcoxen proposal. I’m not optimistic. As far as I can see, the vast majority of those who claim to support “something, but not Kyoto” actually want “business as usual”. Still, I’m agnostic about the differences between McKibbin-Wilcoxen and the Kyoto proposal and will be happy to support whichever seems most likely to get up.

Paul Krugman points out all the qualifications on the quarterly growth figure of 7.2 per cent recorded by the US economy. Still, with all the qualifications, it’s pretty impressive, especially as components like inventories, the trade deficit and investment are going the right way (down, down and up, respectively). One problem, noted by Krugman and Brad de Long, is that it’s hard to see such growth continuing without employment growth, and so far there’s no sign of that.

A second problem is that it’s hard to see how an economy with all levers set to maximum stimulus (near-zero interest rates, large and permanent budget deficits, depreciating currency) can avoid inflation indefinitely. You have to look pretty hard at the tea leaves to find any sign of this, and the problem is then that there’s always the danger of finding what you want. There’s pretty steady inflation in the price of services for example, but that’s what you’d expect with rapid growth in the productivity of the goods-producing sector.

Update 2/11 Angry Bear has more, particularly on the role of the Keynesian stimulus provided by tax rebates. As far as I can tell, much of this rebate was due to the child tax credit, on of the few Bush tax cuts targeted to middle-income and lower-income households.

My reading of the Japanese experience is that fiscal policy can keep an economy afloat for a while to permit restructuring in the wake of a bubble, but can’t do so indefinitely. The US is doing a better job of restructuring than Japan did, but not as good a job as is commonly claimed. I think there are still a lot of unresolved problems in the financial sector, notably with securitized mortgages, and that these problems will start to bite when interest rates rise.

The suggestion, by Daniel Dennett, of the name “brights” for non-believers in God and religion has been endorsed by Richard Dawkins. (Thanks to Wendy James for this link.) The supporting argument is that

having “a naturalistic world view that is free of supernatural or mystical elements” is regarded with suspicion in America, and that part of the problem is that our very vocabulary embodies a certain negativity: godless, unbelief, nonreligious, atheistic.

I have a few observations on this. First, this is primarily an issue in the US, since active believers are a minority in the rest of the developed world. Second, given the decay of classical studies, I doubt that there are that many Americans who recognise “atheist” and “agnostic” as the negative forms of “theist” and “gnostic”.

Third, there are already a string of names to choose from, each with somewhat different meanings.

• Rationalists reject religious belief primarily on the basis of logical reasoning, and represent the endpoint of a line of development from Protestantism through Unitarianism and Deism. Rationalists were an important group in the 19th century, but are very rare these days, though the Australian Rationalist magazine had a late flowering under the editorship of Kenneth Davidson
• Materialists rely mainly on scientific evidence to show that the phenomena typically explained using supernatural elements (including human behavior, emotions and so on) can be explained using purely material explanations based on atoms, genes and so on
• Humanists transfer to humanity the kinds of feelings and aspirations associated with God in religious (more specifically, Christian) world views)
• Secularists don’t necessarily have a specific world view, but are not religious believers and are hostile to the idea that religion should play a role in public life

In this classification, Dennett and Dawkins are materialists, and are at least as hostile to humanism as to theism.

While I’m on this topic, it’s worth observing that the “death of God” has turned out to be one of the great non-questions of modern history. In the 19th century, most people who thought about it assumed that the decay of religious belief would have profound (mostly negative) effects on the way the mass of ordinary people behaved, and on society as a whole. This has proved to be quite untrue. Although we talk a lot about differences between Europe and the US, they are trivial compared with the similarities. The issues where religion makes a big difference in the US are mostly related to trivial points of religious doctrine, such as the ethical status of stem cells and the political status of Jerusalem. The same point could me made comparing the current political processes and outcomes with those of the 19th century.

Finally, I should link to the related discussion over at Crooked Timber. Gregg Easterbrook’s apparent belief in intelligent design is taking a pasting. I was also struck by this rhetorical question from Chris Bertram

How could an intelligent person of any political persuasion not admire Plato and Nietzsche?

Let me out myself on this one. Not only do I not admire Nietzsche, I’ve never been able to work out what his positive contribution to thought is supposed to be. The most concrete thing I’ve been able to extract is a focus on the nonproblem that “God is Dead”. Beyond that, there’s nothing but power-worship, irrationalism and glorification of war.

It’s no doubt unreasonable to blame Nietzsche for the specific pathologies of Nazism, particularly anti-Semitism, but he surely would have welcomed the rise of fascism in its original Italian form. Mussolini, as his admirers portrayed him in the 1920s, was a direct descendant of Nietzschean heroes like Caesar and Napoleon (we are lucky enough to remember the less impressive sight he made hanging upside down). And whether or not Nietzsche contributed to Prussian militarism before 1914, I’m sure he would have welcomed the outbreak of the Great War.

The Centre for Independent Studies has published a number of pieces by pro-speeding British sociologist, Alan Buckingham. The site structure doesn’t facilitate linking so you’ll have to look for them individually. Suffice it to say that the standard of argument is well below that usually associated with the CIS. This passage for example, is fairly typical of the general level

If speed did kill then the safest roads would be urban roads where speeds are lowest. In fact, the reverse is true. It is freeways, where speeds are much higher, which are the safest roads.

I hope it’s not necessary to point out that speeding means going faster than is safe on a given road, and that the safe speed is higher on a freeway than on a suburban street, but just in case it is necessary to point it out, I’ve done so.

Similarly, Buckingham praises increases in the speed limit in Italy and the US, not bothering to observe that both countries have worse road death rates than Australia (the US rate has actually been rising over the past decade).

Then there’s the claim that because road deaths in Britain declined more slowly after the introduction of speed cameras than before, speed cameras are ineffectual. Again Buckingham fails to mention the fact that the policies he’s attacking have produced one of the safest road systems in the world. If his arguments prove anything (this kind of casual empiricism is highly unreliable) is that the safety benefit from speed cameras is less than that from previous interventions such as seat belt laws and random breath tests, all of which were vigorously opposed by the Buckinghams of this world.

Buckingham’s work is riddled with sloppy time-series arguments, invalid cross country comparisons and plain non sequiturs.

There are serious issues to be debated regarding speed and law enforcement, and a fair bit of debate has taken place on this blog. Buckingham has done nothing to advance the debate.

I made a negative reference to Robert Hughes’ The Shock of the New a couple of days ago. Now this fawning piece by Paul Sheehan (link via Tim Dunlop) reports that Robert Hughes has

relinquished his Australian passport, become an American citizen, and made his self-imposed exile permanent …Exactly three years ago, in the aftermath of the squalls that smashed and permanently damaged him (a near fatal car crash, a hostile reaction to his florid criticisms of the investigation, and a critical pummelling of his TV series about Australia) Hughes told me he was giving up on Australia and applying for American citizenship. When it came through he would quietly hand back both his Australian passport and his AO, and not return.

I can’t say I’m filled with deep regret at this news. Hughes has made some worthwhile contributions in the past, most notably The Fatal Shore, but his behavior over the car crash was very poor (admittedly, not an event to bring out the best in anyone), and his TV series combined an incredibly patronising attitude with an almost total lack of knowledge of, or insight into, Australia.

Max Hastings, former editor of the Daily Telegraph and the London Evening Standard, but now writing in the Guardian, says

The Tories will never be electable until they can find a leader who
can offer the British people a vision of the future, not of the past. Britain is now a social democratic country. Barring a national cataclysm, a visibly rightwing party will not again achieve power here.

I think the same is true of NZ and Canada.

In Australia, underlying attitudes are much the same, but it is still more likely than not that Howard will be re-elected in 2004. However, a political party usually pays a price for a long run in office driven by fluke victories and the failings of the opposition, rather than by solid support. Labor paid several times over for “the sweetest victory of all” in 1993, and the Liberals may do the same for Howard’s run.

Almost unnoticed by the Australian media, the British Conservative Party and the NZ National Party both dumped their leaders in the last couple of days. in one sense, the moves are in opposite directions. Iain Duncan Smith, the British Tory leader was the favourite of the Thatcherite branch membership who have, for the moment at least, a substantial say in choosing the party leader, similar to the Greens and Democrats in Australia. By contrast, the NZ Nationals dumped a moderate, Bill English, in favour of someone identified very closely with the radical free-market reforms of the 1990s, former NZRB governor Don Brash.

I’ve met Brash a couple of times and he strikes me as a decent and honest person. But he was a failure as a central banker, both because of the inflation-only policy target adopted under the National government and because of technical failures like the disastrous flirtation with a Monetary Conditions Index. Finally, although I can’t instantly produce a convincing supporting analysis, I am uneasy at the prospect of senior public servants resigning and going into politics.

What the Tories and NZ Nationals do have in common is that they are in deep electoral trouble. With two election losses behind them, neither party has managed to dissipate the popular hostility generated by periods in office that combined radical free-market policies with an authoritarian style (the Tories are still trying, without much success, to shake the tag of “the nasty party”.)

This is part of a more widespread problem for the conservative parties of the English-speaking world. The most common electoral situation is that in both Britain and NZ with a dominant Labour government, a discredited official opposition and the anti-government vote divided among several mutually hostile parties.

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The modern art debate has divided this section of Ozplogistan and not on the usual lines. I’ve now uploaded my 1999 ReView article, which you can read here . I argue that the decline of painting and art music in the 20th century can be traced to emphasis on formal innovation and the Romantic idea, going back to Beethoven, that the artist creates not for the ignorant audiences of today, but for the the future. It is only a short step from this to the vulgarised idea that, the more shocking you are today, the more highly regarded you will be by posterity.

By contrast, with painting and art music, novels and popular music have flourished in the 20th century, precisely because they remain dependent on an audience, rather than on a closed circle of artists and critics. My conclusion:

The other striking characteristic of the novel is the relative insignificance of formal innovation, as opposed to changes in theme or content. A symphony in the style of Beethoven would be a conscious anachronism if composed today, even if it was inspired, like Beethoven’s own works, by contemporary events. By contrast, although there is a wide range of variation, the formal structure of the 19th-century novel remains the starting point for most modern novelists. This is not to say that writers have been constrained to follow this structure – one need only think of Joyce – or to confine themselves to the concerns and conventions of the 19th century novel. Rather, the point is that programmatic formal innovation, such as that of the nouveau roman school of the 1960s, never acquired the kind of institutional dominance it attained in other arts. In the absence of an audience, the nouveau roman withered and disappeared, but the novel flourished.

The experience of the 20th century shows that it is possible for the activity of art to continue, and even to prosper in an economic sense, without an audience. There are also examples like Picasso to show that, in the hands of sufficiently gifted artists, great art will emerge regardless of the underlying theory. In aggregate, however, the 21st century will surely see the art of the 20th as mannered and trivial. If there is to be a revival of art in the new millennium, it must begin with the revival of the mass audience.