According to Ken Parish, Tim Blair has written to say that his move to The Bulletin was entirely of his own doing, that he will still write occasional pieces for The Australian, and that any further speculation on this issue will be countered with a nude protest in Byron Bay.

Unlike Ken, I find the prospect of Tim naked in hippie country bizarrely amusing, so I’ll assert (on the basis of extensive current intelligence from MI6 and other sources, natch) that “he didn’t jump, he was pushed”.

The Slate Saddameter (which I’ve been mis-spelling as Saddamometer), has the odds of war at 95 per cent. While war has obviously got closer (as witness my Freudian slip ‘first Gulf war’, picked up by c8t0 recently), I think Slate is underestimating the Blair problem, as it has done all along.

Saddam has already caved on the issue of private interviews with weapons inspectors, and will clearly do the same on U2 flights if he can get a positive report from Blix next week. The crucial issue, which has been at the centre of things all along, is the production of some documentary (or maybe eye-witness) evidence of weapons destruction. If Saddam delivers on this in some form (which would be possible assuming he’s destroyed at least some weapons), and Blix reports that he is getting satisfactory co-operation for the moment, things will get really interesting (in the sense of the ancient Chinese curse). There are some big ifs here, but I’d say the chances of these two things happening are closer to 50 per cent than 5 per cent, so I’ll proceed on this assumption.

Given a positive report from Blix, there’s no chance of the UNSC endorsing an immediate strike. On the other hand, it’s virtually certain that Bush will dismiss the report. This will leave Blair in an incredibly difficult position, not helped by the exposure of his fraudulent dossier on Iraqi intelligence. If he backs a US invasion in these circumstances, anything less than a best-case outcome (a quick victory, hardly any US or British casualties, modest Iraqi casualties, the exposure of a large-scale weapons program, succesful democratisation) will end his career and perhaps even the Labor government. On the other hand, refusing to back Bush will be exceptionally difficult. All of this applies equally to Howard and to other putative allies like the Turks.

Conversely, the risks for the UN are great. Should Bush bypass the UN and deliver the best-case outcome, the advocates of unilateralism in the US will be strengthened immeasurably (at least until they run out of money – see three posts down).

My own view is that, viewing the Iraq problem, in isolation, the best outcome is one where the pressure is kept as high as possible, as long as possible, without resorting to war. The difficulty is that the expenditure of political and diplomatic capital on this issue has come at the expense of more dangerous problems like OBL, Kim Jong-Il and Israel-Palestine.

vaara is back from hiatus (has been for at least a month actually). The commentary is good, but I could do without the lurid yellow background.

A lot of short stories by Frank Moorhouse, notably Conferenceville which perfectly captures the feeling of the Left in the late 70s – a time of confusion and disillusion. I can’t say I miss that time at all. I haven’t read anything recent by Moorhouse except Grand Days and Dark Palace. I wonder whether he has done (or could do) anything to capture the mood of the post-Cold War world.

I’m also reading more of the Folio History of England. I’m currently on the Victorian era. An interesting observation is that English conservatives in the C19th made much of the examples of self-made millionaires etc, pointing to this as evidence that the English system provided opportunity for all to grow rich, as against the dead level of equality prevailing in (you guessed it) the United States.

The late Herbert Stein, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors in the Nixon administration is credited with the observation “if a trend can’t be sustained indefinitely, it won’t be”. Asking Why Are We Ruled by These Fools? the normally equable Brad DeLong presents budget projections showing a deficit equal to 17.5 per cent of GDP in 2060 (gross debt around 250 per cent of GDP) and observes that the 2003 Bush Budget has put the US on a path to national bankruptcy. Fiscal conservative Andrew Sullivan is almost equally scathing. (I must, therefore, withdraw my previous assessment of him as a reliable Bush supporter.)

Although 2060 is a long way away, it’s important to observe that even the short-term projections showing continuous but modest deficits for the next decade are based on over-optimistic growth projections. And there’s nothing for a war on, and occupation of, Iraq or for reforming the Alternative Minimum Tax – between them they will probably add $150 billion per year indefinitely to the deficit.

Given the pace at which the official estimates have deteriorated, my guess is that the crisis will be clearly apparent by Inauguration Day in 2005. By then, even the official estimates will show deficits chronically in excess of 5 per cent of GDP, which is generally recognised as the critical point. If Bush is re-elected, my guess is that the likely resolution will involve some form of repudiation of US government obligations. Either Social Security and Medicare will be cut drastically or the printing press will be used to solve the public debt problem. The latter seems more in keeping with the Bush style.

The 2003 Budget is based on the idea that large tax cuts will make it politically impossble for a subsequent Democratic Administration to increase expenditure. Kim ‘small target’ Beazley fell into this trap in 2001. Given the size of the crisis, any Democratic candidate who wants any chance of a second term must run on a platform of repealing Bush’s tax cuts, that is, soaking the rich. My guess is that, as with Beazley, most of the Democratic hopefuls will wimp out, and the primary process will weed out those who don’t.

Update We can drop the ‘almost’ in “Andrew Sullivan is almost equally scathing”. He now says:

I’ve been trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, but his latest budget removes any. He’s the most fiscally profligate president since Nixon. He’s worse than Reagan, since he’s ratcheting up discretionary spending like Ted Kennedy and shows no signs whatever of adjusting to meet the hole he and the Republican Congress are putting in the national debt.

This raises the question of how Bush is going to pay for the lengthy occupation and reconstruction of Iraq supported by Sullivan and others. Those in the Administration who favour a quick decapitation of the regime, the destruction of as many weapons as possible and immediate withdrawal will have a powerful fiscal argument in their favour.

Having an urgent paper to finish, I am naturally finding as many excuses as possible to read irrelevant material on the net. So I finally read the whole of James Lindgren’s demolition of Bellesiles, via a link from Instapundit (PDF file).

I was not surprised to learn that Bellesiles picture of an almost gunless Colonial America was false, and that gun ownership was actually higher than now. But, as Lindgren points out, that’s not the only thing Bellesiles got wrong. Bellesiles argued that in his mythical utopia, homicide rates were far lower than today, and that rates rose after the Civil War. In fact, as Lindgren shows, homicide rates were very high in Colonial America. He lists a number of cases in an Appendix of which, admittedly, only one is clearly stated to involve a firearm.

As Lindgren notes “

Just as the gun culture and the romance of the gun were supposedly taking over (in the decades after the Civil War), homicide rates were actually plummeting throughout much of the country, while in the Reconstruction South murder was rising”

Lindgren correctly notes:”

The relationship between guns and homicides over time is so complex that it cannot be reduced to the easy formula put forward in Arming America that high gun ownership and high homicide rates go together”

. Still, if the civil strife in the South is regarding as being a special case, Lindgren’s correct figures give the same (positive) raw correlation as Bellesiles’ bogus ones. So Bellesiles story is the mirror-image of the truth, but in an important sense his errors cancel out.

On the face of it, the fact that large sections of a British dossier on Iraqi intelligence were plagiarised from publicly available sources seems like no big deal, any more than the revelation that John Lott participated in Internet debates using a pseudonym. But, as with Lott, the closer you look the worse it gets.

First, the original source was an article in a journal published in Israel. This doesn’t mean it was false, but the concealment of such a fact is clearly more than a failure of academic courtesy.

Second, the material was presented as current intelligence, but reference to the original article shows that most of the primary source material dates back to the first Gulf War.

Third, the source material was altered to make the Iraqis look worse – for example, “monitoring of foreign embassies” was replaced by “spying on foreign embassies”. Given that there was clearly no additional evidence to justify the change, this is fraud, which would have been detected earlier if the material had been properly cited instead of being plagiarised. (Amusingly, despite these ‘improvements’, the cut and paste job reproduced typos from the original).

It appears that this material came from Blair’s spin doctors rather than from British intelligence or the foreign office. But presumably if Blair had any useful intelligence he would not have resorted to this amateurish fraud.

In terms of Powell’s case against Saddam this reinforces the point I made previously. By throwing in a lot of old and bogus arguments, Powell undermined the credibility of the new evidence he was presenting.

Sources: The Guardian and The Telegraph

BTW, I observed previously that Jack Straw had put forward a more convincing case for war than Colin Powell. Obviously this judgement will need to be revised.

Andrew Norton raises the question of whether too many young Australians are undertaking tertiary education (see also here. This is an important question in a number of respects. Most notably, if, as I and others have argued, we are moving towards an economy which will require universal (or close to universal) secondary school completion and a general expectation of post-secondary education, the associated funding policies are going to be radically different than if we move back towards a system where only higher education is undertaken only by a minority.

Norton’s discussion blurs two separate issues. The first, and most important is whether more students should go on to post-secondary education. Less critical is the issue of whether there is currently an appropriate balance between the university sector and the technical and further education (TAFE) sector. Since both sectors have suffered from much the same set of bad policies, this is a secondary issue. I tend to agree with Norton that TAFE should be expanded in relative terms, but this is in a context where we need growth in all forms of post-secondary education.

Coming back to the main question, the labor market evidence is strongly against Norton. As this article by Ross Gittins based on research by Jeff Borland, shows, despite the substantial growth in numbers of graduates in recent years, the wage premium for graduates has remained unchanged (in the US where growth in graduate numbers has been slower, the wage premium has risen greatly). This outcome would make sense only if there was substantial growth in demand for tertiary graduates as against high school graduates and another articleby Gittins shows that this is indeed the case. Reflecting the polarisation of the labor market, there has also been substantial growth in low-wage service employment most of it casual and part-time.

Norton offers the objection that university graduates are being hired for jobs that would otherwise be filled by high school graduates. Given the wage data this does not make sense. At the margin, a rational employer would do better to hire a school leaver at a lower wage than a slightly more skilled graduate at a much better wage. In fact, they would do better to hire a given person straight out of school rather than waiting for them to go to university (there’s a problem here in that the data refer to average rather than marginal premiums, but more detailed econometric work suggests that this is unimportant).

Although it’s popular, the argument put forward by Norton can only work for a rigidly stratified labour market with a fixed set of slots, unresponsive to the forces of supply and demand. Superficially, for example, the public service of the 1970s, looked like this. In reality, however, even this relatively bureaucratic labour market had a good deal of flexibility, and this was reflected in a steady growth in the number of positions requiring post-secondary education.

If there’s one thing that the many supporters of gun rights in the blogosphere agree on at present is that the Lott saga should not become a “reverse Bellesiles”. However, this has been interpreted in two different ways. One interpretation is that the pro-gun side should not copy the mistakes of those on the other side who defended Bellesiles even when it became clear he was indefensible. The other is that Lott’s offences are not comparable with those of Bellesiles.

In the early stages of the debate it was possible to hold both views simultaneously, favoring fair investigation of the charge that Lott had fabricated a survey, while maintaining the stance of ‘innocent until proven guilty’. All this changed with the near-simultaneous emergence of the key ‘defence witness’, David Gross, and the exposure of Lott’s Internet ‘sock puppet’, Mary Rosh. (You can read the whole saga, as reported by Tim Lambert, here).

A number of gun rights supporters, led by Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, took the second approach, treating Gross’s evidence as closing the case against Lott, and dismissing the Rosh exposure as ‘not news’. This approach is looking steadily more and more untenable as more is learnt about both Gross and Lott/Rosh. Given the obviousness of the symmetry – lost data, a series of steadily more incredible explanations, and a gradual expansion of the scope of the problem, all that is required for a reverse Bellesiles is a group of supporters unwilling to accept the truth, and, so far at least, Reynolds is providing the leadership for this group.

On the other hand, Mary’s defrocking was itself a victory for the first approach, since the observation that Rosh and Lott shared the same IP address was made by Julian Sanchez, a staff writer at the libertarian Cato Institute and supporter of gun rights. Quite a few others have followed a similar approach, most recently Michelle Malkin.

The end result is in fact a further symmetry with the Bellesiles affair, with some diehard defenders standing by Lott, while others recognise that even the most charitable interpretation of the facts cannot rehabilitate his scholarship.

One final symmetry. Even if Bellesiles’ research had stood up to scrutiny, it would have represented little more than a footnote in the debate about gun policy. Who really cares whether American gun culture developed before or after the Civil War? Similarly, straightforward calculations of numbers and probabilities suggest that the impact of concealed carry laws is going to be primarily symbolic, at least in the short run. There aren’t enough extra guns involved to either deter or cause a great many crimes.

And a footnote. I’ve been very critical of the Cato Institute in the past, most notably when they danced to the Republican tune by relabelling social security privatization as social security choice or ‘personal accounts’. So I’m glad to observe that, as with other groups, there’s good as well as bad at Cato. Julian Sanchez has certainly demonstrated his personal integrity on the Lott issue. And this little aside

Doubtless opponents of privatiz… [cough], ahem, personal accounts could come up with their own list of countervailing considerations.

suggests that he would prefer to argue the issue on the merits, rather than relying on dubious rhetorical ploys.

Update (11/2/03) Julian Sanchez has written to offer ‘a quick mini-defense’ of the Republican & Cato name change, discussing the way the political debate evolved. He makes some good points I think ‘partial privatisation’ is the only short and reasonably accurate description of what’s being proposed.

Another PFI (private finance initiative) project in the UK (in Australia these are called Public Private Partnerships) has run into strife. It’s a tramway in the London suburb of Croydon. The problem has arisen with a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) which is not, as you might think a new kind of tram. The SPV is a financial entity set up to make it appear that the risks of the project have been transferred from the public to the private sector, which is crucial in justifying the high rates of return paid to private investors in these deals. Unfortunately, it appears that this particular SPV doesn’t have any assets with which to meet the costs of something going wrong so, in all probability, the public will have to pick up the tab. The story is reported here. What’s really striking though is the comment of one of the financiers

Mr Rawlinson did not see the Croydon difficulties as a problem for SPVs generally. “Most are perfectly safe because they refer to schools or hospitals where the source of income is guaranteed and if they run into trouble they are supported by local or central government.”

In other words, the supposed risk transfer in these schemes is a fraud, which is what the critics have been saying all along.