In the course of following up the work of John Lott, I came across some interesting points about defensive gun use (DGU). There has been a dispute between estimates based on surveys of crime victims, such as that of Hemenway et al, which show very low rates of DGU (less than 100 000 per year for the US) and others such as that of Kleck et al, which show as many as 2 million DGU’s per year. I came across an interesting piece by Tom Smith, which attempted a reconciliation between the two estimates. Among other things the the crime victimisation surveys exclude such crimes as “trespassing, vandalism, and malicious mischief”. By including these cases, Smith adds as much as 40 per cent to the derived from the crime victims survey, though this still doesn’t get him anywhere near the Kleck estimates.

It struck me that, even on the most generous definition of reasonable force, shooting or threatening to shoot a trespasser or vandal would be a crime more serious than the original offence, so I emailed Dr Smith to ask him about this. His response:

I’m no expert on American law, but such uses do meet the criminological definition of DGUs that has been used in the research literature. That literature also states that not all DGUs are necessarily legal or appropriate, just that the gun is used in response to a crime/threat in the mind of the user.

From this definition, it’s pretty clear that the kind of person who brandishes or even fires a gun in the course of, say, a dispute between neighbours over fence lines, could correctly record this as a DGU. The same goes for this case, where the outcome was more tragic (the killer was acquitted of a manslaughter charge, but that says more about Louisiana juries than anything else). Even the use of a gun in a street brawl would qualify, assuming that the shooter felt threatened.

On Smith’s estimates, such criminal misuse of guns constitutes as much as a third of all DGUs. The rate would be higher for the much more frequent use estimated by Kleck et al.

In summary, it appears that, if the Kleck estimates have any validity, they represent an epidemic of unrecorded gun crime.

This is good, if somewhat ambiguous, news. I’ll blog more on this at a later date

The Telegraph reports a public ownership plan for failing British Energy, the nuclear electricity generator privatised by Thatcher.

As yet renationalisation is primarily a device for picking up the pieces when privatisation has manifestly failed, but we can expect more aggressive action now that the taboo has been broken. And already the notion of privatisation as the inevitable wave of the future (taken as gospel only five years ago) is as dated as dialectical materialism.

As I mentioned, my last AFR piece on unemployment has been reproduced at australian policy online. Stephen Kirchner criticises me and says

The unemployment rate in NZ has already posted a low of 5.1% and could well push sub-5%. The NZ case demonstrates that a more liberal approach to labour market institutions can be successful in lowering unemployment.

I think this is drawing a pretty long bow. The National Party government in NZ passed the Employment Contracts Act in 1991. When the Nationals lost office in 1999 the unemployment rate was close to 7 per cent, above that in Australia. The incoming Labour government (which Kirchner criticises pretty regularly) repealed key aspects of the Act. The subsequent decline in unemployment (latest rate 5.4 per cent) may not be a consequence of Labor’s reforms but it certainly doesn’t help Kirchner’s case in the slightest.

Oddly enough, Kirchner goes on to endorse the ‘characteristically intelligent’ comments of John Edwards who begins by pointing out the failure of the radical free-market model in the US. Edwards goes on to respond to a number of the points that I raised in my piece (though he doesn’t mention names on either side), and concludes

If the Australian economy continues to grow over the next few years at the rate I expect, it won’t be long before we are more worried about finding workers than finding jobs.

Of course, a few more years of growth would imply a 15-year expansion, which would certainly be good for unemployment. This may happen, but I see no reason to suppose that Australia is any more immune to the business cycle than the US where similarly rosy predictions held sway until very recently.

As I’ve noted before, I hate being conned. It is now clear that John Lott has been conning a lot of people, including me. Given the favorable assessment by James Lindgren of the witness who claimed to participate in Lott’s survey on defensive gun use, I felt it was necessary ‘in the absence of new developments’, to drop the case of fabrication against Lott. The new developments did not take long to emerge.

According to Julian Sanchez it turns out that the ‘witness’ is a pro-gun activist with a focus on the specific issue where Lott made his name (concealed carry laws). This isn’t absolutely conclusive – there are enough such activists that the inclusion of one in the survey is not surprising, and this is obviously the type of person who would find out about the controversy and approach Lott .

But then it turns out Lott has been using a false identity (‘Mary Rosh’) to post pieces defending himself on Usenet. This is the last straw for me. In particular, Lott reviewed his own book under the name Mary Rosh. Although trivial in relation to the alleged fabrication of a survey, this is, in my view, a clear-cut piece of academic dishonesty. His university (he’s now at Yale) should take immediate action to investigate this and other allegations of misconduct.

Update Lott isn’t at Yale either, but has moved on to the American Enterprise Institute. Judging by my dealings with them (read here or search the site for “Zinsmeister”) he should fit right in.

Rather lost in the debate over plans for war in Iraq has been the question of whether Saddam Hussein actually has weapons of mass destruction. Those in the pro-war camp have generally taken Bush’s word for it that he does, while those opposed to war have implicitly taken the line that it’s up to Bush to prove it. I don’t find either argument entirely satisfactory.

The absence of anything seriously resembling a smoking gun after six weeks of inspections is proof enough for me that the US ‘dossier’ being flourished about six months ago, complete with satellite photos of suspicious installations, was worthless. The sites in the photos have been inspected and found to be innocuous. And the claim that the Americans have the evidence but don’t want to compromise their secret methods is inherently implausible. Assuming that they had enough evidence to nail Saddam, the fact that he might learn about their surveillance techniques seems pretty much irrelevant.

On the other hand, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. All the nasty things that Bush says about Saddam are true, even if they were just as true when Bush senior was turning a blind eye to Saddam’s use of chemical weapons. Saddam is evil and dangerous, if he has kept stocks of weapons of mass destruction in the current crisis, irrational. So it’s important to consider what we’ve learnt.

First, I think it’s pretty clear that Saddam doesn’t have nuclear weapons or any operational program to produce them. The UN found and destroyed his plants in 1991 and he’s been under tight sanctions ever since. Moreover, this is just not the kind of thing that can be hidden easily, or dismantled at a moments notice and moved on a truck. Nuclear operations produce radioactivity and this can be detected. If there were a nuclear weapons program, the kind of inspections we’ve seen would have turned up something by now.

It’s harder to be sure about germ warfare. The Iraqis have produced stocks of various germ warfare agents in the past (though they claim to have destroyed them), and the facilities are easier to conceal than those needed for nuclear weapons. On the other hand, it’s hard to keep stocks of germ warfare agents from degrading in storage, and Moreover, unlike chemical and nuclear weapons, they’ve never been used. The horror associated with these weapons is such that all those involved would almost certainly face either deadly retaliation or subsequent execution, but the actual military effectiveness is probably quite limited. There are some discrepancies in the Iraqi account of what happened to the stocks they produced. However, based on the absence of evidence and the irrationality of persisting with germ warfare programs, the balance of probabilities favors the hypothesis that these programs have been abandoned.

The balance of evidence is much closer in relation to chemical weapons. Lots of these were produced and used and the amount unaccounted for is much greater. Moreover, it would be easy to hide a substantial stock in a bunker somewhere, with a much smaller risk of dectection than for germs or nukes. On the other hand, while scary, chemical weapons are clearly not a threat to be compared with nuclear weapons or with the possible uncontrollabe consequences of germ warfare. Despite extensive use, chemical weapons weren’t decisive in the Iran-Iraq war and Saddam didn’t dare use them in Gulf War I.

This means that the rational course of action would be for Saddam to destroy the weapons. On the other hand, while Saddam isn’t crazy he’s also not exactly rational. This justifies intrusive inspections, private interviews with scientists and continued demands for more documentation of the supposed destruction of these weapons. When this process is complete, a judgement will need to be made.

The threat posed by Saddam’s chemical weapons (if he has any) is not a clear and present danger. The possibility that they will leak to a terrorist group would, if anything, be enhanced by an invasion. The weeks of softening-up bombing implied by standard US practice in these matters would give Saddam plenty of time to arrange this, assuming that he was willing and able.

What is clearly not justified, on the evidence so far, is a pre-emptive invasion based on the absence of proof of a negative.

Because of the fires, I didn’t open up the message board as usual on Monday. So rather than put up my own “Thursday thoughts”, I’m asking for your comments (civilised discussion and no coarse language) on any topic. I’d particularly like further ideas on blame, chance and Fate, which has been the subject of some valuable discussion in earlier comments threads this week.

I don’t suppose this blog will ever be responsible for one of those Internet marriages we’re always reading about. But it can claim at least some credit for introducing Hayek fans, Jason Soon and Jack Strocchi, although their first encounter was scarcely promising. That was all sorted out, and now Jack is adding to the formidable intellectual firepower at Catallaxy.

As I see it, I’ve not so much lost a commentator as gained a fellow-blogger.

Jason Soon at Catallaxy Files writes

A new paper with a completely different spin on things can be found on the excellent AEI-Brookings Joint Centre for Reg. Studies website. The paper, by Mark Nadel, argues that there is little economic justification for laws against unauthorised copying because the higher revenues this generates for popular creations, are in ‘winner take all’ entertainment markets, generally used for promotional efforts and that such efforts crowds out many borderline creations.

In one of my first forays into this debate, in the AFR in 1998, I took an almost identical line, arguing

Turning to the intellectual property arguments, the key difficulty here is the failure to recognise the network externalities associated with fashion-driven markets like that for poular music. The popularity of, say, the Spice Girls, is not due to the fact that they are more talented than the next-best group or that their songs are better written, or even that their marketing is cleverer. Rather, the Spice Girls are popular primarily because they are popular. People, especially teenagers, want to listen to the same music their friends are listening to. Allowing record companies to extract the maximum possible rent through discriminatory pricing will not lead to the greater support for new and innovative music. Rather, it will encourage the dissipation of yet more resources in attempts to capture control of the next big hit.

I will read Nadel’s piece more carefully and perhaps post some comments.

One of the debates that’s been raging in the US, and that I haven’t had time to mention here has arisen from the claim by the Wall Street Journal that the poor and working class are ‘lucky duckies’, who don’t pay their share of the tax burden (some ambiguity has arisen over whether the WSJ actually wants the poor to pay more taxes, or merely to exclude them from tax cuts until the WSJ constituency has had its tax burden driven as close to zero as possible). Among others, CalPundit has done a good job of demolishing this nonsense, which relies on an exclusive focus on Federal income taxes, excluding not only indirect taxes and state and local taxes, but even payroll taxes.

The only point I want to add is that all of this has long been known to anyone with even the slightest knowledge of tax policy. Looking at my not-so-best-seller Taxing Times, from 1998, for example, I find on p21

In Australia, and most other OECD countries, the tax system as a whole is roughly proportional. The progressivity of income taxes is offset by the regressivity of most other taxes, and by the fact that high-income earners have more extensive opportunities for tax avoidance than low-income earners.
The redistributive effect of taxation and expenditure in Australia arises from the fact that, while taxation payments are roughly proportional to income, the benefits of public expenditure are about the same for all members of the community.

. I am not, of course, claiming any originality for this observation – it’s so well-known that I didn’t even bother to source it.

All of this underlines the point that the WSJ and those who have supported them on this issue are either incompetent or dishonest. No-one qualified to write on tax policy could be unaware of the facts in this question.