Haloscan, my commenting facility, is still out of action. The site says they ran into problems while trying to fix the server. I have a bad feeling about this, and I wish there was an easy way to save and archive my comments. However, there is some progress – comments are now readable although posting is still disabled.
For the moment, Monday Message Board is moving to manual backup. Email me your thoughts on any topic, and I’ll post them in batches as I get time.
QED by Richard Feynmann explains the basic principles behind quantum electrodynamics without any of the nasty integrals required to actually work anything out. Quantum theory has been the subject of a lot of confusion and outright mysticism starting with Heisenberg, but for anyone comfortable with probability theory there’s nothing fundamentally counterintuitive about it.
Subatomic phenomena are better described in terms of probability distributions than as miniature versions of macroscopic phenomena like waves and particles. Taking a ‘particle-like’ observation amounts to collapsing a distribution to a point mass in one dimension, leaving an uncertain distribution in another dimension. So far so good. It would be nice to actually be able to work this kind of thing out, and if I ever have a few years to spare, I’ll learn this.
I’m also converting my CD collection to MP3 files for my iPod. I want to move on the more challenging problem of my old LPs next. My turntable just died, but I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Tandy’s still stocks them at very reasonable prices. Anyway, if anyone has experience of converting LPs to MP3s, particularly using a Mac, they’re welcome to email me.
The comments thread has been particularly lively and informative over the past few days. So of course, Haloscan is having one of its now-routine episodes of comment-chewing. On past experience, the comments will reappear later, but comments posted in the interim (that is, now) will be lost forever.
I’ve been putting off moving to MT, despite some valuable advice and offers of help, but I won’t be able to do so much longer. Once I’ve got the main website transition completed and the backlog of files down to a manageable level, I plan to make the shift.
One thing that interests me in discussions of the UNSC is that France, China and Russia are always mentioned as having veto power. But no-one ever mentions the possibility that the US may end up vetoing a UN resolution, say, one calling for another four weeks of inspections.
In a series of recent posts, Ken Parish has attacked critics of George Bush and his Administration as “anti-American”. The targets have included the Labor Opposition, columnists like Ken Davidson, and even Americans like Maureen Dowd.
A major problem with this claim is that most though not all, critics of the Bush Administration were, and are, favorably inclined to its predecessor, at least as far as foreign policy is concerned. Conversely, attacks on Bush pale into insignificance by comparison with the vitriol poured on Clinton by his domestic and foreign opponents. As an example, Ken cites a Bunyip post, which attacks Clinton, as the source for his claim that Davidson’s piece, which praises Clinton and relies primarily on American sources, is “anti-American”.
It seems as if Ken’s steadily hardening pro-war position has clouded his judgement on this one. Only a couple of months ago, Ken himself was writing
I’m not usually impressed by Maureen Dowd’s journalism. However, her New York Times piece on President Bush’s appointment of Henry Kissinger to”investigate” America’s preparedness and actions leading up to September 11 is an exception. It’s succinct, well written and compelling. I must admit I had harboured mixed feelings about the Bush administration until now (despite Paul Krugman’s convincing demolition of the Bush tax cuts), but in my book a government that associates itself with this cynical, thoroughly evil old man has definitively characterised its own values and aspirations.
The fact is that, for many opponents of war with Iraq, including me, distrust of the current Administration is one of the main issues. I simply don’t believe that the stated motives for the war are the real ones, and therefore that the promised outcomes will actually be delivered. By stigmatising all criticism of Bush as “anti-American”, Ken is stacking the deck in favour of war.
A separate claim is that, even if criticism of the current US Administration is legitimate in general, it’s not legitimate for an Australian government or alternative government. The difficulty here is that it’s generally accepted that Howard is going to do whatever the US Administration tells him to in relation to Iraq, and that any Australian government would probably be in the same position. In these circumstances, to say that criticism of the Administration is off-limits for Australians is to accept the role of a client state. Maybe that’s realistic, but it’s also humiliating.
Ina recent post on economists opposing Bush’s tax cuts, I predicted that few free-market economists would line up to support Bush’s budget. As “Anonymous Coward”* points out, I was way off the mark. The US Treasury has just released a statement by 250 supporters, including big names like Feldstein, Boskin, Mankiw and Meltzer. Since Feldstein has in the past been a big supporter of the ‘crowding out’ hypothesis, I’ll be interested to see if he puts forward a supporting analysis.
* This is the default identity from Slashdot and elsewhere, which has been popping up a bit in my comments thread. I’m going to treat AC as one person for the moment, but who knows. It could be yet another manifestation of the many-avatared Imre-Gudgeon-Bunyip-Parish complex, in which some commentators have sought to implicate me as well.
Update I wasn’t 100 per cent wrong. As the NYT points out, there are currently 5 Nobel winners at Chicago, none of whom signed either ad.
I mostly agree with what Ross Gittins writes. But I think he’s off the mark in today’s SMH. Ross plays down concern about growing household debt, noting that it is more than offset by growth in assets. He writes
The value of all our houses accounts for more than 60 per cent ($2.1 trillion) of total assets and it’s been rising at the rate of more than 12 per cent a year. So rising house prices and strong investment in new housing account for most of the growth in our wealth.
The problem here is what’s sometimes called a fallacy of composition. Any one household can deal with a debt problem by reducing housing wealth (taking a second mortgage, or selling their house). But households collectively can’t do this, since the only potential buyers are other households.
What this means is that, far from being part of the solution to the debt problem, the increase in house prices is part of the problem. If there is a general increase in the difficulty of servicing household debt, for example arising from an increase in interest rates, individual households will respond rationally by seeking to sell their housing assets. But since households generally will be trying to do this, house prices will fall, exacerbating the original problem.
The longer house prices (more accurately, land prices) stay high, the more debt individual households will accumulate against their wealth and the worse the problem gets. In fact, having taken on a mortgage in my move to Brisbane, I’m part of the problem – you can’t beat the Zeitgeist I guess.
Quite a few pro-war bloggers, notably including Glenn Reynolds and Tim Blair, have opined that bin Laden is dead and that the recent tape is therefore a fake. I think that they are probably right. But this means, obviously, that the US intelligence analysts who declared the tape genuine are misinforming us, or aren’t very competent. So presumably when Powell presents us with audio evidence, vetted by US intelligence, we should be sceptical. For example, audio evidence of Iraqi officers discussing WMDs.
As far as I can tell, if we discard the phone intercepts, nothing in Powell’s dossier of a week ago is left intact. The in-depth British analysis of Iraqi intelligence turned out to be the products of a Google search, subjected to a quick and dirty piece of spin doctoring by Blair’s in-house team. The supposedly current data was actually a decade old. The Al Ansar chemical weapons factory turned out to be an invention of their local opponents. The Al Qaeda link was evaporating until someone decided to channel bin Laden himself to back it up. The photographs of trucks were photographs of trucks.
Maybe in all of this there’s something solid. But when even Tim Blair and Glenn Reynolds think the Administration is lying, it’s hard to see why anyone else should believe them.
The economic year ahead , Australian Financial Review , 2 January 2003
My predictions for 2003 with a look back at my record for 2002.
As regards the Australian economy, I have, like many others, been surprised by the length and strength of the bubble in housing prices. Fortunately, having learned from past experience that it is easier to diagnose a bubble than to tell when it will burst, I refrained from making any prediction about the timing of the bubble’s inevitable end.
It now seems clear, however, that the period of rapidly rising prices has come to an end. The optimistic view is that the boom will be followed by a plateau, rather than a collapse. However, as the Japanese experience suggests, a long period of stagnation can be just as painful as a short sharp shock. Prices are well above their equilibrium real values and, at current prices, the housing stock is well in excess of total demand. While it is impossible to predict the course of this adjustment, it is safe to predict that it will be unpleasant, at least for the housing and construction industries.
The big question for Australia is whether the strong performance of the past couple of years is a fortuitous by-product of the real estate bubble or a reflection of underlying economic strength resulting from microeconomic reform. I lean to the former explanation, and therefore to the view that a slowdown in housing and construction is likely to be transmitted to the broader economy.
John Quiggin 